Guatemala: Birds, Jaguars, and a Rough Landing

Peter Alden’s upcoming memoir will feature stories from his pioneering nature journeys the world over. This chapter follows his Arizona and Mexico adventures. Warning: it ends with a rough landing!

Lake Atitlan, Guatemala

By Peter Alden

Guatemala was a country that intrigued me long before I ever visited it, with its lakes, volcanoes, and Mayan culture. Throughout my college years in Arizona in the 1960s, most of my travels took me only as far as Mexico. In March 1967, I finally ventured farther south, through the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico and over the border into Guatemala. I led my first Mass Audubon bird watching tour to Guatemala in 1970 and returned with clients many times in the fourteen years that followed.

Earlier that year, based on the success of my first tour for Mass Audubon to Portugal and Spain, I was offered a job to greatly expand their international travel program. I decided to transition from Mexico South Tours and move back to Concord. We operated our programs out of the headquarters in Lincoln, Massachusetts. The trips were built around naturalist-led experiences, emphasizing birdwatching, ecology, and cultural sensitivity.

More than anything else in Guatemala I wanted to see Lake Atitlan, a large freshwater lake ringed by active volcanoes. What I discovered when I reached Lake Atitlan was that there was a bird unique to this one body of water, which is a highly unusual situation. For any species to be found on only one lake is extremely rare. The bird was called an Atitlan Grebe. It looked like a large version of a Pied-billed Grebe with smaller wings and may have been a flightless subspecies of Pied-billed Grebe. It became extinct in 1989 due to habitat destruction, egg-collecting, and the introduction into the lake of large predatory fish that ate the small fish the grebes relied on.

Of the four thousand birds I’ve observed all over the world, the Atitlan Grebe is the only one I know of that has reached extinction in my lifetime.

Because group tours of all kinds often attract elderly and somewhat mobility-challenged travelers, I was always on the lookout for dirt roads or paths that would present few challenges to those of us on foot. Participants on a birding tour may not be able to climb a mountain to see an interesting bird. While on a scouting trip to create an itinerary for an upcoming tour, in the late 1960s, I was making my way to the lovely highland city of Chichicastenango when I spotted a well-maintained dirt road through a pine-oak forest, perfect for visitors who wanted to see a lot without venturing up steep trails.

Stopping to investigate more thoroughly, I spotted a Mountain Trogon, which is a large colorful bird that sits on tree branches and eats large insects and fruit. With its big green head, short yellow parrot-like beak, bright red chest, and banded tail, I knew it would be a popular sight with my tour groups. As I drafted an itinerary for use in a marketing brochure, I dubbed the site “Trogon Hollow,” which led indirectly to an eye-opening discovery on my part. Trogon Hollow became a favorite stop for our groups. Several years later, as new birding outfits began to emerge, they asked their local guides to include a stop at Trogon Hollow. They were going to great lengths to try to figure out where this “Trogon Hollow” was, and of course they couldn’t, because it was a name I’d arbitrarily chosen to assign to this stop. That was how I knew that birdwatching was catching on and helping the local economy with an alternative to farming.

In the back of your mind as you explore the jungles and rainforests of Central America is always the threat of encountering a jaguar. But inevitably, if you return year after year and never see a jaguar, you start to wish that you would – at least that was my experience. Jaguars, whose name comes from the Native American word yaguar meaning “he who kills with one leap,” are revered and feared for their powerful one-strike hunting style. On one trip I stayed with a group in the town of Sayaxché, which is west of Tikal, in the Petén region. We spent the night in palm thatch cottages that are constructed on stilts above the muddy ground. When we climbed down from our huts one morning, the mud just underneath where we’d been sleeping was covered with jaguar pawprints. That’s the closest I’ve come to a jaguar in Central America and I'm fine with not seeing it.

One of Guatemala’s most interesting birds is the Orange-breasted Falcon. Most North Americans have heard of the Peregrine Falcon, which is the fastest-flying bird in the world and can reach speeds of over 200 mph on a stoop (dive). The Orange-breasted Falcon is a rare bird that replaces a Peregrine in rainforests and requires a cliff or rocky protuberance to nest upon. One pair had made its home in Tikal, and for many years I could count on finding them whenever I returned to that site. The other type of bird often found in Tikal is an Ocellated Turkey that lives only in the Yucatan, Belize, and Guatemala. It has a blue head and white wings, unlike our Wild Turkey up north. Tikal is a national park, so hunting is forbidden. As a result, it’s a good place to find not only wild turkeys but also parrots and toucans.

There’s a lot to see in Guatemala: Lake Atitlan, the pristine colonial city of Antigua, the volcanoes, but one of the very best destinations when I was leading tours was the ancient Mayan city of Tikal. There were no paved roads into Tikal; to reach the city you had to fly in on a DC-3, a primitive old propeller plane, one of the first ever used in commercial flights.

In one of the first groups I led to Tikal was a woman who had never been on an airplane prior to her trip to Guatemala. Although she had always been afraid of flying, she managed the flight from Boston well enough. Then we boarded the DC-3 to fly into the rainforest at Tikal. The pilot made an announcement to fasten seatbelts, but it was in Spanish. She asked me what he had said, and I expanded a bit, explaining that we had to fasten our seatbelts because we’d be landing on a dirt runway and it might be a bit bumpy. As the plane made contact with the ground, one of the front tires disintegrated. The plane veered erratically to the left, cartwheeling horizontally on the ground as the propeller chopped up the grass and shrubbery adjacent to the runway, dust flying everywhere. Finally, the plane clunked against a tree and came to a stop.

“Oh, Peter,” said my timid flyer, “Are all the landings in Tikal this rough?” I had to laugh, realizing she had no idea we were lucky to be alive!

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Stay tuned for an update on the publication of Peter Alden's memoir, due to publish later this year.