Bird Museum in Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico

I love birds. I always have. I had them when I was a child; and, from time to time as an adult, I have bred them in numbers I am too embarrassed to admit. When we still lived in the USA, I had a basement full of assorted breeding cages, flight pens, aviaries, and nest boxes with which I brought hundreds of baby birds into the world. I bred American and English Budgerigars, cockatiels, Love Birds, Finches of every type, and diamond doves. I am sure I am forgetting some. I hand-reared the babies and sold them as pets. I was hooked. Even in Mexico, I bred budgies for a while.

We were headed to Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico, to see their infamous bird museum. Located in the northeastern part of the country, Saltillo boasts a population of between six and seven hundred thousand residents. This makes it the 20th largest metropolitan area in the Republic. The oldest city in northern Mexico, it was colonized by the Spanish in 1577. The city of Saltillo is the capital of the state of Coahuila, whose area once included the state of Texas. Until the Texas War for Independence, Coahuila was one monster of a state.

Saltillo is a modern Mexican city with a massive American car industry. It also has an appliance, silverware, and auto-part manufacturing complex called, "Grupo Industrial Saltillo." Some have told me they did not like the city because of its likeness to Detroit and its car industry. It is sometimes referred to as the Detroit of Mexico. Saltillo is a "sister city" of Austin, Texas.

The bird museum is, in a word, impressive. Opened in 1993, this five-room museum contains about 1,800 examples birds in general. About 70% of the examples are Mexican birds. Of the 400 bird species recorded in the state of Coahuila, over 100 are migratory. This puts the state in the major migratory path for migrating birds to rest, feed, and recoup before continuing their journey. Something I learned from the tour of the museum (cost $10.00 Pesos...less than a dollar) is that the migratory birds have to put on a thick layer of fat on which they will subsist during their migration. Thus, they spend more time in their winter home eating than they do when they are in their breeding sites.

In the collection, you will see the birds in the context of their individual habitats. You will also see birds that are involved in the two different types of migration. You can see those birds that make the latitudinal and longitudinal migrations in Mexico. Room number 2 of the museum is where you can see these magnificent birds that choose to go North to South (latitudinal) or East to West (longitudinal). Another thing I learned was that in some species, the different sexes will migrate while the others stay home. For example: In some of the songbird species, only the females and young males will migrate while the adult males remain at the breeding grounds year-round.

The species of birds I was particularly interested in were the Mexican hookbills, or parrots. Mexico is full of them and this museum would not disappoint me.

When I was raising parakeets in Mexico, many of the locals from whom I bought my breeding stock would swear up and down that parrots, those green bodied, red-headed ones you see in American pet shops were not indigenous to central Mexico. They could not conceive parrots being able to survive in such a mountainous climate as Guanajuato has. Well, soon after this friendly debate, a flock of red-crowned parrots showed up in the trees by the river. My friends poo-poo'ed this as being nothing more than "escapees" on the run, so to speak. The prevailing myth was that if it was a parrot, it had to come from the tropics.

The truth is there are numerous parrot species indigenous to Mexico not only from the tropics in Mexico but also from all the climates Mexico has to throw at its parrots.

The Red-Crown Parrot comes from northeast Mexico. They are often seen in Texas. I saw a flock of wild ones in Houston. The Yellow-Naped parrot comes from the Pacific side of Central America, from eastern Oaxaca, southern Mexico, and southern to northwestern Costa Rica. This is one of the parrots I am convinced becomes confused with the "all parrots come from the tropics" adage. The White-Crown parrot comes from southern Mexico. In fact, parrots come from just about every habitat in Mexico. You find them all the way from extremely wet tropical regions to the deserts. And, contrary to what you will hear from the locals in Guanajuato, there are parrots that actually prefer to live in cold, high-altitude pine forested mountains-The Mexican Thick-Billed Parrot. They are sometimes called Snow Parrots.

Mexico's Red-Crown, my absolute favorite, can most certainly be seen in Guanajuato. I first spotted this flock in 2003 and still see it each year. Though the flocks all over Mexico are dwindling, there may be about 6,000-8,000 stretched from the states of Coahuila to San Luis Potosi, Guanajuato, and even a fair-sized population in Querétaro.

This breed of Amazon (as they are called in the U.S.A.) is in danger from poaching for the pet trade. More than 16,000 birds were smuggled into the U.S. between 1970 and 1982, resulting in a more than 50% mortality rate for the birds.

"It's become clear for the first time that at least a dozen parrot species are threatened with extinction in the wild. There is a huge illegal trade in young parrots and, as NPR's John Nielsen reports, a new study shows that parrot poaching has become a serious threat to the birds' survival out of captivity." - All Things Considered, May 30, 2001

Conservation efforts are underway, but I fear it will be too little too late. Perhaps Saltillo's Bird Museum will make a start in the minds of the locals to make it a priority to preserve habitat for all of Mexico's birds.