My Alamos Trip

[Michael Klein]

This is my first day of my trip to Alamos in southern Sonora, Mexico.  I was
there from August 29 through September 5th.  I will provide you some of my
daily highlights and provide a final list by location on my last days
report.  Since Claude and I are still going through our slides,
approximately 300, some need further identification.  So, I hope to have all
of the results back by the time I finish posting.  Also, if there is no
objection, I would like to share not only butterflies but some of the birds
and other wildlife seen while on this trip.  I will have a collage up on my
website when I am through so that you can see some of the habitat and
wildlife seen.

Initially I saw 126 species of birds and 84 species of butterflies and this
is not the high season for either.

I hope you enjoy.

Alamos day 1 - Left Wednesday afternoon, August 28, 2002.  Flew into Tucson
for the evening to catch a 6:30 flight  the next morning to Cuiadad Obregon
in southern Sonora.  We got out of San Diego late due to a delay of our
flight from Sacramento.  So instead of getting into Tucson at 7:45pm, we
landed at 9:30pm.  The flight was packed and due to cramped conditions, my
body decided to test me by performing back spasms in flight.  Since I did
not bring any anti-inflammatory pills, I thought that I was going to be like
this for a week.  Well, a hot shower (hot shower in Tucson in August.  What
a joke) relaxed me enough to try and sleep.  Got up Thursday morning at
3:30am to get packed and shuttled to the airport to catch the 6:30 flight on
Areomexico.  Next surprise was the aircraft.  I wasn't ready for 20 seater
prop-jet.  Talk about cramped.  Watching a 6'5" guy get in was almost
hysterical if I still wasn't tight from the previous evenings spasm.  Well,
we left at 6:45am and off to Hermosillo for changing planes.  Lay over was
about 1.5 hours.  Got to watch tropical kingbirds flycatching around the
palms just outside the main doors.  A pipevine swallowtail (Battus philenor)
and cloudless sulfur (Phoebis sennae) flew around the area for our first
look of leps for the day.  The warmth of the day was helping my spasm along
with regular doses of aspirin.  Caught the next leg of the flight from
Hermosillo to Cuiadad Obregon.  When we landed, our luggage was checked (you
would think they would have done it before we left Tucson) and we were
picked up by our host, David MacKay.

David and his wife Jennifer (Jen) run the Solipaso bed and breakfast in
Alamos.  His step dad owns it and he rents rooms and does tours to help
cover costs.  By the way, Alamos is about 1.5 hours southeast of Cuiadad
Obregon.  We arrived in Obregon at about 9:50am and got to Solipaso in
Alamos at 2pm.  We got infected with Mark Walker fever.  Don't worry Mark
this is a good kind of fever.  The first evidence of the fever was when we
were nearing the city of Navajoa.  We were crossing over one of the
stretches of the Mayo River when David pointed to our right to 2 roseate
spoonbills in a small lagoon.  I said screamed (it was the fever),
SPOONBILLS!!!, I have never seen one before.  Tires screeched and we turned
off a side dirt road to look at them .  David, the trusty naturalist/guide
that he is, pulls out his spotting scope.  Claude rushed ahead to get his
first look at them.  He yells to us where they which, of course, scared them
and they flew west further up the lagoon.  It took us about 10 minutes to
re-find them but it was worth it.  Check off my first new bird for this
trip.  As I was looking at them we were treated to a small flock of Sinaloan
crows flying over us.  Check off my second new bird.  They landed in some
trees along the lagoon so we put the spotting scope on them to get good
looks.  David then says that there were a bunch of small butterflies at my
feet.  Sure enough, there were 10 ceraunus blues (Hemiargus ceraunus gyas).
We also saw a gulf fritillary (Agraulis vanillae incarnata) down by the
waters edge.  We left there after about 45 minutes and I picked up a third
new bird, neotropic cormorant in with a few double-crested cormorants.  We
needed to get out of the heat anyway.  Oh, did I forget to mention that it
was HOT!!!!  Temps were near 100 with humidity the same.

As I said, we got hit by this fever and since I was the more seasoned lep
guy (first time in Sonora and I was the group expert. Scary), David wanted
to look at some butterflies.  We drove about 3 miles down the road to a park
within the Rio Mayo watershed.  Boy was this place steamy.  My contacts were
even fogging up.  We went to a small bog area saw some southern skipperlings
(Copaeodes minimus), bordered patches (Chlosyne lacinia adjutrix?), little
yellows (Eurema lisa lisa) and one mimosa yellow (Eurema nise nelphe).  As I
was looking at the patch (it was dorsally different from the Arizona and
Texas ones I have seen and more like ones seen in New Mexico) David shouted
to me to look at this really large deep yellow and black butterfly.  I
looked quickly and saw only a little bit of the hindwing.  It was
swallowtail yellow.  David said it was a lot of yellow with some black
striping.  Since that is all that was described to me, I assumed it to be
two-tailed swallowtail (Pterourus multiculdata).  After checking ranges,
three-tailed was not a likely candidate or western tiger either.  So, as far
as I can guess it was two-tailed.