One of the first things I did when we moved in here was to build a big pile of rocks near the back of the property. The neighbors were curious of course, and asked what I was doing. “Building an iguana house” I told them. They shook their heads and walked away, not sure if I was joking.
Last May when we were here for a weekend to pay the contractor for adding a bathroom to the house (there was only an out-house when we bought the place), I got the idea. The contractor left a huge pile of river stones in the street, left-overs from building the stone wall that fronts the road. We hired a couple teenagers to carry the rocks onto our property (not that anyone was complaining about blocking the road — that is just common practice here, people just drive around the piles of construction material. Within 48 hours a small black iguana came and took up residence in that rock pile. Here he is climbing the neighbor’s brick wall, which is next to the rock pile.
Blackie the Iguana climbing the wall
So those rocks are too near the casita, and black iguanas get really big (1-1/2 meters long, without the tail) so I figured we would move the rocks and the iguanas would follow. Iguanas, now plural, as during the intervening months two more iguanas have taken up residence on the property.
Anyhow, we thus established our credentials as ‘animal lovers’ among the locals (who have a very utlitarian approach to animals — iguanas are food). So when some neighborhood kids rescued a bird from a dog, they naturally brought it to us. Isabel has an old parrot-cage (she wants a parrot but we have never found one that we can be sure is captive-bred, and refuse to buy one captured from the wild), so she put the injured bird there, with food and water.
Cassique bites the hand that feeds it
Unfortunately, the bird was too badly injured to survive, but I did get the above picture of it. It appears to me to be a Cassique (Cacicus cela) sometimes called a Yellow-rumped Cassique, or Black and Yellow Oriole. They are very common around here, our big fig tree has a nest belonging to a pair of these, a typical dangling drop-shaped nest typical of orioles, truly a wonder of architectural construction.
The only problem is, according to the distribution maps for these birds, they are not supposed to be found this far north. Either my identification is wrong, or the maps are.