292 species, in a city of twenty million. That is the figure in the field guide to the common birds of Mexico City, and it is the first surprise: this is one of the largest urban areas on earth and it still keeps a serious bird list. Chapultepec, the Viveros de Coyoacán, the university campus and the Xochimilco canals are the easiest places to notice it.
The ten you will actually see. Rock pigeon (Columba livia); Inca dove (Columbina inca); house sparrow (Passer domesticus); mourning dove (Zenaida macroura); great-tailed grackle (Quiscalus mexicanus); barn swallow (Hirundo rustica); broad-billed hummingbird (Cynanthus latirostris); bushtit (Psaltriparus minimus); house finch (Haemorhous mexicanus); and American robin (Turdus migratorius).
The one you will hear first. The great-tailed grackle — the glossy black bird with the long keel of a tail that gathers in hundreds in the Zócalo and the Alameda at dusk and produces a repertoire of whistles, clicks and shrieks that sounds mechanical. Once you can name it, you stop hearing it as noise.
Why naming them matters. Naming a bird or a tree fixes it in your field of vision. Most people walk through this city without seeing any of the ten above, and all ten are present on an ordinary street.
Where to look. Early morning in the Viveros de Coyoacán or the second section of Chapultepec; the Xochimilco canals from a boat at dawn, which adds herons, egrets and migratory ducks; and the UNAM ecological reserve, the largest fragment of native lava-field vegetation left in the city.
in the morning or in the evening
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