Bird Thou Never Wert

El Triunfo is a small village high on a big, bulky, flower-covered mountain in the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico near the Guatemala border. Aside from a little snake that the natives call the chica bringa, which they say can jump six feet, there is nothing extraordinary about El Triunfo, the triumph. It is in the cloud forest, on the southern end of the Sierra Madre, whose peaks on the Guatemala side rise to 14,000 feet. There are no challenging heights to be climbed, no ruins, no legends, no colorful markets in picturesque villages. The settlement consists of four dirt-floored houses in a grassy clearing on the continental divide. Clear, cold streams flow in opposite directions there, steeply down to the west and south some 8,000 feet to the Pacific, which you can see from the heights in an immense, blue panorama, or more gradually down to the east, through zones of pines and oaks, into the jungle and the savannas of Chiapas to the Gulf of Mexico some 200 miles away. The El Triunfo area is a wilderness. Most woods are active—trees moving, branches waving. But when the clouds hang around its tree trunks in the morning the woods about El Triunfo are ghostly, and in the afternoon, in the semitropical sunlight, they seem not so much wild as drugged and somnolent.

Nonetheless, El Triunfo is an irresistible lure for one possessed type of visitor for whom it provides the ultimate experience. It is one of the most glamorous places on earth for bird watchers. To take the more familiar species first, there is the wonderful singing quail, sometimes glimpsed peering up anxiously out of the underbrush, excessively shy except at dawn and dusk, when it bursts into a song that consists of tuneful whistles followed by a flute solo. The rose-throated becard is there, a bird the size of an English sparrow and almost as plain-looking, except for a large headdress that resembles an ill-fitting Harpo Marx wig. Also the acorn woodpecker, a demented red, white and black bird that drills innumerable small holes in dead trees and pounds an acorn into each, apparently driven by an innate fear of impending famine, meanwhile giving out a hoarse cry that sounds like "Jacob! Jacob!"

These are ordinary oddities, not hard to come by. The rose-throated becard and the acorn woodpecker are frequently seen in the Southwestern U.S. as well as elsewhere in Mexico, in places far easier to reach than El Triunfo. But there are also such rare, or infrequently sighted, birds as the black penelopina which likes to glide down from the top of a tall tree, giving astoundingly humanlike whistles and whirring its wings to produce a rattling, rushing and crashing noise that sounds like a falling tree. Another rarity is the aptly named resplendent quetzal. When the American explorer and secret agent John Lloyd Stephens prowled around Chiapas in 1839 he reported, "The quetzal is the most beautiful bird that flies." Modern ornithologists are more cautious. Roger Tory Peterson says merely that the quetzal is the most spectacular bird in the New World. In any event the quetzal, with its radiant red and gold-green plumage and its filmy train of feathers, shimmers in these remote woods. Its feathers were once the royal plumes of the Aztecs, their use restricted to members of Montezuma's immediate family.

There are some 10 to 12 species of hummingbirds around El Triunfo. They endure the cold mountain nights by slowing down their basal metabolism, a process akin to hibernation. Among them are the green-throated mountain gem, each of its throat feathertips a shining metallic green; the garnet-throated hummingbird, perhaps the most vividly colored of the 50 species of hummingbirds found in Mexico; the tiny wine-throated hummingbird, scarcely larger than a bumblebee, still so rarely seen that the most practiced bird watcher is transfixed by the sight of one; and the beautiful hummingbird, so named because it is just that—the beautiful hummingbird.

However, the birds that give El Triunfo its special flavor are the mountain trogons, encountered frequently enough elsewhere in Mexico, but there in such numbers as to have become its symbol. They often fly in pairs, fast and fitfully in the morning, landing in a tree and taking off at once as though delivering urgent messages to someone hidden in the leaves. Later in the day you see them perched unconcernedly close-by, in plain sight, watching the bird watchers who are watching them, perhaps waiting for something to happen. In the soft light before sunset you see them in unhurried flight around the forest edge. High up on the tip of a dead branch in the last rays of the sun, they symbolize the strangeness and remoteness of the tropical mountain and its uncanny wildlife.

But why bother with them? "We find [in the forest] whatever we seek," said Alexander Skutch, the pioneer naturalist of Costa Rica. "If we seek beauty, it is there profusely. If we yearn for peace, it awaits us there. If, on the other hand, we gloat in strife and violence, it offers us that, too." If you carry into this bird-enlivened wilderness an overpowering sense of the civilized world, you find yourself pitted against more enduring images—billowing vapor in the trees of the cloud forest at the first morning light, smoke rising straight up from the open fires by the cabins, birds constantly in motion and yet changeless, all of which you know you will always remember.

"We are almost certain to see the resplendent quetzal," said Victor Emanuel before we set out for El Triunfo. "It is possible, though less likely, that we will see the azurerumped tanager. Whether we find the horned guan depends on many things, including the weather. There have been several expeditions in the past 10 years, and the horned guan has been seen only once. But those were brief expeditions, two or three days, and we will have five days."

We were a party of 12 ornithologists and amateur bird watchers, organized to publicize the importance of the El Triunfo area as a bird sanctuary and to search for its rarest bird, the horned guan, which exists only in a few locations in the chain of volcanic peaks and mountains that stretch from Chiapas into Guatemala. We assembled at the airport in Tuxtla Guti�rrez and traveled in two rented Volkswagen buses by roundabout roads, through Villa Flores to a coffee plantation called Finca Prusia in the foothills below El Triunfo. In addition to Victor Emanuel and his partner in a company called Victor Emanuel Nature Tours—John Rowlett, a Texas ornithologist—the party included George Plimpton, a lawyer and his wife from Wisconsin, the chairman of the board of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, a dentist from Massachusetts, a photographer from Austin, Texas, a retired real-estate dealer from Houston, an Ohio coal-mine owner and a journalist and his wife.

We ran a wide range of ornithological experience. Dave Johnson, the dentist, was an expert. He had once worked as a missionary in the Guatemala highlands, winning the friendship of Indians by extracting infected teeth, and was at home in the woods. Plimpton had been a bird watcher in his childhood. His interest was revived when he went on a bird count in Texas with Victor Emanuel a year after the famous Christmas bird count headed by Emanuel in which 226 species were sighted, an alltime record for such efforts. Plimpton had also searched with Emanuel and Rowlett for the imperial woodpecker in the Mexican highlands north of Durango. (Almost two feet long, it is the biggest woodpecker in the world; there have been no verified sightings since the 1950s.) Mary Ann and Tom Neuses, youthful-appearing parents of grown children, had taken bird-watching trips to the West Indies and to the Big Bend country of Texas. My wife Allison had made marvelous bird paintings in her girlhood, before she gave it up to make a living painting portraits; she had never been camping before. We were a miscellaneous collection of interested but undisciplined observers and experienced veterans, held together by Victor Emanuel's determination to find a horned guan.

It was impossible for Victor to imagine that anyone might not want to see a horned guan. He had been studying birds for 25 of his 36 years. When he talked about the guan, or any other bird, he seemed to be trying to sell it. The son of a Texas newspaperman, he had a gift for bird identification that had made him useful to ornithologists when he was a Boy Scout in Houston. While he was still in high school he went on ornithological expeditions to Mexico with scientists. After Harvard and a brief political career working for Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, he became a professor of political science at Rice University and at the University of Houston but gave it up to lead bird expeditions. Slight, even frail-appearing, he displayed demoniac energy as he hustled through the woods, peeking into thickets, motioning imperiously for silence, spotting birds invisible to everyone else. He seemed to pluck them out of the trees. His expedition to El Triunfo was a five-day lecture, in which the professor seemed constantly to be breaking off to rush down the trail to identify another bird—or a dozen more—before returning to continue where he left off.