I returned to Guatemala, this year, after a hiatus of nine years and found the country on the mend after decades of internecine wars. Security was still an issue, but now there was a democratically elected government, a truce between warring factions and a concerted effort on the part of tourism organizations to showcase a country with a great deal to offer tourists, particularly those interested in the Western Hemisphere’s history, early cultures and its more exotic flora and fauna. As I traveled about, this time, I was taken by what could only be described as the country’s added value as a tourist destination. There was great birding at archaeological sites, wonderful historical and archaeological influences at some of the more interesting wildlife reserves: a turquoise-browed motmot settling onto the limb of a cecropia tree at the Quiriguá Mayan ruins near Puerto Barrios. . . a white-throated magpie-jay blurting out a loud "reeeek," then alighting onto the branch of a giant ceiba at the Takalik Abaj ruins near the Pacific Coast . . . I was there to get a taste of Guatemala’s new emphasis on birding, which is, without question, a well-placed emphasis.

"I am speaking today not as ambassador but as a birding enthusiast and one who is really enthusiastic about birding in Guatemala," said John Hamilton, U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala, at the country’s First Bird watching International Encounter at the Green Bay Hotel in Puerto Barrios, this past April. "There is terrific birding to be done almost anywhere you go in Guatemala, but it is especially good in and around the major tourist attractions. Tikal – Guatemala’s big draw – is perhaps the best single birding location in Guatemala and it is simply amazing, just amazing."

Quiriguá archaeological site

An instructive way to start any trip to Guatemala is a Guatemala City tour, including a revealing visit to the Popul Vuh archaeological museum with top tour guide Ivania Sibrian Valle. This will lay a foundation for what lies ahead, with information about civilizations dating to centuries B.C.E and how they interacted with the environment. You will learn, for example, about the early cultures’ reverence for the cacao god, a result of his granting that indigenous bean which was first brewed into a chocolate drink, then transmuted, by Europeans into milk chocolate. Sibrian is a wealth of good information on cultures like the Olmecs, Teotichuacanis and the Mayans, input that both whets your appetite for visits to sites and provides enough background information to gain real insight into what you’ll find there.

After this sort of indoctrination, I set out for the Caribbean coastal town of Puerto Barrios, a five-hour bus journey that would take me from the mountainous core of the country to the sea level at the coast, a descent of more than 4,000 feet. On the outskirts of the capital city there were all the indicators of urban sprawl with little ecological consideration: a huge cement plant in the midst of hillsides reforested with eucalyptus trees that produced an acid soil and so little canopy the new trees have the effect of driving off birds. As the landscape flattened out, agriculture took command: fields of melons, endless canebrakes – most of the crop for rum like Centenario, one of the best representatives of that genre. Fields with cattle grazing swept to the distant mountains, draped in an off-white smog. Along each side of the road, the vegetation eventually greened: breadfruit trees, mango, gumbo limbo, poinciana, then colorful splashes of bougainvillea, jacaranda, oleander.

Stela at Quiraguá

As we crossed into Izabal province, the department of our ultimate destination, large fruit plantations began to dominate, the predominate crop bananas. The size of these undertakings was even more apparent as we cruised into the town of Puerto Barrios, where lot after lot included huge tractor-trailer rigs for hauling the fruit to transshipment points. The final approach to the Green Bay Hotel was along a winding, little improved road with subsistence dwellings, the houses little more than sticks with tin roofs, the occasional campesino wielding a machete, now and then riding bareback on less-than-thoroughbred horses.

The hotel sits in a bay notched into the far western Caribbean, not far from where the Rio Tatin connects the sea to Lake Izabal. It provides an ideal roosting place for exploring this region. The boat run from the hotel to the lake region is a contrast of deep green forests all about you, providing a starkly contrasting background to water birds everywhere, lazing on limbs or plying the breezes. Egrets and cormorants by the dozens nest in trees on a small island. Fisherman form grey silhouettes against an orangey-red sun, giantized in the misty morning. Rag-tag paddlers sit low in dugout canoes, the edges just above the waterline. Sheer cliffs cleave an occasional, stark white contrast against the green, while a village here, a resort there, a single structure in between dot points of land or sit on more accommodating hillsides. As we slip into the Rio Tatin, small Mayan villages are all that line the banks, with duets and trios of canoes heading hither and yon.

The approach to Ak Tenamit rainforest on the Rio Tatin is a birding experience in its own right. The banks on either side are endless swatches of deep green, where water birds as common as egrets become stark white accents reminding you that common doesn’t necessarily mean uninteresting. Pelicans glide along steamy air currents then crash beneath the river for a morsel or two. Grebes glide amid a patch of water lilies, while jacanas and purple gallinules hopscotch across the lily pads. Ak Tenamit proves a wonderful birding venue. We walk easily accessible trails into the world of the audaciously colored violaceous trogon and that pint-sized toucan the collared aracari, nesting in a dead portion of the truck of a cecropia, poking its head out a perfectly round hole. Additional starring roles fall to the white-crowned parrot, the tiny white-necked jacobin or the boisterous Montezuma oropendola. A blue morpho butterfly dances by as a tiny exclamation point.

Rio Tatin

Hacienda Tijax, a resort on the far side of Lake Izabal, sits at the edge of the forest and is a perfect place for serious birders to indulge their insatiable appetites. It’s also an ideal watering hole for a cool drink or a bite of lunch for day-trippers. Trails radiating out from the hotel cross swaying bridges above wetlands and wind through a rubber plantation. Even in the heat of the mid-day we spied a range of songbirds.

If the forests are an attraction, the Mayan sites are that and then some. As you enter the Quiriguá archaeological site, you are struck by the dramatic structures that have been unearthed, but also by the clearly pyramidal-shaped mounds that speak of other treasures beneath. Mayan stelae uncovered here are among the largest and most detailed yet discovered. Wide, open spaces that once were plazas and ball fields are rimmed in structures that celebrate an ancient culture. Here, too, grow giant ceibas that were holy symbols for the Maya and in these great trees are species begging you to hoist binoculars to have a look: the blue-crowned motmot, blue-grey tanager, rufous-tailed hummingbird, and the anomalous melodious blackbird.

In and around the mountains that slope to Guatemala’s Pacific Coast, some of the world’s richest coffee is grown. In and around the coffee plantations, and along trails that climb to dazzling outlooks, birders will find countless species to add to life lists. For example, at the Tarrales Reserve, in the hills just above a coffee plantation and ornamental plant farm, Claudia Avendaño, a biologist and partner with Cayaya Birding, points out a range of species from the tiny cinnamon hummingbird, western tanager and social flycatcher to a large black-headed saltator and golden-fronted woodpecker.

All of this is an easy walk from the Tarrales Eco-Lodge, where you can hole up in the former home of the plantation owner and enjoy delicious examples of local cuisine to fortify your next hike. The principal business here, nowadays, is ornamental plants, those heliconias and ginger lilies that cost a fortune at your local florist back in The States. The place is also a museum of sorts, where you can tour buildings with coffee processing equipment, some of which is as much as 100 years old – and still functional. Andy Burge, the owner/operator of the Lodge and the other businesses on property, employs more than 70 people, even providing a school for the children of those who work there. Our stay included some dramatic accents of life in the hinterlands: periodic blackouts caused by underpowered electrical generation and a tremor representative of the numerous earthquakes in this region of active volcanoes.

Tarrales Rainforest

At the Takalik Maya Lodge, you can choose from accommodations with or without electricity, all of them recently built to blend nicely within the environment. Dozens of species – from tiny hummers to brassy magpie-jays – ply the air currents and roost in the canopy here. Lazing on the second-story balcony of my accommodation on an ultra-dry morning with the air stone dead, I watch numerous species of butterflies dance against the window screens and listen to the sound of a far-off woodpecker rapping an oddly high-pitched tattoo against a tree trunk somewhere, its sound soon drowned out by the growing cacophony of birdsongs. Along the road toward the breakfast area, I get a sense of how dry the dry season is down here, dust turning the foliage the color of café au lait, leaves crunching and cracking under foot, even the scent of the blooms a bit like they had been run through a clothes dryer.

The nearby Takalik Abaj archaeological site is one of the oldest in the pre-Columbian world with structures and carvings, some of which date back three millennia to the Olmec civilization. Estimates are Takalik Abaj was an active center from 800 B.C.E to 900 A.D. While the site lacks the cultural accoutrements of later civic centers – the elaborately detailed temples, the hieroglyphic embellished stelae, even the neatly hewn corners of stone structures – its sheer primitiveness is its attraction. Its lack of sophistication, combined with the realization that most of it, even the pathways are buried beneath several yards of soil, deliver the stark message that you are standing in a one-time social center that is really, really old.

Takalik Abaj archaeological site

The raucous cries of a pair of white-throated magpie jays returning to their roosts, along with choruses of green parrots streaming overhead, add a timelessness to the scene. Birds like these were important to the culture of these ancient civilizations. They are depicted in the carvings. We know that the aristocrats decorated themselves in the colorful plumage of these tropical creatures. Their calls seem to announce a connection between the here-and-now and the there-and-then. It’s a phenomenon unique to Central America, in abundance here in Guatemala. It provided a sense of comfort in the waning hours of this hot dry afternoon.