Female Black-headed Trogon, Cuero y Salado NWR, Honduras

You never know what you will see from the boats at the Cuero y Salado National Wildlife Refuge in Honduras. You reach Cuero y Salado via a short bus ride from the Lodge at Pico Bonito to the train station in La Union, where you board the century old, narrow gauge, one car and an engine, banana train for the ride out to the Refuge on the coast. From the Refuge Visitor Center you take small motor boats out into the three channels at the mouth of the Cuero y Salado rivers, up into the mangroves and out toward the beach. Along the way, you see a wide variety of birds and wildlife native to the habitats. This is a female Black-headed Trogon which was sitting on a branch all but overhanging a narrow channel through the mangroves.

We only regularly get one Trogon, the Elegant, in the US, right down along the Mexican border in the sky-islands of Southern Arizona…but there are more than a dozen in Central America. The Black-headed is one of the most widely distributed and most common.

Even though the guides are expert in their handling of the boats, and make every effort to get you and boat still enough for a good view and even a decent shot, shooting from a moving boat is real challenge…and only possible thanks to the excellent image stabilization built into most lenses and long-lens superzoom point and shoot cameras these days. For the shots from the boat, I switched the Nikon P900 to “Active Image Stabilization” which compensates for both small vibrations due to hand holding, and for larger motions when you are shooting from a moving platform. It worked very well.

Nikon P900 at 1800mm equivalent field of view. 1/500th @ ISO 400 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom.