When people come to Portal to birdwatch, the elegant trogon is the treasured sighting everyone hopes for.

After almost three years of living in a world-renowned birdwatching area, we have gone on our first birding expedition, thanks go our friends Sukon and Michele and a new birder friend Elaine. And we saw and heard the trogon!

We spotted a wide variety of other birds as well, most of which I can’t remember, though a list has been recorded. My favorites were the red-faced warbler, the lesser goldfinch, and the lucifer hummingbird. (In fact, we saw something like seven different types of hummingbirds.) Thanks to great tutelage from our friends, we might even be able to do some birding with other visitors in the future.

Very exciting to us on this trip was that we ventured into the national forest for the first time since the fires and found that there was not as much damage as we feared. Many trees were burned, but not killed, and a lot of undergrowth has begun to grow back.

We also saw a lot of beautiful wildflowers, which have begun to come up with the monsoons.