Macaw Mountain, Honduras

We then swung around the outskirts of town. Darren tried to get a photo of some men shoeing a horse in the street. Saw lots of dogs. Most were too skinny. One was eating what appeared to be the plastic wrapping for loo roll. Darren fished out some bread for him. The dogs seemed better fed in Guatemala.
 
After a bit of a trek, we ended up on a well maintained dirt road that ran around the mountain. Darren had been looking forward to visiting Macaw Mountain this whole trip. And it was definitely worth the trek.
 
A guide comes with the cost of admission. He was a bit surly at first, but once he saw we were really interested, he thawed. His mom lives in Gaithersburg, not ten miles away from us. He called her while we were lingering looking at birds.
 
Macaw Mountain is a bird sanctuary. They take in birds people no longer want. The macaws live 100 yrs in captivity - many of the others 60-80 yrs. Several mate for life and we could see they were highly social - just the most beautiful birds. A well run, beautiful setting.
 
They had an area where some of birds sit on perches in the open and place the birds on your arms for photos. One scarlet macaw took a real liking to the plastic toggle on my hat string.
 
We went back by there before leaving. We kept snapping pics of parrots, toucans, macaws. The scarlet macaws exhibited definite attention seeking behavior. They were on the front perches and if you went further into the group of perches to get closer to the parrots and blue macaws, the scarlet ones would make a ruckus fighting with their mates (marital issues I guess) until you turned and started photographing them, they then piped down. One wanted to eat my hat - also tried to chew on my camera.
 

  All the birds seemedintently interested in what we were doing - watching us as we went around the group. An awesome place to visit if you ever make it down this way.
 
The next order of the day was a pizza splurge (Mama Mia makes excellent veggie pizza) and to spend the rest of our Honduran money. We leave first thing in the morning. So we went shopping for souvenirs.  We then tried to pack previously mentioned souvenirs in our packs.
 
An excellent day. I took more pics today than I have the whole trip.