more on Mexican animals.

Mexico. The land of the jaguar, the divine balam, namer of temples and restaurants. The land of lowly cats in the gutter, dead kittens on sidewalks and skinny beasts scavenging litter heaps and forgoten parts of country, out of town.

Mexico of the eagle and snake and the plumed serpent. Dead dogs. Dead tired dogs, collapsed and bored on hot tarmac, parked up under parked cars, waiting for the next bus in the shade of a bustop. Just endless days of collapsed dog tiredness.

Prehistoric beasts in every lizard way, iguana way imagineable, articulated armoured beasts with darting tongues performing sun dances on rocks and temple steps. Skitter across the dusty dry flesh of Mexican planes. Iguanas as big as the burritos of San Francisco. Small jewel lizards with bloody cheeks. And in the dark the snakes and scorpions of the imagination.

Into the bird kingdom, the diversity of Mexico explodes. Always the little brown jobs. But the bee eaters and the hummingbirds, the coloured fluttering birds that always lie out of the corner of your eye, a fleeting memory of movement, never quite captured in the full beam of a glance. The prehistoric Majestic frigate that soars above Tulum beaches, a mechanical structure, arborne with alien grace crossing the sky at once backwards and forwards, the angle of its wings to its body an aching unknown thing. From the ground its span feels enormous and strange and they can only be alone up thre.high above the other birds, shunned as a creature from another time.

Pelicans clatter past in formation, world war two bomber outfit, preparing to dive into the aqua sea for a big fish, or ready to fall on the fishermen when its time to divide the catch.

The koh, a mysterious bird, unavailable for identification on the web, a king of ruins, guardian and tall trees. Kingfisher blue and with the same strong beak. Its tail as if some bored Maya god had plucked out the penultimate feathers leaving a perfect gap. It bounces through the air, bobbing with its broken beautiful tail.

The morning birds, indiscriminate flapping big black things that racket through the tops of palm trees and thatched roofs in the early hours. The extraordinary clamour of the dawn chorus, which begins not at first light but at the very end of the darkest hour, welcomes insomniacs like me, who write in near darkness to bring sleep, to the possibility of an end to the night, and ushers light sleeps from precious slumber.