Back From Guatemala

"Toto, I don't think we're [on Salton Drive] anymore!"
MK and I took a break from the cold (?) Texas winter with a 12-day getaway in Guatemala on a birding trip. This digi-scoped male Quetzal seems like an appropriate subject to start my uploads. I'll have a few more birds, a handful of moths and insects, and a ton of plants to upload in coming days and weeks.
Scope views of the present bird courtesy of one of our premier guides, Josue de León L.
Edit (2/2/2022): I've added a 2nd image which was taken with my little point-and-hope Canon PowerShot camera, zoomed out to about 20X. It produced a very respectable image (after a little brightening with software)!

This bird was part of a mixed flock attending an army ant swarm. We literally watched these birds from the balcony of the lodge! Both images taken in deep shade with my point-and-hope Canon PowerShot zoomed out to 20X+.

Elevation about 4700 ft.
The gaudy diversity of leaphoppers in a grassy, weedy pasture at CCFC had me wondering if I'd taken some halucinogenic substance. MK got more images of these. I meant to go back with a sweep net to sample further, but I got caught up in other activities.
See, for instance:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=6940&taxon_id=53237&view=species

I'm going to try to be systematic about my moth uploads, but I may jump around a little bit. I thought I'd get this wasp moth uploaded even though it was one of the last moths I documented. This species occurs from Colombia to the Yucatan Peninsula (Belize, Mexico), but I can't find any images or records of it in Guatemala. Geographically, the occurrence is not unexpected since the type locality (coll. 1913) was on the Old River in Belize only about 70 to 80 miles (110-130 km) to the east. It has also been documented to the north in Campeche and Quintana Roo and in Chiapas to the west.

This is the largest moth that I documented in Guatemala. It's wingspan is about 12.5 cm or about 5 inches. The placement to genus is pretty certain. Each of the species in the genus can be highly variable in ground color, but the pattern of lines and eyespots is usually helpful for ID. This is the closest placement I can make.
The species is widespread from Mexico to Brazil but apparently nowhere common. This appears to be a first image for Guatemala.
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/528087-Copaxa-decrescens
The genus is related to the Polyphemus Moth of North America.

Well this gaudy Tortricid turns out to be pretty interesting. It is a member of a diverse set of moths which have converged in a mimicry complex with the overall pattern of orange wings with bold black-and-white marginal banding. Other members of this complex are in this genus, related genera, and even in other moth families. Franziska Bauer created an array of images of some members of this mimicry complex (images from BOLD) and uploaded it to Flickr:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/franziskabauer/25772488391
Some of these, particularly the Tortricids, can be confusingly similar, with minor variations on this color scheme, wing shape, venation, etc.
This species was originally described from Guatemala by Walsingham in Biologia Centrali-Americana, Heterocera, Vol. 4, p. 214, 270, Tab. 8, fig. 8 (1909-1915). I finally tracked down a relatively recent revision of this genus by Obraztsov (Proc. US Nat. Mus. 119, No. 3543, 1966). His key allows me to fairly readily key this out to Idolatteria simulatrix, but even at the time of his revision, the species was only known from the original holotype from Guatemala. I subsequently found another example from nearby in El Salvador on iNat which appears to match this species:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/86929756
Here's a link to the Obraztsov paper:
https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/16916/USNMP-119_3543_1966.pdf%3Bjsessionid=FA96FE806EF6C41C0C1BE6D9AF4A35C9?sequence=1

I'm expecting this to be some type of large shrubby Senecio or a related genus, but I can't seem to find anything quite like it among Central American Senecioneae uploaded to iNat thus far. It forms large clumps as much as 3 to 4 m tall and wide. This was a fairly common and conspicuous understory shrub in highland pine-oak forest, at about 8300 ft (2330 m) elevation. See also:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/105985672
Asteraceae, Senecioneae

I had a heck of a time narrowing down the ID of this tiny orchid, only to realize I had been looking at the flowers upside down. Still not easy. The flowers are only about 5 to 8 mm long. Common small epiphyte on tree trunks in cloud forest at about 5640 ft (1720 f) elevation.