In his talk, Richard will discuss the research he conducted during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, when he had the good fortune to be able to conduct weekly bird surveys in a local tropical forest fragment in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. While most of the urban bird assemblage changed little through the year, every visit still brought surprises as non-urban birds still sometimes wandered into the middle of the city. While birding, Richard could reflect on the research he and his students had conducted in the Yucatan, attempting to understand how communities change across the Peninsula and across seasons. For example, they found that, during migration, migratory bird species richness is decoupled from local habitat productivity, and individual habitat use is unrelated to local resource availability. However, during winter, species redistribute themselves to match productivity gradients. For this talk, Richard hopes you can explore with him how ecological patterns in a region shaped by spatial and temporal variation in precipitation differ from regions shaped by temperature and get to know a place where some Ontario birds spend the winter.