Wildlife is everywhere, especially in your home. Take a close look at your bathroom floor a few days after you've cleaned it and I guarantee you'll see a gnat or a silverfish or maybe something worse: don't panic, just call the exterminator, or scrub better next time. Fortunately there is a much more welcome variety of animals outside our doors and windows, often right in our own backyards. Thanks to landscaping and feeders, countless birds use the trees and bushes around our homes as dining rooms, if not full-time residences.
Many of the native birds that I frequently see in the desert - often far from Phoenix' bustling highways, near dirt roads and along trails in unspoiled parkland - are the same species visiting my backyard and neighborhood, even though the flora is quite different and mostly non-native. Maybe on a break from foraging in the saguaro cactus forests and mesquite tree groves, Gila woodpeckers, curve-billed thrashers and northern cardinals join more urbanized finches and house sparrows munching on seeds and bugs in my well-watered community of tightly-packed houses. And just meters from my own yard, in more open spaces like the Links Golf Course and the Arizona Canal, I frequently see vermilion flycatchers and Say's phoebe's acrobatically diving for insects in the same manner as if they were dozens of miles away along the raging lower Salt River.
But in the heart of the sprawling Phoenix metropolitan area, there is one bird that I never seen in my yard or in my neighborhood: the black-throated sparrow. However he's often one of the first birds I see when I'm visiting a remote park like Spur Cross Ranch in Cave Creek or when I'm parking along the side of the Saguaro Trail to enjoy the spectacular scenery of the rugged Salt River Canyon. But I do frequently see him closer to my home, in fact just across the road from my community in Phoenix Mountains Preserve, home to the popular hiking trails around Piestewa Peak.
Even though I walk past scores of houses to get into the preserve, I haven't observed the black-throated sparrow near the native creosote bushes and palo verde trees that decorate the sidewalks and pathways along the way. But it seems once I'm within the park's borders, on trails lined by naturally growing specimens of the before-mentioned flora in addition to barrel cacti and ocotillos, it's only a matter of minutes before the trills of the sparrow fill the air and individuals are flitting through the branches, grasses and stones.
Okay, it's not a Disney moment and the birds don't appear on cue draping cholla garland around my shoulders, but they're quite common and they're extremely photogenic, with their handsome black cravated necks and white racing-striped heads. It's no wonder he's a personal favorite: a "Welcome to the Desert" sign in flesh and feathers.
Clearly this sparrow chooses the wide-open spaces of the Sonoran Desert with its native flora over the manicured backyards and neighborhoods bejeweled with palm trees, red yucca and aloe verde, much of which is imported from the Old World. What does he know that the other birds don't? Maybe it's just a matter of simpler, local tastes versus outright xenophobia?
The luckiest of us have yards, where we can shelter in place from the COVID-19 virus in fresh air, pondering the idiosyncrasies of flora and fauna hour on end. A few of us braver ones can venture a bit further out our front doors, even if just for a few minutes, to the wider and more open spaces on the sidewalks just several feet away from our hedged and walled asylum. And thanks to a good real estate decision, I can even walk across the usually busy but now quiet Lincoln Drive and hike a couple of blocks to wide open desert land in the shadow of Piestewa Peak. It's a safe haven where I can socially distance myself ten feet away from anyone else I find wandering the lonely trails.
I'm happy to report to a cloistered world that it's springtime in the wild after a long, wet winter, and desert wildflowers are blooming: globe mallows, poppies, lupines. Cactus flowers are bursting in kaleidoscopic colors: magenta hedgehogs, pink Arizona fishhooks, burnt-orange ocotillos. And black-chinned sparrows are singing and feasting, flashing their own unique beauty in the floral symphony, the members safely indifferent to the killer flu that's wreaking havoc on the humans in their uninteresting boxy shelters.
Many of the native birds that I frequently see in the desert - often far from Phoenix' bustling highways, near dirt roads and along trails in unspoiled parkland - are the same species visiting my backyard and neighborhood, even though the flora is quite different and mostly non-native. Maybe on a break from foraging in the saguaro cactus forests and mesquite tree groves, Gila woodpeckers, curve-billed thrashers and northern cardinals join more urbanized finches and house sparrows munching on seeds and bugs in my well-watered community of tightly-packed houses. And just meters from my own yard, in more open spaces like the Links Golf Course and the Arizona Canal, I frequently see vermilion flycatchers and Say's phoebe's acrobatically diving for insects in the same manner as if they were dozens of miles away along the raging lower Salt River.
But in the heart of the sprawling Phoenix metropolitan area, there is one bird that I never seen in my yard or in my neighborhood: the black-throated sparrow. However he's often one of the first birds I see when I'm visiting a remote park like Spur Cross Ranch in Cave Creek or when I'm parking along the side of the Saguaro Trail to enjoy the spectacular scenery of the rugged Salt River Canyon. But I do frequently see him closer to my home, in fact just across the road from my community in Phoenix Mountains Preserve, home to the popular hiking trails around Piestewa Peak.
Even though I walk past scores of houses to get into the preserve, I haven't observed the black-throated sparrow near the native creosote bushes and palo verde trees that decorate the sidewalks and pathways along the way. But it seems once I'm within the park's borders, on trails lined by naturally growing specimens of the before-mentioned flora in addition to barrel cacti and ocotillos, it's only a matter of minutes before the trills of the sparrow fill the air and individuals are flitting through the branches, grasses and stones.
Okay, it's not a Disney moment and the birds don't appear on cue draping cholla garland around my shoulders, but they're quite common and they're extremely photogenic, with their handsome black cravated necks and white racing-striped heads. It's no wonder he's a personal favorite: a "Welcome to the Desert" sign in flesh and feathers.
Clearly this sparrow chooses the wide-open spaces of the Sonoran Desert with its native flora over the manicured backyards and neighborhoods bejeweled with palm trees, red yucca and aloe verde, much of which is imported from the Old World. What does he know that the other birds don't? Maybe it's just a matter of simpler, local tastes versus outright xenophobia?
The luckiest of us have yards, where we can shelter in place from the COVID-19 virus in fresh air, pondering the idiosyncrasies of flora and fauna hour on end. A few of us braver ones can venture a bit further out our front doors, even if just for a few minutes, to the wider and more open spaces on the sidewalks just several feet away from our hedged and walled asylum. And thanks to a good real estate decision, I can even walk across the usually busy but now quiet Lincoln Drive and hike a couple of blocks to wide open desert land in the shadow of Piestewa Peak. It's a safe haven where I can socially distance myself ten feet away from anyone else I find wandering the lonely trails.
I'm happy to report to a cloistered world that it's springtime in the wild after a long, wet winter, and desert wildflowers are blooming: globe mallows, poppies, lupines. Cactus flowers are bursting in kaleidoscopic colors: magenta hedgehogs, pink Arizona fishhooks, burnt-orange ocotillos. And black-chinned sparrows are singing and feasting, flashing their own unique beauty in the floral symphony, the members safely indifferent to the killer flu that's wreaking havoc on the humans in their uninteresting boxy shelters.
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| Black-throated sparrow near brittlebush in Phoenix Mountains Preserve, this week. |
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| Black-throated sparrow on creosote bush in Phoenix Mountains Preserve, this week. |
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| Black-throated sparrow in Phoenix Mountains Preserve, this week. |
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| Black-throated sparrow in Phoenix Mountains Preserve, this week. |
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