"There's a nesting pair of trogons on South Fork Road, just before you cross the bridge, on the left side of the road. The trunk of the sycamore tree they chose seems awfully thin, but they're there." These were the exact details the earnest staff at Cave Creek Ranch, my weekend's lodging, gave me when I set off for the hunt. I had driven over four hours to Cave Creek Canyon in southeastern Arizona because the area is famous in the summer for its elegant trogons. In addition, a pair apparently nests in that very specific area - if not that exact tree! - every year. So why would I have any doubts?
Well I might have suspected the advice was too good to be true when, the afternoon before I set off on my quest, another guest at the lodge told me he was unsuccessful in his own search that day. "Yeah, I spent a lot of time looking, but nothing." I left early the next morning undaunted nonetheless, visions of this neotropical bird dancing in my head.
The birds actually nest much closer to Phoenix, two-and-a-half hours away in Madera Canyon. But the loamy side canyons where they normally find just the right sycamore trees to build nests in are usually far off the established trails. Summer visitors must frequently find solace in hearing only the clucking calls of the trogons echo through the park.
Madera Canyon is in a mountain range known as the Santa Ritas, a high altitude sky island that is part of the Sierra Madre Mountains that lie predominantly in Mexico. Other extensions of the range in the area include the Huachucas and the Chiricahuas, which both harbor similar habitat high above surrounding desert environments. It was in this last range where I found myself last weekend when I picked Cave Creek Canyon to look for nesting elegant trogons.
I had seen this beautiful bird twice before: once in Madera Canyon and once in nearby Florida Canyon. Both lie close to the very northern edge of the trogon's range. But I look at it mostly as a Mexican bird because that's where the vast majority live and breed.
Trogon and quetzals are closely related, in a taxonomic order where the males are strikingly colorful. The elegant trogon's torso blazes in a fire engine red while his head and neck shimmer in an iridescent emerald green, calling a truce at a bold white stripe on his chest. His dark eyes are brilliantly ringed in yellow with his prominent beak the same bright color. His backside is the same shining green as his head, and his wing and tail feathers are gray. Of course his tail isn’t mundane, its feathers showing an intricate damask-like pattern of black and white.
The female elegant trogon has the same size, shape and features as the male but is drably colored: close to a black and white image of the male. She is however demurely embellished with a teardrop-shaped mark near each eye.
Alas it was a sighting of my first nesting pair - and my first female - of these fine creatures that I was pursuing in the Chiricahuas early last Saturday morning. I parked in a pull-off near the bridge and scanned every sycamore tree in the mostly dry creek before walking south, along the road, eyes focused in the trees. However I did notice a few hundred feet further down the road/trail that there was another pull-off with space for maybe three cars. Why didn't the instructions to find the nest reference these clear parking spot landmarks?
Nevertheless, I scanned every sycamore tree that could possibly accommodate a nest, which is usually a cavity in the tree that is entered by a hole excavated by a woodpecker. There were several holes that seemed like candidates, but no trogons were nearby. Only painted redstarts and blue-chinned mountain-gems attracted my attention.
After maybe a half hour, two elderly hikers we had seen walking down the road on our drive up creek returned in our direction. When they reached close to that "three-car" pull-off they paused to peer into the woods on the "trogon side" of the road. One of my sycamore tree candidates was nearby, but the bearded gentleman in the group seemed to direct his binoculars much deeper into the forest.
"Excuse me, may I ask a question?" I inquired. The man held up a finger, telling me to be shut up, or more likely, wait. Thirty seconds later he looked over at me and I asked him about the nest and the breeding pair. He told me he had just had a lock on a male in the woods but had lost him. I didn't hear any sounds or see any movements, but he seemed confident.
When I reminded him about the nest he escorted me twenty or thirty feet further down the road. "Right there, behind those leaves, but they've just left it," he said as his laser pointer - wow, from the office to the birding trail! - marked some foliage in front of a sycamore tree. There could have been a woodpecker hole but I couldn't make one out.
Chances are the pair of elegant trogons and their fledglings were still in the immediate area, with the parents still providing for the youngsters as their flight abilities developed. But this sighting wasn't looking like a slam-dunk, and, to boot, I had a non-birder friend with me that was getting antsy.
My success seeing the trogon in Madera Canyon two years ago was due to the bird spending most of his time along the popular lower paths, my consistent communication with other birders, and my plain perseverance. As a result, I was able to photograph a male over a glorious span of fifteen minutes as the bird glided between several trees. I will mention here that I spent over five hours in that pursuit and, maybe just as important, I was alone!
While genuinely interested, my traveling companion last weekend wasn't quite that dedicated. Besides, I had a plan B up my sleeve: head further up South Fork on the trail from the parking area. The owner of Cave Creek Ranch had also told me that there was great birding in general during the first mile and that trogons regularly nest throughout the whole area.
At that moment in my life, I estimate that I had only found a trogon two times out of the six times I ever searched: awful odds if you're a gambler. I just described my hunt, when I dedicated more than half a day to catching my bird. In contrast, just plain luck was on my side during my other successful sighting, when I made a late day visit to Florida Canyon's trailhead on a hunch. Within a minute or two, a male landed fifty feet away in an oak tree. That thrill still sends shivers down my spine.
It was that same luck I was counting on when I crossed the before-mentioned bridge last week in Cave Creek Canyon and drove a short distance to the South Fork trailhead parking area. Sure it was summer and I was in much more common trogon habitat, but birds have the advantage of flying over a much wider area and volume of space than we can possibly imagine. I wasn't really sure what to expect: disappointment or celebration? My historical odds at success were only one in three.
We headed up the trail that followed and crossed the course of the riverbed. The creek was mostly dry and the bed quite wide, huge, scattered boulders showing evidence of past seasons of torrential flows. One storm's rainfall, six years ago, even destroyed the old parking area and campground that are now just a flattened part of the trail.
It was past this clearing and after the second time we crossed the creek that things started to look up. "Cluck-cluck-cluck-cluck...," we heard coming from up the trail. Trogons! We hiked a bit further around a bend, and the calls got louder. My friend was ahead of me and saw some movement above in the forest canopy. "There he is," he whispered, pointing high in an oak tree.
For the life of me I couldn't see him. I asked: where, what tree, which branch? After what seemed like a minute of listening to locations, I spotted him myself. Click. Click. Click. There was only time for a few pictures before the elegant trogon flew a short way across the trail, high into a sycamore tree. Even from his butt-end, he's quite a beautiful creature.
He wasn't calling but he seemed to linger. For some reason I wasn't surprised when a female flew through the trees and landed a short distance ahead of him. But she only gave us a view of her back, and never looked in our direction, remaining mostly hidden in a treetop. Humble or shy, she certainly lived up to her reputation as the less conspicuous partner.
I'll call the male her mate. And I'll call them a pair. Hopefully they are nesting somewhere in that wide expanse of Madrean forest that they quickly lost themselves in after our very brief encounter. A mere mile upriver from that recently fledged family I failed to find, they could be joined by other elegant trogons visiting for the summer and nesting even further into or across the canyon. There's even still the entire North Fork to consider for the birds' fertile nesting ground. But I was at my trail's end for the morning, and didn't want to overplay my hand.
Well I might have suspected the advice was too good to be true when, the afternoon before I set off on my quest, another guest at the lodge told me he was unsuccessful in his own search that day. "Yeah, I spent a lot of time looking, but nothing." I left early the next morning undaunted nonetheless, visions of this neotropical bird dancing in my head.
The birds actually nest much closer to Phoenix, two-and-a-half hours away in Madera Canyon. But the loamy side canyons where they normally find just the right sycamore trees to build nests in are usually far off the established trails. Summer visitors must frequently find solace in hearing only the clucking calls of the trogons echo through the park.
Madera Canyon is in a mountain range known as the Santa Ritas, a high altitude sky island that is part of the Sierra Madre Mountains that lie predominantly in Mexico. Other extensions of the range in the area include the Huachucas and the Chiricahuas, which both harbor similar habitat high above surrounding desert environments. It was in this last range where I found myself last weekend when I picked Cave Creek Canyon to look for nesting elegant trogons.
I had seen this beautiful bird twice before: once in Madera Canyon and once in nearby Florida Canyon. Both lie close to the very northern edge of the trogon's range. But I look at it mostly as a Mexican bird because that's where the vast majority live and breed.
Trogon and quetzals are closely related, in a taxonomic order where the males are strikingly colorful. The elegant trogon's torso blazes in a fire engine red while his head and neck shimmer in an iridescent emerald green, calling a truce at a bold white stripe on his chest. His dark eyes are brilliantly ringed in yellow with his prominent beak the same bright color. His backside is the same shining green as his head, and his wing and tail feathers are gray. Of course his tail isn’t mundane, its feathers showing an intricate damask-like pattern of black and white.
The female elegant trogon has the same size, shape and features as the male but is drably colored: close to a black and white image of the male. She is however demurely embellished with a teardrop-shaped mark near each eye.
Alas it was a sighting of my first nesting pair - and my first female - of these fine creatures that I was pursuing in the Chiricahuas early last Saturday morning. I parked in a pull-off near the bridge and scanned every sycamore tree in the mostly dry creek before walking south, along the road, eyes focused in the trees. However I did notice a few hundred feet further down the road/trail that there was another pull-off with space for maybe three cars. Why didn't the instructions to find the nest reference these clear parking spot landmarks?
Nevertheless, I scanned every sycamore tree that could possibly accommodate a nest, which is usually a cavity in the tree that is entered by a hole excavated by a woodpecker. There were several holes that seemed like candidates, but no trogons were nearby. Only painted redstarts and blue-chinned mountain-gems attracted my attention.
After maybe a half hour, two elderly hikers we had seen walking down the road on our drive up creek returned in our direction. When they reached close to that "three-car" pull-off they paused to peer into the woods on the "trogon side" of the road. One of my sycamore tree candidates was nearby, but the bearded gentleman in the group seemed to direct his binoculars much deeper into the forest.
"Excuse me, may I ask a question?" I inquired. The man held up a finger, telling me to be shut up, or more likely, wait. Thirty seconds later he looked over at me and I asked him about the nest and the breeding pair. He told me he had just had a lock on a male in the woods but had lost him. I didn't hear any sounds or see any movements, but he seemed confident.
When I reminded him about the nest he escorted me twenty or thirty feet further down the road. "Right there, behind those leaves, but they've just left it," he said as his laser pointer - wow, from the office to the birding trail! - marked some foliage in front of a sycamore tree. There could have been a woodpecker hole but I couldn't make one out.
Chances are the pair of elegant trogons and their fledglings were still in the immediate area, with the parents still providing for the youngsters as their flight abilities developed. But this sighting wasn't looking like a slam-dunk, and, to boot, I had a non-birder friend with me that was getting antsy.
My success seeing the trogon in Madera Canyon two years ago was due to the bird spending most of his time along the popular lower paths, my consistent communication with other birders, and my plain perseverance. As a result, I was able to photograph a male over a glorious span of fifteen minutes as the bird glided between several trees. I will mention here that I spent over five hours in that pursuit and, maybe just as important, I was alone!
While genuinely interested, my traveling companion last weekend wasn't quite that dedicated. Besides, I had a plan B up my sleeve: head further up South Fork on the trail from the parking area. The owner of Cave Creek Ranch had also told me that there was great birding in general during the first mile and that trogons regularly nest throughout the whole area.
At that moment in my life, I estimate that I had only found a trogon two times out of the six times I ever searched: awful odds if you're a gambler. I just described my hunt, when I dedicated more than half a day to catching my bird. In contrast, just plain luck was on my side during my other successful sighting, when I made a late day visit to Florida Canyon's trailhead on a hunch. Within a minute or two, a male landed fifty feet away in an oak tree. That thrill still sends shivers down my spine.
It was that same luck I was counting on when I crossed the before-mentioned bridge last week in Cave Creek Canyon and drove a short distance to the South Fork trailhead parking area. Sure it was summer and I was in much more common trogon habitat, but birds have the advantage of flying over a much wider area and volume of space than we can possibly imagine. I wasn't really sure what to expect: disappointment or celebration? My historical odds at success were only one in three.
We headed up the trail that followed and crossed the course of the riverbed. The creek was mostly dry and the bed quite wide, huge, scattered boulders showing evidence of past seasons of torrential flows. One storm's rainfall, six years ago, even destroyed the old parking area and campground that are now just a flattened part of the trail.
It was past this clearing and after the second time we crossed the creek that things started to look up. "Cluck-cluck-cluck-cluck...," we heard coming from up the trail. Trogons! We hiked a bit further around a bend, and the calls got louder. My friend was ahead of me and saw some movement above in the forest canopy. "There he is," he whispered, pointing high in an oak tree.
For the life of me I couldn't see him. I asked: where, what tree, which branch? After what seemed like a minute of listening to locations, I spotted him myself. Click. Click. Click. There was only time for a few pictures before the elegant trogon flew a short way across the trail, high into a sycamore tree. Even from his butt-end, he's quite a beautiful creature.
He wasn't calling but he seemed to linger. For some reason I wasn't surprised when a female flew through the trees and landed a short distance ahead of him. But she only gave us a view of her back, and never looked in our direction, remaining mostly hidden in a treetop. Humble or shy, she certainly lived up to her reputation as the less conspicuous partner.
I'll call the male her mate. And I'll call them a pair. Hopefully they are nesting somewhere in that wide expanse of Madrean forest that they quickly lost themselves in after our very brief encounter. A mere mile upriver from that recently fledged family I failed to find, they could be joined by other elegant trogons visiting for the summer and nesting even further into or across the canyon. There's even still the entire North Fork to consider for the birds' fertile nesting ground. But I was at my trail's end for the morning, and didn't want to overplay my hand.
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| Male elegant trogon on South Fork in Cave Creek Canyon. |
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| Male elegant trogon on South Fork in Cave Creek Canyon. |
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| Female elegant trogon on South Fork in Cave Creek Canyon. |
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| Late day view of Cave Creek Canyon and the sycamore and oak canopied creek, from Vista Point. South Fork, I believe, cuts to the right of the center mountain range. |
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