My summers in Prescott always begin with much eagerness for the changes from my desert life in Phoenix: cool temperatures, dark night skies, monsoon thunder storms, verdant forest landscapes, an abundance of critters like skunks, and lots and lots of birds. After nearing completion of my thirteenth season escaping some of the hottest temperatures in Arizona - not to mention record-breaking - I've not been disappointed on the subject of birds. Every late spring I love reacquainting myself with the woodpeckers, jays, juncos, nuthatches and titmice that call the juniper and scrub oaks a full-time home.
But it might be the more challenging search for migratory birds that I most look forward to every year. Plenty of neotropical birds that spend our cooler winter months in Central or South America breed in North America during our warm summer. Orioles, warblers and cardinals are just a few of the avian families whose many species travel to or through Arizona starting at the end of spring.
Of course some of these birds are year-round residents. The scarlet-colored northern cardinal ranges over a wide swath of our state - but interestingly not Prescott - while its somewhat drabber cousin, the pyrrhuloxia, lives in the lower third. However, all the other members of the cardinalidae family that we might witness come here only for summer breeding or are just passing through.
Over the years I've been very lucky to see many of the species that migrate through the West actually visit my very own yard. Rose-breasted grosbeaks, lazuli buntings, black-headed grosbeaks, summer tanagers, and blue grosbeaks have all graced my suet and seed feeders. Not far away in the woods at Granite Basin Lake I've seen hepatic tanagers, and in the trees along Granite Creek downtown I've spotted western tanagers.
With days shortening, the nights getting nippy, and the humidity dropping, fall is definitely in the air. As a result, many of these voyaging cardinals have started flying south. Most notably, the abundant black-headed grosbeaks that stop by for the longest periods of any have departed my neighborhood. However last week I saw a blue grosbeak, a male, in my yard for the first time this summer. I was excited to see a pair very early in the season along Javelina Trail (Forest Road 332) two miles away. And I snapped a shot of a female even closer by in the reeds on Willow Creek under Pinelake Boulevard on the very first day of summer.
More recently, I caught a glimpse of a male blue grosbeak in Watson Woods on Monday morning. Nearby I spied several females or juveniles. Are these individuals the last cardinals I'll see this year? Hopefully not because it was late September last year when a juvenile male rose-breasted grosbeak showed up in my Prescott yard. And lucky for me, less than a hundred miles away in and around Phoenix, northern cardinals are waiting to fill any void in my camera frame until next spring.
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| Female blue grosbeak at Willow Creek on June 21st. |
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| Male blue grosbeak in my Prescott front yard last week. |
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| Male blue grosbeak in my Prescott front yard last week. |
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