Mike in the Wild

Recently I succeeded in spotting one of the roseate spoonbills that's been living in the Phoenix area since late last summer.  He's a vagrant, a very rare visitor to the area, and it's anyone's guess how long he'll stay or how he'll manage over time in the desert.  At his home-away-from-home -  Gilbert's Riparian Preserve at the Water Ranch - I missed another rare visitor, a brown pelican.  Both birds' long flights from their nearest coastal habitat along the Sea of Cortez were probably aided by monsoon storms that pull tropical moisture up into Arizona. They are in the same group (technically called an order ) of birds known as pelicaniformes , which also includes white pelicans and white-faced ibises.  These latter two species actually regularly migrate through the state.  Other members of the order are the quite common varieties of herons and egrets that populate the Riparian Preserve and Arizona all year round. It's impossible to visit Gilbert wi...

Driving forty-five-minutes to find a single bird might seem like a fool's errand, especially when your target is residing in a vast one hundred-acre park.  Of course when the site is the city of Gilbert's Riparian Preserve at the Water Ranch you're guaranteed to see an impressive variety of other avian wildlife, especially migratory water fowl.  So the trip is always worth your while.  But it was the roseate spoonbill that was in my sights last week, and I'm happy to say I found him.  The spoonbill is a coastal bird, common in the United States along the Gulf of Mexico in Texas and Florida.  The juvenile that appeared in the middle of land-locked Arizona may have flown in from a closer location, somewhere along the Sea of Cortez or the western coast of Mexico where the bird is also a resident.  Vagrants are not unusual in many species of birds.  After all, they have the ability to fly, so they can often easily travel great distances if successful ...

We're well into winter in Phoenix, and I've become quite familiar with many of the migratory birds spending the season in my desert city.  It's usually the water fowls that I mostly notice, like the wood ducks, ring-necked ducks, northern shovelers and goldeneyes that frequent the canals and lakes that crisscross my neighborhood.  But just recently I identified a new songbird visiting the area: the western meadowlark. In my very unscientific calculation, white-crowned sparrows might be the most numerous of the songbirds, or passerines, wintering over here.  Early in the season I saw quite a few of their sparrow cousins, the dark-eyed juncos.  Any other visiting sparrows I'm observing are lone individuals of Lincoln's sparrows and green-tailed towhees.  Also, some warblers, mostly yellow-rumped, are appearing in the trees around town. Several weeks ago I noticed a number of starling-like birds gathering on the golf course up my street.  I saw them again on S...