A Waterfowl Refresher from Gilbert

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 without appreciating the stunning diversity of waterfowl. It's the wide range of ducks, all in the order anseriformes, that first strikes you. Hundreds of mallards are always present but migratory species are even more plentiful in the winter. Most noticeable are usually the ring-necked ducks, followed by large flocks of American wigeons.

There's a fun sport in identifying the less numerous visiting ducks, like the northern pintails, northern shovelers and cinnamon teals I recently observed. I especially hit the bullseye in that round of birdwatching when I identified my very first female lesser scaup.

Large flocks of ducks seem to always be joined by the equally gregarious and querulous American coots. But they're in a different taxonomic group, the gruiformes. When you manage to see them up close, out of the water, it's that they have toes instead of webbed feet that will strike you first. In Gilbert I got extraordinarily close to one, a common gallinule on dry land, and couldn't snap enough photos of the bird's unique digits.

A few of the waterfowl at the Preserve are the lone representatives of their taxonomic orders. The cormorants are the only suliformes, while the pied-bill grebes the only podicipediformes. However there are a few different charadriiformes in the form (pun intended!) of American avocets, black-necked stilts, and several types of sandpipers. Not surprisingly there are none of their noisy sea-loving cousins, the gulls.

Of course, it's still the birds you normally don't see, like the spoonbill, that motivate you to escape to the wild on an adventure, even in the middle of the Phoenix metropolitan area. So how about seeing your first gaviidae? You'll have to head far north or to the coast to see a loon, or a lake in Minnesota where I saw my first one. What about a procellariiformes? Like most people, I've only ever seen a shearwater at sea. Hmm, with COVID vaccines becoming more and more available, it might finally be time to book that cruise for some birdwatching from the promenade deck.