Mike in the Wild

Last week I finally reached ten warblers for the year.  Eight of the species were sighted in the Phoenix area over the last month.  Two of them were while on a winter cruise stopping in Cozumel.  And then this past weekend, while on another much closer trip, I achieved number eleven with a yellow warbler encounter. I was in Prescott, almost a hundred miles away, for the first time since last September.  Near my cabin is a community that maintains a couple of ponds alongside Willow Creek.  The stream was still flowing steady with runoff from our wet winter.  The immediate landscape is dense with deciduous trees, including towering cottonwoods.  Many were budding, starting to show off their seasonal bursts of foliage.   Loud calls rang from the treetops.  In fact, the repetitive tunes were familiar ones that I recognized as those of a yellow warbler's.  Their strength is quite out of proportion with their source's diminutive size....

For the last month, I've been on a hunt for warblers.  The small songbirds have been migrating through the Phoenix area, some arriving for a summer breeding season in the Arizona desert, others on their way to sites further north.  I've also noticed several orioles, especially the hooded, arriving in the area.  And on Monday I was thrilled to encounter another migrant, a yellow-breasted chat, for the first time ever. Warblers are in a large family, one comprising 117 species, almost half of which range into the United States.  Orioles are a much less plentiful species with only nine types breeding here.  As for chats, the number is one.  In fact, there's only one chat species at all, the yellow-breasted.   And until not very long ago, experts actually considered it to be a member of the warbler family.   Needless to say, the chat wasn't on my radar as I hit the warbler trail over the weekend.  I came up with nothing in my neighborho...

My fascination with this year's spring warbler migration is turning into a contest: just how many species can I spot?  The number reached five this past weekend after I encountered a Wilson's and a black-throated gray, both in Phoenix.  They added to the painted redstart, Lucy's warbler, and common yellowthroat I had identified over the two previous weeks.   Of course factoring in the warblers that spend the winter in the Phoenix area, like the yellow-rumped and the orange-crowned, the number is even higher.  As a result, the local number of the small, colorful songbirds rises to seven.  My preoccupation with the warblers really started in February, on Cozumel in Mexico, where I spotted two visiting species, the American redstart and the pine warbler.  Unfortunately these birds mostly don't migrate to the far western United States, preferring the east for their summer breeding seasons.  Nonetheless, adding them, this year's warbler-spotting number...

Migratory birds were on my mind when I visited the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix on Monday morning.  But it was still a little early in the spring to see black-headed grosbeaks or Bullock's orioles, two species I've witnessed in the park before.  Someone on eBird reported seeing a black-chinned hummingbird there recently but I failed to encounter it.  Instead, I settled on photographing an Anna's hummingbird feeding her two chicks in their nest.  I also captured some shots of two quite common winter visitors to the local deserts: an orange-crowned warbler and a yellow-rumped warbler.   The next day I found myself much further away from the Valley's urban sprawl at Spur Cross Ranch Conservation Area.  Cave Creek was flowing through dense groves of cottonwood and mesquite trees, all framed by a landscape of saguaros rising up steep hillsides painted with wildflowers.  Only a biting chill delivered by relentless gusts of wind marred the pristine...

A sure sign that spring migration is underway was my sighting a pair of hooded orioles in my Phoenix neighborhood last weekend.  His flash of bright yellow swooping into a treetop identified the male, while only her presence accompanying the male initially pointed out the female.  They passed through quickly, pausing only long enough for me to get several lucky shots.   The couple joined a list of songbird migrations that started with a flock of cedar waxwings in my community two weeks earlier.  While the waxwings will travel to Canada for breeding, the orioles could actually stick around Phoenix to build their nests after wintering not too far away in Mexico.  I've not been fortunate in seeing one of the latter species' elaborate nests that appear like a hanging basket often descending from a tall palm tree. Eager to encounter additional migrating birds, I headed on Monday to the Rio Salado Restoration Area near downtown Phoenix.  Bordering the Salt R...