Prescott's Summer Cardinals

This time last year I was writing about mushrooms and their variety of sizes, shapes, and colors sprouting along the trails surrounding my Prescott neighborhood. Alas, a dearth of monsoon rain - not even four inches accumulated by mid-August - has greatly diminished the normal eruption of both mushrooms and wildflowers. Fortunately another bellwether of the health of the area's summer life, the cardinals, haven't disappointed me.

It only took one visit to my cabin in late spring to see a profusion of black-headed grosbeak's at my feeders. They've been multiplying in number all summer, raising offspring and eating well from my larder before their migration south next month. Meanwhile even though they usually don't partake in the suet or seeds, I've sighted western tanagers several times in my yard. And for the very first time, a male lazuli bunting recently started drinking from a bird bath and eating my seeds.

Very early in the season I noticed summer tanagers in my neighborhood. The male might be the reddest bird in the state, brighter even than the northern cardinal common across southern Arizona. However to the best of my knowledge, none of those tanagers have visited my yard this year. In fact over the last couple of years, hepatic tanagers, similarly yet less brightly colored, have been regular guests at my feeders instead. Yet I was starting to think that, like with the wildflowers and mushrooms, high temperatures and lack of rain were going to impede these migrants also until just in the nick of time an individual, either a juvenile or a female, made several stops in my yard's trees.

Black-headed grosbeaks and all the tanager varieties, like the western, summer, and hepatic, have officially arrived or, like the lazuli bunting, started passing through. But what about the blue grosbeaks? I thought I saw the cobalt blue male while I ran in the forest behind nearby Emmanuel Pines Camp. And then I was pretty certain there was another one near Watsons Woods south of Watson Lake. But I wasn't able to get a great look at either and didn't have a camera to capture any shot. However a trip to Granite Basin Lake gave me an opportunity for all the proof I'd need that these birds and every member of the local cardinal family have arrived in Prescott for the summer.

The lake is part of a recreation area that abuts Granite Mountain Wilderness to the west of Prescott. Enough rain had fallen to not only fill the reservoir but to nourish an abundance of wildflowers along the creeks and washes that flow into the body of water. Besides the hummingbirds, goldfinches, and warblers feeding off the bounty of seeds and insects in this riparian environment were a bounty of blue grosbeaks, many easy to photograph.

Black-headed grosbeaks were also prevalent, foraging though dense, leafy foliage and along tall, blooming flower stalks, mollifying my concerns that the birds were over-reliant on my personal handouts for survival. High in cottonwood trees were varieties of tanagers, both western and hepatic, and possibly even summer.

With climate change, sometimes I think that all a nature lover can ever rely on again is the length of a day. How drier and hotter conditions will effect plants and animals are scary enough details in scientific studies; in reality the change will be terrifying. At least for this year, a later and hotter monsoon hasn't yet stopped the cardinals from defining one beautiful aspect of summer in Prescott.