Mike in the Wild

All it took was a glance from the deck into my Prescott yard to beckon me back to the warbler trail.  Looking up from my lunch toward a scraggly alligator juniper that's more of a bush than a tree, I spotted a peripatetic bird with a bright yellow head.  If I were in Phoenix, I'd have supposed it was a verdin, but among the pines at over a mile high I surmised it was a male hermit warbler.  And just like that, I was back to chasing warblers, reaching a new count of eleven individual species for the year.   The next day at close to the same time I witnessed another warbler, darting from branch to branch in the oak trees of my front yard.  I saw distinct black stripes which made me think it was a black and white warbler, an uncommon migratory bird to the area.  Circling my yard, I only captured a picture of a Bewick's wren high in a ponderosa pine tree.  I simply couldn't be as sure with this second warbler.  A couple of days later, I hit the f...

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...