Mike in the Wild

My summers in Prescott always begin with much eagerness for the changes from my desert life in Phoenix: cool temperatures, dark night skies, monsoon thunder storms, verdant forest landscapes, an abundance of critters like skunks, and lots and lots of birds.   After nearing completion of my thirteenth season escaping some of the hottest temperatures in Arizona - not to mention record-breaking - I've not been disappointed on the subject of birds.  Every late spring I love reacquainting myself with the woodpeckers, jays, juncos, nuthatches and titmice that call the juniper and scrub oaks a full-time home.   But it might be the more challenging search for migratory birds that I most look forward to every year.  Plenty of neotropical birds that spend our cooler winter months in Central or South America breed in North America during our warm summer.  Orioles, warblers and cardinals are just a few of the avian families whose many species travel to or through ...

There are a number of cardinal species in the Americas, with the brilliantly red-colored northern cardinal being the most famous in the United States.  But the Arizona deserts are a year-round home to another cardinal, the pyrrhuloxia.  Gray with red highlights, while sporting a pointier crest and stubbier beak than his famous cousin, he calls the American Southwest and the deserts of central Mexico home. Phoenix doesn't get a lot of sightings of the pyrrhuloxia, unlike Tucson's surrounding deserts almost a hundred miles to the south.  But a lone male seems to have taken up residence at the Desert Botanical Garden in the center of the metropolitan area's urban sprawl.  He seems to thrive in the acres of habitat that showcase the world's heat-loving and drought-tolerant flora. And this desert cardinal as he's sometimes called seems to be living at the northern-most limit of his species' range, providing a lucky chance for Central Arizona's birders to conv...