Mike in the Wild

I marked the end of my fourteenth summer in Prescott in typical fashion, weedwacking desiccated wildflowers and covering deck furniture.  I also refilled bird feeders for the last time this year, leaving sugar water for Anna's hummingbirds and suet and seeds for the menagerie of titmice, nuthatches, jays, and woodpeckers that call the trees in my neighborhood their year-round home.  It wasn't the birds' last supper as they seem to manage well enough on the bounty of other humans along with that of the surrounding woods.  Enjoying my last glimpses of these forest friends until the spring, I was struck by two surprises in my yard: a pair of red-naped sapsuckers and a first-time sighting of a red-breasted nuthatch. Red-naped sapsuckers have appeared on my Prescott property at least twice before.  Like this past weekend, the visits were in autumn and the birds were foraging high in the ponderosa pines.  Sapsuckers appear to be seasonal visitors, never joining their ...

I've been quite lucky to have spent the last several summers in Prescott where I've met many high elevation birds like scrub jays and titmice.  With the arrival of freezing temperatures and the departure of summer-breeding birds, I start to lose interest in regular visits north.  But during my infrequent winter stays I still pay attention to the tweets and pecks coming from the wooded landscape and am occasionally rewarded with a fun find like on this past weekend when I discovered a red-naped sapsucker. Four woodpeckers go by the name sapsucker, all in the genus Sphyrapicus.  I think only two are common in Arizona, the William's and the already mentioned red-naped.  While I've never encountered either in the state's deserts I have observed the red-naped in my Prescott neighborhood during autumn on at least two occasions.   I speculate that this weekend's individual might be a winter visitor to the area, breeding in a higher elevation than my neighborho...