Mike in the Wild

"Plant it and they will come," is a rough paraphrase borrowed from a famous late 1980's movie.  These words are an apt recommendation to attract birds to a backyard: landscape with native flora and you're guaranteed to have local species visit your garden.   As I've watched a newly planted palo verde tree mature over the last two years, I've seen verdins - some of the tiniest of desert birds - regularly visit it as they hunt for miniscule insects between its leaves or drink nectar from its spring blossoms.  And recently, juveniles have joined their parents in these forages, reminding me that not only does a well-placed tree encourage visits, it might just nurture a family. When you first encounter a verdin, it's usually their peeps you notice before you spot them.  Peep, hop, peep, hop: their nonstop performance is choreographed to a fast metronome.   They're tiny, even smaller than a chickadee, probably closer in size to a bushtit.  ...

We're lucky to have in the middle of the Phoenix metropolitan sprawl a world-class desert plant museum and education center.  The Desert Botanical Garden's collections of cacti, succulents, trees and plants from all the globe's arid regions are arranged in a multitude of beautiful landscapes, habitats and gardens.  Unsurprisingly, the desert flora attracts a multitude of critters that include many birds, both resident and migratory. But the park of course makes money and needs to attract the people that spend it.  So the garden also has restaurants, shops, art galleries and regular events like the holiday season's Las Noces de las Luminarias when luminaria bags, strings of lights and live bands overtake the peace and calm you might associate with the grounds.  And over at least the last ten years there have been frequent but temporary art installations that have placed contemporary sculptures and lights throughout the desert landscape. As a wildlife and nature lo...

One guarantee for good bird watching in your own yard is to place feeders there.  It seems like half of all the homes in the Phoenix area maintain sugar water-filled hummingbird feeders to attract the hyper-fast, iridescent Anna's variety.  Seeds will bring a plethora of house finches along with more colorful residents like northern cardinals.  Suet is popular with many birds including woodpeckers.  And migratory orioles are known to return to specific homes that put out orange or other fruit slices. But the absolute easiest and cheapest way to attract birds to your backyard is with simple landscaping.  I was reminded of this very recently when I noticed one of the desert's most common birds, the verdin, making frequent stops in a museum palo verde tree I planted over a year ago.  It seems fitting that a bird as associated with the Desert Southwest as the verdin would find good foraging in Arizona's official state tree.  Two varieties of the drough...

There are many well-known birds in the desert Southwest, with the roadrunner possibly the most famous.   In Arizona, the cactus wren, with its playful personality, might be a close second.  The ubiquitous flocks of noisy Gambel's quails are on many people's lists of favorites.  But the most common bird, the verdin, has never been heard of in many circles. The verdin is a tiny bird, smaller than most sparrows, populating the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico.  What it lacks in size, it compensates for in its sharp and frequent peeps that can be heard from most palo verde and mesquite trees as it continuously forages for insects.  Since it seems to be always moving, it's sometimes difficult to focus on him.  And when you do, he's usually just a flash of gray in a dense canopy of branches.  But in the right light, and with the aid of a camera's fast shutter speed, you'll notice his lemon yellow head, proving he's just as conspicuou...