Mike in the Wild

On rare occasions a visit to Watson Woods is a disappointment: not a singe blue grosbeak, summer tanager, great horned owl, wood duck, or bobcat in sight.  Of course there are always some birds - you can certainly bet on seeing lesser goldfinches.  However the preserve has accustomed me to regularly being wowed by a brand-new discovery and an exciting story to recount, like on a single outing to the park in June when I encountered a whopping three of the four tanagers and grosbeaks that call the area their summer home.  Yet two weeks ago I almost called it a day and left after only finding blue grosbeaks, beautiful but not out-of-the-ordinary subjects lately.  But then there was a sign from above when I looked up and saw a flock of over two dozen ibises soaring overhead. I had actually ended up at the northern end of Watson Woods, crossing under Prescott Lakes Parkway where Granite Creek was a mere trickle despite the recent rains.  Not usually exploring that a...

It's the surprises in birding that are often the most exciting: finding white pelicans wintering in Phoenix; snapping shots of rose-breasted grosbeaks as they make a quick stop in your yard during spring migration north; and, like I did this week, encountering a brand new bird, a roseate spoonbill, on  Watson Lake in Prescott, Arizona,  hundreds of miles from its normal range. Vagrants are not unusual in many species of birds. After all, they have the ability to fly, so they can often easily travel great distances if successful in finding food and the climate is agreeable.  But the spoonbill is a coastal bird, common in the United States along the Gulf of Mexico in Texas and Florida.  However the juvenile that showed up in central Arizona may have come from a closer location, somewhere along the Sea of Cortez or the western coast of Mexico where the bird is also a resident. Making the arduous journey inland and so far north may have been aided by summer monsoon s...

The ibis is not a bird that I usually think of when out exploring in the Arizona landscape.  I associate it with Africa, and Egypt specifically, somehow familiarizing myself with the bird by seeing its ancient hieroglyphics and statues in a museum, on PBS or in a "National Geographic."  A little research shows that the species known as the African sacred ibis was indeed venerated by the Egyptians, and was associated with the deity Thoth, who among other things, was responsible for writing and mathematics.  As a result, the ibis was featured as the first hieroglyph, and a number of millennium later, its long, down-curved bill was forever embedded in my memory. Ibises form a large family ( threskiornithidae) of wading birds with up to 34 species distributed worldwide.  It's not uncommon to see a few varieties of them in Florida and along the gulf coast, but in the West we mostly have just one - the white-faced ibis.  In this part of the country, they tend to ...