Phainopeplas on the Move

A funny name for a funny bird, a Greek mouthful nearly as exotic as the creature’s appearance: all smooth, silky black or gray, with a wildly upswept crest and gleaming red eyes. Scouting for this past Christmas Count, we ran into a golf course maintenance man who urged us to be on the lookout for “them devil-birds,” an unjustified and alarming moniker for these gentle denizens of the mesquite bosques.

Phainopeplas have been with us here in the lower foothills all winter, livening up the telephone wires and the ocotillo stalks with their sleek elegance and low-pitched whistled whoops. They spend the colder part of the year eating mistletoe berries from desert trees, leaving pyramidal piles of sticky droppings on mesquites and palo verde trunks, where the still intact seeds of the mistletoe take hold to start a new colony. Our neighbors cut the mistletoe out of their yards, labeling it a vicious, messy, unseemly parasite, but we like our Phainopeplas too much to do that to ourselves.

Spring is in the warm air, though, and our dashing winter visitors are acting restless. Their calls are more varied, and any day now I expect to hear the sweet, oriole-like chortle of the males’ songs. And it will be not many weeks before they all abandon these mistletoe-rich elevations to move higher, to the mouths of the mountain canyons, where they will switch from berries to insects and raise the next generation of devil-birds.