Unbelievably quiet last night in the Santa Catalinas, where Scott and I headed to listen for owls. We started in the early evening at a “known” site for Elf Owl, only to find the hole used by the owls in years past occupied by Gila Woodpeckers; it’s a hard life for the little guys. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to wander around listening for others, but after ticking off Great Horned Owl, started our ascent on the Mount Lemmon Highway.

It should have been a good night for owls, clear and calm early on (the wind did come up later in the evening). But all of our sure-fire stops were silent, with at best a few distant Common Poorwills the only reward for listening hard.

Finally Mount Bigelow (daunting road in the dark!) produced a strigid, and a good one at that. A Northern Saw-whet Owl sharpened his blade for a good 15 minutes as we stood in the cold dark and hoped for a close approach; the bird was in fact not far off, but never bothered to reveal himself against the starry sky.

Normally our route would have produced 6 owl species or more. The drive home was made longer by disappointment, but we diverted ourselves with a complicated calculus of owl value: was hearing the Saw-whet worth missing Flammulated? Did it outweigh missing both screech-owls? Would we rather have heard Spotted or Saw-whet? The games birders play!

I’ve always been a big cowbird fan, and living in southeast Arizona gives me two species to admire. Bronzed Cowbirds drop in to our yard occasionally in the spring, and one male this morning is dominating everything else (even the desert cottontails!) at the quail block out my window; even the House Sparrows and Pyrrhuloxias wait for the red-eyed beauty to finish.

Another male is singing from the other side of the house, his weird squeaks and squeals traveling through the living room window, down the hallway, and into my workroom. Yesterday I got up twice, thinking I’d heard the alarm bleep, to see who was opening the kitchen door! But both times it was the cowbird, that incredible circular ruff spread so wide that it lifted him off the ground as he sang.

Oh, a nice MacGillivray’s Warbler has just joined the scroungers under the hackberry thicket. 

 

Scott and I spent the afternoon in Ramsey Canyon, near Hereford, today, hoping for a good session with the Rufous-backed Robin that’s been hanging out there recently; no such luck, but it was a pleasant time anyway, highlighted by a male White-eared Hummingbird at the feeders. In the east, I always had to get my ear back in with the warblers in the spring; out here in Arizona, it’s the squeaks and chips of the hummingbirds that require refreshing this time of year, and it was good to sit and listen to Broad-billed, Broad-tailed, Black-chinned, Magnificent, and Blue-throated Hummingbirds all at the feeders.

I haven’t found Ramsey all that exciting these last few years, but today the oaks were in bloom and full of warblers.  Wilson’s Warbler was by far the most abundant, but there were also numbers of Painted Redstarts, Audubon’s Warblers, Black-throated Gray Warblers, and a couple of Townsend’s Warblers. Plumbeous and Hutton’s Vireos were singing, and late in the afternoon a Warbling Vireo dropped in. We noticed a couple of Lazuli Buntings when we arrived, and their numbers increased all afternoon until the lawn of the Ramsey Canyon B&B was covered with them, most of them males. A nice scene, enlivened even more by Summer Tanager, Scott’s and Bullock’s Orioles, and Black-headed Grosbeaks; these truly are tropical climes!

A screech-owl has been in a sycamore cavity above the feeders for several weeks now, and it popped into visibility a couple of times while we were there, only to be chased back into the dark by the rambunctiousness of Arizona gray squirrels. The bird has been identified by others as a Whiskered Screech-Owl, but it sure looked to us like a Western Screech-Owl, with heavily streaked (rather than barred) breast feathers; the surest way in the daylight is the size of the feet, which this one, however, kept demurely out of sight. Have to get back up there in the dark sometime and listen!

 

Danny and I left no leaf unturned this morning in Sycamore Canyon, where we had gone to seek the long-staying Rufous-capped Warbler. It was still dim when we arrived, with Montezuma Quail vocalizing from the hillside above the parking pullout at Yank and Hank. We walked down as far as Montana Canyon, listening intently for the hard, metallic tick of the bird or its dry, trilled song; to no avail, though we found Wilson’s and Audubon’s Warblers pretty much everywhere. The walk up to the grassy pool in Montana was similarly unrewarding, and we pretty much gave up and started walking down Sycamore towards Mexico. A male Elegant Trogon was honking away, and eventually gave great views; but we had a schedule to keep, and so turned back to Ruby Road.

At which point, naturally enough, the Rufous-capped Warbler popped up on the trail in front of us, just above the waterfall slightly above the entrance to Montana Canyon. Danny caught the movement first and got me on the bird; we followed it a hundred yards up the trail, with cripplingly excellent views down to just a few feet as the lovely creature fed on the wet ground, in the grass, and in the tangles above the stream. Used to searching for this species by sound, we were extremely lucky that it chose just the moment it did to flit, or we would have walked right past it again, as we certainly did on the way down the canyon earlier in the morning. Great bird, badly in need of a tail molt! Maybe a mate will show up, and we’ll have a repeat of the French Joe show that seems, sadly, to have run its course.

The vast majority of the Lesser Goldfinches in southeast Arizona are green-backed in male plumage, but every once in a while a black-backed male shows up; they seem to be especially frequent at Portal and Paradise feeders in the Chiricahuas, but even here in northwest Tucson we occasionally get a visit. These dark birds seem to show up most often in the winter, but this morning we had a magnificent individual at the thistle seed, shining jet black on the back and auriculars. 

Just what these black-backed birds “are” is still a source of confusion. In the eastern parts of the species’ range, Lesser Goldfinch males tend to be black-backed, though a small minority have green backs; this may be age-related. These birds are generally treated as a distinct subspecies psaltria (sensu Oberholser), while males of the western hesperophila (“our” subspecies) are, according to BNA, “always” green-backed (though sometimes with black streaks on the back and auriculars). If that is true, then the black-backed males we see here are in fact vagrant psaltria from the east. I suspect, though, that Pyle’s quiet suggestion in the Identification Guide is more plausible: namely, that all populations of Lesser Goldfinch are polymorphic, and that green backs and black backs simply appear at different rates in each subspecies.