When I was a boy, not so long ago, butchers actually gave you big chunks of suet for free, and some of my earliest birding memories are of rising in the dark on frigid days to break off chunks of the creamy white block with an ax, then nailing them to the “feeder tree” in our back yard.  Suet is different now: it comes in shrink-wrapped plastic trays, and in ‘flavors’.  A couple of months ago we ran across a store selling off its stock of peanut-butter suet cakes, and, assured that it, magically, would not drip in the desert heat, we bought a couple.  I hung the first one a few minutes ago.

Predictably, the first to partake has been a male Gila Woodpecker, who approached the wire cage with such confidence (and has remained clinging to it with such devotion) that I almost suspect he’s done this before.  To my surprise, the House Sparrow that dropped in to check it out lingered barely a moment before dropping to the familiar quail block below.  But the suet has been a real hit with a male Pyrrhuloxia, who perched on top of the cage and wrested great mouthfuls from the greasy mass in between loud bouts of singing.  I wonder how long it will take the Cactus Wren on the quail block to discover that the new feature in the landscape is edible: not long, I bet.

 

The hackberries I knew growing up in the midwest were tall trees with hard black fruits that yielded a surprising amount of sugar when cracked by young teeth. It’s taken some getting used to here in the desert, where Celtis is most commonly represented by a dense, thorny shrub with soft red fruits that can be charitably described as insipid. But the birds do love ‘em, both the “berries” and the thick foliage that provides shade and cover all year around.

Working inside this morning, trying hard (and failing) to catch up with all that has accumulated in my weeks away, I managed still to do some birding by watching the hackberry thicket out my window. Lucy’s and Orange-crowned Warblers joined the resident Verdins and Black-tailed Gnatcatchers in studiously picking eggs and caterpillars from the leaves, and Anna’s and Costa’s Hummingbirds kept busy collecting spiderwebs from the branches. A flycatching Phainopepla took the thicket’s highest perch, while the shade beneath the low-hanging branches was cover for White-winged and Mourning Doves, Gambel’s Quail, and White-crowned Sparrows.

Our yard is big and pleasingly messy, scrubby enough for a nice variety of emberizids to drop in during winter and migration. The most frequently encountered species is White-crowned Sparrow, and this morning two scratched under the thistle feeder while I did the breakfast dishes. They’re terrifically attractive birds, of course, but the real appeal for sparrow-watchers is that these handsome birds bear their addresses on their heads. One of the birds this morning, a white-lored gambelii, is headed far north, while its black-lored companion, of the race oriantha, may go no farther than northern Arizona to breed.

A conjunction of household disasters (an empty cupboard, a recalcitrant vacuum cleaner, and a head of curly locks severely in need of a shearing) found me standing in front of our local Wild Birds Unlimited this morning, waiting for Alison to pick me up.

This store has great feeders, invariably covered with Lesser Goldfinches and Mourning Doves, so the wait wasn’t really that much of a hardship. I noticed today, though, that they had added to the feeders hanging from the small mesquite out front one of those insufferably cute bundles of wool scraps, meant to attract nesting birds. Yeah, right. And as I stood there, feeling sorry for the poor saps who buy such things (instead of simply letting the cobwebs build up on their windowsills, which is my strategy), a female Anna’s Hummingbird buzzed in, picked up a wisp of wool, and added it to a nest she was building two trees down.

I haven’t tallied up the final list yet, but it looks like our trip to Texas last week turned up around 175 species. I’d hoped for more, but we never really saw anything approaching a “good” passerine migration (which might mean, of course, that the birds were profiting from the nearly constant south winds and didn’t need to stop on the coast). Some of the highlights for me:

10 species of waterfowl including Fulvous and Black-bellied Whistling-Ducks and Mottled Duck;

Northern Gannets off Bolivar Flats;

13 species of herons and ibises, plus both vultures;

Broad-winged Hawks in small numbers, and no fewer than 3 Merlins;

6 rallids including King and Clapper Rails and Purple Gallinule;

30 species of shorebirds (a couple of those, unfortunately, only on my scouting days);

Red-cockaded and Pileated Woodpeckers;

excellent looks at Sedge Wrens at High Island;

only 13 warblers, but among them Prothonotary, Hooded, Louisiana Waterthrush, and Yellow-breasted Chat;

Bachman’s and Seaside Sparrows.