Roper Lake State Park

Denis is still under the weather, so Darlene and I substituted for him on a field trip to Mt. Graham. We managed to get an early start, so decided to stop in on the way at Roper Lake State Park, a new site for me and for all the participants.

The combined words “lake” and “state park” create certain expectations, and they were well met: manicured drives, spongy green lawns, and a carefully engineered bathtub stocked with fish for the frying pan. But the scruffy edges of the park held large numbers of Black-throated Sparrows; at one point a Passerina bunting, probably a Lazuli, was singing away, invisible, from the mesquites. It looks like a good spot for wintering sparrows, and we found a number of Eurasian Collared-Doves on the wires, just a few miles from the beachhead they established in Safford just half a dozen years ago.

Predictably, the lake was covered with Mallards, many of them preternaturally large and clearly revealing their roots on the farm. A few Ruddy Ducks floated blissfully out in the middle, and a young Pied-billed Grebe, perhaps hatched there, perhaps not, was busy hunting anything small enough to swallow. There were several nice patches of cattails, giving hope for wintering (and perhaps summering) rails; that family was represented this morning, of course, only by American Coots. A little disappointingly, the extensive muddy edge attracted nothing but a couple of Spotted Sandpipers, and this at a time of year when just about every bit of moist ground in the state has a Baird’s or two.

All the same, a promising place to look in on on the way to the Pinaleños. Mt. Graham itself, where we spent about 5 hours, was not as good as on our pre-trip trip on Monday, but we did enjoy close-up looks at a Zone-tailed Hawk and a brief view of a passing Northern Goshawk. There seemed to be fewer mixed flocks working the mountainside, or at least we lucked across fewer of them than the other day; still, it’s hard to complain about Red-faced Warblers, which were present in good numbers in every little band of migrants we ran into.