Southeast Arizona Winter

Criminy, thunder! It sounds like the winter rains are about to begin in earnest: gentle, lasting drizzles very unlike the violence of the late-summer monsoon, but no less welcome.

Elizabeth and I had a sense of the change in the weather this afternoon, with humidity and dust heavy in the air at Willcox. The sudden wind kept bird activity down, but we still enjoyed 32 Common Mergansers and 9 Canada Geese (a local rarity, you know) on the big sewage pond, and a Cassin’s Sparrow holding on for dear life to a fence was a nice find for winter.

Before that, we’d visited Whitewater Draw and the Sulphur Springs Valley, especially impressed by no fewer than 5 Ferruginous Hawks in the space of just a couple of miles. Loggerhead Shrikes and American Kestrels were in good numbers of the wires, no doubt casting longing, hungry looks at the Lark Buntings on the fields.

On the way to Whitewater, we couldn’t resist a stop in St. David for the bluebird show. We pulled up to the schoolhouse to find the wires literally lined with Mountain Bluebirds, 290 of them in view at once and no doubt more than that temporarily invisible on the ground behind. They perched quite readily on all sorts of structures, including swingsets that next week will be occupied by bipedal mammals.

The first stop of our morning had been Benson, where the tricky Tundra Swan continues to play hard to get. But we had great looks there at Canvasback, Eared Grebe, and 3 Snow Geese, so all was not lost. Never is, in fact, when you’re birding.