Madera Canyon has had a lot of snow, with a dusting still present as low as Continental School. But it was a bright, calm day, and birding was as delightful as the landscape.

Snow tends to concentrate ground-feeding birds, and so our sparrow searches were made easier today. Proctor Road offered large numbers of Canyon, Spotted, and Green-tailed Towhees in the wintry scene. And a fine Slate-colored Fox Sparrow gave us great and lingering looks; like all the fox sparrows, this is a surprisingly rarish bird in southeast Arizona, making any day a special day when one shows itself.

The road was closed above Madera Picnic Area, so Darlene and I joined the throngs of sledders (sledders! in southeast Arizona!) walking up the hill towards the Santa Rita Lodge feeders. They were quiet (the feeders, not the sledders), but eventually a flock of sparrows came in; most were Chipping Sparrows, offering a weak impersonation of American Tree Sparrows in the snow, but along with them we found Yellow-eyed Juncos and 3 flavors of Dark-eyed Juncos: Gray-headed, Oregon, and a Pink-sided or two. I was stalking a wily pink-side when my camera batteries gave out:

Lousy picture, sweet bird. An excuse to get back up there to try again!

By far the day’s biggest surprise was a Lincoln’s Sparrow feeding in the snow with the chippies and juncos; this is typically a lowland species in the Arizona winter. That must be some good millet they’re feeding at the lodge to entice one up to that elevation on a cold afternoon.

 

It was easier in the old days, when a sapsucker was a sapsucker (unless, of course, it was a Williamson’s). But now, with 3 sort of smudgily defined species possible in Arizona, you have to look at every one. And it pays off sometimes: as a couple of weeks ago, when Scott and I saw a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker in Montosa Canyon, and as this morning, when at the end of a beautifully snowy IBA monitoring session, Beth spotted a sapsucker in the mesquites.

Now when Beth says “Sapsucker!,” people listen. A couple of years ago she found a beautiful apparent Red-naped x Red-breasted hybrid on a field trip I was leading, and until today, that and a bird I saw last year at Boyce Thompson had been the closest I’d ever come to seeing a Red-breasted Sapsucker in Arizona.

Until today.

I didn’t manage any really good portraits of the bird, but this one shows the head pattern well. Nothing we saw in the field or on the remaining photos suggests a hybrid origin, so this one goes down as a genuine Red-breasted Sapsucker.

Thanks, Beth! Here are the best of the photos:

One of the tremendous pleasures of birding in groups is that someone, inevitably, makes me look hard at something I’ve never bothered to look at before.

This morning’s SaddleBrooke group enjoyed lingering looks at a Lewis’s Woodpecker, then proceeded to a really excellent study session with female ducks: Canvasbacks, Ring-necked Ducks, Mallards, American Wigeon, and Ruddy Ducks all drifted past at close range, letting us fix in our eyes the things we’d pumped into our brains in Thursday evening’s lecture.

Of course, with fancy birds like that, you really can’t ignore the males, and there was lots of well-deserved oohing and aahing at the colorful drakes. At one point we were discussing the plumage marks of male American Wigeon, and someone mentioned “those bright white eyes.” I did a double-take; don’t wigeon have dark eyes?

Of course they do. But their eyelids are cottony white, as this blinking drake showed us.