Tucson Bird Count 2007

Facing the end of the count period, I got out early, early this morning to do my part of the Tucson Bird Count. Of the four years I’ve participated in this urban bird survey, this was the latest in the season I had ever run the route, and the first time I’d ever done it on a weekday.

Start time is half an hour before sunrise, and when we were finished two and a half hours later, we had tallied 36 species at the one dozen residential and industrial sites on the route. There were some surprising misses and some low numbers: no raptors, no hummingbirds, no tanagers, no cardinals or pyrrhuloxias, and only 3 Verdins and 2 Western Kingbirds. Some of this was certainly the late date, some of it the added noise and bustle of a workday, but there have been changes along the route since 2006: some trees are gone, some brushy edges sanitized, and a number of ominous “for sale” signs up.

We made up for the misses, though, with our stop above the Orange Grove ‘ponds’. These are deep pits, still being actively stripped for gravel and sand, but some of them wet, and one of them with a fine stand of cattails and rushes. How much avian breeding actually goes on in there I can’t say, but this morning as we stood on the frontage road, trucks rushing by, we found a good selection of migrant waterbirds: Cinnamon Teal, Double-crested Cormorant, White-faced Ibis, Black-necked Stilt, and American Avocet. A Black-crowned Night-Heron flew over, and two Yellow-headed Blackbirds were surprisingly tardy.

The Count period ends Monday, so take time next week to have a look at the results at www.tucsonbirds.org. And if you can, sign up for a route for next year!