Montosa Canyon: Birds and Bugs

Beauty and accessibility were not enough to make Montosa Canyon famous, but the Black-capped Gnatcatchers that moved in there several years ago pulled it off. Nowadays, this gorgeous shallow canyon on the west flank of the Santa Ritas is perhaps the easiest place in the US to find the species.

When they’re there, that is. A little more than two hours of searching this morning turned up nary a peep or buzz; but Darlene and Michael and I enjoyed our time all the same, not least because it was refreshingly cool for the first hour or so. Well, cool by recent Tucson standards.

A summertime walk in Montosa is always filled with Bell’s Vireos. Families of incessantly begging fledglings were everywhere, the parents singing occasionally in between stuffing caterpillars down the kids’ insatiable throats. Summer Tanagers and Crissal Thrashers, an odd combination, sang from the hillsides, occasionally straying into the territory of a pair of wrathful Cassin’s Kingbirds. And both Ash-throated and Brown-crested Flycatchers were apparently feeding young in nests unseen.

All of this avian abundance is due to one fact: Montosa Canyon is buggy beyond belief in the summer. Not mosquitoes, fortunately, but a vast diversity of wasps, bees, hornets, flies, butterflies, moths, ants, velvet ants: you name it, and if it crawls and creeps, it’s in there.

I’d expected this huge Acanthocephala to be easy to photograph, but they turned out to be surprisingly coy, going behind the branches when I got too close, even flying away when they felt the camera’s eye intruding. They were especially abundant where desert broom had been scraped or broken, sucking down the sap.