Those of us who grew up in the east and midwest can be easily confused by this common southwestern bird.

And with good reason: the Song Sparrows of the desert southwest are unusually pale, reddish, and sparsely marked, and they tend to hold their tails cocked high, wren-like, as they poke and prod the wet edges of rivers and ponds. I regularly spend a fair bit of time convincing people that these are in fact Song Sparrows, even though “they don’t look at all like the ones back home!”

When Spencer Baird described these ‘desert’ Song Sparrows in 1854, he recognized their distinctiveness, and in a bit of ornithological wit, named them fallax, the deceiver. And they continue to deceive birders who let themselves be misled by the details of their plumage rather than concentrating on their typically Song-Sparrow-like shape and structure and voice.

My Tucson Audubon field trip started off with a bang yesterday morning, or at least with a flash, when a large green fireball shot across the sky. It was one of the best I’d ever seen, and I’m eager to hear whether others up at the ungodly hour of 4:12 am noticed it too!

I met the participants, a small but enthusiastic group, and we drove slowly to the lake, stopping along the way for Varied Buntings and Yellow-breasted Chats. Those two species tend to be late arrivals; in fact, the buntings were still in small single-sex groups, suggesting that they had just showed up or were perhaps even still on their way elsewhere (not that there are that many “elsewheres” in this country for a Varied Bunting).

But even as the last of the summer birds were arriving, others were busy with breeding activities. Vermilion Flycatchers have already brought off their first broods, but we found one female on a nest yesterday in the same cottonwood occupied by what were probably her own recent fledglings. Black Phoebe fledglings were begging, successfully enough, from perches over the water, and little tiny Yellow Warblers, their bills still soft and their tails barely hinted at ‘neath the down, were squeaking at the parents from the treetops. A Hutton’s Vireo couldn’t quite decide what he should be doing: he sang incessantly even with a mouthful of fluff to add to the nest lining!

With all of that busyness going on, I’d hoped to show the group some juvenile cowbirds; but we had to settle for great looks at adult Brown-headed and Bronzed Cowbirds, including this male singing his weirdly beautiful song at the upper picnic area.