Chiri Chase
It’s a long ways from Tucson to the east side of the Chiricahuas, but Beth, Elizabeth, Michael, Denis, and I were undaunted at 3:00 this morning when it came time to head out. Apart from some early-rising Chihuahuan Ravens and a late-falling meteor, the drive across to Paradise was thankfully uneventful, and we were at the site of this weekend’s warbler sightings not long after 6:30.
Our reception on the part of the birds is nicely summed up by this slightly indecorous photo of one of the half dozen Mexican Chickadees buzzing and fussing alongside the road.
Oh, it wasn’t really all that bad, but our targets, which had apparently spent Sunday perched on camera lenses making googly eyes at the kids from Camp Chiricahua, were nowhere to be seen, or heard, or smelled, or extrasensorily perceived the whole time we and a dozen more birders kept vigil.
That doesn’t mean there were no birds at all. In addition to the chickadees, which were joined by their noisier relatives the Bridled Timouses, we also saw plenty of Western Tanagers, Grace’s and Black-throated Gray Warblers, and Painted Redstarts; Brown Creepers and Hermit Thrushes provided the acoustic background. A couple of Arizona Woodpeckers worked the pines, and the Band-tailed Pigeon numbers were downright impressive by Arizona standards, with the largest flock one of 25 birds and our morning’s total easily approaching twice that.
As is frustrated birders’ wont, our attention eventually drifted to invertebrates. This lovely beetle landed on my leg, then on my head, then finally on a somewhat more photogenic substrate. Ideas?
Leps were abundant once the sun came up; among them was this stunning red-spotted admiral (which I grew up calling by the slightly over-determined name ‘red-spotted purple’).
Most fascinating of all, though, were a couple of insects we didn’t see at all. Some sort of leaf-miner had had its way with this wild grape.
And this golf-ball-sized oak gall is (or was) the cozy home of a wasp larva. In the midwest, many of these large galls have a distinctive apple-like odor; uncertain whether it was occupied, we didn’t cut this one open to find out if it shared that characteristic.
So in spite of the elusiveness of warblers crescent-chested, it was a fun morning, and I even got a photo of a Mexican Chickadee’s front. Kind of.
