Mock Spring, and an AZ BTB

The weather, the light, and the birds this time of year in southeast Arizona often remind me of a midwestern spring: the temperatures warm, the skies often dull, and the birds full of song.

I stepped outside this morning to the wonderful sounds of Mourning Doves and Cactus Wrens, the one sympathetically lamenting the failure of the other to get its vehicle started. Curve-billed Thrashers and Anna’s Hummingbirds chanted and scritched, and as I stood enjoying it all, that tri-tone whistle that truly means spring drifted out of the mesquite above my head: the Verdins are singing! It’s only hours now, I’m sure, until a neighbor or a friend stops me: “I’ve been hearing this bird….”

Spring means warblers, too, of course, and Darlene and I supplemented the usual wintry complement of Audubon’s Warblers with a late-afternoon jaunt to downtown Tucson. Like lilacs in a midwestern May, the African sumac filled the air with what is literally an intoxicating fragrance, but I awoke from my vernal stupor long enough to enjoy the star of the unprepossessing little patch of mesquites and salt cedars. A flash of black and white caught Darlene’s eye, and soon she, Vita, and I were enjoying good looks at a male Black-throated Blue Warbler, my first for Arizona and all that was missing to make this mock spring complete.