This is one of the male Montezuma Quail Linda, Alan, and I saw on Monday along Harshaw Creek.

Like the other birds in his covey, this one displayed a touching degree of confidence in the capacity of a single strand of dried grass to conceal him from view.

Up too late working on my taxes, I’ve overlapped with a Western Screech-Owl singing in the front yard. The owl’s voice is a great deal sweeter than mine after these many hours of sorting and stacking and adding and multiplying.

This picture was taken in early October last year, when we still had our old owl box up and the IRS was just a dim foreboding. Next October the little guy will find the beautiful new box that Kevin built for us at Thanksgiving, and I’ll have a much, much better filing system in place for our receipts.

Another beautiful day out and about in southeast Arizona with Linda and Alan. Birding was actually a bit slender, but we ended the day with Alan attaining an impressive milestone: a Cassin’s Vireo at the world-famous Patagonia Picnic Table was his world bird #1,900. I was delighted to be there for it!

The day’s highlight had come a few hours earlier on Harshaw Creek Road, on the north side of the Patagonia Mountains on the way to the San Rafael Grasslands. It had been quiet thus far, so we stopped for a flock of Chipping Sparrows and Oregon Juncos on the roadside; when we heard Bridled Titmouses, we hopped out of the car to look for them. I got a quick glimpse of a couple up on the ridgetop, and was giving directions at the top of my lungs to Linda and Alan when I saw the grass move a couple of feet from my own: Montezuma Quail, first a female, then a male, then a male, then a female, then another female. The birds moved calmly upslope, stopping to feed on green vegetation and to scratch the ground for seeds. We finally left them still foraging only 15 or 20 feet away from us, once more convinced that these are magical birds.

The San Rafael was less exciting, though we did enjoy 4 White-tailed Kites hunting the edges of the recent burn (how beautiful that is going to be in a couple of weeks when the new grass sprouts!). Lilian’s Meadowlarks were in full song, and it was a lot of fun to work on pinning down elusive plumage characters on birds of certain vocal identity. Sparrows were scarce: we had remarkably unsatisfying views and listens of Chestnut-collared Longspurs, but otherwise found only the usual Savannah and Vesper Sparrows, with the occasional Loggerhead Shrike looking happy, no doubt sated on Sprague’s Pipit with a Baird’s Sparrow chaser.

The raptor wonderland along the lower Santa Cruz River is usually winding down by late February, and this year is no exception; in a full morning along the river between Marana and Red Rock, Lori and I found hawk numbers relatively low. But the quality was there.

Our two Ferruginous Hawks included one stunning black bird and a light-morph juvenile with a broad dark tail-band, raising hopes for a split second of that other feathery-footed buteo. As usual Red-tailed Hawk was the most abundant raptor; among them was a single dark-morph adult.

A fine surprise was two Peregrine Falcon adults perched in the same tree at the Marana Pecan Grove, one big, one small; perhaps they were eyeing the crags of the Silverbells and the dove flocks on the fields, breeding on their minds.

Northern Harriers were always in sight, some of them high above the river and moving north on what was probably the first good migration day of the spring for them. One male gave us the most dramatic sight of the day, when he suddenly broke off his slow quartering of the field to dive at a Sharp-shinned Hawk perched on the ground; the hawk was on a male Red-winged Blackbird, which took advantage of its attacker’s being attacked to high-tail it away. The sharpy landed in a pecan tree and sulked, the harrier went back to the unending search for cotton rats, and the red-wing was last seen on the eastern horizon moving fast!

I met Linda and Alan in downtown Tucson on a cold, almost raw morning, and we headed south, looking for “Mexican” specialties between Nogales and Arivaca. The wind and the chill kept bird numbers low all day, but when we did run across a pocket of activity here and there, it was exciting indeed–as it always is down on the border!

Cold as it was, we decided to start with a drive through the astonishingly birdful trailer park at Continental, just up the road towards Madera Canyon. Gila and Ladder-backed Woodpeckers were drumming and shrieking (well, whinnying in the case of the ladder-backs), and there were plenty of Eurasian Collared-Doves moaning and hooting; a single White-winged Dove may have wintered locally or just may have been pushing the calendar with an early arrival.

It wouldn’t be a day afield without a stop at a sewage pond, so we pulled off the road at Amado, where a small number of individual ducks represented a great variety of species, among them Redhead and Canvasback. A few Northern Rough-winged Swallows were sheltering out of the wind beneath the high banks of the pond, but passerines were otherwise scant and skulky.

Encouraged by the waterfowl diversity at Amado, we checked out the Rio Rico ponds on our way south; this is very much a breeding-season hotspot, but once in a while the stock tanks and flooded pastures draw a bird this time of year too. It worked well this time. Not only did we add several waterbirds to our day’s list–Pied-billed Grebe, American Coot, Green-winged Teal, Northern Pintail, Great Egret, Great Blue Heron, Belted Kingfisher–but we also encountered the day’s biggest surprise in a juvenile Crested Caracara hunting the fields just east of the railroad tracks. Strictly speaking, this bird was out of range, too far south for the population on the lower Santa Cruz, too far east for the usual border birds; if only I were a county lister!

After such good luck en route, I was a mite disappointed to find Peña Blanca Lake quiet–quiet as far as birds, a little noisy as far as human fishermen. Alan spotted a fine male Common Yellowthroat, and there was a flurry of Ruby-crowned Kinglets flashing their crowns at each other. A couple of Black Vultures and a few Turkey Vultures rose as the sun finally winked through the clouds, but most of the birds I’d been hoping for just didn’t show.

On the leeward side of the lake road, though, we ran across a great little flock of passerines, including Canyon, Spotted, and Green-tailed Towhees; a handsome pair of Black-throated Sparrows; and perhaps my “best” bird of the day, a very snazzy Black-chinned Sparrow. A big flock of Chipping Sparrows at the Lower Thumb picnic area had 4 juncos with it–4 juncos of three races! A bright male Oregon and an incredibly lovely Pink-sided were joined by a brace of Gray-headed Juncos, a bird I usually associate with higher elevations during the winter. A good-looking female Red-naped Sapsucker was pecking away in the oaks, too, one of the area’s signature species in winter.

Our scheme was to drive Ruby Road to Arivaca, making stops along the way, but we found few birds and much road damage, so ended up doing more driving than stopping. Rock Wrens were the most frequent roadside birds, while a quick lunch break at the top of Sycamore Canyon produced a few Acorn Woodpeckers and a Red-shafted Flicker. A Turkey Vulture was moving north over the Arivaca Library, promising warmer temperatures and more summery birding when the three of us meet again on Monday!