Desert Rails

I marvel again and again at how good the waterbirds are here in the Sonoran Desert. Not only are the lots of ‘em, but the scarcity of their preferred liquid substrate concentrates them in ways that make the watching better than just about anyplace else I’ve ever birded. In fact, there are a number of aquatic and limicolous species I’ve probably seen more often in Arizona than anywhere else on the continent. Thanks to desert oases like Tucson’s Sweetwater Wetlands, Sora, that familiar little rail of midwestern marshes and ditches, may well have made that list by now.

The photo doesn’t do the bird or the views Darlene and I had of it Sunday afternoon justice, but it does show just how mucky the drawn-down ponds are right now: that foot is downright Byronic as it comes up out of the mire.

And I’m almost certain that I’ve seen more Common Moorhens in Arizona than I have anywhere else in North America.

With water levels dropping quicky in Sweetwater’s eastern ponds, this is a great time to get out and look at some birds that otherwise keep to their cattail lairs. Sunday’s list included everything from Great Egret to Swamp Sparrow, from Northern Pintail to Summer Tanager. Who knows what the newly exposed mud will bring out of hiding next?