The sublime stillness of the Sonoran Desert gives this most beautiful of landscapes a deceptive sense of stability. Unlike the constant motion of lesser habitats, the giant rocks and thirty-foot cactus of the desert seem permanent, unchanging, solid.

Until, that is, the wind starts to blow. One of the things I love about southeast Arizona is the near-absence of wind; but with a big storm on the way, today has been gusty, and it was a bit eerie to wander Catalina State Park this morning with Darlene and Jim and see the mighty saguaros swaying against the blue sky.

The unusual winds kept bird activity down, too, but as always at Catalina, what we did see included the best of desert birds. The sparrow flocks were small but select, with lots of Black-throated and Rufous-winged Sparrows to keep us happy. A wintering Hutton’s Vireo was happily hunting the mesquite bosques, and Black-tailed Gnatcatchers were as loud as they were confiding. The bright skies inspired some tentative vocalizing from Curve-billed Thrashers and Cactus Wrens, too; in just a couple of weeks they’ll be in full song all over town.

It won’t be long, either, before the Cardinalis start their whistling. Both species are common at the park, but this morning we especially enjoyed great views of Pyrrhuloxias, the “gray cardinals” of the desert.

Look close and you’ll see two birds–the rosy male and a half-hidden female to the left. We three birders amused ourselves this morning by attempting to distinguish the chips of this species and Northern Cardinal; you’d think that sheer probability would have let me get at least half of them right….

Somehow, for some reason, Tucson’s city parks attract birds–the bleaker the park, sometimes the better the birds! McCormick is way up there on the bleakness scale, and the male Williamson’s Sapsucker that seems to have set up house in the scattered pines and mesquites around the ballfield is way up there on the good-bird scale.

This species breeds throughout northern Arizona, but it’s an extremely low-density winterer here in the southeast, usually found at high elevations even during the coldest seasons. This one seems to have found a place he likes, though, down on the flats of urban Tucson. I ran over late this morning to take a look, and was rewarded eventually with this view of the bird drilling new sap wells.

Well, to tell the truth, no moths were involved, but you can’t keep a good phrase down. Saturday’s Sandhill Crane show in Arizona’s Sulphur Springs Valley was one of the most exciting I’d ever seen there. We started with just a few birds loafing at Whitewater Draw, but as the morning wore on, more and more returned from their cornfield breakfasts.

After 30 years of crane-watching, I still can’t get enough of that sound, the first faint growls of the distant flock growing louder and louder until you start to wonder whether there is any other noise anywhere in the world–then, suddenly, the clamor gives way to the conversational mumbles of cranes at the roost.

Ambitiously, we were looking for “other” cranes, too; it’s only a matter of time before this ever-increasing flock picks up a Common Crane. Or maybe a Demoiselle. Or even, someday, a Whooping Crane. But Saturday was not to be the day. We did, though, find the brownest Sandhill Crane I’d ever seen in winter.

The birds in this flock were distant (and oddly enough, in alfalfa), but careful cropping gives us this:

Sandhill Cranes are notorious for applying iron-rich mud to their feathers during the breeding season, likely to serve as camouflage during incubation; oxidation–rusting–turns the feathers bright brown. In most birds from migratory Sandhill populations, the pre-basic molt replaces most of those brown feathers with new gray ones, leaving only old remiges and wing coverts to show a brown wash. Who knows what happened to this one–whether it skipped a molt or just found some irresistibly wallowable red mud somewhere on its autumnal way south?

One of the great things about birding is that you don’t need rare birds to have rare experiences. Yesterday I went along on a Tucson Audubon trip, ably led by Chris Benesh and Dave Stejskal, to Whitewater Draw and the Sulphur Springs Valley. We had more than our share of rarish birds, among them a Dunlin, a very late Snowy Egret, and a regionally scarce Blue Goose among the Snow and Ross’s Geese. And we enjoyed great views of some common birds too: a Virginia Rail scampered along one of the dikes at Whitewater, a good 10 or so Ferruginous Hawks and individual Bald and Golden Eagles were out on the grasslands, and of course–much as it pains a Nebraska boy to admit it–the Sandhill Crane show was impressive as always.

But the most memorable part of a memorable day came as we were leaving Whitewater Draw. The vehicle I was in paused briefly for a fence-perched Crissal Thrasher, then almost drove past another one of the numerous Red-tailed Hawks that had moved in for the winter. But we stopped to see what it was eating–a good decision indeed.

Red-tailed Hawks aren’t the most discriminating gourmands around, and I usually see them munching on roadkilled rabbits, or still-writhing snakes, or sluggish spermophiles. Very rarely have I seen one eating a bird, and this was the first time I’d ever seen one dining on Barn Owl! Neither Bent nor BNA lists Barn Owls among the prey recorded for Red-tailed Hawk, and I couldn’t have been more surprised. Of course, we did not see the hawk capture the owl, and it’s possible that it merely scavenged it from the road, but the corpse was still relatively intact and relatively pliable when we saw it, suggesting that if the owl had been hit by a car, it had been a glancing blow inflicted at high noon.

Neither of the birds involved is a rare one in southeast Arizona. We’d seen dozens of Red-tailed Hawks and at least two Barn Owls by the time we witnessed this post-top banquet. But to see one consuming the other was, I suspect, a once-in-a-lifetime sighting for most of us, and one to top anything else we saw all day–even if one of the birds of the day was dead.