The Dragoons

Their martial name notwithstanding, the Dragoon Mountains–separating the San Pedro and the Sulphur Springs Valleys–turned out to be magically beautiful on Saturday’s visit with Darlene, Starr, and John. We left Tucson in the dark and unwonted damp of an early spring morning, then made our way through eerie fog towards the Dragoons. As the haze lifted, it revealed no fewer than eight Greater Roadrunners along Middlemarch Road, the black down of their rumps raised to greet the warming sun.

Climbing gently into the oaks, we began to encounter the usual wintertime flocks of Chipping Sparrows, stunningly beautiful, cheerful little birds displaying the plumage variation that so surprised me when I first came to Arizona: winter chippies range from rather dull, brown birds to bright-capped, neat-faced individuals lacking only the black bill of spring. As usual, the flocks were rather homogeneous, though one aggregation included a single Black-chinned Sparrow, a common breeder on at least the east side of the mountain range. And a few Vesper Sparrows and Gray-headed and Oregon Juncos accompanied the flocks, too.

The other passerine action was provided by Bridled Titmouses, forming the core of small and active flocks containing Ruby-crowned Kinglets, Hutton’s and a single Plumbeous Vireo, and woodpeckers. Ladder-backed Woodpeckers were easy to see–not always the case with this common but usually inconspicuous creature–and Red-naped Sapsuckers were common and uncharacteristically noisy, their hawk-like squealing sometimes the only voice in the otherwise silent woods.

We were out for the birds, of course, but I was particularly eager to see Council Rocks, a site thought to have been continuously occupied for a thousand years, from the time of the Hohokam to the end of the Apache. It is a dramatic place indeed, with great boulders piled up and columns weathering out of the mountainside.

The scenery was so spectacular that I don’t know whether we saw birds or not up there!

In the center of Council Rocks, slabs and pillars have fallen together to create a series of natural shelters; it was here that the prehistoric inhabitants prepared their harvest in small grinding holes and decorated the walls and ceilings with images as beautiful as they are inscrutable.

And it was here, they say, that Cochise and his followers met to ponder their betrayal, hiding in the tightly angled chambers created by the rocks.

After gazing nearly our fill, we moved on north along the west flank of the mountains, where a good road led us to one of the most beautiful riparian areas I’ve seen yet in Arizona’s sky islands.

It was quiet, nearly birdless (though a mean-spirited Townsend’s Solitaire did fly past us, moving up-canyon too fast for all of us to get on it in time). But the dense vegetation, the promise of water in the moist seasons, and the remoteness of the place made me eager to go back in spring. Who knows what’s in there? Saturday was not just a beautiful day, it was a reminder that southeast Arizona still holds more secrets than we sometimes remember. And this is just the sort of locality where they’re hiding out.