Costa’s Aplenty at Tohono Chul

Alison and I are honest-to-goodness card-carrying members at Tohono Chul, a gem of a desert park just around the corner from our place. But it’s rare that we actually go in: the parking lot is way too much fun all by itself!

I got in the habit of wandering the entrance road years ago, when good friends here in Tucson tried to take me to Tohono Chul for the first time–twenty minutes after the park closed. Opening hours don’t matter much, though, to the abundance of leps that hang out in the flowery edges, and the clock don’t make no nevermind to the Lesser Goldfinches that gorge themselves on the thistle feeders discreetly hung from the trees.

This afternoon, the overspill from the socks attracted a Gambel’s White-crowned Sparrow messily molting from first-winter into glorious badger-striped adult plumage; he even sang a couple of times in assertion of his majority.

It’s the hummingbirds that make even the quickest visit worthwhile. Tohono Chul may be the easiest place in Tucson to see Costa’s Hummingbirds, and plenty of ‘em. Birds of both sexes are everywhere in the penstemons and justicias and other tubular sugar sources, while males perch high and keen above it all; this afternoon, one male had somehow got into the plant shop, where his bill-on-the-blackboard whistle echoed painfully underneath the roof.

Anna’s Hummingbirds are almost as common, and it’s a delight to see the two Calypte species together. Anna’s is a bulky, cylindrical hummingbird in any event, but it’s a hulk in direct comparison with its slight and slender congener.

Anna’s we have with us always, but Costa’s Hummingbird has an oddly complicated seasonal schedule here in southeast Arizona. They’re common and conspicuous in winter and early spring, frequenting pretty much every feeder in town, but in just a few weeks they’ll become noticeably more difficult to find; by the time summer really heats up, it can be an easy bird to miss. The standard story is that they retreat west into the deserts during the warm season, returning to sing and breed once things cool down in late fall.

And unlike most of Arizona’s special hummingbird specialties, Costa’s is hard to find in any season at the great trochilid hotspots of the extreme southeast. I’ve seen them off and on at Mrs. Paton’s in Patagonia, at Mary Jo’s in Ash Canyon, even (once or twice) at the wonderland that is Beatty’s Miller Canyon Guest Ranch; but it’s not at all unusual to end a spectacular 13- or 14-species hummingbird day with a fast drive to Tohono Chul to look for the missing Costa’s!