With four days in a row out in the field, I ran up a very nice hummingbird list this past weekend. The highlight, of course, was the Berylline Hummingbird Danny and I found in Florida Canyon, one of very few I’d ever seen “in the wild” (that is to say, away from feeders) in Arizona.

On Sunday, Tom and I did some target birding in the Huachucas, with two more Arizona specialties on our wish list. The male White-eared Hummingbird at Tom Beatty’s in Miller Canyon put on a spectacular show for us and the assembly of eager birders waiting on it, and we had fine views, too–this painfully lousy photo notwithstanding–of a female Lucifer Hummingbird at Mary Jo Ballator’s place in Ash Canyon.

Rare hummingbirds are great, of course, but it takes a lot of common ones, too, to beef up a trip list. And so in addition to the targets, we enjoyed Black-chinned, Costa’s, Anna’s, Broad-tailed, Rufous, unidentified Allen’s/Rufous types, Magnificent, Violet-crowned, and Broad-billed, for a total of 11 species, not half bad for April. (Now that I count ‘em up, I wish we’d put in some time looking for Blue-throated and Calliope, too!)

Some of those birds already have fledged young out and about, while others are just getting their breeding season underway. High in Miller Canyon on Sunday, Tom and I saw something black blur past carrying something white–and followed the female Magnificent Hummingbird to her neat little nest on an oak branch.

If that image doesn’t say spring in a southeast Arizona canyon, I don’t know what does.

There’s something about the small owls, that combination of ferocity and slight ridiculousness, that makes seeing one the highlight of any birding day. One of the commonest here in southeast Arizona, but still a bird most people rarely see, is Whiskered Screech-Owl, the typical “eared” owl of the higher oak canyons.

Favorite spots for day roosts are the knobbly wounds left when Arizona sycamores self-prune; the birds blend in incredibly well, looking just like the shadows of the cavities they fill.

We tend to think of this (and the other screech-owls, too) as strictly nocturnal, but in spring, Whiskereds are often moved to sing during the day, their polite little hooting sometimes giving way to the frenzied syncopation of their “Morse code” song, a vocalization that completely belies the grave dignity with which they otherwise comport themselves.

Scheelite Canyon is one of the loveliest places in southeast Arizona, quiet and dim, just the place for a walk on a warm afternoon.

Most birders come here not for the relaxation, however, but for a chance at some of our area’s most famous individual birds. The Spotted Owls of Scheelite Canyon have been reliably delighting feather fans now for a human generation.

Tom and I looked for the species in Miller Canyon yesterday morning, after scoring our major targets in the form of Lucifer and White-eared Hummingbirds. Alas, the owls in Miller were their usual reclusive selves, and even with precise directions to Saturday’s roosting tree, we failed to find them, contenting ourselves instead with Red-faced and Virginia’s Warblers and hopes of running across the owls farther north, in Scheelite.

All the way up to the waterfall pools we peered and peeked, hoping to abstract from the trees that part that was not tree but owl. No luck. We’d had a full three days already, with plenty of uphill and downhill, so decided not to continue onto the higher, steeper, hotter portion of the trail but to head back down to the car and count ourselves lucky at all the birds we had found. And, just in case, to keep our eyes open as we went back down canyon.

And of course, there sat our bird.

We’d walked within ten feet of the snoozing beauty on the way up, our view blocked by the tree trunk. What had been invisible on the way up was unmissable on the way down, and we paused briefly to admire this rare and splendid bird, leaving it then to concentrate on its nap.

A second great day out and about with Tom. Our first stop this morning was Montosa Canyon, where I’d told him we could make good one of yesterday’s misses. And we did: after walking up the canyon and through the giant culvert, I caught a glimpse of a bird too small to be one of the myriad Bell’s Vireos or Wilson’s Warblers, and a few minutes’ patience gave us outstandingly close views of a pair of Black-capped Gnatcatchers, feeding silently low in the mesquites.

Black-capped Gnatcatcher remains one of the most-sought “Mexican” species in southeast Arizona, a bird high on every visitor’s wish list. But they’ve been steadily, slowly increasing these past several years, and there are four or five readily accessible sites where you have a fair chance of running across them–Montosa my favorite of them all.

So a nice bird but an unsurprising one. Much more impressive was the bird we’d discovered just a few minutes earlier just a few yards down canyon. Carefully scanning the dense vegetation, we picked up on some sloppy, floppy movement; and then a creamy white breast with heavy black streaking. What on earth? Just as I formulated the question, the bird whipped around to reveal first its foxy red tail, then its dull orange eye and decurved bill. Brown Thrasher! I was beside myself with startelaciousness, and immediately pronounced it the bird of the day by far (on a day that included Violet-crowned Hummingbird and Zone-tailed Hawk and Rufous-winged Sparrow and pronghorn and tons of other good southwestern creatures).

Oddly, Tom–from Virginia–was less excited about the thrasher than I was.