Perspective

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.