Spring Hummingbirds

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.