Darlene, Elizabeth, and Alison and I chose the wrong canyon today to look for this itinerant Brown-backed Solitaire: we ended up in Miller Canyon, and the bird apparently showed in Ramsey. Ah well. If we’d gone to Ramsey, we might still have missed the bird–and we’d have had nowhere near so good a hummingbird day.

The middle feeders at Beatty’s Guest Ranch were buzzing, mostly, of course, with Anna’s, Black-chinned, and Broad-billed Hummingbirds. But there were also plenty of Broad-taileds and Magnificents, and a great hulking bully of a Blue-throated emerged from the foliage once in a while to chase everything away from “his” feeder.

Denis and I had walked up the hill together, and the first bird we saw on our approach to the feeders was a male White-eared Hummingbird, soon enough joined by another male. Both birds were molting primaries; one had replaced all its secondaries, while the other still showed a couple of old brown ones.

White-eared has become almost expected in the Sky Islands these past few years, but Berylline Hummingbird is still scarce and hard to find. The bird in the photo came in several times to feed, perching for long periods and basking in the admiration we cast its way.

Scarcity and beauty aside, Berylline Hummingbird has a special place in my personal birding history. I’d never heard of the bird when my friend and mentor Ruth came back from a trip to Arizona, full of the excitement of having seen one in Madera Canyon. Her tales of that bird opened my eyes to the possibility of birding travel–not that I thought I’d ever be able to go as far away as Arizona. Now when I see a Berylline Hummingbird, here or south of the US border, I’m always reminded of humid summer days in Nebraska, listening to stories about places I was sure I’d never see.