A spectacular Sweetwater morning Wednesday with friends from La Posada in Green Valley: sunshine, birds, good company, what could be better?

It seems counter-intuitive, but desert wetlands are among the best places to see a good variety of woodpeckers this time of year. This male Red-shafted Flicker joined a female Gila Woodpecker on the wires for a shouting contest.

The Gila won, as usual. Our quick walk also turned up unusually cooperative Ladder-backed Woodpeckers, and some (not I, unfortunately) got to see a nice Red-naped Sapsucker. It pays to check out tapping this time of year in the desert!

One of the traditional tricks of the ornithology field exam is a bird of this species,  facing away.

This happens to be a male–it works much better with female House Sparrows–but the attentive student always remembers that the back pattern of passerids is coarse, with great orange stripes rather than the delicate black and brown of native emberizids.

Have you ever gone out a-looking for a rarity, found it–and then run into something so startling, so amazing, that even something as good as my first Arizona Rough-legged Hawk fell back to second place on the list of the day’s memorables?

Don’t get me wrong. The Rough-leg was one of the great highlights of this young birding year so far, and there’s not much I’d trade the sight for of that archetypical arctic wanderer soaring against the blue sky and dark mountains of southeast Arizona. And the adult Golden Eagle perched on the corner of 191 and Dragoon Road was nice, too.

And so were the five Ferruginous Hawks, and the silver Northern Harriers, and the American Kestrels and Red-tailed Hawks–yes, it was a spectacular raptor day.

But even spectacularer were the Lark Buntings.

It’s been a tremendous year for this bird in southeast Arizona, with more flocks and bigger than I’ve seen in any winter before. And today really took the cake, with flocks coating the roads like some sort of fungus.

It was impossible for a mesmerized birder to proceed, but other drivers felt no such compunction.

It was just about here that the birds started to get nervous; they stopped singing, and a few headed for the ditches.

Short seconds more, and panic was general.

I wouldn’t have wanted to disturb the birds like this, but what a feeling it must have been to be surrounded by that flickering fluttering cloud of prairie blackbird–like a musical storm of snow and ash.

What an amazingly beautiful day it was yesterday! I spent way too much of it getting a haircut, but fortunately was able to get Darlene and Nickie to pick me up and go out to Catalina State Park to look for sparrows.

My day was complete, of course, as soon as we saw our first Rufous-winged Sparrows, but the most exciting find of our walk was a lone Black-chinned Sparrow, another of my many emberizid favorites and not always the easiest bird to find this close to Tucson.

Drama was provided by a pair of Red-tailed Hawks that discovered an intruding juvenile. They chased it, all three screaming, out of their territory and over our heads, where it eventually landed nearby to nurse its wounded pride.

I’ve only been up there twice this month, but it seems to me that this is a very good winter at CSP. A little more attention might produce some rarities–it’s worked in the past!