Michael and I spent yesterday on the oak-spattered slopes of the Atascosa Highlands, one of the wildest places left in southeast Arizona. The sector we were assigned for the area’s Christmas Count was the 7 miles of Warsaw Canyon Road, famous (if it’s famous at all) as the “back way” to California Gulch. We drove a little, walked a bit, drove a little, walked a bit more–the perfect way to spend a winter day, even if the wind kept birding quiet much of the time.

As a glance at the landscape suggests, Chipping Sparrow was our easily predicted most abundant species; we tallied 191, a figure that almost certainly understates their abundance in these oaks.

Surprisingly, we found other emberizids pretty hard to come by, though a pair of Rufous-winged Sparrows at the confluence of the canyon and California Gulch was considerable consolation for missing such normally common birds as Brewer’s or White-crowned!

And our hurt feelings were soothed, too, by the fourteen Montezuma Quail we found on the grassy hillsides. At the compilation, we learned that the day’s total for the entire circle would far exceed 200 individuals–a pretty good showing for a bird that is so greatly coveted by visiting birders. Michael and I took the prize for closeup views, even if of only scattered bits.

The best bird of our day came towards the end, as they often do. We’d turned around to head back to the civilized world of Ruby Road when a long-winged raptor appeared overhead, moving southwest on fast, stiff wingbeats. Crested Caracara! A pretty amazing bird, out of range and decidedly out of habitat in those rough canyons, and one of fewer than five ever seen on the count. It was our thirty-fifth species for the day, not bad, we decided, for a sector with no ducks and no shorebirds!

Our species list:

Montezuma Quail

Sharp-shinned Hawk

Red-tailed Hawk

Crested Caracara

American Kestrel

Mourning Dove

Acorn Woodpecker

Gila Woodpecker

Red-naped Sapsucker

Ladder-backed Woodpecker

Arizona Woodpecker

Red-shafted Flicker

Gray Flycatcher

Black Phoebe

Say’s Phoebe

Ash-throated Flycatcher

Loggerhead Shrike

Hutton’s Vireo

Mexican Jay

Verdin

Bushtit

Rock Wren

Canyon Wren

Bewick’s Wren

Ruby-crowned Kinglet

Western Bluebird

Northern Mockingbird

Green-tailed Towhee

Canyon Towhee

Rufous-winged Sparrow

Rufous-crowned Sparrow

Chipping Sparrow

Northern Cardinal

House Finch

A pretty exotic list from an exotically pretty place. Might have to do this one again next year!

That’s Fahrenheit! It’s always cooler at Catalina State Park than at home, but I hadn’t expected the temperature to be approaching freezing at the start of a mid-October Big Sit. It’s Arizona, after all!

But I unpacked anyway, to the sweet hooting of a pair of Great Horned Owls that became the first of the day’s 38 species.

I’d brought a coat and gloves, but soon went back to the car for a blanket, too, and huddled up to await the dawn.

In spite of the cold and the dark, we tallied a good list by the time the sun rose shortly after 7:00. Rufous-winged Sparrows and Abert’s Towhees were singing within minutes of my laying out our circle, and by local sunrise–noticeably late there in the shadows of the high Catalinas–we already had 20 birds checked off.

First light brought a little warmth and the first clear glimpses of our home for the next 12 hours.

The picnic site I’d chosen was the same one we used for our 2005 count, surrounded by amaranth tangles and open mesquite woodland. We also had a clear view through the bosque to a saguaro-covered slope.

What we didn’t have, of course, was water, and that had been precisely the reason we’d settled on this spot in 2005. Placing the circle in Sutherland Wash, where tiny pools and puddles often persist into early fall, would vastly increase our list potential (as would simply abandoning Catalina State Park for any of Tucson’s amazingly birdy artificial wetlands), but I wanted to see then, and am still fascinated by the idea now, just how many birds could be ticked from an area where we were guaranteed to see no waterfowl, no shorebirds, no Great-tailed Grackles or Inca Doves.

That doesn’t mean we wanted to do completely without water. There is a dripping hydrant within sight of our circle, though this year the mud (generous word!) seemed more attractive to butterflies than to birds.

Most of the birding during a Big Sit is centrifugal, of course, straining to pick birds out at the limits of vision, all the while with a single foot inside the circle; in fact, the optimal circle is always chosen to maximize sight lines, meaning that like ours, it is surrounded by but itself devoid of any real habitat. Nevertheless, we had a few birds share our 175 square feet. A Gray Flycatcher or two dropped in to munch on small insects taken from the low mesquite branches or from the ground. And a small flock of Audubon’s Warblers, with them half a dozen Black-throated Gray Warblers, also spent most of the day cycling through, busily gleaning the twigs and leaves.

The best bird of our day was one that braved the edge of the circle. We’d been watching Lazuli Buntings drink from our water drip, and when I heard a Passerina on the edge of the bosque, I assumed it would be another. In fact it was a Varied Bunting, a female-plumaged bird but readily identified by its curved culmen and dark plumage. With a couple of Blue Grosbeaks dropping in during the day, we scored high in that genus, higher, I suspect, than any other Big Sit this year. It’s always good to be best at something.

Visible migration was otherwise nearly non-existent. A few Violet-green Swallows passed overhead during the warmer parts of the day, and two Western Kingbirds were slightly tardy on their way south. By mid-afternoon, it was pretty clear that while the day was beautiful and the company outstanding, it would take the mother of all mixed flocks to get us anywhere near our 2005 total of 50. But who can complain about a day that brings Crissal Thrasher and Green-tailed Towhee, Pyrrhuloxia and White-crowned Sparrow?

Our final bird came at 4:48 pm. Catalina State Park is notoriously good for raptors, and after Saturday’s stormy winds and dim skies, I’d expected Sunday’s blue heaven to fill with resident and migrant hawks. Not so. More than eleven hours in to the day, we had not had a single falconiform bird–and I was starting to get a little weary of the reports each new Big Sitter brought: a Prairie Falcon on the road in, a pair of Red-tailed Hawks at the park entrance, a family of Harris’s Hawks in the yard when they left home…. Finally, finally, a juvenile Cooper’s Hawk made a clumsy pass at the Mourning Doves gathered in the amaranth, the entire day’s only diurnal raptor and species number 38 for the Big Sit.

We stayed to watch the moon rise and the sun set, and by the time I was packing the car back up for the quick drive home, I was once again bundled up against the desert cold. We’d seen a couple of hundred individual birds of 38 species (39 if the invisible flicker calling in the morning was not, like the one that flew through at noon, a Red-shafted Flicker), enjoyed good company all day long, and most importantly, made a donation to Nature and Culture International equivalent to an acre of tropical deciduous forest in southern Sonora, Mexico.

Just might do this again next year!

Fourteen degrees F is not an unusual temperature at the start of a Christmas Count in most parts of North America; but in southeast Arizona, it was a bit of shock this morning in Patagonia. Happily, we were well dressed and the wind stayed down, but there were still moments when we had to look up at the spectacular scenery of the Patagonia Mountains to be certain that we were in fact just a couple of miles from the Mexican border!

It was a terrifically beautiful day, if chilly, and Denis and Alison and I had a blast being out in it. Matt and Abbie had very kindly assigned our party to Flux Canyon, a remote and still little-known area in the middle of the mountains, with obvious great potential for interesting birds. We ended up not tapping that potential to its fullest on this day of relatively slow birding, but we still came across some nice birds.

The highlights among the 32 species we picked up on our nine-mile stroll included  a fine pair of Montezuma Quail, the female giving their location away with her clucking and nervous scratching, which sent a small cascade of rocks down onto our path; the male, a strong silent type, was not visible until he flushed. Equally exciting was a pair of Peregrine Falcons, both adults, soaring close over the oak woodland, seeking whom they might devour. And it was my best day ever for Olive Warblers. We saw a conservatively counted 6, and had repeated eye-level views of males and females as they fed very actively in the junipers; it was a far cry from the usual neck-breaking routine in the summer, when they like to live at the tops of ponderosa pines.

My own personal “best” bird of the day was one that left Alison, after these last months in New York, unmoved. We were enjoying yet another nice flock of Oregon, Gray-headed, and Pink-sided Juncos when a spectacular male Slate-colored Junco appeared among them. Denis and I shouted the bird’s name at the same time, while Alison just kept watching the Bridled Titmice she has done without for so long!

A big thanks to Matt and Abbie for organizing a great count with excellent coverage!

Facing the end of the count period, I got out early, early this morning to do my part of the Tucson Bird Count. Of the four years I’ve participated in this urban bird survey, this was the latest in the season I had ever run the route, and the first time I’d ever done it on a weekday.

Start time is half an hour before sunrise, and when we were finished two and a half hours later, we had tallied 36 species at the one dozen residential and industrial sites on the route. There were some surprising misses and some low numbers: no raptors, no hummingbirds, no tanagers, no cardinals or pyrrhuloxias, and only 3 Verdins and 2 Western Kingbirds. Some of this was certainly the late date, some of it the added noise and bustle of a workday, but there have been changes along the route since 2006: some trees are gone, some brushy edges sanitized, and a number of ominous “for sale” signs up.

We made up for the misses, though, with our stop above the Orange Grove ‘ponds’. These are deep pits, still being actively stripped for gravel and sand, but some of them wet, and one of them with a fine stand of cattails and rushes. How much avian breeding actually goes on in there I can’t say, but this morning as we stood on the frontage road, trucks rushing by, we found a good selection of migrant waterbirds: Cinnamon Teal, Double-crested Cormorant, White-faced Ibis, Black-necked Stilt, and American Avocet. A Black-crowned Night-Heron flew over, and two Yellow-headed Blackbirds were surprisingly tardy.

The Count period ends Monday, so take time next week to have a look at the results at www.tucsonbirds.org. And if you can, sign up for a route for next year!