In a fascinating bit of serendipity, this onomastically maligned bird, resident from Mexico south through Central America to Colombia, in fact has a Nebraska connection. Described 150 years ago in the genus Elainia, the tyrannulet was quickly renamed Tyranniscus vilissimus, where it remained until in 1977 the late Melvin Traylor–himself memorialized in the scientific name of the Orange-eyed Flatbill Tolmomyias traylori–erected a new genus for this and another ten or species.

Traylor named his new genus Zimmerius, in honor of the great and little-remembered American ornithologist John Todd Zimmer. Born in Ohio in 1889, Zimmer and his family moved to Nebraska in the early years of the twentieth century, and he graduated from the University of Nebraska one hundred years ago this year; he took the M.A. there in 1911, and was granted the D.Sc. honoris causa in 1943. Like others I could name, Zimmer spent much of his college time outside looking for birds and inside looking at birds, and he eventually left a large and very fine collection of Nebraska skins to the state museum, where they still reside.

Zimmer left Nebraska to hold positions in the Philippines and New Guinea, then moved to the Field Museum and finally to the American Museum, where he spent nearly thirty years working on the birds of the Neotropics, particularly Peru. The naming of Zimmerius recognizes his contribution to the taxonomy of South American birds, cited by the Brewster Medal Committee in 1952 as “truly the foundation for the work of all other current students of the South American avifauna.”

Unfortunately, when Sclater and Salvin named the Paltry Tyrannulet in 1859, they gave it the specific epithet vilissimus, the superlative of the Latin adjective vilis, meaning (as its English descendant “vile” would suggest) “contemptible, worthless, ordinary, vulgar,” a reflection of both the bird’s abundance and its relatively undistinguished appearance. With Traylor’s revision, though, the species’ current scientific name, Zimmerius vilissimus, joins the epithet to a person’s name–giving us a translation something like “the very contemptible Zimmer.” The fact that the species is polytypic makes it even worse: the nominate subspecies, Z. v. vilissimus, is “the very, very contemptible Zimmer.”

Surely not what Traylor wanted to say, but such things happen in the world of birds and words.

Tucson doesn’t really have a beach, but less than four hours’ easy drive south and west are the sands and rocky points of Puerto Peñasco, the nearest and easiest place for us desert rats to do a little seabirding. This past Wednesday I led a Tucson Audubon group down to the Sea of  Cortez in search of shorebirds. We wound up with only eighteen species of waders, a slightly disappointing tally for this time of year–but among them were some goodies, and there was plenty else to keep us busy during the nine hours we had on the beach before turning back to Tucson.

We left town that morning a little after 4:30, with a hint of dawn already visible behind the Rincons. By the time we entered caracara country, it was daylight, and we saw two Crested Caracaras checking out the night’s offerings on the highway east of Sells. A bit of a puzzlement was a medium-sized, relatively brown owl flying stiffly across the highway near the old Mesquital Migrant Trap: anywhere else, at any other time of year, I’d probably have ticked it off as a Long-eared Owl, but that’s just too weird for the desert in August.

Our border crossing at Lukeville was easy as pie–we didn’t even show our passports, much less have to stop for what is usually a desultory inspection. A few Black Vultures and Harris’s Hawks joined the abundant Turkey Vultures around the Sonoyta dump, and then, good conversation making the time and the miles slip away, we were in Puerto P.

We’d timed our tour so as to have a few hours before tide started coming in. We started in the inner harbor, which was lined with the usual Brown Pelicans and Heermann’s and Yellow-footed Gulls; our only Lesser Yellowlegs of the day flew past us here, and Willets hunted the rocks and the sandy edges, oblivious of fishermen and early swimmers. Off the seawall we saw our first terns of the day, mostly Common Terns but with the odd Black Tern or Royal Tern passing. Careful scoping produced small numbers of Brown and Blue-footed Boobies, and two distant Black Storm-Petrels. A couple of Black-vented Shearwaters flew in and landed on the water, but so far out that for most of us they were nothing more than occasional heads occasionally visible above the more than occasional waves.

With the tide good and low, we decided to run out to Rocky Beach (or whatever the beach at Sinaloa Ave. is called) and see if we could find any rockpipers. Wilson’s, Semipalmated, and Black-bellied Plovers were wandering the flats and pecking at the edges of the tide pools, accompanied by the omnipresent Willets. A couple of Black-vented Shearwaters were in attendance on the pelicans right in the surf, the splendid views more than making up for the frustration the earlier birds had caused. Royal Terns were almost constantly in sight here, and it wasn’t long before a fine Elegant Tern came in, passing close to us and to its thicker-billed cousins for an excellent comparison.

But this was a shorebird trip, and so we kept our eyes downcast, hoping for the movement that would betray the presence of waders on the rocks. Aha, there they are! Three Surfbirds, all adults, all still with a hint of golden spangling on their scapulars and hearts not on their sleeves but on their flanks, were feeding quiet and calm nearby.

For a long time, this was the only shorebird I’d seen in Sonora and not in the US (a fall trip to California finally took care of that for me)–and I still haven’t seen it in Vancouver, which may well have been an earlier port of call for these very individuals as they made their way south.

The day couldn’t get any better, I thought, but we trundled out to the rocks at Pelican Point, where the tide was so high that people were swimming merrily on the path I’d intended to use to get out to look for boobies. We did stand on the ever narrower strip of beach, the tide lapping at our tripod feet, long enough to see another Black and two Least Storm-Petrels, completing the list of tubenoses reasonably to be hoped for from shore.

The usual constellation of boulders had disappeared beneath the tide, so we looked for a spot to look down on the rocks. We’d been seeing both species of booby fly past all morning, but here was where we finally got good views of them perched, some of them at distances so close as to convince us that they deserved their disparaging English name. Most were Blue-footed Boobies, their eponymous webs glowing blue-violet against the white glare of the rocks.

But there were Brown Boobies among them, too, adults dapper in brown and white, juveniles elegantly somber in two-tone chocolate.

With the tide rapidly approaching its highest, we turned back to visit the head of Cholla Bay, where rising waters can concentrate shorebirds and terns in impressive numbers. I can’t say that we ran into masses of birds this time, but the quality was high if the numbers weren’t: we had up to eleven Snowy Plovers at once on the beach, and Least and Forster’s Terns joined the Commons, Blacks, and Royals loafing on the rapidly submerging sandbars. The commonest of the large sandpipers was Marbled Godwit, always a happy sight.

They shared the sand and salicornia flats with curlews, including plenty of Whimbrels

and gentle-faced Long-billed Curlews down from the prairies.

The really big show here at high tide is the abundance of Large-billed Sparrows, the large, blurry Passerculus endemic to the Sea of Cortez. When the water is low, they scamper through the saltwort, generally unseen this time of year; but when it rises, they emerge to feed on the roads and to fly flutteringly from emergent patch to emergent patch of taller vegetation. Our estimate this time: no fewer than 33 individuals, many of them giving great looks as they fed on the sandy road and sought shade under the rocks (all the time, no doubt, aware that my camera batteries had died).

I replaced my batteries, or at least my camera’s, and we struck off for terra incognita–the golf course ponds tantalizingly just visible across the head of the bay. We’d been watching birds drop in there, from terns to an adult Reddish Egret, and decided to spend the last of our day trying to figure out how to get in. Geographically, it turned out to be quite straightforward: the golf course is called Laguna del Mar, and it’s reached from Highway Eight north of town. Fortunately, it didn’t take much Spanish to let the guard at the gate know what we wanted, and even less to understand that he would give us 20 minutes, no more.

We zoomed. We zoomed past small ponds that must be some of Puerto Peñasco’s very best migrant traps, past lavishly irrigated lawns that must prove irresistible to stray grasspipers, past remnant patches of bleak saltbush that must hide Le Conte’s Thrashers. But we stopped, too. We stopped for a gang of some 45 Horned Larks, with streaky and spotty juveniles among them, and we stopped for an incongruous female-plumaged Red-breasted Merganser on one of the large ponds. And we stopped for a fine flock of shorebirds, including the day’s only dozen or so Ruddy Turnstones and a couple of American Oystercatchers.

We pushed it hard, but it was still half an hour before we turned in our permit and thanked the friendly guards for letting see their muchos pajaros; on the way out, we pondered whether it might not be worth it to buy a lot just for the birding privileges.

The drive home was as pleasant as the drive down that morning had been. Our border passage took no more than ten minutes, and Tucson was nearly in sight by the time the Lesser Nighthawks started swooping over the road. Home at 7:30 pm, and ready to dream of the next visit to our very own tropical beach.

The day’s list is on line here. If you see anything you like, join us next August for another shorebirding trip to the Sea of Cortez; it will be announced on the Tucson Audubon website as soon as we’ve settled on a date.

A fantastic group of lynx-eyed birders at the Patagonia Picnic Table.

Black-bellied Whistling-Duck

Mallard

Green Heron

Plegadis sp.

Black Vulture

Turkey Vulture

Cooper’s Hawk

Gray Hawk

Swainson’s Hawk

Red-tailed Hawk

American Kestrel

Killdeer

Spotted Sandpiper

Long-billed Dowitcher

Rock Pigeon

Eurasian Collared-Dove

White-winged Dove

Mourning Dove

Common Ground-Dove

Greater Roadrunner

Lesser Nighthawk

White-throated Swift

Broad-billed Hummingbird

Black-chinned Hummingbird

Gila Woodpecker

Ladder-backed Woodpecker

Northern Beardless-Tyrannulet

Black Phoebe

Say’s Phoebe

Vermilion Flycatcher

Brown-crested Flycatcher

Tropical Kingbird

Cassin’s Kingbird

Western Kingbird

Thick-billed Kingbird

Loggerhead Shrike

Bell’s Vireo

Mexican Jay

Chihuahuan Raven

Common Raven

Northern Rough-winged Swallow

Cliff Swallow

Barn Swallow

Verdin

Cactus Wren

Rock Wren

Canyon Wren

Bewick’s Wren

Northern Mockingbird

Curve-billed Thrasher

European Starling

Phainopepla

Lucy’s Warbler

Common Yellowthroat

Yellow-breasted Chat

Summer Tanager

Western Tanager

Canyon Towhee

Rufous-winged Sparrow

Cassin’s Sparrow

Rufous-crowned Sparrow

Five-striped Sparrow

Lark Sparrow

Black-throated Sparrow

Song Sparrow

Northern Cardinal

Pyrrhuloxia

Blue Grosbeak

Indigo Bunting

Varied Bunting

Red-winged Blackbird

Eastern Meadowlark

Great-tailed Grackle

Brown-headed Cowbird

Hooded Oriole

House Finch

Lesser Goldfinch

House Sparrow

California Gulch

This photo, from the Tubac bridge, shows the yellow diffusion of the breast, the long (if somewhat foreshortened bill), the dull brown rectrices, and of course that notorious tail notch.

Eager birders visiting southeast Arizona or the Rio Grande Valley in late summer often rely too much on tail shape in identifying yellow-bellied kingbirds. It’s true that Tropical (and Couch’s, which has occurred once in Arizona so far) show a far deeper and better defined notch than the other species in fresh plumage–I repeat, in fresh plumage. This time of year, adult Western Kingbirds are beginning their tail molt, and nearly all the Westerns we saw this week were missing their central tail feathers, giving perched birds a nice deep notch and flying birds a funny frigatebird look.

Our tour was intended to add rarities and specialties to the list, but as usual, what I think most of us will remember is learning a little more about some of the common birds we might not have known so well. None of us will ever look at a kingbird again without at least trying to age it–and no tail notch will fool us again.

One of three pronghorns that greeted my Southwest Wings group in the uncharacteristically lush Sonoita grasslands Wednesday afternoon. If the reintroduction of black-tailed prairie-dogs “takes” here, these grasslands will have a nearly intact mammalian fauna once again–lacking only the Mexican wolf and grizzly bear.

With a juvenile tail and head and adult-like barring on much of the underparts, this is a bird undergoing its slow second pre-basic molt. What interested us–apart from the sheer beauty of the creature–was that Wheeler describes that molt as beginning on the head, while here it is clearly the head, the tail, and some of the wing coverts that are “retarded” in comparison with the body plumage. Is this an aberration, or is the prebasic molt in this tropical species so protracted as to be this variable?

Most of the little buzzers visiting our feeders right now are Costa’s Hummingbirds, pretty much as expected at our latitude and elevation. We do have an Anna’s or two drop in once in a while, too, but the prize of our summer hummerwatching here at our place is Black-chinned Hummingbird.

Yes, it’s the most abundant hummingbird in Arizona and much of the west, but we don’t see all that many of these swan-necked beauties in our desert neighborhood. The bee-like buzz of their wings and their silly squeaky chattering chips always make me look up, while I’m so spoiled by Calypte that Costa’s and Anna’s can often come and go without forcing so much as a glance.

There’s a historical mystery about Black-chinned Hummingbird, too. Its specific epithet is alexandri, and no one knows why. The most precise information out there is in Montes de Oca’s 1875 Ensayo ornitologico, where he writes simply “El Dr. Alexandre que visitó nuestor país [Mexico], fué quien descubrió esta preciosa especie de colibríes, y los Sres. Bourcier y Mulsant, en honor del descubridor, le dieron el nombre de Alexandri.” No one has ever been able to track down this mysterious Dr. Alexandre; Bourcier and Mulsant named the species in 1846, so he was not among those Frenchmen collecting for the “Emperor” Maximilian in the ’60s. Maybe I’ll figure it out someday. Meanwhile, we’ll be watching our feeders closely for migrant Selasphorus and for the arrival of wintering Broad-bills.

And then, just a few hundred yards in on Ruby Road, we encountered this.

It may not look like a lot of water, but it was moving fast and hard, and probably carrying more than enough sediment to wash even the squattest of Subarus off the sharp edge of the road and downstream.

I hemmed, I hawed, I chickened out.

After a few minutes of admiring the torrent, we turned around and drove back to Peña Blanca Lake, where the water was flowing just as furious. But the parking lot was still accessible, and a narrow, instable spit of land still protruded into the west end of the lake where the boat ramp once was. We walked out, and walked into a feeding frenzy.

Dragonflies big and small were skimming the waters where they calmed, and they were hunted in turn by a good dozen Cassin’s Kingbirds and half that many Brown-crested Flycatchers, noisy even over the roar of the flowing wash. A couple of Vermilion Flycatchers and a family of Black Phoebes, the kids still sporting their bright brown wingbars and yellow gap flanges, sought smaller prey, while a Northern Beardless-Tyrannulet seemed to spend almost as much time singing as it did picking through the leaves. Summer  Tanagers, Yellow Warblers, and Northern Cardinals added color to the scene, and drama was provided by two Black Vultures that took off from their clifftop roost above us. A juvenile Gray Hawk screamed and squawked, but its stunning parent was obviously “weaning” it, flying in with prey in its feet to land close to the still keening, still hungry juvenile, then taking off without sharing whatever unfortunate frog or lizard had crossed its path.

Just as we were thinking about leaving this lively scene, we cast another glance at the two Spotted Sandpipers that had been bobbing on the flotsam–and this time we picked up another movement in the water. It was the pair of Least Grebes that Cliff had discovered last week, and for a good quarter of an hour they plied the muddy waters in front of us, diving frequently and staying under long.

Common and familiar in Mexico and Central America, and easy enough to find along the lower Rio Grande, this is a very rare bird in Arizona, and with the apparent demise of the long-faithful individuals that frequented two Tucson sites, these are the only Least Grebes known in the entire US outside of Texas.

Since their discovery last week, these two are reported to have built a nest, copulated, and laid eggs in front of the ornithovoyeurs. We couldn’t see the nest this morning; it may well have fallen victim to the same storm that kept us out of California Gulch. But the pair did stick close together, in obvious conjugal fondness, and once we heard them sing, a loud trilled duet like silver under the monsoon skies.

In fact, even counting the stilts and the Killdeer and the thirty or so Least Sandpipers cringing on  the edges, there weren’t a hundred shorebirds out there this morning. But among them were a couple of minor prizes: an adult Stilt Sandpiper (a species that will be more and more common over the next weeks) and two adult hendersoni Short-billed Dowitchers, scarce birds in Arizona and usually detected only as juveniles.

The best time of year!

American Avocet breeds in variable numbers on the Willcox Playa, about 80 miles east of Tucson, and July is a great time of year to see the thick-legged chicks on the shores of Lake Cochise. Survival rates seem to be low, no doubt a reflection of the happily high populations of coyotes and bobcats in the area, but still a few young avocets seem to come off every year.

The surviving chicks grow longer-billed and warier every day. While their parents are always anxious on the approach of a vehicle, very young avocets tend to just run slowly along the shore–but as they get older, the adults’ loud kluuiting seems to be contagious, and the chicks start to evade intruders, first by running more quickly, then by taking to the water with their parents.

It’s as if it took the little ones a few days to figure out what those webs between their toes were for.