Recent Sightings

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 [...]

The sublime stillness of the Sonoran Desert gives this most beautiful of landscapes a deceptive sense of stability. Unlike the constant motion of lesser habitats, the giant rocks and thirty-foot cactus of the desert seem permanent, unchanging, solid.

Until, that is, the wind starts to blow. One of the things I love about southeast Arizona is [...]

Somehow, for some reason, Tucson’s city parks attract birds–the bleaker the park, sometimes the better the birds! McCormick is way up there on the bleakness scale, and the male Williamson’s Sapsucker that seems to have set up house in the scattered pines and mesquites around the ballfield is way up there on the good-bird scale.

This [...]

Well, to tell the truth, no moths were involved, but you can’t keep a good phrase down. Saturday’s Sandhill Crane show in Arizona’s Sulphur Springs Valley was one of the most exciting I’d ever seen there. We started with just a few birds loafing at Whitewater Draw, but as the morning wore on, more and [...]

One of the great things about birding is that you don’t need rare birds to have rare experiences. Yesterday I went along on a Tucson Audubon trip, ably led by Chris Benesh and Dave Stejskal, to Whitewater Draw and the Sulphur Springs Valley. We had more than our share of rarish birds, among them a [...]