Perhaps just a bit less “mega” than it would have been before the invasion of 2004-2005, a female-plumaged Crimson-collared Grosbeak was reported from the Frontera Audubon thicket in Weslaco this afternoon. More details to come, I hope.

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 the near-absence of wind; but with a big storm on the way, today has been gusty, and it was a bit eerie to wander Catalina State Park this morning with Darlene and Jim and see the mighty saguaros swaying against the blue sky.

The unusual winds kept bird activity down, too, but as always at Catalina, what we did see included the best of desert birds. The sparrow flocks were small but select, with lots of Black-throated and Rufous-winged Sparrows to keep us happy. A wintering Hutton’s Vireo was happily hunting the mesquite bosques, and Black-tailed Gnatcatchers were as loud as they were confiding. The bright skies inspired some tentative vocalizing from Curve-billed Thrashers and Cactus Wrens, too; in just a couple of weeks they’ll be in full song all over town.

It won’t be long, either, before the Cardinalis start their whistling. Both species are common at the park, but this morning we especially enjoyed great views of Pyrrhuloxias, the “gray cardinals” of the desert.

Look close and you’ll see two birds–the rosy male and a half-hidden female to the left. We three birders amused ourselves this morning by attempting to distinguish the chips of this species and Northern Cardinal; you’d think that sheer probability would have let me get at least half of them right….

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 species breeds throughout northern Arizona, but it’s an extremely low-density winterer here in the southeast, usually found at high elevations even during the coldest seasons. This one seems to have found a place he likes, though, down on the flats of urban Tucson. I ran over late this morning to take a look, and was rewarded eventually with this view of the bird drilling new sap wells.

I hope many of you can make it to tomorrow night’s lecture at the Sonoran Audubon Society’s meeting in Glendale, Arizona. I’ll be talking about birding a part of the world many North American birders never even think of–and the ways that birding can help the establishment of a conservation ethic in some fascinating and ancient landscapes.

See you there!

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 more returned from their cornfield breakfasts.

After 30 years of crane-watching, I still can’t get enough of that sound, the first faint growls of the distant flock growing louder and louder until you start to wonder whether there is any other noise anywhere in the world–then, suddenly, the clamor gives way to the conversational mumbles of cranes at the roost.

Ambitiously, we were looking for “other” cranes, too; it’s only a matter of time before this ever-increasing flock picks up a Common Crane. Or maybe a Demoiselle. Or even, someday, a Whooping Crane. But Saturday was not to be the day. We did, though, find the brownest Sandhill Crane I’d ever seen in winter.

The birds in this flock were distant (and oddly enough, in alfalfa), but careful cropping gives us this:

Sandhill Cranes are notorious for applying iron-rich mud to their feathers during the breeding season, likely to serve as camouflage during incubation; oxidation–rusting–turns the feathers bright brown. In most birds from migratory Sandhill populations, the pre-basic molt replaces most of those brown feathers with new gray ones, leaving only old remiges and wing coverts to show a brown wash. Who knows what happened to this one–whether it skipped a molt or just found some irresistibly wallowable red mud somewhere on its autumnal way south?