Sunflower amidst clouds and rain

It's been a great monsoon this year in Arizona. Every afternoon in late July and parts of August, the heavy clouds gather, often bringing lightning storms and dusty wind. Too often they just make everything dirty without leaving any precious precipitation, but this summer we've been very fortunate in our rainfall. The clouds have been offering evening downpours and often staying through until morning, following up with a.m. showers to keep the desert temperatures comparatively low and the foliage comparatively green. Of course, this does impede birding and photography somewhat, but there's not too much high level birding to be done in Phoenix this time of year, so I won't complain.

Last Friday Pops and I made a trip to Sunflower, which is little more than a turn off from the Hwy-87 with a few houses and a tow truck company. The Sunflower turn-off leads to a section of closed off road, now called the 'Old Beeline Highway' (the 87 is the new one up to Payson). This road is now closed to vehicle access, but pedestrians can walk along and use the vantage point to observe the denizens of Sycamore Creek that runs adjacent to the eastern side of the Old Beeline.
With all of the recent rain, the creek here and at Mesquite Wash, ten miles down the Hwy-87, were flowing at a very good clip.

The well-watered riparian area and the juniper canyons on either side of the Old Beeline Highway make this stretch of Sunflower excellent nesting habitat for both Zone-tailed and Common Black Hawks, and these were our target birds, along with the optimistic hope for hearing or seeing a Yellow-billed Cuckoo on the side.
For much of the drive up to Sunflower (about fifty minutes), the percussion of raindrops and streaks of lightning gave us quite a show. It was still raining when we began birding on foot, so I initially left the camera in the car. Yellow Warblers, Bell's Vireos, Blue Grosbeaks, Ash-throated Flycatchers, and Cassin's Kingbirds were all very common and audible on the walk, even with the rainfall. Phainopeplas still dotted many of the canyon juniper bushes while Gnatcatchers flitted around in the understory.



The creek continued to swell with runoff and the cloud cover made for a very pleasant walk, enhanced by not lugging around heavy camera gear. That nicety was shattered though, when we looked up into one of the many Arizona sycamores and saw a large mass of sticks. Not only was it a nest, but there was the single silhouette of a raptor chick sitting pretty. Alas, it was mostly obscured when I later returned with the lens.
Which species was it, Zone-tailed or Common Black Hawk? This was a matter of no small discussion, a matter that has still not been fully resolved.



As we were walking along the road maybe one hundred feet up from the nest, a Common Black Hawk spooked from a sycamore and made a beeline towards the nest area. At the time, this seemed to confirm that the nest was Black Hawk property, but that wouldn't be the end of the story.
After we were treated to calling Cassin's Kingbirds, who were also prone to bouts of aerial bellicosity as they staked out their respective domains, the very loud, very recognizable shriek of Zone-tailed Hawk wafted through the canyon.

Though these Hawks seem to prefer canyon walls for perching and hunting, they also hang out and nest in riparian areas, particularly in cottonwood trees or sycamores. In addition to the two birds we saw on the rocky escarpment, there was also an individual bird calling not much farther down the road. 

The presence of these three raucous Zonies, all relatively close to the nest, made us rethink the site as that of a Blackhawk chick--it just seemed dangerous and impractical from the point of view of prospective Blackhawk parents. That being said, the Zonies never came near the nest, nor even crossed over from the opposite side of the Old Beeline Highway. Who knows...

It proved to be a very good day for raptors, and not only because we found our two target Hawks. We heard and saw multiple Cooper's Hawks, and even a single Sharp-shinned Hawk--identified in part by its distressed flight call and wingbeats--which is a pretty rare find in the area during late July.

There was a Red-tail and plenty of Turkey Vultures (of course), but the Cooper's were unusually Cooperative. The bird shown below was perched on the side of the road, between us and the car, but let us approach from a hundred feet or so until we were even with the bird, opposite the road.

After a few minutes of observation it departed, showing some pretty haggard primaries on the tail. These moments, when the bird is stretched at take off, can show how proportionally short the accipiter's wings are, relative to the length of its body.

As things started to quiet down at Sunflower, we retraced our route on the Hwy-87 and stopped off at Mesquite Wash, still hoping for a Cuckoo photo-op and anything else that would be new for the day. A young Summer Tanager fit that bill, but the wash itself was pretty flooded and muddy, making the trek somewhat perilous and uncomfortable as the sun finally forced its way through the clouds.
We spent a fair portion of time trying to get good looks and photos of the numerous Blue Grosbeaks in the area, a bird which manages to deny me with the ol' stick-in-the-face trick every single time...



Our experience with the accomodating Cooper's was one-upped at Mesquite though, as we had close encounters with another adult Cooper's Hawk and its two whiny offspring, who were perfectly capable of flying and hunting for themselves, but still seemed determined to mooch off of their parent.

They had very little fear of people, and in fact we didn't spot the first bird until we were standing right underneath it. For the next hour or so that we spent exploring the muddy wash and surrounding bosque, the distant, plaintive calling of the two demanding young was a constant.

Really, these birds were being spoiled by their parent(s) and the relative bounty of the flooded riparian woodland. It's a sign of the times, or so I've read. Kids stay living at home with their parents later and later, not wanting to wade into the tumultuous and unpromising job market, saddled with economically debilitating student debt and an inability to catch one's own songbirds.

Then again, from the parents' perspective, who could say no to this face?

New Birds in Old Places

These last few weeks I've been forcibly trying to bird more on workdays. After school, I usually have about an hour and a half of good daylight, and even though rush hour (it's not just an hour...) traffic is always a bother, I've been able to fit in some brief but good birding throughout these last few weeks. Often times I leave the camera in the car, in part because I often run out of the necessary time and light needed to pursue photos, and also because there's something refreshing about not having any of the anxieties that come with missing a good shot or making sure to come away with some good photos for one's trouble. 

As such, I've been able to get a lot more birding in this 2013 year and see a lot more birds sooner than I have before. I'd be lying if I said that seeing my name so low in the eBird species lists after January wasn't a substantial motivating factor, but of course the satisfaction and refreshment of birding is reward and motivation in and of itself. One of my recent destinations, which is fortunately nearby, was the Rio Salado/Salt River Audubon Center on Central Ave. 

For being only ten or fifteen minutes south of the downtown (Phoenix is weird like that), this Audubon center is very nice and sits on a pretty piece of property overlooking the Salt River. This site hosts the monthly Birds and Beer get-together and, equally fun, has also hosted a Pacific Wren and Eastern Phoebe this winter. The birds themselves hang out about a half-mile away from the center, down near the trickling water. I used to go birding here quite often before I moved farther away, as it was one of the best places to see Black-throated Grey Warblers and Green-tailed Towhees in Phoenix. 

In addition to the lessened proximity, another one of the reasons I had stopped birding near this center/along this portion of the Salt River was that it's totally trashed. I've had some unpleasant run-ins with vagrants down in the Salt River wash, and the riverbed is strewn with garbage. 

Traipsing through this materialist quagmire, I was constantly looking over my shoulder for a large, one-eyed squid monster to pop out and grab me. You know, like the one living in the garbage compactor in the Star Wars movie? The accumulated trash stretches for miles along the river. It's bad in part because there are seldom any organized cleanups  here and this is where the Salt River dumps everything out, from old frisbees to plastic bottles, car parts, and 1990s-style sneakers (which is also why there's less demand to clean here than where people actually go fishing and tubing farther east).

The area wasn't exceptionally birdy--I only had the usual Herons, along with Orange-crowned and Yellow-rumped Warblers and Black Phoebes for company--but the whole trek paid off when I spotted a conspicuously white-breasted Phoebe in the willows about half a mile west of the central avenue overpass (in the river bed). 

The Eastern Phoebe, a rare but regular vagrant to Arizona in the winter months, only stayed visible for a few minutes before it flew farther west. I had a hard time following the bird as I was looking into the sun, which was also reflecting off the water to form a dual-effect solar blind. I felt like I had to thread the needle, shooting manually through all the willow twigs, but given how short a time I had with the bird it was a very satisfying sighting. It wasn't a lifer, but it was my first Eastern Phoebe in Arizona.

Heading back towards the Audubon center I heard the Pacific Wren vocalizing a Kinglet-like buzz call and saw the bird very briefly, but being low down in the wash and with the sun falling from the sky, and also this Wren's typical behavior, further photos weren't an option. A handsome Cooper's Hawk served as a great consolation sighting at the end of the walk, and I left the Rio Salado area feeling very glad to have revisited this quintessential desert riparian birding site. 

The Birds and Beer event is hosted every third Thursday of the month. I haven't been yet, but I had a celebratory Sierra Nevada Torpedo IPA at home after this trip, and will try to make it for some hobnobbing next month.

Cooper's Hawk

I don't know who Cooper is, but I found his Hawk, or rather, it found me. Since the Middle Ages, someone who made or repaired casks and barrels was called a cooper (is that where recuperate comes from?). I doubt there's much correlation here though.
According to the Cornell Ornithology Lab, the Cooper's Hawk is one of the more skillful flyers in the raptor group. Regrettably I didn't get to see any dexterous displays, but it was nice to get such a cool new bird while looking for wrens of all things.

The Cooper's Hawk looks very similar to the Sharp-Shinned Hawk with its rusty marked breast/belly and chin. It also had has the darker wings and banded tail. Despite this potentially tricky identification, the hawk was close enough that I could tell its size (20 inches), which is substantially larger than the 16-17 inch Sharp-Shinned Hawks. The rounded tail is also a helpful clue, since the Sharp-Shinned Hawk's tail has a squared edge.
The Cooper's is an accipiter, which means it has a longer body and longer legs, but shorter and more compact wings, which all serve to help it fly quickly through tree canopies and in wooded country.

The talons on this bird seem to be exceptionally long as well.

A couple of weeks later I saw a juvenile Cooper's at the same location.