Cling Well Drill Well Sap Well Stay Well

It was a rip roaring Thursday afternoon at the new work patch as I added no less than five new birds to the patch list, bringing the total up to a staggering 26 species! Yes indeed, with clutch finds of Eurasian Collared Dove, House Finch, and Northern Mockingbird, I pushed solidly past two dozen. This is more than likely about as far as I'll get until some more Swallows, Nighthawks, and WW Doves show up along the canal in a month.

Too much sarcasm, or even irony, like too many Blackbirds, if off putting though; I did return to the the work patch for other reasons than pursuing a few overstated, cheap ticks. I had a small but lingering desire to give the SRP Falls and Herberger Park a quick going over for a couple of months, ever since taking an AMSP/FOAL break there with another employee before a summit meeting. 

While we were unscrupulously indulging in good ol' fashioned American vices in the afternoon, I noticed firstly that there were plenty of pine trees at the park--not a given around Phoenician parks and a favorite of some birds--and that many of the Australian bottle trees were absolutely riddled with holes.

There are only but one of a few possibilities for how a proud bottle tree such as this could become so porous, and since I didn't see any OCD kids with pellet guns hanging out in the park, I deduced that it must have, in fact, been some sort of Sapsucker. Pretty clever eh? 

Red-naped, of course, would be the only real suspect, but even with that being the only possible (and Yellow-bellied does tend to drift a lot) Sapsucker in Phoenix, it's a decent find for the central city given the small amount of woodlands. Upon returning to Herberger Park on Thursday I soon found the freshest looking sapwells, and soon after found the culprit.

Caught red-handed!...err red-naped!

There were two birds, both males, from what I observed in about thirty minutes. The conspicuous red on the napes immediately ruled out any possibility of Yellow-bellied (also known as the "for lack of any other obvious distinction" Sapsucker), but it's still a pretty gorgeous bird and certainly the most solid find thus far at my dinky little work patch. I dig how the red on the nape is very haphazard, like whoever was designing this bird just gave up towards the end and stopped coloring in the lines.

Apart from the presence (or not) of red on the nape, the black malar border on the RNSA is thinner and doesn't extend all along the red throat to keep it from meeting the white face paint. That black malar border is much more distinct on a Yellow-bellied, which I'll still hold out hope to see here some day.

It was a quick jaunt before I had to be back at work, but on the way to the car I snagged another tick for the patch list as it patrolled the canal. It's up to Prescott this weekend to see who's hanging out where there's some decently cool whether.

Just Keep Pecking Away

We left Tumacacori in high spirits after finding the Green Kingfisher so easily and getting such nice looks. We were even ahead of our loosely organized schedule as we headed north towards the Santa Ritas, so we decided to dally along Proctor Road and the White House Canyon picnic and to look for some lesser vagrants (lesser compared to an Eared Quetzal that is). 

A one-day Varied Thrush at Proctor Road was a bust, but persisting reports of a Red-breasted Sapsucker at the picnic area and a less reliable Evening Grosbeak were much more intriguing. Tommy and I had seen and photographed both of these birds already for the year, but as any witness can attest, they're too gorgeous to ever pass up, especially in Arizona. 

When we parked at the White House picnic area we were spoiled again. Another nice birder had already pinpointed the woodpecker, which was drilling sap-wells only fifteen feet or so away from the parking lot. It was absurdly time, like it wasn't even fair kinda tame, like it almost cheapened the sighting kinda tame. Almost, but not quite.
Understandably, he stayed on the shady side of his mesquite, and that didn't allow for his dazzling colors to have their full effect, but crikey what a bird! For his drilling persistence and despite his relative ease around people, I named him Daniel Plainview.

Throughout the morning we had been monitoring the listservs for any reports on the Quetzal. It was seen two days before by Laurens Halsey, a very well-known and respected bird guide in Arizona, but no one had been able to relocate the bird. Quetzals are a secretive species, and while this record in Madera was very believable, there were nothing but negative reports since the initial sighting. 

With the weather being nice and with us also having an urge to visit nearby Florida Canyon for its now-resident Rufous-capped Warblers, our patience in the Queztal hunt was not what it should have been. Every birder we talked to on our way up Madera Canyon to the Carrie Nation Trail--and there were a fair amount--was beleaguered. There was a constant stake-out by some half dozen birders around all of the upper canyon berry trees where the Quetzal might perch, and so after about an hour we decided just to call it quits and head next door for some better birding. Along the way though, the Woodpecker show continued. 

A female Arizona Woodpecker flew in and perched in the open at eye level--not the most common thing to see. Despite this being a staple bird of the Santa Ritas, it's not one I've been able to photograph very well and I was pleased to get more face time with this precocious little pecker. 

Yellow-eyed and Dark-eyed Juncos were also moving back and forth between their oaken perches and their leaf-littered foraging spots. It's a big messy family, but at the end of the day a Junco is a great bird with a great name. I'm always hoping to get a good face-to-face with an Olive Warbler in this area of Madera (near the Super Trail and Carrie Nation trail heads). That's how my first ever Oliver Warbler sighting occurred many years ago, but since then my sightings of the species have always been brief or obscured. It was only Juncos and Kinglets this time around, but that ain't so bad.

We couldn't turn up a Williamson's Sapsucker, but this accommodating Red-naped Sapsucker was a gorgeous consolation. This photo has a special place in my heart because it is not only the first post-able photo of the species that I've taken, but I shot in manual focus since my autofocus was on the fritz, and this is a big deal for me.

Unfortunately Florida Canyon was pretty dead; to be fair, we were hitting it around 1pm. We had very brief looks at the Warblers, though we helped point a Washington birder in the right direction in the mean time and, upon running into him later, learned that he got some amazingly close views. 

We left the Santa Ritas without getting our (longshot) target bird, but with some very nice hits on the side. We were also looking ahead to our planned pitstop in Eloi, Arizona, for Mountain Plover and Crested Caracara. 

The Santa Cruz Flats did not disappoint. We had nearly a dozen Caracaras perched near the corral on Baumgartner road and more than three dozen Mountain Plover on the sod farms off Pretzer and road 2750. These two birds are the essence of "locally common." They're very reliable in the winter months, but this is one of very few places in Arizona where both of these species are consistently seen. 

Even without the Quetzal, I added a lifer and three year birds on the trip. It was a nice coup de grace for what may well be my last trip down south for the year (Havasu and Yuma beckon next), unless that Queztal pops up again...