Mt. Baldy Birding: Feelin' the Forest and the Fungi

Arizona is know, justly, for its desert landscapes. It has a lot of them, they are interesting, and they are relatively unique in North America. Arizona also has mountains. It has a lot of mountains, 210 ranges in fact, and some of the prettiest, tallest, and most ecologically inviting are the White Mountains in Apache County of northeastern Arizona. The fittingly titled Mt. Baldy is the tallest peak/mountain in the range, and it hosts a wilderness loop trail that ranges between 14 and 20 miles--depending on one's route--that cuts through several different biomes and offers plenty by way of scenery and wildlife. I had hiked and birded portions of this area in years previous, but on this holiday weekend crammed down our throats by fat-cat union gangsters (Labor Day) I endeavored to walk the whole loop (success!) and crush some birds in the process (semi-success). 

The Mt. Baldy west fork/east fork trails take one through healthy and not-so-healthy spruce, fir, and pine forests, as well as alpine meadow that hosts truly tremendous numbers of elk feeding before dawn. The landscape is also dotted with small lakes and reservoirs, most of which are fed by snowmelt and the Little Colorado River. As such, Ospreys do very well here.

Animals that live in these high and harsh temperate zones must be very tough and adaptive to survive. It is a fascinating place. It is a hard place. It is an odd place. It is a place where tiny populations of Spotted Sandpipers and Magnificent Hummingbirds come to breed, both above 9,000 feet. It is a place where one sees...off-kilter things...but things not best left unseen:

It is also a place where one sees many good things, like American Three-toed Woodpeckers exfoliating conifers with their slash-and-burn-style 'flaking' technique. Just look at the reddish, exposed portion of these trees vs. the grayer, older, weathered bark. This may be America's most industrial Woodpecker.

What is the evolutionary advantage of having three toes you ask? There is no definitive answer yet. Some say it allows better leverage for their style of feeding, at the expense of climbing speed. Some say the style of feeding came because of the lack of toe. In order to find out the advantage or disadvantage, we'll just have to ask them after the apocalypse. 

The West Fork trail is longer than the East Fork portion of the loop, but of the two was the site of more recent Dusky Grouse sightings and thus my trailhead. With this now being the 5th time I've unsuccessfully sought the bird in proper habitat in AZ, it's becoming a bit of a nemesis. It feels more of a nemesis because DUGR is also one of those secretive, sparse species that's also seen easily by people who aren't even trying.
Every time I've hiked in the White Mountains area I'll run into a non-birder, usually a plump lady with a purple sweater and a small white dog, excitedly sharing how she had "3 funny little turkey chicken birds with yellow eye feathers run up to me from the woods!" So that is frustrating, but there's plenty else to distract the mind on a Grouse-less hike, questions that are probably very answerable and yet, to my uninformed mind, provocative.
Why are there so many various and cool types of fungi? What are their competitive advantages? Why does that one look likes pecans? Why does that one look like Dip-n-Dots? It is the fungi of the future?

Why do trees grow so particularly in some places, seeming to form a huge, cascading flow of conifers and aspens and then--STOP--no more trees. Or there will be meadow and then a few trees just giving a big rude middle timber to the rule-following masses pressed up against the invisible boundary. It must be a cultural thing.

And in other areas the woods are severely skeletal, and not apparently from fire. This is below the timberline, where young fir trees are sprouting but all the spruce seem to be dying either from bark beetles or maybe even just a natural progression of their life cycles, being similarly aged.

The West Fork trail passes through all these habitats but, apart from the constant chatter of Mountain Chickadees and Golden-crowned Kinglets joined occasionally by other expected mix-flock members of their ilk, the trail-birding is pretty bland. As mentioned previously, the Grouse failed to materialize again and I was neither lucky nor skilled enough to find more breeding records of Pine Grosbeak. Since I was hiking with others and on a timeframe I was reticent to go much off trail or explore detour patches. Everything comes with a cost in this world it seems, though also plenty of reward.

After 8 miles of West Baldy we reached the gentile's false peak. The actual Baldy summit is off-limits to non-tribal members without permits. The East Baldy trail is actually a bit shorter and proved to have more interesting rock formations, as well as better birding on the day--so I'd recommend it the more highly of the two, although doing a loop hike whenever possible is man's God-given exhortation. 

There are three birds in the photo below, which composed 3/5 of two different family groups near the top of the West Fork Trail. I mention these uninteresting numbers only to point out that Townsend's Solitaire's are not nearly as solitary as their namesake might suggest, although I have experienced this to be the case, predominantly, with Solitary Sandpipers (none of which were seen atop Mt. Baldy).

              

Immature Townsend's Solitaire's one members of a very small group of birds that might actually look better, or at least more interesting, than their mature/adult counterparts. 8 out of 10 Solitaire's I saw were of the young scaly variety, which is probably expected in early September. TOSOs learned long ago that being too solitary is a bad strategy for passing on the genome.

The East Baldy trail was also the site of a well-executed ambuscade. With hope of extra-cool birds beginning to fade, I was very pleased to see the shining white cap of a Gray Jay later in the afternoon, another species only found in AZ in these mountains and that seemed to materialize out of the encroaching gray mass of clouds and thunder.

While distracted by this distant bird the attack came not from the front, but from the sides. The other Jays I didn't even know were there. They flew in and landed with total silence on owl-quiet wingbeats and without any vocalizations, something very unusual considering the day's lengthy exposure to antithetically behaving Stellar's Jays. Clever Girls...

Since the Grouse and Grosbeaks felt like long-shots in September anyway and were also no-shows, the target Gray Jays had a redemptive quality to them. While "redemptive" may not be a quality often associated with Jays of any kind, it is not the only quality that GRJAs boast. They reside year-round in coniferous forests near the timberline, storing caches of food only where it is cold enough and the trees are scaly enough to harbor such stockpiles. They also utilize cooperative breeding, and have very good manners for being in the corvidae family. 

The greatest lesson learned from the long day's excursion? Little mountain towns that claim to have "The World's Best Thai Food" are dirty rotten liars. 

Summer Epilogues and Existential Affirmations

It was the end of July and those last precious days of summer were ticking away. Having been laid up for about two months with pre-surgery and then post-surgery physical limitations (face-lifts don't come without their own baggage, people), it had been a low key summer. There was much watching of movies and much reading of books, in addition to much playing of cards and drinking of...drinks.

While I was very content with the summer, there was also a whole inside this Butler, a void of certain sights and sounds that continued to enlarge its emptiness in the bearer until that the most heinous of thoughts--that the summer would soon be over and had been wasted--began to flicker on and off in my mind, like a patchy fluorescent light destroying any possibility of sleep or peace.

Female Selasphorous Hummingbird in Butler Canyon, Greer, AZ

I had to go birding, and I had to bird hard! There had been enjoyable walks and light birding in New Hampshire, as well as Maine and Pennsylvania during the summer. I had also gone out a few times and hobbled along the spillway of Tres Rios to ogle the Least Bitterns. But these were short, easy affairs. I was missing the gritty, all day birding, the burning hikes and the scratchy bushes, the thrill of a growing day-list and the pain of poor eating habits. I would have to face my family, my friends, my coworkers, and admit that I did no hardcore birding this summer, none at all. I'd become soft, even insipid.

Luckily I was saved from this pending existential crisis when a bird buddy started posting his wonderful photos and write ups from his week-long birding adventures in the White Mountains of Arizona. With a week left before returning to work, I expressed my interest in seeing some of the wonderful alpine birds, and the invitation was on. Thank you Tommy.

I arrived in Greer Tuesday afternoon, and although the northern AZ skies were even more permanently and thickly clouded than Phoenix's, we still had a couple of hours to bird, to prologue the all-day bonanza that was to come. We went to nearby Butler Canyon, a fine place to go for Butler's Birds, pining for some Woodpeckers. Tommy has already written up a fantastic post on the Williamson's Sapsuckers he was studying all week long, and we quickly found several different specimens on the pine trees around the lower canyon, while Olive-sided Flycatchers and Steller's Jays made their noises in the background. Here, a young female Williamson's scampers up a tree.

The Williamson's Sapsucker was a very overdue lifer, one I had never chased when they showed up at Boyce Thompson Arboretum or other areas closer to Phoenix. I wanted to see them up in the pines and knew that eventually I would. As it turns out, not only would I get to see them, I'd get to see all of their (very) variable plumages. Here a young male, yet pale in the belly and awkward in attitude, surveys a possible reservoir for some sap wells.

In the high-elevation pines there were many first year birds, and in fact it wasn't until our fourth or fifth specimen that we saw a fully fledged male. Alas I didn't get any photos of the handsome bird, neither while it foraged nor when it flew away and fully revealed its striking blacks and whites. Here instead, for your viewing pleasure, is another immature male looking rather like a beetle.

Seeing this lifer first thing in Greer was greatly satisfying and a good indication for the rest of my brief birding trip. We would see them occasionally at our other birding spots on Wednesday, but never in such high concentrations as at Butler Canyon. To do the birds more justice, I'm going to cheat and use a photo here of another young male that wasn't taken in Butler Canyon, but is a more fitting view for this groovy sapsucker.



The Williamson's were a part of a one-two Woodpecker punch (why is no one producing a birder themed drink, with one such flavor being Woodpecker Punch???), and the other half was even more particular to the White Mountains area. Odds were I'd eventually see a Williamson's closer to Phoenix in the next couple of years, but certainly not it's White Mountain counterpart.
Yes, this is a woodpecker that seldom strays below 8,000 feet and stays masked in shadow.

Evidence of this specialist Woodpecker is most often seen in recently burned forest, the type of charred trees now tragically surrounding parts of Greer from a large fire several years ago. The brittle bark on the burned pines allows for the unique flaking feeding habits of this Woodpecker, that is, chipping and flaking off the bark instead of drilling holes into it. It also makes for some interesting textural and color combinations in the spooky woods.

I speak of course, of the American Three-toed Woodpecker, one of the longest named birds in North America. Often difficult to distinguish from the unscrupulous Hairy Woodpeckers that are also found in the area, their unique feeding style is one quick ID tool, and since most views of this bird are going to be of it foraging high in a pine tree, that's a good place to start.

We actually found this female on the side of Greenspeak, but again I'm going to take the photos and include them there, out of a deep concern with justice for the birds, that they be better represented than the shadowy, hazy junk I took on Tuesday. The heavy black and white barring on the sides, visible on this female, is also a good way to tell the bird apart.
Needless to say, if one somehow gets a good look at the feet, counting toes will also help in an ID.

The Three-toed and the Williamson's made for two lifers during our preliminary birding, giving us a great start and alleviating some of the pressure going into Wednesday's epic bird day, the story of which must be told and illustrated next week. Tuesday night ended with a burger and a beer at the Greer lodge and a semi-pleasant night spent in the car, as rain and thunder made for a very natural orchestra, accompanied by its own natural light show.