Friday we joined a 9:00 Bird Hike on the nearby trail lead by a
very knowledgeable volunteer named Di. She was a fount of information and
deftly went from giving hints and identifying birds herself, to eliciting the
identification from the 13 or so of us in her group as we learned more. Our
most exciting sight was a flock of around 30 Mountain Bluebirds, males and
females, posing at the top of a large tree. We were amused that the guide and
locals were nearly as excited by a flock of Robins; these common backyard
visitors (to us) are a rare sight here in southern Arizona. Similarly, people
around here get all excited when they sight Northern Cardinals, while we’re
more taken by the related but rare (to us) Pyrrhwoxia. The three hours went by
very quickly and now we can identify the Black Phoebe and other new-to-us birds
with the best of them. We had lunch and spent much of the afternoon reading in
the sunshine as the temps rose into the low 70°s. (With temperatures at night
in the 30°s and during the day in the 70°s we are shedding and redonning
clothes throughout the day but we don’t mind.) Both of us felt like another
hike around the campground before we made dinner and worked on the computer for
the evening.
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| Black Phoebe |
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| Add caption |
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| Flock of Mountain Bluebirds |
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| Close-up of the Bluebirds |
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| Sonoita Creek before it opens into the Reservoir called Lake Patagonia |
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| Our Birding group |
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| Bluebirds seen later in the hike, right over our heads |
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| Female Pyrrhwoxia on one of several feeders at the trailhead of the Birding Trail |
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