To a Pennsylvanian it’s counter intuitive that birding is excellent in southeastern Arizona in early August.  It’s hot — especially at the lower elevations (104^oF in Tuscon last Monday) — but the birds are active because it’s the breeding season.  Breeding?  Here’s why.

From late June through September, it’s so hot that rising desert air creates a low pressure zone that sucks in moisture from the south, primarily from the Gulf of California in western Mexico.  When the moist air hits Arizona’s sky island mountains it condenses into clouds, isolated thunderstorms, and rain.  This annual weather pattern is called the monsoon.

The moisture doesn’t have to travel far. This mountain in Mexico, called Sierra San Jose, is easily visible from Sierra Vista, Arizona, headquarters of the Southwest Wings Festival.

While I was at the Festival it thundered every afternoon at 3:00pm and rained somewhere by 4:00pm.  “Somewhere” means you can see it raining in the distance but you often don’t get wet.  The downpours are intense but you can drive in and out of them, sometimes within a mile.  However, watch out for flash floods!

The rain brings cooler temperatures, green leaves and, I quickly learned, bugs.  (Don’t ask me about chiggers.)

Bugs are food for baby birds so the monsoon is a second Spring when the birds court, sing and nest. That’s why the Southwest Wings summer festival is held in early August.

I had a great time!  The festival offers free seminars and one-day or two-day paid outings with guides.  I chose the day-long outings where we hiked in morning, ate lunch in the shade, and watched hummingbirds at feeders in afternoon.  In this way I visited Madera, Box, Ash, Miller and Huachuca Canyons, the Sonoita grasslands, and Patagonia.

The guides were excellent!  I saw 139 species and 33 Life Birds during my time in Arizona, and that wasn’t my first trip to the area.  Did I tell you I saw four elegant trogons?  Yes!

I highly recommend the Southwest Wings Birding and Nature Festival.  Southeastern Arizona is a lovely place in early August.

(photos by Kate St. John)

When you travel west in North America you often encounter birds that are similar but different from those back home.  Here are three natives of Arizona and their eastern North America cousins.

Yellow-eyed junco vs. dark-eyed junco:

Did you ever wonder why our eastern juncos are called a “dark-eyed?”  Perhaps because there’s a yellow-eyed junco (Junco phaeonotus) in Arizona, pictured above.  Click here to see the dark-eyed junco (Junco hyemalis).

Bridled titmouse vs. tufted titmouse:

The bridled titmouse (Baeolophus wollweberi) has a fancy face compared to his eastern cousin, the tufted titmouse (Baeolophus bicolor).  Click here to see the tufted titmouse.

Black-throated gray warbler vs. black-throated green warbler:

These two warblers not only resemble each other but have very similar English names.   The black-throated gray warbler (Setophaga nigrescens) is common in southeastern Arizona. The black-throated green warbler (Setophaga virens) is the bird we see in Pennsylvania. Click here for a photo of the black-throated green.

And for you Bird-Code wonks:  These two would both be coded as “BTGW” but have been altered to BTYW (gray) and BTNW (green) to make them unique.

For more same-but-different Southwestern birds see this blog from December 2013 featuring Steve Valasek’s photos from New Mexico.

(photos from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the images to see the originals)

This yellow oriole breeds in the southwestern U.S. on desert foothills and dry mountain slopes because he’s picky about plants.  He prefers places with yuccas.

Scott’s oriole (Icterus parisorum) uses yuccas for food, shelter, nesting material and nesting sites.  Not only does he drink the nectar from yucca flowers but he looks for insects on the plants.

When it’s time to nest his lady prefers arboreal yuccas such as Joshua trees or this tall soaptree yucca but she’ll use desert palms, piñon pine or juniper if she has to.

No matter where she places her nest, she uses yucca fibers to build it. According to Birds of North America Online, she “pulls at and strips off long, loose, stringlike fibers from edges of yucca leaves and weaves these together to form the main part of the nest.”  Fortunately there are lots of yucca species to choose from.

As with many other orioles, the female is not nearly as colorful as her mate. Click here to see what she looks like.

To find Scott’s oriole in the breeding season you have to be near yuccas.

p.s. I can’t resist telling you about their name:

The scientific name, Icterus parisorum, was coined by French naturalist Charles Lucien Bonaparte who used the species name “parisorum” to honor the Paris brothers who financed specimen collection trips in the Southwest in the 1820’s.  Decades later Darius Couch tried to rename the bird for his Mexican War commander, Gen. Winfield Scott, but he lost that battle and had to settle for the common name: Scott’s oriole. 

(photo of Scott’s oriole by Gregory “Slobirdr” Smith via Wikimedia Commons. photo of soaptree yucca from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the images to see the originals)

Another warbler, but this one is real.

The painted redstart (Myioboris pictus) of the U.S. Southwest and Central America is a famous singer, unusual among warblers because both males and females sing and perform duets during courtship.

Black and red with white accents, he has a white spot below his eye that’s similar in shape and position to the eye-black that football players wear to reduce glare.  I wonder if it has the same function.

Though not closely related to the American redstart, he also has white edges on his tail and flairs them as his eastern namesake does.  But he’s not a redstart, he’s a “whitestart” with many Central and South American relatives in the Myioborus genus.

Redstart?  Whitestart?  What shall we call him?

He’s always “Painted.”

(photo from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original)

The olive warbler (Peucedramus taeniatus) was so hard to classify that he was removed from New World Warblers (Dendroica, now called Setophaga) in 1875 to a genus of his own.  This made him the only member of a genus found only in North and Central America.

The genus Peucedramus ranges from Arizona and New Mexico to Nicaragua, precisely where the olive warbler lives.

This level of uniqueness is troubling to biologists.  Every animal is descended from others so who were this bird’s ancestors?  Doesn’t he belong in some other group?

DNA testing confirmed that he’s not really a warbler but his characteristics are still hard enough to place that arguments continue.  He might be a finch or a sparrow or even an Old World Warbler (as are kinglets and gnatcatchers).

But he looks like a warbler and if you want to see him in the U.S. you have to visit where he lives.

Don’t look for him at Cornell Lab’s All About Birds website.  He’s not there!

(photo from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original)

31 July 2015  

NOTE as of December 2020:  Since this was written in 2015 the Picoides genus has been split. The American three-toed and Black-backed woodpeckers are two of only three species in genus Picoides. All others listed below are in genus Dryobates.

Though he’s called the Arizona woodpecker this brown-and-white bird is slightly misnamed.  Most of his range is in Mexico.

He’s one of nine Picoides woodpeckers found in North America, each with its own special habitat.  Some of them are familiar and wide ranging.  Others have such specific needs that you must travel to see them.

Here’s how they’ve divided up the continent.  At least one of them lives near you.

• American Three-toed: in the Rockies and Canada in boreal and coniferous forests disturbed by disease or fire.
• Black-backed: in Canada and northern U.S. in boreal and coniferous forests with burned trees.
• Downy woodpecker: found in most of North America in open woodlands and along streams.
• Hairy: found in most of North America in mature woodlands.
• Ladder-backed: in desert and desert scrub among cactus in the Southwest.
• Nuttall’s: in California’s oak woodlands.
• Red-cockaded: found in mature longleaf pine forests in the southeastern U.S.;  endangered.
• White-headed: in pine forests in Pacific Northwest and California mountains.
• Arizona: in pine-oak forests in the mountains of Mexico and southeastern Arizona.

Like his familiar Downy and Hairy relatives in Pennsylvania, this woodpecker visits suet feeders.  That’s where I saw him for the first time at Madera Canyon.

In Arizona.

(photo from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original)