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)

When I tell people I’m going to Arizona in July I’m sure they wonder, “Are you nuts?”

Today I’m on my way to the Southwest Wings Festival, July 29 to August 1 in Sierra Vista, Arizona.  It’s one of the top 10 birding festivals in the U.S. and happens to be in one of the cooler places in the state.

“Cooler” in two ways:  cool birds and cooler temperatures than Phoenix.

The festival is held in the mountains of southeastern Arizona where it never gets as hot as Phoenix.  The arrow shows where it is.

The birds at this location are definitely cool.  The area is the northernmost range of many Central American mountain species and the only place in the U.S. where you can find them including 15 species of hummingbirds, the elegant trogon, the Arizona woodpecker, yellow-eyed juncoes and much, much more.

Many of the best birds are migratory so the festival is held in late July during southeastern Arizona’s “second spring” — the monsoon season.  I’m looking forward to a lot of new Life Birds and getting reacquainted with birds I saw the last time I was in Arizona in 1997.

Am I crazy?  Well, I’m the only one in the house who’s crazy enough to go to Minnesota in the winter and Arizona in the summer.  My non-birder husband is wisely staying home.

(image from the National Weather Service)

When I visited St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands with Keystone Trails Association last week, I expected it to be different from Pittsburgh but I was surprised at how different it is from North America’s Atlantic coast.

The Virgin Islands are mountainous like Acadia National Park or the Canadian Maritimes, but they’re steeper and their peaks are sharp because they were never scraped by glaciers.

Here’s how steep it was: I climbed 135 steps from our Concordia Eco-Resort cabin to the upper parking area where this photo was taken. By Day Two the drivers in our group always fetched the cars and picked us up at the flat end of the boardwalk below.  Whew!

The climate is both dry and humid with a daily high of 81 degrees F in late January.  The tops of the mountains are moist and forested.  The lower elevations resemble southern California with cacti and succulent plants.  Here’s a view at Salt Pond where the water is saltier than the ocean.

81 degrees F sounds comfortable but the dewpoint is always 70+ degrees so it felt hot as soon as the sun came up.  Because I don’t like heat, my favorite time of day was dawn and my favorite things were:

• The wind.  Unlike North America’s prevailing west wind, the Virgin Islands have a strong east wind — the Trade Winds that brought Europeans to the West Indies.
• The sound of the breakers at Drunk Bay.  Our cabin was perched high above boulder-strewn Drunk Bay where the sound of the breakers lulled me to sleep.
• The views.  The islands are spectacularly beautiful with steep green mountain peaks and turquoise water.  My photos don’t do it justice.

And there are beautiful white sand beaches.  Trunk Bay, below, is rated one of the top 10 beaches in the world.

Most amazing of all were these differences in bird life. At St. John I found …

• No flying flocks.  I was amazed not to see any flocks in flight.
• No gulls at all.  According to a local birder, the laughing gulls return in April but that’s about it.
• Few fishing birds.  Magnificent frigatebirds were most numerous (I saw five at once, soaring up from their roost), followed by royal terns (three) and brown pelicans (two).
• Few shorebirds. Except for resident black-necked stilts at Francis Bay there were only single shorebirds at most locations.
• No corvids.  No ravens, no crows, no jays.
• No vultures.  They sorely needed vultures but this niche seemed to be filled by rats, feral cats and mongooses all of whom were imported to the island.
• Few birds of prey.  I saw one red-tailed hawk and a few American kestrels.

Eventually this all made sense.  The lack of fishing birds matched the lack of fishing boats.  I suppose there are few catchable fish at St. John. Perhaps the coral reefs protect them.

If you like heat and sun and warm Caribbean water you will love St. John, USVI.  It’s a very different place from Pennsylvania.

(photos by Kate St. John)