Dirt Fields, Mountain Plovers, and a Rufous-backed Robin

On Friday, January 21, John Yerger and I volunteered our time to survey the southern Santa Cruz Flats of Pinal County for wintering Mountain Plovers. We made countless stops along remote county roads such as this, overlooking off-season cotton fields. This is looking NE toward Picacho Peak, familiar to commuters along I-10 between Tucson and Phoenix.

In our search for Mountain Plovers, we were getting warmer when we looked over the sod farms near Tweedy and Pretzer roads.

We finally located a group of 15 Mountain Plovers in a relatively flat dirt field (few dirt clods or plants) to the southwest of the intersection of Hotts and Tweedy Roads.

I also noticed this minute velvet ant – actually a wingless female wasp. This species is Dasymutilla foxi.

Since it was in our area, we also stopped at this row of fruiting privet where Richard Fray and Laura Steward found a Rufous-backed Robin just five days earlier.

It was not there for the first several minutes, but while we were chatting with Laurens Halsey and Andrew Core, it flew in and began feeding out in the open. I managed this "digibinned" shot with my Canon PowerShot S90 held up to my Zeiss binoculars.

I kept track of our sightings for entering into eBird. We came up with a total of 55 species:

Mallard	5
Great Blue Heron	1
White-tailed Kite	2
Northern Harrier	6
Cooper's Hawk	1
Red-tailed Hawk	22
Ferruginous Hawk	3
Crested Caracara	11
American Kestrel	9
Prairie Falcon	1
Killdeer	3
Mountain Plover	15
Least Sandpiper	16
Eurasian Collared-Dove	158
Mourning Dove	576
Greater Roadrunner	1
Gila Woodpecker	25
Ladder-backed Woodpecker	1
Black Phoebe	2
Say's Phoebe	18
Loggerhead Shrike	6
Chihuahuan Raven	18
Common Raven	41
Horned Lark	176
Verdin	2
Rock Wren	1
House Wren	2
Ruby-crowned Kinglet	2
Rufous-backed Robin	1
Bendire's Thrasher	1
Curve-billed Thrasher	2
European Starling	19
American Pipit	212
Orange-crowned Warbler	2
Yellow-rumped Warbler	18
Common Yellowthroat	1
Green-tailed Towhee	1
Abert's Towhee	6
Brewer's Sparrow	12
Vesper Sparrow	43
Lark Sparrow	10
Lark Bunting	161
Savannah Sparrow	68
Song Sparrow	6
White-crowned Sparrow	39
Northern Cardinal	1
Pyrrhuloxia	6
Red-winged Blackbird	550
Western Meadowlark	222
Yellow-headed Blackbird	50
Brewer's Blackbird	475
Great-tailed Grackle	12
Brown-headed Cowbird	350
House Finch	5
House Sparrow	19