Christmas Bird Counts Are My Life

While tending my garden, attending potlucks, celebrating friends' birthdays, enjoying a wonderful Thanksgiving in Mississippi, and banding hummingbirds in the yard have been some minor activities over the past weeks, my life has been dominated by the two Christmas Bird Counts that I'm organizing.

Tucson Valley Christmas Bird Count (blog here) is scheduled for Sunday, Dec 16, and as of this moment we have 119 birders in 27 teams as well as 6 feeder watchers. There should be 50 feeder watchers, but many don't know about the CBC.

Atascosa Highlands Christmas Bird Count (blog here) will be on Saturday, December 22, and the 21 teams of 71 birders will have a very different experience than the Tucson Valley counters. It's virtually all wilderness. In fact, I can scarcely think of two circles in US so close to each other (58.5 miles center-to-center; or 43.5 miles edge-to-edge) with such radically different characters as AZTV and AZAH.

Larry Norris and Brian Walsh have been banding hummingbirds on a nearly weekly basis in the back yard for the past month, and I've been here for all but one session. Yesterday we recaptured a banded female Anna's Hummingbird that had been banded a couple months earlier some 55 miles south of here at Sonoita Creek State Natural Area. She was first recaptured here in mid-November, so it looks like this is where she's decided to spend the winter.

Then last Wednesday, my friend Brian McKnight and I made an honest attempt to get a record late date for Chiricahua White (Neophasia terlooii) in Madera Canyon. It was warm and beautiful, but no whites. We did see a few Painted Ladies, Southern Dogfaces, a Common Buckeye, and Ceraunus Blue. We hike up Old Baldy and down the Super Trail, a good 3-hour workout.

This is looking down from the Super Trail to the NW, over the Madera Canyon bajada, Green Valley, and the blight of copper mine taling and slurry piles.

Looking the other direction up at Mount Wrightson (9470 feet, 2885 meters), with the lush Bellows Spring Canyon dropping down towards us.

Garden Update: Sweetest Peas

No photo today; just a place holder and calendar item. Yesterday I sowed about 170 Sweet Pea (Lathyrus odoratus) seeds, which I had soaked for 24 hours and inoculated with a bacterial booster. About 115 were Pink Cupid, an 18-inch tall heirloom variety that will surround the perimeter of my winter veggie garden. The remaining 55 were High Scent, which grows to 4-6 feet tall, right underneath my office/bedroom window. I can barely stand the wait.

Garden Update: Five-and-a-half Weeks

I'm tickled pink with the progress of my garden. OK, it's not perfect. Somehow the carrot and onions didn't sprout as well as I thought they should (did I plant the seeds too deep?). But this photo from this morning shows the progress 5 weeks and 4 days after sowing. The plants in the foreground are actually the starts given to me, and the arugula (rocket) and spinach are ready to be used. The plants in rows on the right are the ones I sowed, and in the far corner are the starts that I began in a tray a couple days beforehand and kept indoors for a few days – spinach, chervil, kale, broccoli, and parsley. I don't think the two days head start (plus transplanting a couple days ago) did them any favors.

You can't see it in this photo, but there are four nasturtium seedlings that have come up as well. They'll add some nice, edible color to the garden.

In the lower right corner you can see a bit of the frost cloth that I've cut to size. I'll be sewing (extremely coarsely) three pieces together and stapling the edges to some wood that I bought to weigh it down and give it some shape. Who knows when I'll need it. I think this is the longest, warmest fall I have ever experienced here, with lows in the low 40's and highs in the upper 70's F. We've had one light frost that did no damage to even the most tender plants. Nor did it budge the whitefly.

Eastern Screech-Owl at Bentsen

This Eastern Screech-Owl was seen by the 38 participants on this morning's Lower Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival field trip to Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park. It apparently roosts right next to the road on many days, but some days it goes to another spot that apparently isn't visible from the road. We were lucky today.

We saw lots of the valley's specialties here, especially at the feeders maintained by the state park. These Green Jays created lots of oohs and aahs.

Birding in The Lower Rio Grande Valley

I'm in Harlingen, Texas for five days of leading field trips for the excellent Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival. The first two days have been great. Yesterday I did one of the "Big Day" field trips with Willie Sekula. We tallied 131 species from Estero Llano Grande to South Padre Island, including lots of Harris's Hawks, a Northern Beardless-Tyrannulet, and a Black-throated Gray Warbler. At Estero we ran into my friends Sophie Webb, Michael O'Brien, Louise Zemaitis, and Shawneen Finnegan leading a sketching workshop.

Today, John Arvin and I were joined by our participants on a boat ride on the bay from Port Isabel. Here's George Colley pointing out a pair of Peregrine Falcons on a tower. Best bird of the day was a gorgeous male Mangrove Warbler.

Week 1 Garden Update and Another Hobby Revealed

The garden's coming right along, thanks. The first seedlings popped their pair of cotyledons out of the soil surface on DAY 3, which is right up my instant-gratification alley. It was the row of mustard spinach, so that's what you should plant if you hate waiting.

This is what it looks like after a week. The foreground is the bed of randomly planted starts from my friend Greg. Turnips, mustards, beets, and mache are all up, but the only visible lettuce is rouge d'hiver. No sign of the carrots yet, despite our daily highs in the mid 80's to around 90°F all this past week.

My other non-bird hobby:
I'm almost surprised to have noticed that I've never mentioned my knitting on this blog. I guess I've been subconsciously trying to stick to a theme to match my screen name of "Birdernaturalist," but this is MY blog, after all. So I come out of the closet yet another time:  for the past 2 1/2 years I've been addicted to knitting. I have a Ravelry profile, and I have a stash. I rarely come out of a yarn shop empty handed. Mostly socks are my thing, but I've knitted scarfs, hats, dish rags, hot pad holders, a cardigan, and a camisole. I knit on the plane, in the airport, and even some evenings during trips. I knit each weekday while listening to Democracy Now with Amy Goodman.

This are one of my latest projects, a gift for a friend, entirely knitted while on the scouting/fam trip in Ecuador and Peru this past month. The yarn itself was a gift, a self-striping dye pattern that is supposed to have the colors of the olympic flag. For every metal won by the US team in London this past summer, the price of the yarn would drop by a few cents.

I had no idea what how the yarn would knit up, given what it looked like rolled up in a ball.

One last bit of birdernaturalist news: While I was sitting in the yard this week a Red Crossbill flew over. Will we have some on the CBC?

Another Rock Corral Canyon Visit

This past Tuesday I led a Tucson Audubon Society field trip to Rock Corral Canyon in SE Arizona's Tumacacori Mountains. I like this place more and more each time I visit it.

The 2-mile road in has a rather steep spot with loose rock which (it turns out) requires a 4-wheel-drive vehicle to ascend – not just high clearance. Luckily we had enough 4x4 cars for all 13 of us to fit in, and, passing many Rufous-winged Sparrows along the way, arrived at the main parking area in a mesquite bosque.

Birding began right away, with Bewick's Wren, Hermit Thrush, Ruby-crowned Kinglet, Gray Flycatcher (heard) and a very late Black-chinned Hummingbird all coming in to my imitations of Western Screech-Owl and pishing.

Just up the canyon was a Golden Eagle hopping and creeping on the ground on the opposite hillside. We must have surprised it after its breakfast of cottontail or ground squirrel.

Just as we crossed the threshold into the Atascosa Highlands CBC circle, Sue Carnahan heard a gnatcatcher. A bit of pishing and owl imitations brought it in – a female Black-capped! Already, the best bird of the day, and we had just started.

In addition to the 40 species of birds we netted (checklist at eBird), we looked at butterflies, bugs, and flowers.

This stand of Anoda abutiloides, Indian Anoda was a good find.

On it were this Erichson's White-Skipper and a runt Desert Checkered-Skipper.

We puzzled over this fuzzy understory plant, but Sue and I put out instincts together and eventually figured it out: Iresine heterophylla, Standley's Bloodleaf, in the amaranth family.

Another semi-tropical plant is the acanth Tetramerium nervosum, Hairy Fournwort, but we didn't find any of its exotic butterfly feeder, the Elf. We did see another rarity though – a Mimosa Yellow came into a flowering Trixis for some of us.

Despite there being very little water in this canyon, we saw a few dragonflies and this spreadwing damselfly, Archilestes californicus, California Spreadwing.