D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
July 2009
Testing the Waters
Looking for the birds in the desert Southwest? Follow the water for some surprising sightings.
Story and photos by Jay W. Sharp
If you are a birder who has come, for the first time, to the Southwest from a home in the Pacific Northwest, the Great Plains, the Eastern Woodlands or a coastal region, you are likely in for a few surprises.
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Cliff swallow--one of hundreds--at
nesting site beneath bridge over the Rio Grande. |
First, you may be taken aback by the number of species that have found year-round or seasonal environmental niches in the Southwest desert basins and mountain ranges.
Second, you might be astonished by the birds' resilience and resourcefulness in coping with an arid and often unforgiving environment and in adapting to dynamic and changing conditions.
Third, you might be surprised to discover that the birds' limited choices of watering places in our arid region serve as an advantage for birdwatchers. This is because more species tend to concentrate in fewer and often more open areas, making them easier to observe and photograph than in, say, a heavily watered and densely foliated rain forest or estuary.
The broad range of Southwest species, which thrive often under extreme conditions, speaks to the tenacity of life. According to the National Park Service, more than 300 species hold residence during the course of a year in the Mojave Desert's Death Valley National Park, where summer air temperatures in the parched lower basin routinely exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit and soil temperatures may reach 180 degrees. Several hundred species occur in the Colorado River delta region, in the northwestern Sonoran Desert, where summertime air temperatures near sea level reach 115 degrees and soil temperatures 130 degrees. Hundreds of species live in the northern Chihuahuan Desert, where summer air temperatures exceed 100 degrees and soil temperatures 120 degrees. These species have found places in the Southwestern deserts even though rainfall in these areas only infrequently exceeds more than a few inches in the course of a year.
The broadest mix of species tends to occur at those places where different environmental regimes intersect. Nearly 400 bird species have been counted, for instance, in the Chiricahua Mountains, in southeastern Arizona, where the Chihuahuan Desert, the Sonoran Desert, the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Madre all join forces. Hundreds of species populate the slopes of Arizona's Mogollon Rim — the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau — which abruptly rises some 2,000 feet from the Sonoran Desert floor to forested slopes. Several hundred species breed in or migrate through northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, where high and arid sage-covered plains meet the San Juan Mountains.
While many birds of the Southwest take moisture from the fruits and seeds of plants and from the tissues and moisture of prey, the populations tend to congregate, as if drawn by magnets, in those areas where water occurs — the mountain streams, the rivers, the riverine wetlands, the desert basin's ephemeral playa lakes, and the river impoundments.
Birds of the Mountain Streams
On summer hikes along the banks of mountain streams at the higher elevations, through stands of ponderosa pines and aspens, you will discover that "a tremendous number of birds — large and small, silent and noisy — find a congenial home in the forests of the West," as Spencer Whitney notes in Western Forests, one of the Audubon Society Nature Guides. Grosbeaks, tanagers, warblers and bluebirds dart through the dark green streamside foliage — mere flashes of gold, yellow, red or blue — sometimes making identifications difficult. The stellar jay issues a raucous call; the raven, a taunting caw; a drumming woodpecker, a miniature jackhammer sound.
For the Birds After a lapse of several years, the 4th Hummingbird Festival will be held July 25-26 at Lake Roberts. Sponsored by the nonprofit Hummingbirds of New Mexico, the event features hummingbird banding, local artists, food and thousands of hummingbirds. For information, see www.hbnm.org or call 536-3866. For information about birdwatching in Grant County, including a species checklist and current sightings, see silvercity.org/activ_birding.php The Southwestern New Mexico Audubon Society offers a recently revised Southwestern New Mexico Birding Trail Map and an online bird identification guide; for information, see www.swnmaudubon.org Every January, Willcox, Ariz., hosts the Wings Over Willcox festival; see www.wingsoverwillcox.com for information about the 2010 event. |
If you happen to peer into a curious three-inch-diameter hole drilled into the lower part of the trunk of a ponderosa pine, a western bluebird may flush from the nest cavity, right in your face. Where a stream flows swiftly over a gravel bottom, you may see a charcoal-colored American dipper skittering along the surface, diving suddenly to the bottom, and dashing underwater over the sand and rocks in a search for aquatic insect life. Early in the morning, a raven may fly overhead, weaving through the trees, with a certain arrogance in his call.
Once, early one morning when my family and I were camped beside the Mimbres River up in the Gila Wilderness, a cocky raven weaving through the trees smacked into a branch of a narrow-leaf willow, hitting it so hard he knocked a large dead twig loose. The bird perched dizzily for a moment on a limb, then flew on his way, perhaps a little chagrined. He returned the next morning, cawing as loudly as ever to announce his presence — but he flew well above the trees.
Through the day near mountain streams, a broad-tailed hummingbird, marked by a rose-colored throat, takes nectar from summer blooms awash in sunlight. Come the dying light of evening, a great horned owl takes wing, flying silently and surely through the trees, a ghostly specter in search of rodents or birds as prey.
Should you be in the bird-rich Chiricahua Mountains, along the stream that flows through Cave Creek Canyon, you could have the exceptional good fortune of seeing — or at least hearing — the elegant trogon, perhaps the Holy Grail of birding in the Southwest.
Birds of the Rivers
Along the few rivers in the Southwest, you can expect the bird communities to vary continually, reflecting the challenges raised by the changing conditions of the streams. They have to adapt as water flows normally during years with average upstream rainfall and snowpack, or rises and rushes dramatically following intense upstream thunderstorms, or disappears altogether during periods of prolonged drought.
In normal years, given the right season, the right river conditions and good luck, you could see not only the birds of the adjacent arid lands, but also many water birds — in the hearts of the deserts! These could include, for instance, geese, ducks, herons, cranes, egrets, terns, sandpipers, rails, coots, plovers, ibis, grebes and phalaropes. You might even see birds you normally associate with coastlines and estuaries — for example, the Franklin gull or the white pelican or a double-crested cormorant.
I remember once, not long after we moved to the Southwest, my wife and I saw, to our astonishment, an osprey. We were near the Rio Grande just below the Big Bend National Park in Texas, hundreds of miles upstream from the Gulf Coast. The osprey, says Roger Tory Peterson in his Western Birds, is "our only raptor that hovers over the water and plunges into it feet-first for fish." We had not seen an osprey since we moved from the Gulf Coast, near Houston, several years previously. We learned later, from an expert on the birds of the Big Bend region, that the osprey makes fairly frequent appearances along the river, where it flows through the Chihuahuan Desert, especially in those years with good stream flow.
You will find that the San Pedro River, which rises in Mexico and flows northward into Arizona to join with the Gila River near Hayden, about 75 miles southeast of Phoenix, ranks as one of the top birding areas in the entire United States. One of the last free-flowing rivers in the Southwest, the San Pedro's "cottonwood-shaded corridor supports about 350 bird species and provides critical stopover habitat for up to 4 million migrating birds each year," according to The Nature Conservancy's website (www.nature.org) "The San Pedro supports nearly two-thirds of the avian diversity in the US; about 100 species of birds breed around the river and an additional 250 species use the corridor for migration and winter range."