I stopped briefly in Green Valley to buy groceries and check my weather app before driving to Madera Canyon.  It was late January and excellent weather was forecast, mid 60s, partly cloudy skies, light breezes, perfectly fine conditions for birding.  I drove east to the Santa Rita Mountains on the Madera Canyon Road.  The Santa Ritas are rocky summits, a southeast Arizona Sky Island fortress, an isolated mountain range with unique fauna and flora surrounded by low-lying Chihuahuan desert.  This topographic and climatologic isolation resulted in endemic populations of plants and animals that survived the Icehouse glaciations and subsequent warming starting about 20,000 years ago.

The mountain range has a complex geologic history different from its nearby neighbors like the Santa Catalinas near Tucson and the Penalinos north of Safford.  The modern day Santa Rita Mountains are the result of multiple geologic events:  regional extension and compression, intrusion of granite plutons, and explosive volcanism, all a response to plate-tectonic motion along the western margin of North America.  I was headed there to hike and investigate the fascinating geology but also to observe local plants and animals, especially the birds of Madera Canyon.  It’s one of the most popular birding destinations in the Southwest.

I planned to meet Linda Castor at Bog Springs campground.  Linda is a long-time family friend from our Taos years, a part-time vagabond, a Boondocker, and an experienced birder.  She has lived in a Lance camper she calls White Bird and regularly travels the American Southwest.  She participates in Audubon bird counts in the eastern Chiricahua Mountains and volunteers at the Forest Service visitor’s center near Portal for the Friends of Cave Creek Canyon.  The Chiricahua Mountains are also a popular birding venue.  Thousands of visitors swarm that area too, especially during warm winter months to follow migrating birds.  Once or twice a year, Linda and I meet in bird-friendly territory to hone our skills.  Many tropical birds have a northern range that extends well into the southwestern United States.

I spotted White Bird immediately and pulled into an adjacent site.  Bog Springs is a small campground half way up the canyon across the road from Whitehouse picnic area so named for an adobe ruin, an 1880s house built by an early settler.  We chatted about birding experiences and vagabond life.  Linda caught me up on recent sightings and the most interesting birds of Madera Canyon that year.  The tropical focus of this trip was the elegant trogon.  My Sibley bird app indicated that at least one male had been spotted just days ago in Madera Canyon.  The elegant trogon is a member of the trogon family.  It’s about 12 inches in length, brilliantly colored in reds, greens, grays, and blues, a well adapted bird with a croaking or barking call, a Ko-ah Ko-ah Kum sound.  It nests in tree cavities and eats insects and fruits.  Up to 50 breeding pairs stray into New Mexico and Arizona each year.  The trogon is a must collectable for any serious birder!  We planned on starting out the next morning at the Proctor Road Visitor Information Center near the lower end of the canyon.

We walked west from the picnic area along the creek.   There were other birders on the trail but it wasn’t crowded.  The valley here is an ideal desert riparian environment, thinly populated with sycamore, oak, cottonwood, hackberry, and ash.  Grass pastures offer grazing for deer.  We chatted with other birders who said the trogon was sighted nearby earlier that morning.  We saw kinglets, acorn woodpeckers, thrashers, and several raptors.  We passed long poles topped by boxy looking bat houses.  I read somewhere that Madera has 16 species of bats, but hat’s nowhere near the 256 species of birds identified here.  We continued to walk while collecting more birds, a nuthatch, another acorn woodpecker, but no trogon.  We passed more hikers.  They also acknowledged that the trogon was nearby earlier.  After another hour without a trogon sighting, we quit the search promising to return the next day.  Back at the campground, we clandestinely spread bird seed near Linda’s site and attracted several woodpeckers and squawking Mexican jays.  They land and grab, then fly away to hide their booty in tree cavities.  Apparently, they have excellent memories and hide the tidbits for future consumption.

The next morning was beautiful and clear.  I was optimistic.  This time we drove to the Proctor Road day use area and started up the trail.  We immediately spotted some black-tailed gnatcatchers and a painted redstart.  I had never seen a redstrart.  I was getting excited.  We met a local inhabitant from Green Valley, a friendly older man with a camera and an impressive telephoto.  He had just seen the trogon and told us where to find it.  We quickly trekked up canyon.  About twenty minutes later, we eyed a gaggle of birders looking up into a sycamore.  As we approached the group from behind, we heard the discussion and felt the excitement.  A male trogon was half way up the tree perched in a branch.  I spotted it by color, bright red and green, at first partly hidden by branches, and then suddenly fully visible.  I had a clear view of an iridescent kaleidoscope of color, smaller than I imagined, staring at us.  We had him in our sights for 3-4 minutes.  I could hear the click click of cameras, some jabber.  And then, that was it, an experience of the moment, a rare sighting at a bird’s northernmost range.  The trogon would stay here to meet a female and mate.  Shortly, we humans will move on for another birding challenge.

Birding can be a form of collecting.  Some collectors acquire tangible items like stamps or coins, puzzles, maybe model airplanes, post  cards, almost anything.  Birders collect memories and photos, the momentary viewing of an avian.  Some collectors are fanatical.  Several years ago I read Mark Obmascik’s book The Big Year (2004) about three devotees on a quest to find the most birds possible in a calendar year.  In 2011, the book was adapted to the big screen and starred Jack Black, Steve Martin, and Owen Wilson in an entertaining comedy adaptation of Obmascik’s book.  I later read Wild America (1955) by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher, the first road trip book of the genre.  Peterson and Fisher were birding friends and toured the eastern and southern periphery of the United States in 100 days.  They logged more than 30,000 miles and documented 572 species.  Kingbird Highway by Kenn Kaufman (1997) was a kick.  Kenn was a high school dropout and nature lover.  He wrote about his Big Year backpacking across North America on pennies a day.

According to Wikipedia, Guy Emerson held the first known Big Year record in 1939.  He was a traveling businessman who timed his trips to bird occurrences.  He recorded 497 species.  In 1952, the year before the Peterson-Fisher expedition, Bob Smart broke Emerson’s record with 515 species.  In 1969, the American Birding Association standardized and regulated Big Years.  The competitive frenzy has continued.  As far as I can tell, the current Big Year record with the American Birding Association is 840 species awarded to someone from Australia.  That’s quite an accomplishment.  Apparently, the world record holder for species in one year is held by Arjan Dwarshuis of the Netherlands with 6,852 species.  That’s nearly 70 percent of the species on the planet.  Then there are the 600 Club folks who build life lists for North America, and the World Series of Birding in Cape May, New Jersey.  The list goes on.

Most birders are not overachievers or obsessed with collecting feathered fowl.  They are not interested in a Big Year or a life list, rushing to find the nearest vagrant shore bird blown into the area by a storm.   They just love the experience of being in a beautiful place, enjoying the intellectual excitement, the love of the outdoors and nature’s beauty.  I’ve been on hikes where I’m drawn by everything:  birds, rocks, scat, coyote sightings, a developing thunderstorm, pottery sherds, and ant hills.  I’m sometimes overwhelmed by the abundance of sensory experiences in nature.

My enthusiasm for birding began when I was a child in Illinois, no doubt stimulated by my mother’s birding interests.  She always had a bag of seed on the back porch ready for local avians.  We lived across the street from the Fox River.  The area was a great habitat for waterfowl, raptors, and passerines.  Gaggles of quacking mallards flew or risked the trek to waddle across Bennett Street in busy traffic to Paula Dyman’s backyard smorgasbord of treats.  She supplemented seed with table scraps, especially for the ducks.  I was always concerned that an unlucky mallard might be smashed on our busy street by an unattentive driver.

My birding career began with Herbert Zim’s Birds, published by Golden Books (1956).  My first entry in the notes section at the end of the book was robin, followed by grackle.  I was an amateur enthusiast by 5^th grade, but ultimately, birds took second place.  Rocks and landscapes were higher on my list of intellectual pursuits, especially when I realized it might be hard to pursue a lucrative career in ornithology.

Flight is an intriguing evolutionary adaptation to survival.  It occurred at least four times during the geologic past, first with insects, then with pterosaurs, birds, and bats, all separate evolutionary pathways from different ancestors.  It’s an amazing use of morphological space, the physical and environmental landscape of the atmosphere.  Birds are fascinating creatures to geologists and paleontologists too, especially considering their initial adaptation to flight, their survival beyond the terminal Cretaceous extinctions, and their close evolutionary relationship to other dinosaurs.  They are generally viewed today as avian dinosaurs and are (believe it or not) related to crocodiles.  Birds evolved from theropod (three toed and hollow boned) dinosaurs during the Jurassic about 150 million years ago.  The famous Jurassic Archaeopteryx fauna of southern Germany was part of a dead-end evolutionary line.  Archaeopteryx had teeth and a long bony tail, probably a transitional creature somewhere between dinos and true birds.  Researchers conclude that four groups of Cretaceous birds survived the great asteroid blast 66 million years ago.  It’s a fascinating enigma that birds survived that event.  One suggestion is that small avians were able to find food in a stressed environment.  The general view is that the Cretaceous extinctions were not instantaneous but occurred over tens or hundreds of thousands of years.  Coincidently, the Deccan Traps volcanic province of west-central India erupted about the same time from an upwelling of mantle magma as the subcontinent slowly moved northward on its trajectory to collide with Eurasia.  The magmatic plume extruded 200,000 cubic miles of basalt over hundreds of thousands of square miles of the India plate as it inched northward.  The extrusions released significant volumes of sulfurous gases into the atmosphere.  These gases may have contributed to the demise of numerous species.  Research has shown that 75 percent of all living species of animal life disappeared at the end of the Cretaceous.

During the subsequent Paleocene Epoch, surviving bird families expanded exponentially, filling numerous available habitats.  Birds became smaller and more adept at finding food.  They lost their teeth and evolved gizzards, they modified their bone structure, and ultimately acquired beaks.  Modern flightless birds resulted from one of the post-Cretaceous evolutionary branches.  I’ve been fortunate to see emus and ostriches in their natural habitats.  I apparently ate kiwi once at a Māori banquet called a Hāngi in New Zealand.  Kiwis are the smallest flightless bird species, endemic to the island nation.  The local Māoris used thermal waters at the Rotorua geothermal area to cook the birds.  Kiwis were recently downgraded from the endangered species list to vulnerable, surprisingly since only 5-10 percent of hatchlings survive to adulthood.  I had pangs of guilt after reading about kiwis, still hoping that the Māoris used store-bought chickens to simulate their feast.

In 1971 Irene Faivre and I lived in Ashton, a tiny farming community in northern Illinois about 90 miles west of Chicago.  We were both teaching in elementary schools nearby, and I was finishing a Masters degree in geology at Northern Illinois University in nearby Dekalb.  We had rented a second floor flat above a two-car garage owned by a friendly retired couple.  It was a creaky one bedroom apartment with a tiny kitchen, but we loved the place because it had lots of windows, especially the one in the kitchen above the sink.  It was late April or early May and the spring semester was well under way.  It was a busy time.  One morning I noticed some disordered twigs on the outside kitchen window sill.  Then more twigs later in the day, and then a robin or maybe two robins.  As days passed, the construction project was well underway.  A nest was soon completed, an admirable architectural feat for the robins.  We left the window closed to avoid frightening the birds, even with warming weather, and we treaded lightly when cooking or washing dishes.  Then three turquoise blue eggs appeared, and the female began a two-week incubation project.  She rarely left the nest, and only for short periods.  We were getting excited.  It was the biggest event (at least for us) in Ashton, a rather sedate community.  Two weeks later the eggs hatched within hours of each other and three tiny, scrawny, ravenous chicks appeared.  The male robin materialized bringing food.  Both parents were busy arriving with tidbits to stuff down the open mouths of the little featherless creatures, pieces of earth worms, bugs, larvae, then larger chunks, and later, entire worms and bugs.  The chicks rapidly matured, feathered, and grew larger until they were almost too large for the nest.  They waited impatiently for meals and flapped around, seemingly ready to depart.  Then one day when we returned from work, the chicks were gone.  At first, we feared that they had fallen to the ground and died.  The nest was intact.  We examined the area under the kitchen window, looked around the yard, and everywhere else in the vicinity of the building.  No dead robins, and thankfully, no neighborhood cats.  During the next week we spotted several speckle-breasted adolescent robins fluttering around the neighborhood.  I later read that only about a quarter of fledgling robins reach breeding age.

One of my most humbling avian experiences took place on January 19, 2018.  I remember the date simply because I entered it in my birding log along with the names of the 36 species I identified that day.  It was a successful event, sort of.  I also recall exactly what I said to the two gray-haired women sitting on the bench near the south shore of Patagonia Lake.  I was on the Sonoita Creek birding trail, a popular riparian venue in southern Arizona.  The Audubon Society and Nature Conservancy have been involved at Patagonia for years.  During the spring migration, 60 species of recent arrivals can appear in a few days.

The older women were well dressed in comfortable outdoor attire, well spoken, seemingly knowledgeable, and equipped with expensive binoculars.  They were exchanging comments as a flock of frenzied sparrows and other passerines were at a bird feeder in front us.  As I approached,  I remember what I said too.  “Do you mind if I join you for a moment?”  “Of course”, one of them said as they amiably moved over.  They were going back and forth about sparrows in general, of their color, sexual dimorphism, age changes, shape, and geographic distribution.  I was silent for a few minutes, intent on looking at the feeding birds and at some ducks on the lake beyond.  I listened to more of their conversation:  eye rings, scapulas and secondaries, mustaches, throat stripes, and beak characteristics.  I should have known better but muttered that I thought most were Lincoln’s sparrows.  That was a serious birding mistake, an error of unfathomable proportions, and a serious faux pas.  They smiled but had that subtle look of condescension.  I repeat with a bit of paraphrasing because the experience was so stressful to my male ego, and I may have forgotten the exact exchange.  “Oh, no.” One of them said in a soft tone.  “They don’t have that peaked crown and there’s no streaking on the throat.  The breast streaks just aren’t crisp enough.  And look at the beaks, too stout for a Lincoln’s, and that strong breast spot.”   The other one chimed in.  “The calls are way off, and the Lincoln’s is really uncommon here.”  Then she threw in, “Lincolns are mostly solitary.  Look at that crowd.  There doesn’t seem to be any mixing today.  They’re definitely song sparrows.”  Sometimes Lincoln’s sparrows mix with other sparrows in large flocks to feed, and Lincoln’s have been identified here, but apparently not today.  We sat in silence for a moment.  I didn’t know what to say, other than “Wow.  Thanks, have a great day.”  I politely excused myself and walked up the trail to identify some easy woodpeckers and robins.

The Centennial Valley is an 80-mile-long rift in the southwest Montana crust, a geological feature formed by Tertiary relaxation after millions of years of continental squeezing as the Pacific plate collided with North America.  More recently, during the glacial epoch, a huge lake occupied the valley.  Today two small remnants of that lake remain.  They are the summer home of several breeding pairs of trumpeter swans and many other waterfowl species.  Trumpeters are the largest bird species in North America with a wingspan of more than six feet.  They are still on the endangered list but have recovered from near extinction in the last century. Trumpeters were shot by the thousands for their feathers as soon as Europeans arrived on the continent.  In addition, trumpeters often build nests on beaver dams.  We all know what happened there.  When a ban on beaver trapping was implemented, the swans flourished.  Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge was created in the 1930s to protect the trumpeter and several hundred other avian species.  In 1933, only 70 trumpeters were known to exist, all within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem which includes the Centennial valley.  Today, the population has reached more than 40,000 and ranges throughout the northern Midcontinent, the Rocky Mountains and southern Canada.  I was fortunate to work in southwest Montana for more than 30 years and often camped in or near the NWR.  In July 2020, on a four day visit to the valley and surrounding mountain ranges I logged 42 species of birds (including trumpeters), quite a fete for an amateur like me.  When I added up all of my visits over the last decade, the number exceeded 70 species.  On one occasion I saw four bald eagles, two breeding pairs of trumpeters, one of which had at least 8 chicks (called cygnets), and two barn owls in the refuge.

These and other memorable birding experiences remind me of the dangerous lives of avians living in environments dominated by humans.  A recent paper in the journal Science describes a multiyear research project to identify the rate of decline of bird species in North America.  The study concluded that the total bird population has declined by more than 25 percent over the last 50 years and 14 percent in just the last 10 years.  Perching bird species such as warblers, juncos, sparrows, black birds, and finches have been devastated.  That’s a total population drop of some 3 billion birds. The report even found that the invasive European starling has declined.  The work included annual bird counts conducted by the Audubon Society and weather radar data collected to monitor migrating birds.  The work did not identify specific causes for the decline, but several factors have been documented elsewhere including environmental variables such as climate change, pesticides, insect loss, wind turbines, vehicle traffic, reflective glass buildings, and cats.  Published data indicate that 2.4 billion birds are killed by cats each year, 1.2 million by wind turbines, 340 million by vehicle collisions, and 976 million by glass windows in buildings [From various sources including Wikipedia, USA Today, and American Bird Conservancy].  The cat totals seem outrageous until one realizes that the U.S. cat population ranges from 60-140 million.  The large disparity of numbers from different sources may be due to large numbers of (hard to document) feral cats.  Cats kill an order of magnitude more birds than vehicles do.  Considering there are nearly 300 million vehicles in the U.S., that’s quite a feline accomplishment!

According to Wikipedia, of the 10,000 known bird species, 1,200 are under threat of extinction.  That’s more than 10 percent.  Many of the birds are island species of the Pacific basin.  Since AD 1500, 190 species have disappeared, including the famous dodo, elephant bird, passenger pigeon, Labrador duck, great auk, laughing owl, and ivory billed woodpecker.  Written bird accounts by early explorers indicate far larger populations than those of today.  Historical records, memoirs, and diaries are full of ornithological descriptions and experiences.  I recently reread the journals of Lewis and Clark expedition and found many references to birds and their abundance.  Thomas Jefferson, an avid bird watcher himself, ordered Lewis and Clark to describe birds and return with specimens from their journey in additional to other geological, geographical, botanical, anthropological specimens and information they could muster.  I recall descriptions of the (now named) Lewis’s woodpecker and Clark’s nutcracker.  When the expedition wintered in the Mandan villages of North Dakota in 1804, they sent back a prairie chicken and four magpies.  All together, Lewis and Clark identified 134 species of birds on the trip, and that was before the invention of the binocular telescope and bird apps!

One of the most tragic bird stories involves the passenger pigeon.  According to the Smithsonian, their population was estimated at 3-5 billion in the early 1600s when Europeans first arrived in North America.  The passenger pigeon was a fast, graceful, and maneuverable bird most closely related to the mourning dove.  It inhabited hardwood forests forming flocks comprised of thousands roosting together.  The migration patterns must have been amazing, massive flocks flying at an estimated 60 mph.  They became extremely popular to kill, and professional hunters decimated the population through the years.  A massive decline began by the 1860s and continued until the early 20^th century.  Attempts to successfully mate captured birds were fruitless.  Interestingly, the Ohio State legislature proposed a bill to protect the passenger pigeon in 1857, but a select committee of the state senate said, “The passenger pigeon needs no protection. Wonderfully prolific, having the vast forests of the North as its breeding grounds, traveling hundreds of miles in search of food, it is here today and elsewhere tomorrow, and no ordinary destruction can lessen them, or be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced.”  Greed has always trumped environmental pragmatism.  The last passenger pigeon, Martha (named for Martha Washington), was housed in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoological Garden.  She died on September 1, 1914 at the age of 29.

I’m at Cave Creek today in the eastern Chiricahua Mountains of southeast Arizona.  I’m fascinated by the unique geology of the range.  Around 27 million years ago, a huge subterranean magma chamber centered blew its top releasing more than 100 cubic miles of ash and pyroclastic debris into the atmosphere.  The resultant caldera formed the basis for the modern range.  Most recently, during the last 20 million years, Basin and Range extensional faulting reconfigured the topography  into its present form.

I’m camping today in my van near the Friend’s of Cave Creek Canyon visitors center where Linda Castor has been volunteering.  White Bird is nearby.  I’m drinking coffee and reviewing my bird log.  Whenever I visit the Chiricahuas, I easily collect 20-30 or more bird species at one time.  Linda had suggested we try to find an eared quetzal.  It is a slightly larger iridescent cousin of the elegant trogon and lives in the Sierra Madre of northern Mexico but is an occasional vagrant north of the border.  We are at its northernmost range.  I’m up at 7 am and I can already hear cars driving up Cave Creek Road.  The word is out.  Bird apps have identified the eared quetzal nearby.  People drive in from as far away as Tucson to catch a sighting.  Many have flown to Tucson from other parts of the country or beyond.

We are in no hurry.  Linda had talked to people who sighted the bird.  She knows where to go.  Apparently the quetzal has a favorite tree.  We meet at 9 am and drive up canyon about two miles and slowly pass a few intent camera-wielding birders.  There are four or five cars parked along the road near Sunny Flat campground, my usual abode while in the area, but all the campgrounds are temporarily closed due to Covid-19.  We park and approach the group, a friendly but quiet bunch intent on looking up into the trees.  Linda recognizes some local Portal birders and introduces me.  In just a few minutes we see it in a sycamore tree, perched on a mid level branch, occasionally turning for us just like a model in a fashion show.  Click, click, the cameras sound off.  That was a quick sighting, and with almost no effort.  The quetzal hangs around for five minutes before flying to another nearby favorite tree.

We soon walk back to my van and decide to do some birding near a small reservoir in the valley east of Portal.  As we walk back to the van, I have mixed feelings.  I’m happy to see the quetzal, but part of me is also sad.  Considering all the attention rare birds receive and the tremendous impact humans have on the natural environment, I quietly ponder whether the quetzal and other stressed bird species will survive the next 50 years.