What is your favorite bird? And every fowl encounter you've had under the sun

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Time to catch up. I had the the first Monday of the new year free, so I spent most of the day chasing rarities at some urban hot spots. My first stop was a large park with a lake where I got year bird #63 Redhead, #64 Eurasian Collared-dove, #65 Bronzed Cowbird, #66 Curve-billed Thrasher, and a rare #67 Williamson’s Sapsucker.

Our State Bird

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Female Williamson’s Sapsucker. Rare anywhere around here, really rare this low.

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After scoring the sapsucker I headed off to another park with a large lake, where I found #68 Great Blue Heron, #69 Great Egret, #70 Neotropic Cormorant, #71 Western Grebe, #72 Snow Goose, #73 Sharp-shinned Hawk and #74 Yellowthroat.

Here’s the two rare Snow Geese, one blue phase and one white phase. It’s weird to see them in the desert, but they’ve been hanging out in this park with some domestic geese for a while.

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The rare Western Grebe

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Neotropic Cormorant

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And just for kicks, Mr. Wonderful, the Vermilion Flycatcher

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My next stop was a hot spot next to the river just downstream from where the county discharges reclaimed wastewater into the stream bed. There I managed to pick up #75 Least Sandpiper, #76 Rough-winged Swallow, #77 Greater Roadrunner, #78 Belted Kingfisher and my target bird, a rare visitor from back East, #79 Northern Parula.

Here’s the parula. He was hard to photograph since he stayed close to the interior of his favorite mesquite. Pretty bird though

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A funny photo of a Great Egret in the river bed.

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And funny photo of a Great Blue Heron in the weeds with some gnats.

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Since Sweetwater was on the way home, a quick stop got me year bird #80 Common Gallinule.

2020 year bird #80 Common Gallinule

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And for good measure, another, more difficult to see gallinule, a sora doing it’s gallinule thing.

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I’m pretty sure this is a cover of coots.

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On the ocean? Did you see their little white bills?

(I can’t tell what they are even with enlarging the photo)
 
Haven’t been out birding since two weekends ago when I took a short hike in the Tucson Mountains with my sweet wife. Beautiful morning. It had been raining a lot. The birds didn’t get active until later on on when the sun came up and warmed things up a bit. New birds for 2020: #81 Black-throated Sparrow, #82 Loggerhead Shrike, #83 Gilded Flicker and #84 Canyon Wren.

2020 year bird #81 Black-throated Sparrow

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A really bad shot of my target bird, 2020 year bird #83 Gilded Flicker, a specialty bird of the Sonoran Desert

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Year bird #84 Canyon Wren. This bird has one of the prettiest songs of the bird world.

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Tucson Mountain Park (if they got hair, I don’t care)

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More urban birding at one of our local parks two weekends ago produced #85 White-winged Dove, #86 Rufous-winged Sparrow, #87 Brewer’s Sparrow, #88 Lark Sparrow, #89 Brown-headed Cowbird and #90 Brewer’s Blackbird.

2020 year bird #85 White-winged Dove. In a few weeks they’ll be here in numbers. A small population spends the winter in Tucson.

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Say’s Phoebe

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American Wigeon

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Great-tailed Grackle, a bird of local parking lots and garbage cans

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A bad photo of 2020 year bird #86 Rufous-winged Sparrow (no, really!). Another local specialty

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Yay!!! I had 2020 year bird #91 come by and visit my water feature last Friday. This is a bird that I usually see about this time of year in my back yard, but didn’t manage to see at all in 2019. I’m so happy to see it again.

2020 year bird #91 Black-throated Warbler.

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And again…

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Continuing my Super Bowl Sunday Tradition…2020 year bird #92 Peregrine Falcon doing a little pole dancing.

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Year bird #93… Broad-billed Hummingbird.

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Not the best pic I know, but better than the Super Bowl.

And one more pic of my friend the Phainopepla who appears to be guarding some sort of food supply.

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My favorite non-raptor bird: the mockingbird. They are so amusing to watch, and can put on a real concert!

My favorite raptor: the peregrine falcon. The fastest animal in the world, and a very pretty face for a raptor. I follow a local nesting pair every year during nesting season. Through three cameras trained on the nest box, I get to watch the whole cycle, from courtship, egg laying, hatching, feeding the chicks, the chicks maturation, and finally, fledging. The young leave the area when they’re ready, but the parents hang around all year.
 
This beautiful hawk landed on our back fence…
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I live in southeastern Arizona. The birding is really interesting here. We’re at the southern end of the Rockies and the northern end of the Sierra Madres so we get species from both ecosystems, plus anything that doesn’t breed here, winter here or lives here permanently migrates through at some point. I currently have 309 species on my Pima county life list.
 
I’m hoping, this year, I can start seeing Western Tanagers again. They used to show up a few years back, but I haven’t seen any in recent years. The male Western Tanager is spectacular.

We had neighbors last year who cut down a lot of trees, diminishing nesting sites for area birds, and they did it for logging purposes, for profit. We had a beautiful privacy screen with those trees, and now it’s all opened up so we can see them and they can see us. Some folks are so thoughtless! We couldn’t do anything because the trees were on their property – I just wish they had given it a little more thought before ruining the natural ambiance.

One year, we had an irruption of Black-Headed Grosbeaks, but haven’t ever seen them since. We’ve been getting the Evening Grosbeaks for a few seasons lately, and I hope they’ll be back again this year.

A-N-T-I-C-i-P-A-T-I-O-N ! ! !
 
Life has caught up with me so I haven’t been out in the field as much as I’d like to. Year bird #94 was a Harris’s Hawk I spied while on my way to mass one morning. Other than that I’ve had two ventures into classic Sonoran desert type habitat. The first was Sabino Canyon Recreation Area where I found 2020 year bird #95, Green-tailed Towhee,

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and year bird #95 Pyhrruloxia or as it know colloquially, Mexican Cardinal.

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And finally, year bird #96 Rock Wren. This would be a difficult ID if not for the give-away rock.

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Our state bird on our state flower with Cathedral Peak, named by Padre Kino in the 17th century in the background.

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The wife and I had a few unexpected days off so we took the opportunity to go camping to one of our nearby state parks. 2020 year birds included #98 Costa’s Hummingbird, #99 Ash-throated Flycatcher,

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#100 Lark Bunting (totally unexpected)

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and #101 Black Vulture, a local anomaly. A really boring pic, I know.

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A few more pics from the trip.

Curve-billed Thrasher (see it’s curved bill?)

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Black-throated Sparrow demonstrating the delicate approach it takes to land on a staghorn cholla.

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House Finch

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Gashawk. Gender unkown.

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Living the RV lifestyle with a Cactus Wren, your friendly campground host.
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Picacho Peak State Park

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That Gashawk is quite interesting. Probably more like a gasHOG. LOL!

Flycatchers are particularly difficult to identify, as are many of the sparrows that don’t have distinctive markings. I recognize the Song Sparrow and the Chipping Sparrow, and the White-Crowned Sparrow. Some of the others are trickier.

Aren’t those Black Vultures a bit out of their range? Aren’t they normally farther east?
 
I am wondering – could the word “foul” in the heading of this thread be changed to “fowl”?
 
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