At My "Whits" End

I haven't been able to meet the challenge of writing at least one blog post per week, so I am a few weeks behind in the news. Around the beginning of May I started to hear brown-crested flycatchers in my Tucson neighborhood (Palo Verde neighborhood). You typically hear their "whit" calls plus other "gurgles" (as I, idiosyncratically, call them).

Brown-crested flycatcher in the Palo Verde Neighborhood, Tucson, AZ

I set out one morning with a camera and the dogs in tow to see if I could get a photo. This is the best I could do--it's as much a photo of mesquite as it is flycatcher. I'll keep trying, but at least you can see the darker, brownish crest, the gray throat and breast, the yellow belly and the warm, orangish-brown color in the wings. Here is more information about brown-crested flycatchers.

What's in your neighborhood? Just go out and look!

The Yard Birds

Once you are paying attention to birds, you recognize when something new shows up. According to my records on ebird.org, before Saturday May 10 I had seen 30 bird species in, or from, my yard.

Again, I'm not out to set records. I don't have time to sit around the yard every morning and observe every bird that comes by. This is the effort of a reasonably good birder that pays attention some of the time--an effort I think many people can identify with.

Green-tailed towhee

Well, I had been trying to get some yard work done, little by little, in the cool of the morning. I was in the back yard when I heard what I thought I might have heard the buzzing call of a lazuli bunting. That definitely would have been a new yard bird. Plenty of them come through town in spring migration but never had I seen one from my yard.

I went inside to get a camera just in case. But after a few minutes it was clear there was no lazuli bunting. Maybe it was just one of those house sparrow sounds I had heard, or maybe it was "the bunting that got away." But as I walked back toward the house a bird flew into the yard that was shaped like a towhee--kind of like a sparrow but larger, lanky, and with a long tail. As it foraged on the ground for treats, including below the bird feeders, I saw the reddish cap, the gray underside, white throat and the greenish hue, especially on the tail.

Green-tailed towhee is an attractive bird that is found around the Tucson basin in the winter--though usually tangles of native trees and shrubs and usually not back yards. By some time in may they leave for nesting sites in the mountains or much farther north. It was nice to host one in the yard, if only for a few minutes.