We met up with Rob and Reta, two of the local volunteers, for a day of birding in the Willcox area. It is a well known birding area (hence the festival). Rob is an avid birder and has been down to this area many times. They also were here to staff the refuge table at the festival on Sunday. We met them at the Willcox Community Center early in the morning, piled into their car and were off. First stop the local sewage treatment plant and its adjacent golf course. There were lots of ducks and coots, rather different birds than we'd been seeing, but noting that we hadn't seen before.
From there we stopped at the Willcox Playa, a dry lake this year and walked nearly two dusty miles to where there are often Sandhill Cranes. There weren't any cranes but it wasn't a total loss, we saw our first Sagebrush Sparrow. The only other bird was an out-of-place Ladder-backed Woodpecker, sitting on a metal fence post, hundreds of yards from the nearest tree.
After the playa, it was off to find hawks and cranes. Ellen had expressed a desire to see a Ferruginous Hawk. Rob indicated that he could find one and about a minute later we had a Ferruginous Hawk (light morph) right near the road. After tracking it for a while, we continued to the agricultural fields along Kansas Settlement Road. We saw other vehicles up one of the side roads and went in their direction to find about 10,000 Sandhill Cranes working the fields.
As we watched them feeding, something disturbed the cranes at one end of to flock and they took off. This started a chain reaction that rippled through the entire flock and soon there were 10,000 big birds loudly calling and flying right over our heads. It was quite the spectacle. The cranes circled in a big loop, probably about a mile in diameter and ended up coming down not far from where they took off.
We continued up the road heading to Whitewater Draw, with brief stop at a pond next to large feed lot where we caught a glimpse of some Western Grebes and other ducks. The atmosphere of the feed lot, both aromatically and morally, caused us to quickly continue on. As we were driving, Rob spied another Ferruginous Hawk, this time in dark morph.
Whitewater Draw is one of the premier birding hotspots in Southeast Arizona. It is a state wildlife area and is usually quite wet but not this year. Water was being pumped into one large pond, but the majority of the wetlands were dry. However, being a Saturday and also the festival, the place was packed with birders and walkers. After lunching at the picnic area, we strolled the paths. There were another few thousand Sandhill Cranes here along the fields of the draw and they were significantly closer so we could get a good look. Aside from a Great Egret and a Great Blue Heron in the pond, we didn't see much more than the usual grassland birds. We did have a Great Horned Owl sleeping peacefully as birders clicked his photo but a well-known Long-eared Owl habitat came up empty. Time to head back to Willcox.
On our way out of town in the morning, we passed the Big Tex BBQ which Rob said was his favorite restaurant in Willcox, so we treated them to dinner there. It was good barbecue and a good time was had by all. We said our farewells and they went off to their hotel. We had originally planned to go to the Chiricahua National Monument after dinner, but it had gotten rather late and the 35-mile drive to a campground in the dark was not appealing, so it was back to the Sagebrush RV Park for one more night.
Saturday Birding Photos
On Sunday morning, we drove to Chirucahua National Monument. It is in the Chiricahua Mountains and is known for its spectacular rock formations. The mountain range, which includes the monument and a large section of the Coronado National Forest, is also one of two places in the United States that is home to the Mexican Chickadee. It only lives at elevations over 5,000 feet, so we'd have to hike the trails at the top of the monument to try and find it.
The hiking almost didn't happen. Had we arrived a day later, we wouldn't have been able to drive into the park at all. (We could have walked up the road, but it would have added an extra five miles of hiking just to get to the trails we wanted to hike.) The road into the monument above the campground was being closing for a month for construction work. We had made it just in time to drive to Massai Point (almost the highest road point in the park) where the upper trailheads begin.
There is a viewing building at the top of the road along with restrooms. The view is a spectacular 360° with mountain ranges in all directions and a view into the Sulphur Springs Valley where we had spent the last couple of days. We couldn't quite make out the flock of cranes.
From there, we hiked a loop which combined the Massai Nature Trail, the Ed Riggs Trail, the Hailstone Trail and the Echo Canyon Trail, also known as the Echo Canyon Loop. The trail runs below the towering rock formations that are the key feature of the park. They are like the Bryce Canyon hoodoos on steroids, not crumbly but huge towers of welded volcanic tuff. The trail was a medium length loop through the rocks and canyons, about 4.5 miles, and went from nearly 6,900 feet in elevation down 600 feet and back up (being a canyon hike).
We started down the nature trail to the Ed Riggs trail both of which were snow covered. It is on the north-facing side of the canyon and it was pretty icy and hard-packed in places. We wished we'd remembered to bring our Yak Tracks, but we were going to the Southwest and the desert ... so we thought.
When we came around the corner onto the south-facing Hailstone Trail, it was finally warm and sunny and not a speck of snow in sight. It is here that the rock faces come right down to the trail and we began to find birds but no Mexican Chickadee. When we reached the bottom of Echo Canyon and headed back up, we were in open forest and we were just about surrounded by Canyon Wrens. They were quite inquisitive and one perched about an arms length from me, close enough that I couldn't focus my binoculars on it ... a life bird.
We continued upward through Echo Canyon finally passing through a grotto of rock towers. It was reminiscent of a slot canyon in places as they were so close together. We finally came out to the Echo Canyon trailhead parking lot and took to the road for the last half-mile of our walk back to Speedy at Massai Point. We had hoped for the "parking lot effect", that well known time when after searching for birds in the wild, you find them all in the parking lot. Alas, however, no Mexican Chickadee.
Sadly, we coasted back down to the campground for the night. The Bonita Canyon Campground is a rather small campground in the woods surrounding a wash. We found the only paved site and settled in for a nice dark but cold night. Like most National Park Service campgrounds, this one had no water or electricity, but we'd learned about not having enough water on our last foray. The nights have been so cold that we cannot fill our water tank for fear of freezing our water pipes and breaking something, so we have to improvise a bit. Last time we just filled our hiking water bottles, but that didn't really work out. This time we stopped at a supermarket in Willcox and bought a 2.5-gallon jug of water with a tap. This gave us plenty for drinking, washing and flushing for this overnight in the park.
The next morning was a noisy, chilly start, with the chattering of jays and woodpeckers right outside of Speedy. After coffee and muesli, we took a short walk to the Visitor Center and back and counted 37 Mexican Jays, 13 Acorn Woodpeckers, a Northern Flicker and a single Ruby-crowned Kinglet, most of them right in the campground.
As we were walking towards the Visitor Center, we could hear the heavy equipment moving up the road. It was surely closed now and wouldn't be open for a month while it was being repaired. Time for us to start back to Tucson for weekly shopping and then back to Buenos Aires.
We made one last stop at Faraway Ranch, part of the National Monument. It had been a guest ranch until not long ago and is on the National Register of Historic Places. The ranch house is only open on the weekends, so we weren't able to go inside (it was also quite early), but the grounds were well-treed and the birding yielded a selection of small birds including several Juniper Titmice, another life bird, but still no Mexican Chickadee.
Chiricahua Photos
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