My Life’s Birds: #277-284

July 3, 1994 – Cave Creek Ranch, Portal, Az – You might expect the day after the best birding day of my life to be something of a let down. You’d be wrong, of course, because any day in southeast Arizona is one where anything is possible. The campers where again split into thirds and this time, our day was spent with the irrepressible Dave Jasper as we walked up the dry wash leading out of the canyon and into the desert.

Cave Creek Canyon has three distinct habitats. The pine forests in the higher altitudes were the first we visited, and they’re definitely the most famous, but the towering sycamore trees that border the dry creek bed are home to unique birds of their own, not least of which a staked-out Western Screech-Owl that stared at us from his roost in the crotch of a tree, and the Black Phoebes and Ash-throated Flycatchers that hawked big flying bugs from the branches.

We eventually wandered back up to Dave’s house where we sat tight at his feeding station watching Anna’s Hummingbirds fight over the sugar water and White-throated Swifts coarse through the sky. The regular feeder birds of the last few days were here too, but Dave had some surprises in order. The scrubby bushes around his home hosted nesting Bushtits and, most impressively, Virginia’s Warblers. This drab little desert warbler was the bird of the day, and the one we had come to this place especially to see. It was no trogon or anything, but a new warbler is certainly nothing to ever sneer at.

WSOW from wikipedia