My Life’s Birds: #311-315

July 9, 1994 – Sawmill Canyon to Patagonia, Az – An interesting thing about birds, they take to just about any expanse of moderately undisturbed appropriate habitat, regardless of who manages it. So when we birders think about where we find desirable species, traditional hotspots like wildlife refuges and state parks and national forests obviously top the list, but less known are the wildlife santuaries found on military bases.

When you think about it, such bases tend to have acres upon acres of land that’s actually minimally affected by people, back country used for training or orienteering or even a buffer zone between civilians and the secret stuff that goes on there. For instance, here in North Carolina the army base Fort Bragg sits square in the middle of thousands of acres of pristine Sandhills Pine Barrens, expertly managed by federal authorities and home to a thriving population of endangered Red-cockaded Woodpeckers, who apparently don’t have much of a problem with camo-clad dudes running around their woods once in a while. Back in the halcyon days before 9/11, civilians could drive onto the base for bird watching. Those days are now sadly gone, replaced with beefed up security, but it’s nice to know the Woodpeckers still keep on keepin’ on behind those well-guarded gates.

The same can be said for Fort Huachuca in Arizona, which happens to hold several pristine canyons where an intrepid bunch of birders can find several desirable species. While Fort Bragg is off limits to birders anymore, Huachuca allows the optics clad crowd still to visit, provided you submit to some added scrutiny beforehand. It’s a small price to pay for superb birding, but unnecessary back in 1994, when bin-Laden was still just a fancy pants Saudi prince slumming in Sudan.

Because we had missed many of the high altitude specialties earlier in the trip due to raging forest fires this stop at Sawmill Canyon, one of the many birdy canyons on the Fort, was crucial to picking up the species we otherwise would have missed. And by nearly all accounts, it was a wild success because the oak-pine forests provided Pygmy Nuthatch, the two great flycatchers Buff-bellied Flycatcher and Greater Pewee, and great looks at the halloweeny Olive Warbler, a bird so strange no one quite knows where to place it taxonomically. Such birds are always worth savoring.

From there it was on to our next stop, the Patagonia area and home to the famous rest stop of the same name. But that was for our next day, first we had to head to a campsite at Lake Patagonia State Park, a place far more traditionally desert-like than anyplace we had been before. The birding was slow in the evenings, most of the desert specialties we had already picked up earlier in the day, but one of the more common species was still a new one, the Northern Cardinal’s desert cousin, the Pyrrhuloxia. Tents were pitched, camp fires were lit, and the evening began. We had an early morning, our last in the field.

photos from wikipedia