I'm (Mostly) Happy Winter is Leaving

 Winter is my least favorite season here in Tucson. It's not the weather, which is mild enough. In fact it might be more reasonable to wait for torrid summer temperatures to relent. After all, in winter all you need to do is put on a sweater, then you can go out and enjoy the fresh out-of-doors. Harder to do in summer when it is 115 outside. Well, that's the kind of thing people say.

But I've always loved summer. I think it was because I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a kid I was always disappointed with our summer. All I wanted to do was jump out of bed in the morning and go out looking for snakes and spiders and insects. But before I got up I would wait in bed sampling the air in the house. If it smelled of heated dust rising from the top of the furnace, it could only mean the central heating had been going all night, and that would mean the cold drenching fog was in, and probably would be in at least till noon which killed most of the day. No living thing would be stirring.

It's nothing like that here.When it gets to be summer, it pretty dependably stays summer. And when it is 115, well, we live on a cul-de-sac off the Catalina Highway, and we can get in the car and drive to Inspiration Pt. at 7,000 feet, in 45 minutes, where the temperature is a balmy 80.

No, it's winter I don't care as much for. It's not for the most part terribly cold, but the birds aren't singing and everything sort of shuts down. By the time we get up to our favorite Inspiration Point there is often a bitter wind blowing.

But there is or there might be a problem this fast-approaching summer. You see, it is at the change of season that new birds come down from the mountain top, or new birds come up from Mexico. But it works the other way, and we may lose birds, too.The last couple of years a hummingbird has moved in along the bushes on the front side of our house, and we got to watch it making a nest and raising a young bird, and we got to watch the whole operation directly out the window. Each time, it was a Broad-billed Hummingbird, and each time it only laid one egg, when usually I believe hummingbirds have two young, and each time it was very tame, and all this made us think it was the same bird--our bird. Also it had what looked like a bent bill from crashing head-on into a window sometime in the past. Our nickname for it was Broken Bill (rather inappropriate since only female hummingbirds build a nest and raise young). I had some close up hummingbird nest photography planned this summer, but so far there is no bird hanging around in the bushes there.

 

 

And we had already lost two birds. First of all, for the last few months we had had a tame Bewick's Wren that we were very fond of. When we got up in the morning and went into the breakfast room, it was already waiting for us looking in the window, its long tail twitching back and forth. We would pick up a small handful of meal worms and carry them outside. As soon as we opened the backdoor it would rush back to a spot peeking out from a behind a bush waiting for us, and it would shoot around and grab every meal worm we threw it, and it would rush back around behind the bush (for some reason it would always insist on eating in privacy. It was so small it had trouble swallowing the worm, and it was as though it were embarrassed to have us see its awkwardness). After it swallowed each one it would come back out from behind the bush and wait for the next one. After five or six its tiny stomach would be full, and it would go on about its business.

 

 

 

And a second bird was hanging around that we got used to seeing every day, a Lincoln's Sparrow, a very pretty, very precisely marked bird.

 

 

 And now on a single day both Bewick's Wren and Lincoln's Sparrow have left, taking off for wherever they go in summer, which is not here.

 

So maybe some very special bird will suddenly appear and stay with us for the winter, but for the moment we don't have any special bird, just all the usual ones, and we feel sort of bereft.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Many Hummingbirds?

 When we first moved in here we put up bird feeders, with grain or suet for the regular birds, and with sugar water for the hummingbirds. I was especially interested in what hummingbirds we would get. I had always lived in northern places where you could expect one species regularly, with perhaps another species that would make a wrong turn in migration and occasionally appear in the midst of winter. I was sure Tucson, deep in the southwest, would turn up more variety.

We quickly learned we had three evidently year-round species, Anna's, Costa's and Broad-billed. The adult males of all three were brilliantly colored in breeding plumage, so we couldn't complain about the selection we had drawn. I had never before lived in a place that had so many species. But like a typical birdwatcher, I wasn't satisfied. I wanted more than three.

 

 

 

The thing that galled me is, I had almost certainly seen another species, and a real rarity to boot. Not long after we had moved in, I woke up early one morning and walked through the quiet house to one of our feeders outside a window, and there was a hummingbird on it. What I noticed at once is it had a strongly curved bill, and though I couldn't remember its name, I knew there was such a bird, and it was very special. Adult male hummingbirds usually have bright colors that serve to identify them, but sub-adult,  or female birds, often don't have distinctive marks and can be difficult to identify. This was one of those drabber birds, but I tried to memorize any marks I could see on it.

It flew away before I could wake up Cheryl to witness it with me. And it never occurred to me to try to photograph it. I looked up the books, which told me the bird I thought it was was the Lucifer Hummingbird. The special mark I had memorized was that the throat was pure white (hummingbird throats are often spotted or brightly colored), and that low down  on the throat were two or three dark, lozenge marks.

The bird I saw was exactly like the illustration of the sub-adult male Lucifer Hummingbird in The Sibley Guide to Birds, Second Edition (p. 298). I have never again seen a bird like that. But I was too new at looking at the hummingbirds here to trust my judgment. So, I was still at three species.

But then I began seeing a brownish species I couldn't make head or tails of, and I sent a picture I had taken of it to bird-watcher neighbors who in turn sent it to their friend who happened to be the author of the Peterson Guide to Hummingbirds of North America and she said it was a Black-chinned Hummingbird, and so that was my fourth species, and indeed I have now seen adult male Black-chinned examples that I can ID myself (though one has still never stopped so I could photo it).

 

 

 There is a species  (Broad-tailed Hummingbird) I thought I would never record on my property, because it stays up at the top of the mountains and never comes down, but the other day one, perhaps in migration up from Mexico, did travel through our yard, and spent two or three days coming to the feeders in our backyard, and even let me take a picture of it. It is a handsome bird with a bright red throat with a white bib beneath it, and a green crown to set off the throat and bib, and that is the fifth species, and a clear moral that if you wait patiently, new species will go on showing up. Who knows, one day even the Lucifer.