A Rich Avian Habitat

THE SUN CREPT BARELY over the horizon, and the sky was still deciding whether to remain milky or burn into the silky blue that is typical above the Arizona desert. Sitting in my truck on a quiet side street in Kingman, I watched the beam of my headlights fade in the brightening air and waited for Russ Balda to emerge. Balda, then an ornithologist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff who had spent the night in Kingman, would join me on an excursion to Truxton Canyon, a fertile but largely unknown birding spot. I'd had my first encounter with this narrow canyon, some 40 miles east of Kingman, several years earlier while researching the history of the sprawling Crozier Ranch. Truxton Canyon runs east and west, directly south of the Crozier Ranch.Long before highways were built across northern Arizona, Truxton Canyon was a popular route for Indians, explorers and railroad survey crews because it contains a permanent water supply. Today the only non-natural feature of Truxton Canyon is the train track owned by the Burlington Northern Railroad. The railroad line is on a terrace high above Truxton Wash, which contains permanent water from White Rock spring. The birds that fill the willow and cottonwood trees have adjusted nicely to the steel snake that roars through their homes several times a day. By the time Balda and I traveled east on Old U.S. Route 66 and turned south toward the mouth of Truxton Canyon, it was 6 A.M. The canyon sits at an altitude of 4,200 feet, and the air was still cool, even though the sun was up. As I was about to cross the creek, headed for the rail bed where we were going to start our hike, I caught a flash of yellow out of the corner of my eye."Some kind of yellow bird stopped in that willow, but it moved too quickly," I said, stopping the truck in front of the creek. "Let's get out and look around," Balda suggested, [OPPOSITE PAGE, TOP] The brilliant scarlet plumage of the male summer tanager contrasts sharply with the female's subdued orange-yellow and olive coloring (above).

[OPPOSITE PAGE, BELOW, LEFT TO RIGHT] Lucy's warbler, yellowbreasted chat.

ALL BY TOM VEZO

Back. “There's a great heron and an American heron. It's spectacular to see those birds against the desert backdrop.”

I knew what he meant. Shore birds occasionally wander east and west of the Colorado River, which is at least 70 miles west of Truxton Canyon, and while these visitors are not necessarily unusual, they are startling to see.

The day before my visit with Balda, I had walked into this canyon with now-deceased Sam Robinson, whose family owned Crozier Ranch at the time. As we watched for snakes and meandered through the tall grass in the canyon's bottom, something white flashed against the adobe-colored canyon walls above us and appeared to light near the creek behind some dense willows. We both were startled.

“What was that, Sam?” I asked.

“I don't know, Sam,” he answered, with the hint of a smile.

Robinson was pretty good at guessing the weight of cows, and I'm pretty good at identifying a bad spark-plug wire, but swiftly moving birds that show themselves for only three or four seconds were a real challenge to us both.

“I'd say a snowy egret or a heron,” I declared with authority.

Robinson shrugged. “It'll be back, I'll bet.” Evidently it did return the next morning when I walked the area with Balda, and he identified it as one of two herons.

Balda and I left the cattle ponds and climbed to the railroad bed, where we were nearly level with the tops of cottonwood trees that had their roots below us in the canyon proper. For about a quarter-mile, we followed the rail bed until we found an easy route into the shade along the creek that wanders through Truxton Canyon.

At the bottom, we discovered refreshing clumps of watercress growing wild along the creek. Balda cocked his head and stood stock-still.

“Hear it? Cheetle cheetle chee! Cheetle cheetle chee. There he is. It's that LGB-Bell's vireo. Such a nice little song.” Suddenly the professor in Balda remembered his students back at NAU. “You know,” he said, “if I were going to teach songs, this is where I'd come. This place is just incredible habitat. It has everything.

“There's no doubt this is yellow warbler heaven. But-hey, look at that-there's a cottonwood branch pointing toward that dead mesquite near the creek, and there are two black phoebes and a phainopepla and they're flycatching together.

“But see, that's what I mean,” Balda said. “You have so much here because the habitat is marvelous. The birds will feed on insects and, later in the year, on seeds, and the insects thrive on standing or running water, so here you see these beautiful birds, the vermilion flycatchers, sallying forth and catching insects in flight, and at the same time you have gleaners like the yellow warblers and Lucy's warblers picking insects off the leaves.” As I listened to Balda's enthusiastic reaction to this rich canyon, I thought of another time and place. I was at the border between Mexico and Guatemala, watching the cloud-filled forest for a glimpse of the resplendent quetzal. My companions had traveled a great distance to record a sighting of this bird, and later that day I cautiously brought up this seemingly hollow fascination with bird lists.

“It's not so much the list,” my friend Rick Taylor of Tucson declared. “Don't you see? Birds are very good at taking the initial collecting instinct in someone and elevating it above that. Birds are symbols of where you've been and what you've done in your life and your connection to the real world of nature, and so if you say you've seen a resplendent quetzal, it means you've visited a remote tropical place, that you've seen tremendous tropical oaks encrusted with...” When I returned from Truxton Canyon, I called Taylor and reminded him of the statement he had made 10 years earlier, and then I said, “So, let's play a little game. I'll rattle off a list of birds I saw last week, and you tell me where in the natural world I was.” “Okay”, he said.

“Bell's vireo, Lucy's warbler ...“ “Stop!” he shouted.

“Hey, I'm not done. I've got about another 20 birds.” “It doesn't matter,” he said. “Wherever you were was lower than 4,500 feet in altitude, you were near a desert stream or wash and there were thickets of mesquite nearby. Could have been hackberry, but probably mesquites.” “You're right on the money,” I said.

“It goes without saying,” he said, humbly. All Sam Negri of Tucson has pursued birds in canyons throughout Arizona and is always equipped with binoculars, a full set of tools and jumper cables. He claims the dead battery only delayed his exit from Truxton Canyon by 45 minutes.

Lonely Land of Mountain Lions Secluded Santa Teresa Mountains sheltered outlaws on the run

“Look AT THAT,” said Newell Dryden as he pointed to a faint, but large, black bear track on the Gardner Canyon Trail in the Santa Teresa Mountains. “No telling what we'll see today.” No telling. Each time I explore this lonely sky island range in southeastern Arizona, it surprises me. Its demeanor lags decades behind the 21st century, as if the mountains reside in a time warp where nature still rules and the men that frequent its slopes often look the same as the cowboys who tried to tame it. Photographer Marty Cordano and I joined Newell and his wife, Bunny, on a 14-mile horseback ride into the center of the Lshaped Santa Teresa Wilderness at the southern end of the range. The Drydens run the Black Rock Ranch Wilderness Retreat from their family's 110-year-old ranch situated in the folds of the mountains near landmark Black Rock. The Drydens know the area intimately, and the day-long ride turned several pages of history of a range that many people don't know exists.

My introduction to the untamed nature of the Santa Teresas came a year earlier while hiking the nearby Cottonwood Mountain Trail. Unsigned, secluded and many miles and hours from help-like most of the mountains' routes - the trail made me feel like a tenuous guest in a wilderness with a spirit much bigger than mine. Its unkempt geology showed a hodgepodge of spired ridgelines, precipitously gouged canyons and slabs of rock slanting down slopes. I didn't know it at the time, but the mountains got a surreptitious hold on me, like the spark of chemistry that makes someone linger on the mind.

“They do that,” said Chuck Duncan, trail manager with the Coronado National Forest. “It's a different type of country back there. It's very remote and not for everyone. There's a feeling that gets a hold on you. A seclusion that you just can't quite explain. You don't really know what you have until you experience it.” The next time I explored the wilderness on the Reef Basin and Holdout Canyon trails six months later, I looked forward to the feeling Duncan described. I planned to hike to an area located deep in the mountains' belly where scofflaws skulked among a labyrinth of weirdly eroded granite formations. But before I even got a chance to set foot on the trail, a gregarious pack of hounds surrounded me as I sat in the front seat of my truck changing my shoes. One of the dogs jumped unabashedly into my truck as if the open door had invited it in. Their owner soon appeared on horseback.

“Howdy, ma'am,” the man touched his hat as he nodded his head. “Some pretty rugged country in there.” Cowboy from the top of his hat to the point of his boots, with chaps and a rifle in between, the man, who introduced himself as Larry, leaned forward with one hand on the horn of his saddle and the other crossed over it as he talked with me. After I told him of my intended route, he told me he was tracking mountain lions.

Elusive as the cats they hunt, trackers normally shy away from any attention. Larry talked briefly about the cats in the Santa Teresas.

“It's a pretty electric moment when you corner a cat,” he offered. “They spit and snarl like crazy.” The Santa Teresas have the highest concentration of mountain lions in the state. Duncan said he often finds lion tracks covering his when he tours the wilderness. Once, he said, he watched a mountain lion for more than 45 minutes.

When I reached the Holdout Trail, I found cat tracks almost as big as my hand where the trail entered a pine-oak forest. Though I was hiking solo, I knew I was not alone.

The tinge of fear that toyed with my comfort level during my first hike in the