ALONG THE WAY

BIRD OF PARADISE

With its lush riparian habitat and diversity of flora and fauna, Aravaipa Canyon is among the most beautiful places in Arizona. No wonder one of the state's few black hawks decided to call it home.

ON A BALMY DAY, Jay Schnell and I inched our way up to the east end of Aravaipa Canyon in his 1960 Jeep. The massive cottonwood and graceful box elder trees along the creek had sprouted new leaves, but the long mottled limbs of the sycamores remained bare. This was a good sign. We were looking for black hawk nests, and those in the sycamores are easier to see without the camouflage of the trees' giant leaves. The short-tailed common black hawks (Buteogallus anthracinus) with distinctive broad white bands on their tails average about 20 inches in length, with wingspans of about 48 inches. Issuing their high-pitched calls, they swoop down on their prey from low perches, usually along creeks and rivers. Most of the surviving 250 pairs of black hawks in the U.S. live in Arizona and New Mexico, although they're much more common in Central and South America. The presence of these birds, Jay told me, is an indication of the health of a river corridor, since they can find enough prey only in a healthy riparian area. Streamside areas like Aravaipa, 70 miles northeast of Tucson, play a vital role in the survival of the hawks, since they remain protected and free from development. The winged predators will eat bats, birds and even desert centipedes, but depend heavily on fish and frogs. That explains Jay's annual frog and fish census. "How do you count frogs and fish?" I asked, immediately sensing this was a dumb question. "Well," Jay said, "I walk along the creek with a counter, and every time I see a frog I click it. I do the same thing with the fish. We do a fish census in the spring, a frog census every fall."

Although the current decade-long drought in the region has strained the creek, its spring-fed flow still supports sizeable populations of seven different native fish.

Traveling on foot, Jay covered 1.7 miles of the creek, right through the most dramatic part of Aravaipa Canyon. Click-click. Click-click. With the fish darting about in colonies, it could get crazy. But frogs were another story. They were getting easier to count because their numbers are dwindling.

Frogs have been mysteriously disappearing throughout the world, not just in Aravaipa, Jay said. His census documents the decline. In particular, lowland leopard frog populations face a host of challenges, including invading non-native species, flooding following fires, the drying up of many riparian areas and chytridiomycosis, an infectious, fatal fungal skin disease that has caused local frog extinctions on several continents.Back in 1979, Jay counted 2,385 frogs in Aravaipa Creek, but then numbers fell dramatically. By 1999, he saw only four frogs on a 9-mile search. Fortunately, the lowland leopard frogs have made a comeback in recent years, according to the current caretaker, Aravaipa Canyon Preserve Manager Mark Haberstich.

"Since their decline in the 1980s and '90s, populations of lowland leopard frogs have rebounded nicely," Haberstich said in 2007. As the frog population has recovered, so has the black hawk population. "In the last nine or 10 years, their numbers seem to have stabilizedhere in the canyon," said Haberstich.

During my hawk search with Jay, a coatimundi, a member of the raccoon family, suddenly leaped across the road in front of us, and Jay cut the engine. The coati, tail held high, pranced about 30 feet into some dry grasses and studied the beat-up Jeep: What it made of all this was beyond speculation. It waited and we noticed another coati off to our right, evidently waiting to join its mate or parent. We moved on.

At the time of my visit, Jay had been looking after the hawks since 1975, living with his wife in a beautiful ramshackle old house belonging to The Nature Conservancy, which owns and protects part of Aravaipa Canyon. A zoologist with a Ph.D. and a consummate fix-it man, Jay has since passed the caretaker torch and moved to nearby Klondyke.

On our long ramble through the shady canyon, we saw four nests but no black hawks. But just as I was getting ready to leave, we wandered into a clearing near some tall sycamores and cottonwoods where Jay trained binoculars on an empty nest. Suddenly, he lowered his glasses and turned 90 degrees. I sensed the tension in his neck and shoulders.

"There!" he said, pointing to my left. With the red schist cliffs of Aravaipa Canyon as a backdrop, a magnificent black hawk soared in a graceful arc about 150 feet away, the unmistakable 2-inch band of white feathers clearly visible across its tail.

Jay had heard the bird before he saw it. I had heard nothing, but after many years, Jay Schnell's ears can separate the wind in the trees from the sounds of a black hawk high above the canopy of Aravaipa Canyon. I am happy he did, because the long look at the great bird seemed a precious gift-an ample reward for the hours we'd spent in and out of the creek looking at empty nests. All