STRICTLY FOR THE BIRDS

Although he has a master's degree in creative writing, Rick Taylor spends most of his time studying the rare birds of Southeastern Arizona, from elegant trogons and fan-tailed warblers to white-eared hummingbirds and bluegray gnatcatchers.

For 35 years, but when he says, “I just had lunch with nine wild turkeys,” it’s clear he hasn’t changed. Driving toward Taylor’s home in the Chiricahua Mountains of Southeastern Arizona illustrates the ardent nature of birders like him. “People keep dropping by,” he says, in the hope of seeing a rare bird he’s reported. But the pin-straight road, leading to increasingly narrower and more rugged trails, evokes wonder that anyone might ever drop by. Taylor appears at the gate of his Whitetail Canyon aerie. Aside from his hair and beard now being white, Taylor is the same as I remember: agile, enthusiastic, highly intelligent and equallyarticulate. Most importantly, he's still always birding. Sometimes he's birding and drinking coffee, birding and hiking, birding and working, or birding and writing. When he's talking, he often breaks off in the middle of a sentence to point out what he's seen or heard and explain it to the listener. If he's awake, binoculars are at the ready. Taylor is equal parts man of action and man of words. He tramps, traverses and travels most continents, leading birding tours; when he's home, he writes guides for Arizona birders with equal vigor and productivity. When naturalist Alexander Skutch died just short of his 100th birthday in 2004, Taylor became the world's leading authority on the elegant trogon, which he immersed himself in studying for eight years in his 20s. (He's never really stopped.) For birder Rick Taylor, the Chiricahua Mountains are an ideal place to study the rare Arizona birds that have captivated him since he was a teenager. STEVEN MECKLER Around sunup, Taylor is on the deck outside his office in a two-story building that went up because the massive trees around his house, built in the 1890s, couldn't accommodate an addition. His hand is wrapped around a thermal coffee mug, and he's double-shirted so he can savor sitting outside in 50-degree weather.

"I could be lying somewhere prone, with my eyelids sealed, thinking about what I'm going to have for breakfast," he says. "Or I could be out here, surrounded by light and color and bird music. To open your senses, to have your skin feel the delicious humidity of today's coming... it's hard to find a day that you don't see something to love about."

No matter what Taylor is explaining, his master's degree in creative writing doesn't go to waste. No sentence is dry. A baby wild turkey is "like a feathered orange." Black-chinned "And then I saw an elegant trogon in the South Fork of Cave Creek. It was as if the scales had been lifted off my eyes with a potato peeler."

hummingbirds have what look to be all-black throats, "but when they turn around, they have a band of violet - for the hedonists among you, they're just an uproar of the senses." He "remonstrated" with some trappers.

And when he describes why birds have occupied most of his attention since his teens, the language soars: "I think all humanity suffers from liking beautiful baubles; for some, that's jewelry, for some, filthy lucre. For me, you know, what's intuitively valuable is that birds are alive - a fusion of all that's precious, that makes life itself such a glorious experience."

LOOKING OUT OVER HIS YARD - where a massive sycamore trunk wedged in an angle of his house leads to soaring, century-old branches - Taylor describes his decades-long affinity for this place. He first discovered the Chiricahuas in his teens, when he and a friend told the older student driving them back from a youth conservation camp on Mount Graham that the logical way back to Tucson led down through Portal, over Onion Saddle and into Willcox. "I was hooked," he says. "I just loved the Chiricahuas."

Then, as a University of Arizona student, he and a friend returned and the deal was sealed.

"When I came up this canyon... there was actually an apple orchard - apples hanging over the road," he says. "It was all I could do not to jump out of the car and start harvesting. This must have been September of '68 or something. I saw this house, and I said, 'The people who live there are the most fortunate people. They are living in paradise."

Taylor breaks off to call out the green glow of a Rivoli's hummingbird - "the former 'magnificent,' renamed for the Duke of Rivoli." He adds that the smallest, the largest and some of the rarest U.S. hummingbirds all visit his feeders.

"The calliope can't sit to feed; it's too small, so it has to fly," he says. "Blue-throats are 10 times bigger." And the white-eared hummingbird he recently spotted lit up comments on eBird, a worldwide bird sightings repository sponsored by Cornell University.

Taylor relishes all avian life, but he talks with almost sacred savor about his introduction to the trogon.

"I knew at least 100 species of birds by the time I reached my 20th birthday," he says. "And then I saw an elegant trogon in the South Fork of Cave Creek. It was as if the scales had been lifted off my eyes with a potato peeler. It was heavy-handed, the transition. I was sold. I thought, This exceedingly beautiful, this true treasure - this is manna. This is what existence is supposed to be. It was just such a metamorWhile trogons and hummingbirds fascinate him, Taylor also appreciates the larger species, including the local wild turkeys that seemingly let him share their space. "I swept turkey dung off the front porch this morning; I'm in danger of sinking under the weight of it," he says. "I love them; don't get me wrong. But that doesn't mean I can't see the downside."

Wild turkeys test Taylor's wiles in making sure other species get a shot at the food he offers. A suet cake feeder hangs off a high branch, because turkeys aren't agile enough to reach it. "If I spread it on the ground, other speThe property where Taylor hosts his avian open house wasn't always the carefully landscaped pocket of bounty it is today. It once was a shack with so many mice, a former tenant let a snake loose in the walls. How it became a sturdy oasis with terraced stone and a guest house is a colorful narrative that includes replacing water pipes that froze nightly and didn't thaw until midafternoon. With minimal cash and backbreaking amounts of sweat equity, Taylor was able to acquire the space he called paradise the first time he saw it.

It's said that we all drink from wells we didn't dig, and one well of Chiricahuas lore that Taylor still treasures is

his experiences with Ralph Morrow, a game warden who lived just down the road in Taylor's early years here. "I'd go down to Ralph's house every single night after dinner, just to hear his stories," he says. "He'd start spilling history, ecology, geology of the Chiricahuas. He looked like Hopalong Cassidy. Bright baby-blue eyes, but when those eyes set and the mouth formed a straight line, he was one of the scariest guys I've ever seen in my life, Six-foot-3, 190 [pounds]. As a game warden, he single-handedly braced poachers and cattle rustlers alike."

Taylor's Chiricahuas, it seems, are populated with colorful characters: "They include a rattlesnake milker, insect scientists and eclectic perennial migrants."

On a drive to Cave Creek, which shares its name with a Central Arizona location but is unique in countless ways, Taylor lists its highlights. "Cave Creek has more species of plants than Alaska and Canada combined," he says. "The Southwestern Research Station of the American Museum of Natural History has spawned the most dissertations in biology of any location in the U.S. It's a biodiversity mecca. I swear I just heard a bluegray gnatcatcher."

After a twisting drive, Taylor strides effortlessly upward while pointing out rock formations, describing the high cliffs as citrus-colored and explaining that the lemon, orange and lime hues are lichen. He lights up when he sees Dave Jasper. Each recognizes a kindred spirit: a birder who loves to exchange info.

Concerning a whiskered screech-owl absent from its usual daytime perch, Taylor looks up and says, "Most likely a day roost, not a nest. The male could be in that Arizona cypress."

Jasper: "Abundant breeding bird here, but not north of I-10. If you're a baby looking for space, you have to wait till Grandma or Grandpa kicks off."

Taylor, on the elf owl: "I hear one cackling at my house. I do not attempt to sex elf owls."

Jasper: "Wait for a lifted leg." He adds about Taylor: "That man can talk a stray dog off an armful of meat. He's Guide Almighty."

AFTER WE RETURN FROM THE HIKE, Taylor can almost be described as lolling in his second-floor office, except that his brain, ears and eyes are on constant scan for birds. This is where he does his writing, which right now means an impending deadline for Birds of Arizona. He notes that it's "a title that's been used for other books, but I think it'll be the best one out there right now."

Besides three substantive Arizona birding guides, he's authored bird checklists ranging from Alaska to Tasmania under the byline Richard Cachor Taylor. He explains that "Cachor" was a nickname bestowed on him during his U.S. Forest Service years. It's short for cachorro, Spanish for "cub" or "puppy," and it helps separate him from a crowd of Rick Taylors.

He has held birders in high esteem since meeting his first one. Sharing what he knows about birds carries an almost urgent quality: Knowing is only a first step.

"When I worked for the Forest Service in Cave Creek, I saw almost all campers were there because of birding opportunities," he says. "These people were lovely. They were intelligent, had a sense of humor, loved nature, wanted to leave a legacy of the natural beauty of the world to their children and grandchildren. Birding ... you know, it's in some ways symbolic. You bird because you love the whole. It's a portal, a doorway into that world. "Birds are a mostly invisible gossamer web, a valence layer on the Earth. We only see 1 percent of the avian life that flows around us. There are people who weary of looking at birds in a few moments, but others keep going deeper and find a universe that keeps expanding."

Birders are committed, he says: "Last April [in 2018], I saw the first fan-tailed warbler in the U.S. since 2012, here in my yard. In one week, about 300 people showed up. Some drove 26 hours. Some flew in from Great Britain."

Taylor basks in being surrounded by the birds and wildlife that flock to his homesite. "To me, birds are like mobile flowers: They tell you about what lies underneath," he says. "I count them like people count their checking account balances, to make sure I'm doing my due diligence. I'm in it for the beauty and the insights, and I think the insights are beautiful."

What would some of those insights be?

"That they're doing the same things we are: earn a living, raise young, try to interact without friction in their community with other beings, with other life forms," he says. "I wouldn't be surprised to find that - and not just birds, but mammals, reptiles, fishes - they would really like to leave a legacy. That they would like their life to have had meaning."

If anyone can cross the language barrier between birds and people, Taylor's a sure bet. AH