PORTAL WELCOMES BIRDS AND BIRDERS

PORTAL, ARIZONA This Cochise County village is known worldwide as the province of Arizona's bird of paradise ... and 243 other species

Year after year, one of the most enjoyable events in the life of “Doc” Pugsley was the brief drive from his home in the Chiricahua Mountains to the post office at Portal, at the mountains' eastern edge. His route through the Coronado Nation al Forest to the post office followed the one road that snakes between the rhyolite cliffs of Cave Creek Canyon. It was impor tant to him that the road be maintained in decent condition, and when, toward the end of his life, he found it marred with potholes, he complained loudly to the U.S. Forest Service. A country doctor accustomed to direct and sensible explanations, he was not amused when the Forest Service told him, in dead earnest, that repairs to the road would have to wait because the noise would disturb birds nesting in branches of the nearby trees. Doc, who was never referred to as Matthew Pugsley, was not insensitive to events in the natural microcosm, but he had lived in the Chiricahua Mountains so long that a new “industry” had moved in, almost imperceptibly; and that industry, evidently, was taking precedence over his need for a smooth drive to the post office. Pugsley's home was in an area once the province of outlaw cowboys, Apache Indians, homesteaders, and miners. Now it had become, as the old doctor learned, the province of the bird-watcher. The South Fork of Cave Creek Canyon, a short distance from Pugsley's house and the Southwestern Research Station of the American Museum of Natural History, is home to one of the richest lodes of bird life in the United States. Equally important, it was discovered to be the northern most range of a parrot-like bird called the elegant trogon. And ever since that discovery, the world has literally been beating a path to the trogons' doorstep. The elegant trogons, known until a few years ago as coppery-tailed trogons, rub the sleep out of their eyes at 4:45 every morning in Cave Creek Canyon. On numerous occasions, Richard Taylor was awake before them, hidden in the trees, watching. In order to see the trogons bustling about their nests at 4:45 A.M., Taylor had to start bustling about his own nest, some fourteen miles away in Whitetail Canyon, at 2:30 AM. Taylor had several reasons for watching the trogons. For one, he was gathering information for a book subsequently published: The Coppery-tailed Trogon: Arizona's Bird of Paradise. But there also was the matter of esthetics: trogons are extraordinarily attractive birds. The male has a scarlet-red breast, smoke gray wings, an emerald green body, a yellow bill, and an orange eye-ring circling a large dark pupil. Females are dove gray with coppery tails and rose-red bellies; their eyes are set off by a circle of white delicately lined with orange. In short, watching a copperytailed trogon is infinitely more satisfying than watching a pigeon.

The trogons are rare in the United States; fewer than fifty pairs occupy an area of some 10,000 square miles in southern Arizona. Furthermore, they are fussy about where they live. "So limited are they in their choice of habitat," Taylor notes, "that the knowledgeable can predict almost to the acre where trogons are likely to summer." According to Taylor, the small number of trogons that come across the Mexican border end up in four major canyons in the Chiricahua, Santa Rita, Huachuca, and Atascosa mountains. Still, the largest population of trogons in the United States is in the Chiricahuas, specifically within walking distance of the South Fork campground. Two other unique animals, the Apache fox squirrel and the coati, reside in the same area, but the amateur and professional naturalists who flock here seem most captivated by the elegant trogon. (The handsome bird is officially desig nated Trogon elegans). The flora and fauna of Cave Creek Canyon specifically, and the Chiricahuas in general, are responsible in large degree for the survival of the human beings who inhabit the tiny community of Portal. As Vincent Roth, former director of the Southwestern Research Station, put it in a letter a few years ago: "More ecologically oriented scientific research is conducted in the Chiricahua Mountains than any other field area within the United States. The Southwestern Research Station and other nearby facilities host college groups from many of the fifty states, in addition to scientists from throughout the world. Naturalists, photographers, and bird-watchers make up three other user classes attracted to this area by its wildlife and scenic opportunity. The economy of the businesses in this area depends largely upon the patronage of all of these groups...." Portal is a tranquil community about sixty-five miles northeast of Douglas. Most of its 150 permanent residents are retired professionals and, not surprisingly, several of them are prominent naturalists. Walter Spofford, for example, is a zoologist whose exhaustive research during the 1960s persuaded Congress to grant protection to the golden eagle-a magnificent creature that can occasionally be seen wafting over the Chiricahua's deep canyons. Spofford's home is a stone's throw from that of Willard Gertsch, a spider expert who retired from a position with the American Museum of Natural History. Students of arachnology know Gertsch's work well; he wrote some of the seminal books in the field. And, a short hop through the creek alongside Gertsch's home, Vincent Roth, another spider expert who for many years doubled as manager of the Southwestern Research Station, built his retirement home.

But the majority of Portal's residents are not professional naturalists. Most of

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PORTAL

Them are, like Robert Morse, bird-watching hobbyists. On April 11, 1985, Morse took his binoculars and his knapsack and set out on one of his frequent treks up the South Fork of Cave Creek. By the end of the day, he was being discussed all over Portal because of his "newsworthy" experience in the woods that morning: Bob Morse had seen a flame-colored tanager.

If this does not cause you to leap to your feet and seek out your spouse to share the bulletin, do not feel unworthy. But it is essential to an understanding of the social and cultural life of Portal that you realize what Bob Morse and many of his neighbors realized: a flame-colored tanager had never before been seen in the United States!

After spotting the bird, Morse returned to his home in Portal and called the Maricopa Audubon Society in Phoenix. The following morning, Janet Witzeman of the society's Phoenix branch, along with some twenty bird-watchers from other parts of Arizona, paraded up Cave Creek Canyon to confirm Morse's finding. Once confirmation had been made the bird was good enough to stay in the area-Morse called the North American Rare Bird Alert, a national "hot line" for bird-watchers that lets people know, by com-puterized system, what rare birds have been seen and where they are.

"As soon as I called in the confirmation," Morse recalled, "it became national news, and within a few weeks, at least 1000 birders came in to see this flame-colored tanager."

Like the trogon before it, the bright and cheerful tanager had a powerful impact on the economy of Portal. Nancy McAvoy, a waitress and general factotum at the Portal Store - the only store in the area - remarked at the height of the tanager episode: "Last Saturday morning, we went through seven dozen eggs at breakfast. That's just crazy! Things have really been hectic around here. Birders are coming from everywhere. One man flew from Germany; a couple arrived from England, and somebody said another man came from Canada. As soon as they walk in the door, the first thing they want to know is if the bird's still here."

It is not just the birds, of course. Scientists come here to do serious and esoteric studies in the laboratories of the Southwestern Research Station, which houses a collection of local flora and fauna, including a nearly complete collection of the seventy-four species of mammals, 244 species of birds, thirty-one snakes, twenty-four lizards, four turtles, and thirteen frogs and toads that populate the area.Doc Pugsley died in an automobile crash several years ago. He would be happy to know the road to Portal has been repaved. It might amuse him to learn-now that the road to the post office is in better condition-that an estimated 25,000 visitors a year drive down that road to see the birds that caused him such aggravation more than a decade ago.

For the sake of an accurate record, it also must be noted that Pugsley's preoccupation with the condition of the Portal road was not linked exclusively to any obsession with the mail. Once a week, Doc and his wife, Anna, would leave town. A friend recalled: "No matter what else he'd done during the week or where he had to go, every Friday the two of them would drive into Douglas. He would drop Anna off at the hairdresser, and he would go do the grocery shopping. Then he would pick her up, and they would go to lunch at the Coney Island Cafe or the Gadsden Hotel."

In 1979, I asked Pugsley if that itinerary was accurate.

"It's all true," he said, "and every week, when we go to lunch, we each get one Manhattan on the rocks."