Birding

You wouldn't think something as seemingly easygoing and passive as bird-watching could get this frenzied: not long ago an eared trogon, a very rare tropical bird (in these parts, anyway) was seen near Portal, on the lower east slopes of the Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern Arizona. Word went out on a national rare-bird hot line. Back in New Jersey a contractor and addicted birder named Sandy Komito hopped a plane to Tucson, rented a car, drove to Portal, spotted the eared trogon, noted same, drove back to Tucson, and flew home. That's Example No. 1. Example No. 2: in the late spring of 1991, the lovely and infrequently seen berylline hummingbird showed up at the Mile Hi/Nature Conservancy preserve in Ramsey Canyon near Sierra Vista. “I’ve been keeping track of the numbers of people coming in to see the berylline,” Ramsey naturalist Jack Whetstone told me a little later, “and as of yesterday the total was 210.”

POWER BIRDERS TAKE TO THE HILLS

INFINITE VARIETY IS NATURE'S TRUMP CARD IN THIS BIRDING HOT SPOT.

That number included Louis Banker of Kansas City, Missouri, another birding whiz. He’d been down in the Florida Keys looking for a Bahama mockingbird. He got back to Kansas City and found a message on his answering machine from Whetstone that the berylline was at Ramsey. And he did just what Komito did: flew/drove to Ramsey, saw the berylline, and then drove/flew home.

Birders — I mean “power birders” who keep lists and compete and see how many different birds they can spot in a year— do that sort of thing all the time. And one of the places where they do it most is southeastern Arizona. Birding experts in Tucson estimate these dedicated folk bring $10 million a year into Arizona.

Roger Tory Peterson, the famed naturalist and bird authority, calls the area one of the nation’s “dozen birding hot spots.” Sunset magazine says bird-watching there is “unlike anything else in all the United States.” “Bird-watchers are drawn to southeastern Arizona as golfers are to St. Andrews in Scotland or baseball fans to the Cooperstown Hall of Fame; it’s a pilgrimage,” wrote Joan Easton Lentz in her book Great Birding Trips of the West.What is it about southeastern Arizona that (a) causes all this to-do and (b) attracts enough birds to justify it?

Well, first of all, the state has those rather special mountain ranges — “sky islands,” they’re called — that rear up starkly and spectacularly from the surrounding desert. They include the SantaCatalinas, Santa Ritas, Huachucas, and Chiricahuas. Within these mountains are riparian areas and a choice variety of treelined canyons. Combine all this, then, with desert warmth and late summer rains that produce what bird folk call a “second spring” and thus a longer-than-usual nesting season.

Result: birds. A lot of them. Many flying in from Mexico. “Here,” says naturalist Peterson, “one finds a greater variety of nesting land birds than in any comparable area in the United States.” Result: birds. A lot of them. Many flying in from Mexico. “Here,” says naturalist Peterson, “one finds a greater variety of nesting land birds than in any comparable area in the United States.”How many? I’ve heard figures in the range of 300 species and more. That’s about a third of all the birds to be found in North America. With some luck, you can see, in southeastern Arizona, 12 species of hummingbirds, such rarities as the rose-throated becard, thick-billed kingbird, and flame-colored tanager, plus 13 kinds of owls. One of the fetching sights at Madera

POWER BIRDING

SANCTUARY FOR FLORA AS WELL AS WILDLIFE, SOUTHEASTERN ARIZONA PROVIDES COUNTLESS NESTING SPOTS. (CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE) A CACTUS WREN. ROBERT CAMPBELL A BLACK-CHINNED HUMMINGBIRD. JAMES TALLON A FAMILY OF FIVE-STRIPED SPARROWS. DAN FISCHER

IT TAKES A SHARP EYE TO DETECT NESTS WITH BABY BIRDS.

Canyon in the Santa Ritas is an elf owl smallest in the world, five and three-quarters inches long peeking out of its telephone-pole nesting home drilled by an acorn woodpecker. "Other birds ought to pay money to the acorn woodpecker for providing their nest sites," said Carol de Waard, a Tucson bird-tour guide, during a morning walk in Madera Canyon. We saw 24 species of birds in the course of our two-hour walk. (Actually, said Louie Dombroski, naturalist at the 50year-old Madera Lodge, the total on a good midsummer birding day can run as high as 40.) You don't, however, have to take a walk to see birds in Madera Canyon. Just sit on the front porch of one of the cabins at the lodge and watch the feeders (for the hummingbirds) and the seeders (for other birds). You'll see eight or 10 hummingbirds vying for access to the sugar-and-water nectar in the feeders. Then, in the night, if you watch closely, you'll spot the Mexican long-tongued bats swooping in to finish off what the hummingbirds didn't drink. Lyle Collister, who, with her husband, David, runs the lodge, said the quart-size containers of nectar have to be refilled every day or two.

The front porches of Madera Lodge aren't the only places where you can take the easy-does-it approach to birding. At Portal in the Chiricahuas, instead of stalking your feathered friends through the woods, you can sit in the Spoffords' backyard and just, well, bird-watch.

Walter and Sally Spofford came out from New York state some 20 years ago. (He taught neuroanatomy at a medical school in Syracuse; she was in the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology). They had always liked to let people anybody, everybody come to their place and look at birds, and they decided to do the same thing at Portal. All you need to do is be reasonably quiet, and don't sit near the brush piles that shelter the groundfeeding birds.

How many kinds of birds might one see at the Spoffords? "Our list is now 209," said Sally. "That includes birds we've seen flying over." How many visitors do they get? In one recent year: about 3,500.

And at the Spoffords', as at Madera and Ramsey canyons, the bird-watchers come from everywhere. "We get birders here from all over the world," said Madera Lodge's Lyle Collister.

Ruth Russell, past president of the Tucson Audubon Society, tells of a couple who called the Audubon office from Norway. They wanted to see a fivestriped sparrow, and, in due course, they came and saw it.

Ramsey Canyon's Jack Whetstone said that in the first five months of 1989 "we had people here from all 50 states and 22