Birdman of the Chiricahuas

BY: Sam Negri

Everyone had news about the trogons. "About 200 yards up the trail there are five or six of them, practically at eye level," a hiker coming down the South Fork of Cave Creek Canyon said.

Encouraged by the news, Richard "Rick" Taylor and the dozen bird-watchers on his tour accelerated their pace up the shady canyon in the Chiricahua Mountains. Burnt-orange cliffs of rhyolite towered above them; tiny rainbow trout skittered in the clear creek adjacent to their trail.

A few hundred feet up the canyon, Taylor stopped, cupped his hands to his mouth, and let out a singularly unappealing call that sounded like someone tearing a thick piece of cardboard. Somewhere above, in the dense stands of velvet ash, sycamore, oak, pine, and spruce trees, the tropical bird known as the elegant trogon returned the call.

"They're all out there," Taylor said, "above the canopy." Two more hikers

Rick Taylor Birdman

came down the canyon with additional in-formation: “There are two or three of them just above the next creek crossing. They’re high up, but you can hear them calling.” No one asked whether Taylor and his birding group — easily identified by the ex-pensive binoculars dangling from their necks, the cloth hats with the campaign pins from various bird counts in other parts of the country — were looking for trogons. South Fork, well known to birders the world over as “trogon heaven,” is a place where this rare and beautiful bird can easily be seen. The elegant trogon, sometimes called the coppery-tailed trogon, is nearly a foot long and vaguely resembles a parrot. Before 1885 there were no firsthand reports of tro-gons north of Mexico. The first positive identification of a trogon in the United States was made that year by Lt. H.C. Benson, an off-duty Army officer stationed at Fort Huachuca, a military post adjacent to Sierra Vista in southern Arizona. Today there are fewer than 50 pairs of these birds in the U. S., all concentrated in four southern Arizona mountain ranges. By far the easiest place to see them is in the Cave Creek drainage of the Chiricahuas where their nests are scattered at half-mile intervals along the streams. At South Fork, at least one nest can usually be found with-in a quarter mile of the parking lot at the road’s end, about a five-minute drive from the tiny community of Portal near the Arizona-New Mexico border.

Rick Taylor, 44 years of age, started doing research on the trogons nearly two decades ago. He estimates that at least 25,000 visitors per year come to Portal primarily to see the elegant trogons that come up from Mexico each April to spend the summer at South Fork. “It’s one of the three most sought-after nongame birds in the United States,” he says. “The trogons are as rare as the whoop-ing cranes in this country.” Trogon experts may be rarer than both. Taylor, author of the book Trogons of the Arizona Borderlands, began studying these birds in 1976, long before the term “ecotourism” entered the traveler’s lexicon and years before he ever envisioned supporting himself by leading visitors on natural history and birding tours throughout the world. At the time, Taylor was living about 14 miles north of South Fork in Whitetail Canyon (now his part-time home). He had just finished writing a guidebook, Hiking Trails and Wilderness Routes of the Chiricahua Mountains, and, employment opportunities being few in that remote corner of Arizona, he launched what he thought would be “a fast and easy project,” a short fact-filled book on the elegant trogon. The book would be based on research funded by several Arizona chapters of the Audubon Society, and although the commercial value of a work so narrowly focused was minimal, Taylor didn’t care. It was the mission that was most important to him. As he explains: “At that time, no one knew how many trogons there were. The best guess was about 20 birds. My concern was that we didn’t unwittingly eliminate trogon habitat simply because we lacked information about their habitat needs.” Besides, he liked what he was doing.

After all, trogons are extraordinarily attractive birds. The male has a scarlet breast, smoke-gray wings, an emerald-green body, a yellow beak, and an orange eye ring circling a large dark pupil. Up close you can see copper highlights on the upper tail. Females have a brown body, a dove gray head, and a white eye ring with an inner pencil line of orange. In short, says Taylor, “This bird happens to be glamorous.” Furthermore, trogons are fussy about where they live. “So limited are they in their choice of habitat that the knowledgeable can predict, almost to the acre, where trogons are likely to summer,” he says. The majority of trogons that come across the Mexican border end up in four major canyons in the Chiricahua, Santa Rita, Huachuca, and Atascosa mountains, spanning about 125 miles of the Arizona-Sonora, Mexico, border. Within these mountains, the trogons occupy approximately 1,000 acres, where they live on insects and the fruit of the canyon grapevine and Southwestern chokecherry tree, among other plants. Taylor knows these things because for nearly a decade he hiked more than 500 miles a year in search of trogon nests. Ironically, in 1992, after he had spent 16 years on bad roads and finicky trails looking for these birds, a pair of trogons built a nest a few feet from his home in the Chiricahuas.

In the early stages of his research, Taylor set up housekeeping in a tent in South Fork. (The Forest Service has since declared South Fork a Zoological Botanical Area, and overnight camping is now prohibited.) He would scramble out of his tent at 5 A.M. and pursue trogons until 9:30 A.M. Then he would mount a bicycle and pedal to his job as a fire fighter at the Forest Service station in Portal. The next year, he took a leave of absence from the Forest Service to continue his trogon study, and he never went back.

Predictably, he learned more about trogons than most might want to know. He even learned the trogon language. “They have about 10 calls that are separable in the field,” he notes. At his desk in a tiny office in his Whitetail Canyon home, he would listen to his field tapes repeatedly, and eventually he decoded the function of each of the calls. Now he’s confident he can tell what the trogons are saying. By their behavior, the trogons are clearly saying they like what South Fork has to offer. Despite armies of birding enthusiasts trodding through their habitat, the birds continue to return to nest in the same few acres of forest every year. Why? In a word, food. Vegetation in the shady canyon bottom is so diverse and lush that it nurtures a thriving insect population. Trogons, fruit and insect eaters, don’t have to travel far from the nest to feed their young. South Fork is the northernmost range of the trogons. In this one canyon, they can find an unusual mixture of tropical