Cheery Cow (a helpful homophone)

March 23 continued
After crossing the New Mexico border into Arizona and passing by the turnoff to Portal twice (our standard procedure is to pass by at least once before making a turn) we finally turned off onto a dirt road that saw us through to the base of the Chiricahua Mountains. Portal, true to its name, opens up into Cave Creek Canyon, our passage into the “sky islands” of the Sierra Madre. This term refers to the geographical isolation of the elevated ranges from the surrounding desert. And they really do appear that way from a distance, hazy, blue mountains rising up out of the flat desert scrub.
The light goes down behind the canyon walls quickly, but we managed to find a campsite soon after our arrival. Our greeters were two new bird species, our first Arizona birds: first the Painted Redstart and second the Bridled Titmouse. I had been hoping the Redstarts would have arrived by now, since we were now a bit ahead of our schedule. Well, they were not only here but the most abundant warblers in the canyons by far. In the evening, we went for a walk, and when we returned, we found a group right outside our site playing owl recordings to lure the territorial creatures in for a look. So we got to see a Whiskered Screech Owl on our very first night in its small corner of North American habitat. It felt good to be sleeping in a tent not in the desert but in the woods, now comprised of junipers and oaks and evergreens, too.

March 24
We woke up early and enjoyed the amazing slabs of rock across the river gradually lighting up with the rising sun. We hustled off to the South Fork trail, thinking this would be the best time for birding this famous section of Cave Creek. What we had counted on was that the birds didn’t like the cold any more than we did, and that canyon wasn’t going to warm up for another couple hours, not until the sun got over the steep walls. So we kept a brisk pace and tried to warm up, spotting the occasional Painted Redstart, Acorn Woodpecker, or Kinglet. We gave up and decided to have breakfast where it was warmer. And sure enough, the birds were much easier to find there in the parking lot. We found a new warbler, early for the season, a Black-Throated Gray. And talking to some other birders we realized that probably some of the strange-looking Kinglets we’d been seeing were actually Hutton’s Vireos.
We checked out a new campground called Sunny Flats -- because as nice as the shaded forest was in principle, the reality was that a little more sun in the morning wouldn’t have killed us. We also ran across a number of birdfeeders, over-run with Pine Siskins, and some sugar feeders for the hummingbirds as well. Today was our first experience with the larger hummingbirds, the Magnificent and Blue-Throated varieties, as well as the staple Southwest hummer, the Broad-tailed, with its distinctive flight trill produced by the wingtips.
In the afternoon, we explored the Southwest Research station, where we had perhaps our best find yet. A Buff-Breasted Flycatcher. These guys are mostly found just in the Huachuca Mountains, but there is a small, more recently established breeding colony here in the Chiricahuas as well. The catch is, it’s not usually spotted at the breeding grounds until more than a month from now. We then went on a walk to a natural spring feeding in high above the creek on the mountainside. About a mile from the end of the loop, we second-guessed ourselves and decided it might not be a loop, so we turned around and went all the way back before encountering a sign informing us of our folly. I arrived back at the campsite and remembered I still hadn’t called Mom on her birthday, so I drove back to the research station and covertly used their phone while Abby started boiling water for a classy ramen-noodle dinner back at the new campsite.

March 25
We started out birding in “downtown” Portal, where we gleaned some area knowledge from a local birder. Birding is all about insider advice, who’s seen what where, and that means schmoozing. Except that you’re trying to schmooze a group of people who are not known, not in the least, for their social skills. So it can get interesting. But what birders may lack in talking grace, they make up for in hospitality. Our next stop was a good example. A nature guide named Dave Jasper lives near Portal. He lets any birder who wants come onto his property, in the middle of the Big Thicket where certain difficult-to-see desert species can be found, and sets them up with feeders galore and lawn furniture to park in. There, we saw a huge mass of Gambel’s Quail, who communicate with what we thought sounded like alien water-droplet noises. We sheepishly put a bunch of coins in the “seed fund” box (because we only had 20’s) and headed back to Portal. At this point we were hungry. Also, the Portal café had a bathroom for customers only, so we decided, to hell with the expense, we’d have some Mexican food. This is how logic works in the backcountry. The enchiladas were not undercheesed, and I was delighted.
Next, we headed for another site listed in our bird-finding guide. One lesson about these kinds of guides—even the most up-to-date of them are often not updated enough. So that if you are directed to a desert pond, a sort of bird’s oasis paradise where waterfowl are all but compelled to stop on their long journeys through the arid parts of the country, it may be bone-dry when you get there. The Willow Tank was one such dried up well.
But luckily we did have other business out this way, in Rodeo, just across the border into NM. Namely, getting fuel for the car since there was none in Portal. And getting a shower (remember when Abby said we hadn’t showered in six days, then figure that statement was made two days ago…okay, don’t think too hard about it). The shower consumed our supply of quarters about as fast as I’ve been known on this trip to consume a bag of sour gummi-worms. That is, stunningly fast. But it felt heavenly nonetheless. My hair looked like someone else’s, finally having been washed. And I even managed to shave two week’s worth of “beard” (a.k.a. chinstrap). Though this involved running between a faucet in one room and a mirror in another, and I missed more than one large patch on the initial try.
The next big event was finding out that we’d been operating on the wrong time zone for the past several days. Apparently Arizona doesn’t do daylight savings. This helped explain more than one mildly confusing incident or conversation recently. We headed off to Paradise, a subsection of Portal, and watched the feeders at another house opened up to the public through the good graces of the owners. There we were amazed by a pair of Rufous Hummingbirds, their metallic gorget feathers just starting to come in, and a black-hooded Scott’s Oriole. The “unimproved” road surface that took us to Paradise did not get any more improved on the way over Onion Saddle to the far side of the mountain range, where we planned to spend the next day. We spent the night in Pinery Canyon, and there Abby made a delightfully goopy dessert that combined all the dessert-like things we had in the car, including brownie mix, knock-off oreos, peanut-butter and chocolate chips, and cocoa powder. The only thing left to do was sleep on a meal like that (I think we had some soup prior to this as well, but that’s not the stuff one remembers, is it?).

March 26
In the morning, we drove the final leg to the Monument, which is not an obelisk or statue but a National Park area with a different label. The difference, we learned from one of the ubiquitous placards, is that a Nat. Park is an act of congress, whereas as all the other things (Monuments, Historical Landmarks, etc.) are just created because the president wakes up one morning and says so. Well, it was a smart president who set this one aside. We took a “hiker’s shuttle” up to the very top, which meant that we could hike down through all the different elevations rather than hiking up through only the first few. The driver of the van may have been old enough to drive, but she sure didn’t look it. At least the roads are paved. The federal government is good for something, I guess.
The hike down took us through fields of bizarre rock formations. These structures are created by erosion and form drip-sand-castle columns and improbably balanced boulders on narrow pedestals. You can even climb a ways inside certain “grotto” areas on the way down. The birds were better once we got out of the wind on the very peak, but up there we contented ourselves with the geological. And the placards of course. One memorable one described a legend of the leader of the Cochise tribe, whose face appears in profile on the adjacent mountainside, in a rock formation called Cochise Head: a loose conformation of chin, nose, and oversized forehead. The sign noted that he even has an eyebrow, formed by a 100-foot Douglas Fir tree. It also went on to say that he was one of the few Native tribal leaders who was friendly to the settlers, up until one of them tried to arrest him, which began “an unfortunate 11-year war.” Woops!
The trees here are very visibly a mixture of Rocky Mountain types (Douglas Fir, Ponderosa Pine), Sierra Madre types (Pinyon Pine, Alligator Juniper), and desert lowliers beneath (Agave, Yuccas, Lechuguilla). We were particularly pleased to find in the middle elevations a couple of Mexican Chickadees, pretty similar to the Black-capped variety from home but only to be found in these mountains with the United States. On the way down, we also ran into a few migrant species which we had to fix in our brains until we got back down to the field guide. We knew they were vireos, but there are a number of vireos we wouldn’t know yet. This one turned out to be a Plumbeous Vireo. The computer spellcheck suggests that perhaps I mean, “Slumberous,” but I assure you, dear reader, that is not what I mean. One of the great joys of bird identification is the silly names. I will cling to this one, though I’m no more sure than my computer that it actually means something.
We decided to camp nearby in another “dispersed” camping site, which means that you don’t have to pay to sleep on the ground. This makes intuitive sense to me. The unfortunate part of this afternoon’s junket was that the car started making an awful knocking noise as we took the tight turn onto the makeshift campsite road. It continued to make this noise as we maneuvered into position near our chosen piece of flat ground. At least we were a little closer to civilization (it’s all relative of course), so we planned to get it looked at in Bisbee, a town I’m only familiar with from the movie “3:10 to Yuma,” where it appears as a mining town full of wranglers and ne’er-do-wells. You can see why this was such a natural choice for honest automobile service.
We used the remaining part of the day to take another little hike, where I attempted to take a decent photo of Abby drawing. This is not some meta-artistic nonsense, don’t worry. Abby just needs an artist photo for an upcoming workshop she’s giving at the Acadia Birding Festival back in Maine this coming June. Anyway, posed pictures are neither of our thing. We did hear a Northern Saw-Whet Owl calling on our way back down, which is a rare treat in this area, pretty removed from its usual haunts. I had heard them before responding to a tape recorder in Hopkins Forest in Williamstown at the banding station but had never heard one out of the blue like this. It must have been a good night for owls, because later in our tents I was reading “Once and Future King” (which contains a famous screech owl named Archimedes) and heard a Northern Pygmy Owl, a regional cavity-nesting owl down here. Owling, a subset of birding, requires a little more imagination than song-birding, if I may coin a new term. It’s actually not the norm to see the bird in question. So you fall asleep reconstructing its image in your mind from the pictures you’ve seen in field guides and magazines and maybe, if you’re lucky, on a day-time roost. But mostly you just enjoy the haunting, other-worldly noise and feel good to be near something that can make such a sound.

Don