The birds of Sulphur Springs Valley - a birder's-eye view

Only a fledgling birder myself, I jumped at the opportunity to join eight Liberty Wildlife volunteers for two days of bird-watching with the Southeastern Arizona Bird Observatory. SABO is operated by Tom Wood and Sheri Williamson, who, in addition to taking turns as driver, bird spotter, tour guide, and historian, are genuinely delightful people. We all boarded a tall-windowed tour bus and spent two days together crisscrossing this sparsely populated agricultural valley in search of our prey - the birds we seldom or never get to see otherwise, the birds that winter here in Sulphur Springs Valley. Living in Phoenix gives us the chance to see quite a few different species of birds - but it's nothing like what showed up for us on that early February weekend. The sheer variety of birds congregating in Sulphur Springs Valley is astounding. We had each started out the weekend with a scorecard to help us keep track of what we saw. Heading back to Bisbee near the end of the second day, we checked off the litany of species we had spotted - 80 in all. Did anyone see a great blue heron? No, we hadn't - wait, what's that out there in the field? Great blue heron - check. Make that 81. The sight of even one hawk - not a daily occurrence for me - always inspires awe and wonder. Trust me, the thrill doesn't disappear, even when the tally of just red-tailed hawks surpasses 100 before noon, as it did on both days of our trip. Red-tails apparently come in more flavors than Baskin-Robbins ice cream. Two members of our party had traveled to Tucson earlier that week to see one in a variety known as "leucistic" - almost pure white, but with just enough pigment to not be albino. On the opposite end of the color spectrum, on Sunday morning we spotted the darkest morph of red-tails, known as Harlan's. This bird was the color of licorice - everywhere but his tail, which looked like it might have originally been red enough for his name, but appeared to have almost completely washed away to white, leaving only a hint of amber. I heard someone exclaim, "I've never seen a Harlan's!" "Well, now you've seen one - no, there's another - and there's a third!" Quite a day already, and it was only 9:00.
Our first red-tailed hawk of the day surveys Sulphur Springs Valley from atop an agave shoot...	...and we creep up for a close-up of him.
Near the center of this valley, the scarce water collects in a marshy pond called Whitewater Draw. On its southern edge, a grove of trees yielded a dozen different owls, their camouflage plumage safely hiding them all in plain sight. Our hosts knew just where to find them, though, and after training a high-powered spotting scope on each owl from a respectful distance, we were treated to close-up looks at one after another of these silent hunters. I still don't know what amazed me more - the way these beautiful creatures completely blend into the surrounding branches and leaves, or the ability of our guides to find them amid the foliage. I stared at a branch only a few feet away and saw nothing; I looked through the scope pointed at the same branch, and the owl appeared, magically, in Audubon-like detail; and I looked back at the branch naked-eye once more and realized that I had been looking right at him - I just hadn't seen him.
This well-concealed long-eared owl becomes a "spotted" owl...	One of the more memorable events of the trip started out as a wisp of black smoke way out on the horizon - then another, and another. Gradually, as they rose and grew, each wisp became a cloud, and each cloud resolved into a flock of individual sandhill cranes. They circled overhead, in layer after layer, swarming and teeming in every direction like schools of fish. Then slowly, these prehistoric-looking birds shed altitude, and landed in wave after wave on the edge of the marsh.
Here, the numbers become truly staggering. I thought such a huge flock would defy any estimation, but our guides put their number at about 35,000. Words cannot convey the squeaking, squawking, bugling and trilling call of just one of these magnificent fliers. And the effect of that sound times 35,000 simply cannot be imagined - you have to hear it for yourself. The sandhills collectively share the award for "Bird migrating the greatest distance to get here." Over the years, a few specimens of the crane have been fitted with tags and radio transmitters, and their journeys have been plotted on a map: leaving Sulphur Springs Valley heading north and east over the Great Plains (they're named after the Nebraska Sandhills on the Platte River), then cutting back to the west in a wide arc that leads them over the Rockies, Canada, Alaska, the Bering Strait - and finally, Siberia for the summer. Then all the way back here again next year. Mind-boggling.
Just a few of the thousands of sandhill cranes at Whitewater Draw.	A personal side note - I had always been frustrated when trying to watch anything through binoculars. Focusing them was never a problem, but when you train high-powered binoculars on an object that's usually small, distant, and in motion - like a bird in flight - the slightest hand tremor can completely sabotage your efforts. Well, it's the 21st century, and one of our greatest technological advances is called image stabilization. What was once only found in Steadicam technology in movie cameras has made its way into binoculars.
My Canon binoculars with IS allow me to hand-hold a 10-power eyepiece and see an image as sharp and smooth as a PBS nature special. Not cheap, but one of the most worthwhile investments I've made - and highly recommended to any aspiring birder who has experienced the same frustration I did with old-fashioned, jittery binos.
So many other miscellaneous images to carry home from Sulphur Springs: the brilliant blur of the vermilion flycatcher, one of the few birds we saw that wasn't dressed in earth tones; the tiny burrowing owl - or rather, just the top of his head, as he slowly lowered himself into his burrow and became just another smooth round stone on the desert floor; the shovelers in the pond, all plunging their heads underwater to feed, giving us spectators a front-row seat at the Duck Butt Ballet; owls and kestrels obeying the rites of spring, and pairing off to raise their own brood - "Love is in the air"; all the ones that "got away" - the Montezuma quail, the crested caracara, the aplomado falcon, and others - the birds that have yet to be spotted, and will have to wait another year before they find can land on someone's life list. Until next February, that is, when we all pile back onto the bus with binoculars in one hand and Sibley's guide in the other. Perhaps we'll spot you there...