pygmy nuthatch

Birding Rose Canyon, Mt. Lemmon

When I arrived at the Rose Canyon turn off at a quarter to eight, the entrance was barred.

Turns out that the campgrounds and picnic areas would not be open for another 15 days.

I parked at a lot to the right of the entrance and there was only one car in the lot. Could they be birders of anglers?

One huge draw of driving up to 7,000 feet above sea level is that it is much cooler than in Tucson. The temps were in the high 50s as I walked down the road towards Rose Canyon Lake.

I had two key species I was listening and looking for: olive warbler and greater pewee. I had birded southern Arizona on four occasions but somehow I hadn’t seen these high elevation conifer-loving species. Now is the time to go to a good hotspot at Mount Lemmon, which is the road I was now on in Rose Canyon.

The first species encountered was one I hadn’t seen in a while: yellow-eyed junco. The Devil’s junco.

As I continued down the road past empty campsites and picnic areas, I first heard the greater pewee singing its “Jose Maria” call. Lifer!

I continued on toward the lake looking and listening for the olive. Even this early spring, they didn’t seem to be singing, while many others were in full voice.

At the lake I found the occupants of the car I parked next two: two anglers. But not much on the lake except a few mallards.

As I walked up the hill towards the lake parking lot, now completely empty, I spotted a dark raptor soaring above the trees.

I put bins on the bird and thought it was either a zone-tailed or a common black hawk. I raised my camera up and got off four shots before the hawk moved over the ridge. I would sort out identification later when I got a better look at the photos.

A common black hawk.

I retraced my route back towards my car, scanning the ponderosa pines for a black-masked bird with a tawny orange head.

Before long I found a male foraging in a pine to my left. Olive warbler, lifer at last!

He flew across the road and was soon joined by a female and they foraged together and then moved higher up the pine and out of sight.

I later saw another female on the ground gathering nesting materials. Spring is here in the mountains!

Once back at the car park I headed up towards the summit and Summerhaven. I pulled off to the small ski resort of Ski Valley.

The resort, the most southern ski resort in the United States, had three lifts and a small building capped with a bell tower which I guessed is the ski school.

Off to my right and above the pines circled a large, dark raptor. Was this the same bird I had seen at Rose Canyon? After reviewing photos I identified the bird as a common black hawk.

On my return down the mountain I stopped at Windy Point to sketch the otherworldly rocks and to take in the views greater Tucson. It’s amazing to think that I only had to travel about an hour from Tucson to be in a completely different world.

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The Voices of the Steller’s Jay

Depth and nuance. That is something I strive for when journalling and sketching. And spending time in nature, on my deck in the Santa Cruz Mountains, for instance, really deepens my understanding and appreciation of nature.

Depth and nuance. When the casual observer, if they are observing at all, will hear the loud call of the Steller’s jay they might describe their call as “jarring”, “annoying”, “unmusical”, or “head-splitting”. But spending time with these birds really makes you love the depth, variety, and dynamics of this western jay’s vocabulary.

For me, this comes with time and awareness. Depth of time and the nuance of the subtlety of sounds these birds produce.

One morning, when the Steller’s jays were thick around the trees near the suet feeder, I decided to log the different sounds the jays made during a 15 minute interval. I tried to give a name or a onomatopoeia facsimile of the sounds I was hearing. Purely a subjective and unscientific exercise but a fun one at that!

The jays were especially vocal and I could only wonder at the meanings of their varied sounds. Even ornithologists do not fully understand the meaning of all the Steller’s jay’s calls. Why, for instance, do they imitate the red-tailed and red-shouldered hawk call?

In the space of 15 minutes, I counted about 15 different calls. I scribbled down in those 15 minutes calls such as: Faster chirp, Red-shouldered Call, rusty huge (Old gear), One grunt, Alarm clock (old school), tri-chump, Accelerated tri-chump, shirk-shirk-shirk, Reep!, red-shoulder whisper, silent whispser-ramble, Reet-Reeet!, and Ray-gun.

The “Reet-Reeet!” call was the call that called attention to an avian predator is close proximity. This was most likely the local Cooper’s hawk. This warning call not only alerted other Steller’s jays of the threat but also other birds in the area that seemed to know the jay’s warning cry.

Pygmy nuthatches can be tough to photograph well in low light because they are always in constant motion and images contain lots of motion blur. That is not the case then the nuthatches are frozen.

A few days before I noticed two frozen pygmy nuthatches on and near the suet feeder. Upriver I heard the masses mobbing calls of the Steller’s jay. This seem to be a warning that there was a predator in the area. I wondered what makes a pygmy nuthatch freeze? Was this a response to a predator in the area, just to hold absolutely still.

This is the duality of the Steller’s jay. On one hand they are nest robbers and on the other, they are the avian warning system of the confer forest than saves other bird’s lives.