One of my favorite hangouts when I was a student at the University of Arizona was Madera Canyon in the Santa Rita Mountains. Next to the Chiricahuas, the Santa Ritas were among the most fascinating of the Sky Islands of Southeast Arizona and the rich biodiversity was a strong draw to anyone interested in field biology.
Over this last year Arizona has fallen into a terrible drought (See: droughtmonitor.unl.edu/...), with the monsoon rains failing and some areas, like the Santa Catalina Mountains, burned over and limited in access. I was lucky to travel to Arizona in 2015 and 2017, when the mountains were much wetter and the birding fantastic. On my trip in 2017 I went with a friend back to Madera Canyon and had one of the best birding experiences of my life.
The Santa Rita Mountains drew me to drive up the winding road to Madera Canyon with my newly purchased Rambler station wagon back in the early 1970s. The road was steep and I had to let the motor cool and then add coolant, but I made it up and back. While I was waiting for the Rambler to cool down, I went on a relatively short hike, disturbing a Great-horned Owl in the process. I also visited other parts of the the mountains. One trip I went on was when my graduate professor, Dr. Walter Miller, took a group of us to look for Cretaceous fossil freshwater mollusks in Adobe Canyon on the east side of the range. I also blacklighted in Madera Canyon with my beetle collecting buddy, Karl Stephen, running into Professor Charles Tripplehorn from Ohio in the process. However in none of these trips did I spend any real time bird watching and so it was with great pleasure that I drove with the friend from near Tucson to do a spot of actual bird watching in one of the most revered birding sites in Arizona during my visit in the summer of 2017.
On our way to the bird watching area around Santa Rita Lodge, we did some exploration along the road to Mount Hopkins and spotted a male Northern Cardinal. It would, unfortunately, not allow a clean shot for my camera so I had to settle for an obscured one.
After doing a bit of insect watching along the road, we drove on to the Santa Rita Lodge in Madera Canyon and we spent the next few hours watching birds around the lodge’s feeders and along a nearby trail. It was one of the most productive afternoons that I have ever spent watching birds and the variety was astounding. I got 15 species, including several life-listers. It was not my highest number for a day, but still considering the species we saw and photographed, not bad. We just missed an Elegant Trogon, which somebody had seen down the road.
All photos, as usual, are by me.