Here’s some eye refreshment for those of us in the hot desert to contemplate: a view of a moist, mossy and cool rainforest from Aotearoa (New Zealand).  Here there be Kiwi birds, and Kakariki, and Mohua.

Native bush at Makarora: temperate rain forest

It always amazes me how effective a bit of shade is for cooling, visually and physically, even in the most searing summer heat.  Our desert trees may not be hundreds of feet high, or hung with mosses and orchids, but on days like today I’m very grateful for our gnarly mesquites, and light-mantled palo verdes, and other arid land stalwarts.

(Photo A.Shock)

…a little bit.

¡Hola everyone!

It’s been brought to my attention that some people are having problems emailing me through the Contacts page.  The problem is being worked on right now (and most people aren’t having any problems) so start on the Contacts page if you’re trying to get in touch.  If that’s not working for you, please contact me by replying to emails that have come to you from my email address.

I’m also aware that for a while it’s been difficult if not impossible to leave a comment on a post in the Three Star Owl Journal.  This problem seems to have been fixed, and if anyone would like to leave a test comment I’d appreciate it!  Note that if you’ve left a comment in the past the chances are that I haven’t received it, and you’re welcome to send again if you like.  Sorry for the inconvenience — these problems are being worked on and should be fixed pretty quickly.

The last pieces for Three Star Owl‘s Southwest Wings Birding and Nature Festival date slid into the kiln thursday, so no more pinching, coiling, stamping, slipping, scoring, or glazing nares, coverts, hooves, beaks, talons, or TOES again, until after the event.  Meanwhile, here’s a peek at a few things lurking informally around the studio now, waiting to be photo’d, priced, and packed:

New for this event are Javelina salt & pepper shakers and owl whistles.  And there’s a Plethora of Owls in all forms this time, even more than usual.

The Festival is in Sierra Vista (Arizona) at the Windemere Hotel, 5 – 9 August — that’s next week.  If you’d like to drop in, the vendor’s hours are: Thursday, August 6, 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.; Friday, August 7, 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.; and Saturday, August 8, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.  Admission is FREE to the vending and exposition area in the hotel Lobby and Conference Rooms.  And, there’s still some room in several of the birding and natural history field trips, too.  Come by and say Hello!

…crankiness to an artform.

…are not a Victorian law firm.

They are delightfully specific bird-related terms: it seems that falconers and ornithologists, like the French, have a different word for everything.

You can talk about a raptor’s “thumb”, meaning the strong digit that in most birds is at the back of the foot, and people will know what you mean.  But there’s a useful Latin term for it, regularly and properly used in both falconry and ornithology: hallux, plural halluces.  Ornithologists have assigned birds’ toes numbers to express foot skeletal structure and toe arrangement, and the counting starts at the hallux: it’s 1.  Used in an informative sentence: “It’s useful to know that if you have a Great horned owl on the glove, and it’s gripped your free hand due to your inattention, ask someone to gently pull its hallux upward to release the grip, avoiding an unpleasant situation involving talons, pain and possible nerve damage.”  Actually, hallux is an anatomical term that refers to our own human big toe, too.  Any word with an X in it ought to be used as much as possible, says I.

That would include the word Retrix, which is a tail feather.  Plural: retrices.  Most birds have ten or twelve, and they are numbered in the order they are shed during a moult, which is from the center of the tail outward: R1 – R6, with the R1s being the two central tail feathers and the R6s being the two outer tail feathers.  Additionally, the two central tail feathers are referred to as the “deck feathers” or, as the French call them, les retrices centrales.  Used in a sentence: “The deck feathers are the first retrices to be moulted out of the tail.”  To learn more about feathers than you wanted to know, check out the Feather Atlas.  (Please remember it’s illegal to collect or own non-game bird feathers, by the way.)

Feak is a verb: feaking describes the action of a bird rubbing or wiping its beak on the perch or branch, usually for cleaning (the beak, not the branch).  Raptors do this after feeding to remove excess matter from the beak.  Songbirds do it as well, including hummingbirds whom I’ve seen feak after slurping at a nectar feeder.  It is a side-to-side motion, like sharpening a knife.  A raptor bends forward to feak, a hummingbird just tucks its chin.  Unlike the words hallux and retrix which are from the Latin, feak is an Anglo-Saxon word, and though it doesn’t have an X, needs to be said often, just to hear the sound it makes. Used in a sentence: “The Summer tanager should have feaked after eating that juicy katydid.” By the way, I think the French word for feak is feak, but I’m not positive.

Falconry is well-stocked with this and other specialist vocabulary, like stoop, warble and rouse, or yarak, haggard and crab — not to mention bate, creance and imp — each of which sounds like a Bleak House Dream Team.

(Photo, Summer tanager, A.Shock)

Late each spring, later than most other neotropical migrants, the Brown-crested flycatchers (Myiarchus tyrannulus) return to our neighborhood (and other places in southern Arizona) from their wintering grounds in Mexico.

They are relatively large tyrant flycatchers, about the size of the more familiar Cardinal, but unlike Cardinals they’re not usually seen on or even terribly close to the ground.  They are Birds of Trees, and favor woodland and riparian areas, as well as the occasional suburban or park setting.  They need trees with trunks large enough to contain generously sized holes, because they’re cavity nesters.  A saguaro will do (a “Crest” once checked out a woodpecker hole in our now defunct saguaro, but didn’t select it), or a cottonwood, or any other tree a good-sized woodpecker like a flicker has excavated a hole in already.  We’ve got Gilded flickers and Gila woodpeckers around, so there are holes big enough for the Brown-cresteds to raise a brood in.  Excellently, the BCFL is one of the few native cavity-nesting passerines able to out-compete Starlings for nest-holes.

As flycatchers, they are also Birds of Air, and feed almost entirely on insects which they catch on the wing.  They’re distinctively vocal, and it’s often easier to detect them by sound than by sight, as they give vigorous rolling brrrts and wheeps from the tops of trees.  In addition, they seem to be the earliest singers of the morning, starting before sunrise with a gentle repetitive song that differs in note and pattern from their daytime vocalizations, but is similar in tone.  Many people find it easier to identify them by sound: Brown-crested flycatchers have a look-alike smaller Myiarchus “cousin” the Ash-throated flycatcher, which is more widespread in arid regions of the southwest but utters different sounds.

Though they arrive late in spring, they also leave earlier than most migrants, and around the middle of August, I find myself listening each morning for the early song of the Brown-crested flycatcher, wondering when they’ll all have flown.

(Sketch book watercolor, A.Shock)

The sky on Saturday night was remarkable.

Somewhere south of the Phoenix area a big storm collapsed, and the gusty winds flowing down off the top of its towering cumulus clouds blasted a well-defined edge of dust that rolled outward for miles.  It’s called a Haboob — fans of the the movie “the Mummy” will know what a Haboob looks like with a scary gaping face digitized onto it — and we get them in the desert during the Monsoon season each summer, without the evil high priest Imhotep’s face on them.

The top picture shows the very moment the storm arrived in our neighborhood. This is looking up at the leading edge of the dust cloud — that’s the peach-colored part of the sky.  The blue is the normal as yet dust-free twilight sky.  The color in these photos is neither enhanced or incorrect — this is really what it looked like for about an hour.

The next picture was shot in the thick of the dust storm, when everything was engulfed by swirling dirt.  The nearby Papago Buttes are barely visible through the murk even though they’re only two blocks away.  For contrast below is a photo of the same butte and the same mesquites next morning, looking more like themselves.

The final photo shows an infamous 2003 Haboob dramatically engulfing the Phoenix suburb of Ahwatukee.

Our little Saturday Haboob was impressive-looking on the ground here, but as far as monsoon events go, it didn’t live up to its own visual drama.  Often these storms are accompanied by destructive winds, and followed by drenching, flooding thunderstorms, but this one brought none of that, at least in our neck of the woods.  We must have been right at the edge of the storm as it breathed its last gust.

(Photos: top three: A.Shock; bottom, from Wikimedia Commons, with a thank you to the  anonymous photo sharer who generously posted it there)

When the Gophersnake made its appearance, I was about to post on Costa’s hummingbirds, because “informal censusing” (= what we see in the yard) indicates that this is the season when the Costa’s hummer population is highest in our Phoenix area yard: we are lousy with Costa’s right now.

I would guess it has something to do with post-breeding population movement, and the fact that there are a lot of YOY (young of the year) out and about.  Right now, at least three of our back yard nectar feeders are being defended by male Costa’s, one of which is an immature bird, still showing just a few purple spangles at the corners of its throat.

These tiny feisty birds definitely fall into the “dinky desert dude” category.  They spend a lot of time in exciting high-speed tail chases, pursuing each other and other larger hummers like Anna’s away from the nectar sources, even in the impressive heat we’ve been experiencing.  In between, they sip intermittently at nectar sources both natural and human-made, using the energy-rich fluid to fuel their aerial gnatting forays which provide them with protein.

For now, the males seem to have quit their flight displays until next breeding season.  But from their favorite perches — often on twigs under the canopies of open trees like palo verde and mesquite — they engage in quiet “singing” which is a descending sibillance so high and thin that some people can’t hear it.  Even if it’s beyond your pitch range, you can always tell if a Costa’s is singing, because it “assumes the position”: a bit hunched, throat very slightly puffed, head forward and oscillating back and forth gently as the notes are emitted, as if to spray the sound evenly in all directions like audible air freshener, so other hummers in the area can hear it.

The top photo shows the typical neckless, puff-ball silhouette of a Costa’s, short-tailed and gray vested.  In this light, the blazing purple of the “Yosemite Sam” mustachioed gorget is not activated, except for a patch behind the eye.  Even without the bright color, the bird is easily identified by the pattern of dark and light, as in the photo on the left, with the white throat and neck contrasting strongly against the dark moustaches.

(Photos: top, Costa’s in yard creosote, A.Shock; bottom, Costa’s in Boyce Thompson mesquite, E.Shock)