It’s been a while since we’ve had a SPOT THE BIRD.

Rock wrens, Salpinctes obsoletus, live among rocks in the arid mountain and desert west.  Here are some rocks.  These rocks are along the Castle Hotsprings Road between Phoenix and Wickenburg, AZ.  There is a Rock wren in these rocks.  If you could hear the wren, it would be singing its spring song which sounds a little like a small mechanized Mockingbird, and also calling “zhe-deeee zhe-deee,” etc (or, if you prefer, “tick-ear”).

Remember, you are looking for a tiny tiny grayish bird among big rocks.  You should be able to click once or twice on the image to enlarge it, although that will make the search a good deal easier.  Answer to be published later.  As usual, no prizes, but I’d love to hear from you when you locate the wren.

(Photo A.Shock)

Yesterday an MLO (Medium Large Owl) emerged fresh from the kiln, all mute greens and golds, looking wind-blown and content.  I’d built this owl outside on the back porch, in a plein-air studio annex location during our in-between-not-too-hot-not-too-cold season, and I put it back outside to save indoor shelf space. Anything on the porch is considered Part of the Field by the local wildlife: the raccoons drink from the water bucket on my work table, the finches and doves and cactus wrens forage around it, and Hoover the hand-tamed African Collared Dove, perched on it, hoo-ing, as he had all through the construction process.

<< Hoover on MLO (all photos A.Shock, click to embiggen)

For him, landing on the clay owl’s head to cock his seed-beady eye at me and beg for safflower and peanuts is no different from landing on a branch or a chair-back to seed-schnorr.

So, the next time you’re tempted to try to “scare birds” from your roof or garden with one of those Plastic Owls, here’s your pin-up poster of how effective it will be: Not.

Still, Good Feathery Detail is its own virtue — this plastic Snowy Owl purchased here in Phoenix (and fully 100% guaranteed to be totally unrecognizable as a threat to desert birds) became ours simply on the strength of its shapely molding and piercing yellow eyes.  It stands impotently in our herb garden perfectly disregarded by greens-pecking quail hens and greedy-cheeked rock squirrels.  Still, despite slightly opaque corneas (UV causes cataracts, you know!), you can tell from its expression that it takes its job very seriously. And in fact, we never have had even one lemming in the garden yet.

By the way, the Medium Large “Windblown” Owl (18″, top photo) will be available (without dove) at the Three Star Owl booth at the Verde Valley Birding and Nature Festival at the end of the month.  It’s hand-built, glazed stoneware, one of a kind, and perfectly suited to deter pests (or not) in your garden or outside living space.  (The cheap plastic snowy owl effigy is not for sale, sorry; we fear too greatly potential inroads of the arctic vole here in Phoenix.  You can’t be too vigilant when it comes to inroads, or so our governor tells us.)

They don’t all make it.  E found a dead fledgling hummingbird in the path across the wash, under the palo verde tree. It was dried, mummified, an inoffensive inanimate thing, not even worth the ants picking over.  We buried it under a nearby chuparosa, a favored food of hummers.  (Photos E.Shock)

Top: detail of foot, with primary feathers behind.

Middle: detail of rump feathers and tail feathers, showing juvenile buffy-edged plumage with a hint of metallic green.  The green deck feathers (middle tail feathers) are just growing in.

Bottom: whole little corpse, with partly-grown baby-beak.

We’ve been watching a hummingbird Hen — we think she’s an Anna’s (Calypte anna) — on a nest since the middle of February.  Lots of people have passed close to her chosen spot, which was fairly low in a crooked Aleppo pine in our backyard, right over a gravel path through the side of the garden.  There was a big wind storm, and chilly late-winter temperatures.

>> Hummingbird nestling (photo A.Shock; click to embiggen)

But the Hen kept sitting, and we finally saw the results of her diligence: one slightly fluffy, fairly well-grown chick peering out over the edge of the small cup-like nest (see photo above).  There’s going to be one more influx of people in the next couple of days to try its courage.  But at least the weather is warm now, and many more flowers are blooming, including some recovered chuparosa flowers, so when the new little bird fledges, there should be lots of nectar and gnats to learn on.

And, for those who follow this blog regularly, I believe I forgot to mention here the last appearance of the unusual (for Phoenix) male Broad-billed hummingbird in our yard last month.  He stuck around until the 16th of February, and we haven’t seen him since.

In other hummingbird news around the yard, yesterday, March 14, we saw our first-of-season Black-chinned hummingbird (Archilochus alexandri) at one of the feeders.

<< Black-chinned hummingbird magnet (Three Star Owl/A.Shock)

Or rather, saw and heard: the males’ wings produce a whirring zizzz in flight: usually we hear them in the yard before we see them.  These hummers are slender, and the males have a black head which shows a purple swash at the bottom edge along their neck, but only if the light is just right.

…by the dawnzerly light?

<< Here’s one of the local Cooper’s hawks preening in the pre-dawn light above my tent “office”.  Every morning at EXACTLY 5:48 by the alarm clock, the pair begins their day by skrekking KIK a couple of solo kiks, then rolling out a long stream of duo kik kik kik kik kik kik kiks.  But the crows are up a few minutes earlier, also clacking and giving their hollow caws. (Side note: crow is okay, but raven is better, if you’re lucky enough to live where it live.  I missed raven when we lived in St. Louis, although there there are two species of crow, American and Fish; it almost makes up for being ravenfree).  The crows are nesting too, and fly into the palms with beakfuls of sticks.

American crow (all photos A.Shock, click to enlarge!) >>

I haven’t had a chance to bird the campground systematically, but casual encounters besides crows and coop’s are yellow-rumped warbler, a common yellow-throat who sings every morning on the other side of the fence, mallards who stroll about the campsites like cats, snapping up dropped hotdog buns and popcorn, a white-crowned sparrow or two, ruby-crowned kinglets scolding fussily overhead, and Anna’s hummingbirds, a hen of which kind was moments ago diligently gathering spiderweb from the plank fence just feet from where I’m eating breakfast.  She took her time — eventually I got the photo on the left. <<

>>Cooper’s hawk in the morning sun.  It was being hassled by the crow above.

Today I’ll be at the San Diego Audubon Festival at the Marina Conference Center on Mission Bay from 11am until 5pm, or maybe a little later.  If you’re in the vicinity, come on by: there’s still both beastie and wazzo wares to check out, and other artists and exhibits to enjoy!

Here is the Office, Three Star Owl‘s nest away from nest on certain roadtrips, complete with cot and a TV tray table that serves as a desk, and a battery-powered lamp or two. <<

And here is the Cooper’s hawk who nests here each time I’ve stayed in this RV Resort.  It’s eating something fairly large, with pink feet — like a pigeon — and feathers and tiny shreds of meat are dropping down onto the empty campsite below.  Attracted by the predatory event, a gang of crows is circling, cawking, but the Coop’s is plucking calmly. >>

From 11am to 5pm on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I’ll be at the San Diego Audubon Bird Festival in the Marina Conference Center on Mission Bay in San Diego, with wazzo-ware and beastie-ware in small but delectable quantities.  Come on by!

Talk about a bull in a china shop.  It could have been much worse, but still…

Just after the Three Star Owl Open Studio/Camelback Studio Tour came to an end, and I’d put all the remaining wares onto my studio worktables to await packing for the imminent San Diego Bird Festival trip, a big stupid dove — a Eurasian Collared Dove — blundered in on foot through the open door and into the small space, pecking the bricks for imaginary food.  It was not a good place for it to be; Eurasian Collared Doves belong in my studio as much as they belong in the Western Hemisphere, which is to say, not at all.

<< Eurasian Collared dove.  Their monotonous, moronic call is “Duhh, HUNHHH, What?…” (photo A.Shock)

The studio is an add-on plexiglass “lanai” type room, so there’s nothing but windows all around.  When the dopey bird realized it was inside, it panicked — even though no one was chasing it — flapping repeatedly against the windows, knocking stuff over, and not getting anywhere near the door, which was still wide open. Test-tiles and miscellaneous small art and found objects festoon the horizontal window-support where it was fluttering, and they rained down on the artwork below, crunchily.

Although several of the falling items were broken, I was lucky: there was only one serious casualty among the sales items, a nice little turquoise horned lizard box with a road-runner on top, smashed to unpleasantly surgical fragments: a horn here, a beak there, a tail, a foot.  Here’s the grisly carnage >>

The dove was luckier: it came to rest, and E was able to gently grab it in his hands and release it outside.  It flew away, a little bit alarmed at its unintentional incarceration, but probably mostly disappointed that there wasn’t any millet to be found in that scary clear box.  Sigh; one less piece to pack for San Diego.

…and also why it’s called “Broad-billed”.

Although those two statements concern two different birds.

Update: as of Friday morning, “Bill”, the Broad-billed hummingbird, is still reporting in to our backyard feeders, passing the 72-hour mark (I first observed him on Monday afternoon).  We guess he’ll be here until he’s not!

Breeding season for Anna’s hummers is in full swing here in Phoenix.  The males are executing their showy flights, shrieking down from a height with their gorgets flashing scarlet, making a loud peeping pop with their tail feathers like tiny bullroarers, then rising vertically upward to do it again and again, usually targeting a perched female to impress her with this routine.

<< Anna’s hummer on current nest in Aleppo pine (click to enlarge; all photos A.Shock)

And from my studio I’ve been watching a female Anna’s gathering spider webs and flying away with her beak wrapped in gossamer, a sure sign of “nidification,” otherwise known as nesting.

When our trees were trimmed last week, we searched hard beforehand to make sure there were no current nests in the trees affected, and didn’t find anything. However, late this afternoon, while scanning for the errant Broad-billed hummingbird who has been working our feeders, I did find a nest, just by luck: I saw the Hen fly up into a low pine branch, and stick.  Binox showed me a little beaky head above an apparently completed nest, built above a pine cone on a nearly horizontal branch.  From everyone’s perspective, it’s not a great spot: it’s fairly low over the path through the part of our yard we call the Sonoran Garden, and E could (and probably unintentionally will) bump the branch with his head as he walks by. To me it seems a very exposed location.  In fact, while I was watching her, the Broad-bill zoomed up and perched on a smaller branch just inches below the nest with hen, apparently unaware of her.  She knew he was there: she froze, and waited perfectly still until he went away, which was soon — he’s a restless body.

>> Male Broad-billed hummer, out of place, out of season, but he’s been here for 48 hours, that we know of.  (Click to enlarge.)

The Broad-bill flew a short distance away and settled on a preferred perch in the “ugly” lemon tree.  Although the photo isn’t perfectly sharp, you can see that the base of his bill is slightly flattened, making it look broad, especially in comparison with the needle-like rest-of-the-beak.

Incidentally, for the first time ever, the normally prolific “ugly” lemon tree set one whole lemon as its entire crop this season, and it dropped that during the tree-trimming episode.  So as far as I’m concerned the shirking citrus can bear the burden of a tiny colorful bird as its tangy winter crop for a while longer.

Another update: going onto day three of “Bill” at the feeder.

Update: as of Tuesday late afternoon, the BBLH is still at our feeder, defending it against the local Anna’s hummers, happily zipping about under the pine and between our yard and the neighbor’s.

A series of rapid, smacking clicks and a rich chip caught my ear as I was making mugs in the studio, and I looked up to catch a dark emerald at the hummingbird feeder under the Palo Verde.

A glittering green hummer with no light feathers on its belly? This was worth risking the mugs drying before I could get rim coils onto them, so I went out with my binox and little camera to stake out the feeder. I didn’t have to wait long: a male Broad-billed hummingbird is working our backyard. If I lived in Tucson, this wouldn’t be exciting. But this is a species that usually sticks to Sonoran desert foothills and southeastern Arizona; they can be found 50 miles east of here (for instance, in the oasis of Boyce Thompson Arboretum), but only once have I ever seen one in the low desert, and that was several years ago at the Desert Botanical Garden, a couple of miles from here. This is a species whose range is usually shown as just coming up into the southwestern US from Mexico. So, this little guy is a “yard bird” for us… a never-before-seen species for our property.

(All photos A.Shock, click to enlarge!)

Perhaps the unusual cold pushed it down into the Metro area from the foothills: our Chuparosas were in full bloom when last week’s extreme cold hit, killing almost every single spray of nectar-filled blossoms, and it’s even colder up around Superior — the food sources higher up must be few and far between. This little guy is aggressively holding his own against the Anna’s who are the more usual residents.

I managed to get some lousy pix, but here they are anyway — I’m too excited by having a Broad-billed hummer in the yard to self-edit! And in fact, the blurriest photo — of the speeding little glinting shuttlecock coming in fast to chase a competitor off of the feeder — is my fave. We’ll see how long he hangs around.