Spent a most enjoyable day with old birding friend Jay Hand, a former Connecticut birder and now long time Arizona resident and birder. I pulled into a parking lot at Catalina State Park outside of Tuscon to see Jay standing in the road pointing at what turned out to be my target bird for the day, a Rufous-backed Robin.
Rufous-backed Robin
This bird had been hanging around the same area since at least December last year, and is usually pretty easy to see, although we we lucky to get there early enough this day as the crowds of hikers, picnicers, dog-walkers, and screeching kids appeared to drive the bird under cover; it was not around when we returned from a three hour bird walk.
Rufous-backed Robins are "endemic to Mexico, where it is reasonably widespread and common over western and central areas of the country"*, and one or more now appear almost annually somewhere in Southern Arizona in the Winter.
After the robin fled, and after spotting a rare (for this location) White-throated Sparrow in the parking lot, we walked the Birding Trail. I had a couple other target birds; for some reason my previous birding in the West had not yielded a Rufous-winged Sparrow. After I misidentified the first one we saw as a Rufous-crowned, there were suddenly numerous Rufous-winged mixed in with White-crowned and Chipping Sparrows, with one Brewster's.
Rufous-winged Sparrow
One of the Rufous-winged flock stood out: I noticed it had no tail.
Jay speculated that our little friend had sacrificed its tail to survive a predator.
By the time we got back to the parking lot, the crowds had swollen considerably and we were happy to depart to spend the rest of the day hiking a short stretch of the Arizona Trail on Mt. Lemmon.
*Soberanes-González, C., C. Rodríguez-Flores & M.C. Arizmendi. 2010. Rufous-backed Robin (Turdus rufopalliatus), Neotropical Birds Online (T. S. Schulenberg, Editor). Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology; retrieved from Neotropical Birds Online: http://neotropical.birds.cornell.edu/portal/species/overview?p_p_spp=553036
Rufous-backed Robin
This bird had been hanging around the same area since at least December last year, and is usually pretty easy to see, although we we lucky to get there early enough this day as the crowds of hikers, picnicers, dog-walkers, and screeching kids appeared to drive the bird under cover; it was not around when we returned from a three hour bird walk.
Rufous-backed Robins are "endemic to Mexico, where it is reasonably widespread and common over western and central areas of the country"*, and one or more now appear almost annually somewhere in Southern Arizona in the Winter.
After the robin fled, and after spotting a rare (for this location) White-throated Sparrow in the parking lot, we walked the Birding Trail. I had a couple other target birds; for some reason my previous birding in the West had not yielded a Rufous-winged Sparrow. After I misidentified the first one we saw as a Rufous-crowned, there were suddenly numerous Rufous-winged mixed in with White-crowned and Chipping Sparrows, with one Brewster's.
Rufous-winged Sparrow
One of the Rufous-winged flock stood out: I noticed it had no tail.
Jay speculated that our little friend had sacrificed its tail to survive a predator.
By the time we got back to the parking lot, the crowds had swollen considerably and we were happy to depart to spend the rest of the day hiking a short stretch of the Arizona Trail on Mt. Lemmon.
*Soberanes-González, C., C. Rodríguez-Flores & M.C. Arizmendi. 2010. Rufous-backed Robin (Turdus rufopalliatus), Neotropical Birds Online (T. S. Schulenberg, Editor). Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology; retrieved from Neotropical Birds Online: http://neotropical.birds.cornell.edu/portal/species/overview?p_p_spp=553036
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