Fun Birding Tours

09/21/2024

Another new yard bird! It's been a great day in the yard, with 28 species including six different hummingbirds, and migrants such as Wilson's Warbler, Lazuli Bunting, Green-tailed Towhee, Brewer's and Vesper Sparrows, plus my second yard record of Willow Flycatcher, and first yard record of this cute little House Wren.
I used to wonder why these birds were getting lost among the mesquites, but now I'm starting to think that maybe, just maybe, they've deliberately found my little oasis of increasingly effective habitat 😎

09/12/2024

Exciting news! You can now watch Jennie in a movie about Purple Martins! 😎*
"Purple Haze - A Conservation Film" is now available to watch, in full, for free, on YouTube 🤩💜
Congratulations to Zach Steinhauser for creating this excellent documentary, and thanks for sharing it for free 😎
Go watch it, everyone! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dONZ7qBFNOU&t=1301s
*(Plus a tiny bit of my video, so I'm also in the credits) 😎

What we do at home affects what we do to the world. Follow one man’s journey chasing America’s favorite backyard bird halfway around the world and back.After...

09/07/2024

Day six, and Lady Lucifer is still visiting the feeders very occasionally, when she can dodge the insanely aggressive Rufous Hummingbirds that are also passing through. I saw her three times this afternoon, and got this shot out of the window at dusk, with the Atascosa Mountains in the background 😎
I've had eight species visit the feeders this week, which is pretty good for this habitat/elevation. In order of abundance: Black-chinned, Broad-billed, Rufous, a few Anna's, a few Costa's, two Calliope, one Broad-tailed, and of course, one Lucifer Hummingbird 🤩

09/05/2024

Another new yard bird! I was NOT expecting this one! 😮
While Acorn Woodpecker is common in oak woodland above about 4,500 ft here in SE Arizona, they really don't like the sort of mesquite-dominated Sonoran desert foothills in which my house is situated. So it was a great surprise when, out of nowhere, this lovely female woodpecker dropped in briefly to drink from the hummingbird feeder ant moat.
That's species number 139 for my yard list 😎

09/01/2024

Woohoo! New yard bird! 🤩
Friends in the mountains above, and friends in the valley below have all added this rarity to their yard lists, but finally it was my turn. Yard bird #138 was this devilishly attractive female Lucifer Hummingbird!

07/25/2024

Beautiful Gray Hawk in Green Valley last week 🩶

07/24/2024

More fun with the new camera in the yard! 😃
This is a young male Broad-billed Hummingbird feeding on a native Mexican Bird of Paradise flower (not to be confused with the one everyone calls Mexican Bird of Paradise, which is really a non-native Red Bird of Paradise),

07/14/2024

I finally bit the bullet and bought a new camera! It's a Canon R7 (mirrorless) with a Canon RF 100-500 lens. I tried it out for the first time this morning, while helping Jennie with her Desert Purple Martin study. Not bad, I think I'll get the hang of it... 😎