OUR WEEK IN REVIEW!

It's warming up in the desert, but we have still been able to do some birding. Last Sunday we went up to Madera Canyon. We hiked up the Carrie Nation Trail and saw some great birds. We saw two pairs of Elegant Trogons. One pair was at the nest, and we saw them trade off baby (or is that birdy) sitting duties. I did get a fairly good picture of the male Trogon. You can see the nest hole to the left of the Trogon. We also saw some Red-faced Warblers. These little warblers are what we call "flitterers". In other words they move around quickly and it's hard to take their picture. The picture below is looking down at Green Valley from up Carrie Nation Trail. On Memorial Day, we went with our friends Linda and Jim to Tubac to bird along the Anza Trail. We had a good day and saw 34 different birds.

This morning (Sunday, May 31) we walked out to see if we could see any Burrowing Owls. We did see one.

Can you see the Hummingbird in the nest in the picture below? You have to look very carefully as he/she blends in with the background so well.

Below is a picture of a little Hummingbird I took in our yard. He kind of looks mad!

On our walk this morning, I took this picture of a Gila Woodpecker peeking out of his nest hole in a Saguaro Cactus.

This family of Quail have come to our backyard a couple of times in the past few days. There were 11 babies. I couldn't get a picture of all of them together -- they move fast!

Lately we have also had a Roadrunner that makes a swing across our patio daily. I am sure he is looking for baby Quail. I try to shoo him away if there are any baby Quail in the vicinity.

All in all we had a great week seeing more than 70 different birds. Some of the highlights were: The Elegant Trogons; the Red-faced Warblers; Peregrine Falcon; Blue Grosbeak; Varied Bunting; Summer Tanager; Black-headed Grosbeak; Hepatic Tanager; White-eared Hummingbird; Cardinal (always a favorite); and the Roadrunner.