Pintail Slough, Rotary Park and the Bill Williams Delta

My wife and I had gone to Laughlin on Friday February 6th to see Huey Lewis and the News in concert, and took advantage of the location to spend Saturday 7th along the Lower Colorado River Valley.

We began with a stop at Pintail Slough, unexpectedly finding a Greater Yellowlegs in the first pond and then finding other targets - Black Phoebe, Marsh Wren and Snow Goose - on a short circuit of the area. We also found a Cinnamon Teal among a group of Green-winged Teal, making up for the miss the week before.

Our next stop was at Rotary Park where the target bird was something of a long shot - a Purple Finch had been in the area for the past few weeks. Alas we couldn't even find the House Finches with which it had been associating! We saw around 200 Ring-billed Gulls - many more than had been there at Thanksgiving - but with no other gulls mixed in, lots of American Coot, around 20 Inca Doves and lots of Yellow-rumped warblers, but this was a disappointing stop.

Ring-billed Gull

After buying lunch we headed down to the Bill Williams Delta for an easy hour and a half of scoping the waters and locating the expected Barrow's Goldeneye, Greater Scaup, Western Grebe, Clark's Grebe and Eared Grebe. Black-tailed Gnatcatchers and Yellow-rumped Warblers were expected along the path, and a Costa's Hummingbird was a nice surprise. Less expected was a pair of Phainopepla and a fly-by Barn Swallow.

Around Flagstaff

A Harris's Sparrow had been found outside the Forestry Building on the NAU Campus on January 23rd and on Sunday 25th and Monday 26th I made unsuccessful short stops to try and find the bird. On Wednesday 28th I tried again, this time without m camera and had excellent views of this bird!

On Saturday January 30th I took a drive down Lake Mary Road to Mormon Lake and back and saw hundreds of ducks and geese on the lakes. I had a fly over flock of 70 Pinyon Jays while scanning through the geese at the far end of Upper Lake Mary, and then found two Lewis's Woodpeckers at Mormon Lake Village.

On Sunday February 1st my wife and I went to the Kachina Village Wetlands where Cinnamon Teal had been seen regularly the previous week. On arrival we ran into Eric who had seen them on the far side of the wet pond, but alas these birds were not there when by the time we got there. Instead we were treated to calling Virginia Rail and Sora. It seems that this was the second year in a row that both species had stayed through the winter.