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.