Buckeye and Glendale

On Saturday March 14th my wife and I spent an hour at the thrasher spot in Buckeye before checking the Lower River Road ponds and then driving to the Glendale Recharge Ponds for another hour of birding.

Birding in the thrasher spot is never easy and we walked around hoping to hear thrashers singing or to see a LeConte's Thrasher or a Sagebrush Sparrow moving along the ground between bushes. Our late arrival at the spot, having left Flagstaff at 10am meant that the only singing came from Northern Mockingbirds, and our hour long wandering found just a single Sage Thrasher and several White-crowned Sparrows. The only new bird for the year was Cliff Swallow which we saw along the road before we arrived. We saw many more of these swallows at the Lower River Road ponds where we saw few ducks but a single Spotted Sandpiper and a small group of Least Sandpipers.

Phainopepla

We stopped at the Glendale Recharge Ponds aiming to add some shorebirds to my 2015 list and immediately added Black-winged Stilt, followed soon after by Lesser Yellowlegs. Finding a single Western Sandpiper among a group of Least Sandpipers took a little more work, and we were just about done when we finally ran into a small group of  Long-billed Dowitchers, a bird that had been expected.