Hummingbird rescue!

In the yard this morning, as I watched the chickens scratching, pecking, and dirt bathing, I noticed a male Broad-billed Hummingbird that seemed in distress. He flitted from one feeder to the next, trying each of a half dozen in turn without staying long enough for a decent drink. When he finally sat a moment and turned his profile to me, I saw the problem: a crusty black bump at the tip of his bill.

I ran inside and found Tom. "There's a Broad-billed out there with something on his bill! Can you help me trap him?"

Tom watched out the window until the bird reappeared. "The remote control on the trap is still not working," he said. (It got soaked in a ferocious thunderstorm last week and hasn't been the same since.) "Why don't we try luring him into the chicken coop?" Brilliant.

We hung two feeders, one in the doorway and another inside, and within minutes the desperate bird tried to drink from both feeders before flying toward the back of the coop. With a little gentle corraling from Tom, our patient was soon in hand.

The bump is the head of a bee or wasp, shackling the bill and
preventing the bird from feeding properly.

Up close, I confirmed that the lump was the hard carapace of an insect, a bee or wasp. Only the head remained, impaled on the bill. The bird couldn't insert his bill into most feeders or flowers, nor could he open it to catch insects. I'd seen this sort of thing before both in person and in photos, but what I'd never seen until now was injury to the bill from the carcass.

A ring of raw, swollen bill tissue on the body side
of the insect's head is a bad sign.

A hummingbird's bill is mostly living tissue, vulnerable to damage from the sharp edges of the insect's exoskeleton, decomposition of its tissues, or both. This bill looked bad, as though the tip might be necrotic. Removing the bird's handicap would not be easy or painless. A pang of dread clutched at my heart.

Armed with high-power reading glasses and banding forceps, I performed the removal as gently and quickly as possible. The bird cried as the crusty carcass came off in bits, and I kept apologizing for the pain I was causing him (he couldn't possibly understand, but it eased my own pain a little). Once it was off, a little blood welled up in the ring-shaped wound—a sign of healthy underlying tissue. He stopped crying and experimentally licked out his tongue. Definitely a good sign.

I washed the wound, applied a thin film of antibiotic ointment to the top and bottom of the bill (taking care to avoid the edges where it might get into his mouth), and gave him a long drink from a feeder. To recognize him if he visited us again, Tom and I banded, measured, and weighed him. He felt like nothing in my hand, and the scale confirmed that he had been slowly starving. Just 2.8 grams, compared to 3.2 to 3.7 grams for healthy, unencumbered male Broad-billeds that we have banded recently.

The wound looks awful, but the pink color and slight bleeding
are signs of healthy tissue.

Back outside, he lay in my hand for a few seconds before departing. Hummingbirds are tough, and this little survivor is welcome to stay in our yard as long as he needs to recuperate.

Refugees

On this hot, dry, and windy June afternoon, the chickens were restless. Despite my efforts to make them more comfortable—watering patches of dirt for bathing, setting out a bowl of iced apple juice—they wanted more relief and knew where to find it. One by one they hopped up onto the porch and stood by the door, looking longingly through the glass. 

It was uncomfortable for me, too, so I went back inside, locked the dog in the bedroom, and invited the girls into the house. They ate and drank from Sibella's bowls, scavenged the kitchen floor for crumbs, and visited me in the study as I worked at the computer. Pearl was muttering to herself a lot and couldn't seem to get comfortable on my lap. Only when I noticed her trying to mold a nest out of the folds of a serape draped over the dog's chair did I realize that she had an egg to lay and needed to return to the coop.

With bowls of frozen peas and corn as bait (lightly thawed as a cool treat), I lured the girls out the door into dim orange light filtering through a dense column of smoke. Fragments that were once grass leaves, now carbon ghosts, spiraled down to land on the deck. The plume from the Monument Fire, 22 miles to the west on the southern end of the Huachuca Mountains, had been drifting across our neighborhood since yesterday afternoon. In less than an hour it had increased so dramatically in breadth and density that it sent a jolt of fear through me. I hurriedly shooed the chickens into their run, grabbed my car keys, and headed west to see how far the fire had spread.

The Monument Fire in the Huachuca Mountains, as seen from near Bisbee

It was an eerie scene. Smoke billowed up from a broad front on the southeastern corner of the mountains, reducing the sun to a glaring red eye. From my distant vantage point I could see no flames or firefighting activities, but it was clear that the fire was burning the oak woodland and pine-oak forest homes of many of our favorite birds and approaching the houses of people we know.

The order came down this afternoon that residents of the southeastern canyons of the Huachucas would need to evacuate. Human residents will take refuge in the homes of friends and relatives, motels, bed & breakfasts, etc. Livestock will ride out the fire at nearby ranches. Untold numbers of wild creatures will find no sanctuary while the fire rages. Many will not survive, and many that do will have nowhere to return to once it's out.

Residents of the Chiricahua and Huachuca mountains have reported wild refugees fleeing the fires. Bird activity around the town of Portal in Cave Creek Canyon has been very high, and a colleague who lives in the Huachuca foothills reported seeing a desperate-looking Black Bear at his backyard water feature as he was preparing to evacuate.

A hungry Western Tanager

We live too far from the Huachucas or Chiricahuas to expect fire refugees, which is a small blessing. We already have our share of drought refugees, birds and other wildlife desperate for food and water.

This spring, unprecedented numbers of Wilson's Warblers, Western Tanagers, and Black-headed Grosbeaks swamped feeding stations and concentrated along the San Pedro River seeking what little water and food were available in this parched landscape. In our yard, Mule Deer stripped a young mulberry tree of most of its leaves, and Javelinas (a.k.a. Collared Peccaries) ate all the new growth from our few prickly pear cacti that survived the brutal February cold snap. Rock Squirrels were eating all the seed, fruit, and peanut butter dough we put out for the birds, so we began live-trapping them for deportation well beyond the edge of town. We've relocated eleven so far. Cages, netting, and vigilance are the only reasons any of our vegetables have made it this far.

The drought and fires extend well into Mexico, which may be responsible for the appearance of a number of local and regional rarities: a Yellow Grosbeak in Ash Canyon, a Berylline Hummingbird on the San Pedro River, Lucifer Hummingbirds at several unusual locations, and various eastern "vagrants" at others (possibly stranded, unable to find enough food to fuel the next legs of their migrations).

Drought is such a slow-moving disaster that it doesn't make headlines until fires break out. Climate change, too, creeps so slowly that Big Fossil's lobbyists and the politicians they own have had plenty of time to quibble, bluster, and stall, effectively thwarting efforts to avert this disaster in the making. It beggars belief that anyone can continue to scoff in a year of record-breaking storms, floods, droughts, and fires, yet some do.

The past year has fulfilled climatologists' predictions of greater extremes, including wet summers in the Southwest followed by rainless winters and springs. This is a perfect recipe for devastating forest fires. Summer rainfall stimulates abundant growth of grasses, annuals, and shrubs that, once dried, provide ideal fuel, and winter/spring drought creates ideal conditions for catastrophic fires.

It's vitally important to understand that fire is an essential element in many western forests. Southwestern forests in particular need periodic fires to recycle the nutrients in leaf litter and other debris that doesn't decompose in the dry climate. Keeping fire out of these forests is a recipe for disaster, yet that's exactly what we've been doing (first incidentally, then actively) for more than a century.

That said, the fires currently burning are not the kind we need. Natural fires are sparked by lightning from the first dry storms of the summer "monsoon" and usually quickly extinguished by the rains that follow. The current fires are all of human origin, ignited weeks ahead of the rains during our driest, hottest, and windiest time of year. This means weeks of valiant efforts to manage the fire, keep it away from structures and ecological jewels, and "encourage" it to burn in a way most conducive to forest hygiene. Weeks of flames sweeping and/or creeping through our "sky islands."

This is all I can bear to write tonight, but there's more of the story to tell. I'm going to go watch the moon rise and think about Part 2.

Update: I just heard from a friend that the fire jumped Hwy 92 late this afternoon, and that a number of structures have already been lost.

     

Anna's in the snow

A male Anna's visited our hummingbird feeder during this morning's mini-blizzard. He could barely hang on as the feeder swung in the wind and snow pelted his face. Not wanting to make his morning even more stressful, I waited until he left to put out fresh, warm sugar water.

It's been a grim winter for Arizona's hummingbirds. Many died in the Big Freeze of 2011, and many others had to be rescued. Hummingbirds in Tucson and Phoenix, where temperatures rarely stray below freezing, seemed more affected than those wintering at higher elevations. Here at 5000 feet in the foothills of the Mule Mountains, our two or three Violet-crowneds and handful of Anna's managed to ride out the January cold snap, but most disappeared after the all-time record low on the second night of the Big Freeze (0° F./-18° C.).

The following morning's weather was much improved, so I'm hoping that they rode out the worst and departed as soon as possible, as hummingbirds wintering in much colder climates have been observed to do. We're still hosting at least one female Anna's in addition to this male, but there's been no sign of a Violet-crowned since the first day of the freeze (at 8 a.m., during the second feeder change of the day). Even with a bustling clientele of Northern Cardinals, Pyrrhuloxias, Green-tailed Towhees, Gambel's Quail, and many more, the feeding station seems forlorn without an occasional flash of violet blue.

It will be weeks before I can tell how much of our hummingbird garden survived, but in the meantime I'll be escaping waaaay south of the border (Belize and Tikal) for a couple of weeks, leading a birding and natural history tour for SABO.

Panic at the playa

It was early afternoon in the southern Sulphur Springs Valley, and the last few hundred of Arizona's largest flock of Sandhill Cranes were returning to their roost at the playa lake at Whitewater Draw Wildlife Area after breakfasting on waste grain in nearby farm fields.

Suddenly, chaos erupts as thousands of cranes take to the air in seconds!

Normal crane chatter rises to a deafening clatter as a multitude of voices raise the alarm.

What could have caused this mass hysteria?

The answer comes gliding through, slicing the panicked flock in two: A Golden Eagle, one of the few predators an adult crane has to worry about.

This scene plays out almost every winter day at Whitewater Draw Wildlife Area, one of the lesser-known jewels in Arizona's birding crown.

   

Portrait of a worried dad

This male Lesser Goldfinch has every reason to look worried. He and his mate have a very late nest in the plum tree by our patio, so when I heard an unusual amount of mewing and chipping out there I went outside to see what was going on. The goldfinches were eyeing a Curve-billed Thrasher making its way through the thick foliage toward the nest. Our thrashers don't miss many meals, so I didn't feel too guilty distracting it with a few harsh words ("Hey! I hear your sister is dating a starling!") and convincing it to leave. The finches stayed exactly where they were, still on high alert. Probably not a good idea to go straight back to a nest when the predator might still be watching.

Lesser Goldfinches are one of those those birds whose voices are so delicate that even their harshest calls lay as sweetly on the ear as a song. More sweetly than their own songs, in fact, since these consist largely of other birds' calls. One of our neighborhood males sings rapid-fire songs that consist mainly of flycatcher calls: Ash-throated, Brown-crested, Vermilion, Say's Phoebe, Cassin's Kingbird, Western Kingbird, Western Wood-Pewee. A male that lives in Miller Canyon does a great impression of the "rubber duck" call of the Sulphur-bellied Flycatcher. The phrases go by so fast that the bird may be four or five species further along by the time you can say, "Hey, wasn't that a...?" --SW

September surprise

So, yesterday morning I was out on the patio supervising the chickens' free-ranging activities and watching the show at the feeders when I notice this hummer sitting on the far feeder across from a Rufous/Allen's...

Something about it set sirens off in my head. As the Rufous/Allen's backed away, the other bird raised its head in response...

...revealing the long, curved bill of a Lucifer, the first confirmed in our yard in the nearly 15 years since we moved in and put up the first feeders.

The species nests here in the Mule Mountains, so hopefully we'll see more of them next season now that this lady has found our garden and feeders. With a Calliope that Tom spotted later in the afternoon, our 48-hour hummingbird tally came to a whopping 8 species: Broad-billed, Violet-crowned, Black-chinned, Anna's, Lucifer, Calliope, Broad-tailed, and Rufous (mostly "Rufous/Allen's," but most of the juvenile males are identifiable to species by their tail feather shapes). —SW

A lovely creature however you pronounce it

The lush monsoon grasses are setting seed, and waves of Lazuli Buntings from the north are feasting. This gorgeous male was among many at Whitewater Draw Wildlife Area yesterday morning.

When you see one of these, what do you say?

"Look! There's a La-ZOO-lee Bunting!"?

"Why, I believe that's a LAZ-oo-lie Bunting!"?

Or maybe "Check out the the little blue dude!"?

Leave a comment with your favorite pronunciation, or take the poll in the sidebar. --SW

I've got my eye on you...

I'm pretty sure we're on their life lists:

White-winged Dove

Male House Finch
Juvenile Cooper's Hawk

Desert snow

We woke up this morning to this:


After one of the worst "monsoons" on record and a virtually rainless fall, we'll take our precipitation any way we can get it. Melting, it registered .35" - not too bad.

It's the chickens' first snow, so I let them out to scratch around in it.

While supervising their explorations, I noticed that the hummingbird feeder was caked with snow. The feeder went dry while we were away for a few days, and I hadn't seen or heard a hummer since we returned, but I dutifully minced through the slush and brushed the ports clear. I hadn't taken three steps back when a male Anna's appeared out of nowhere.

Within a half hour a female Anna's and a Violet-crowned also came to drink, so I guess they've forgiven us for neglecting them while we were away watching other hummingbirds.

The chickens are only allowed out when we're there to supervise. We love our chickens, but we also love our raptor neighbors and don't want to lead them into temptation. We haven't noticed regular visits from the Cooper's Hawk that used our water feature as her personal spa the last two winters, but the local Red-tail is a proven bird hunter. One morning as I stepped out to check on the chickens, a flutter caught my eye. There was the Red-tail atop a nearby utility pole. Hey, neighbor, I thought. Another flutter, and a double-take: the hawk wasn't alone.

He can have all the pigeons he wants, and I've never caught him eyeing the girls, but better safe than sorry.