I mentioned last week how I receive daily eBird email alerts on rare bird sightings in the area. In eBird, you can make a selection to receive email alerts either hourly or daily. Additionally, you can specify for which county you want to receive notices.
Recently, there have been a lot of rare bird sightings in Yavapai County, and many of them have been at Willow Lake. For a few weeks now, numbers of birders have observed an eastern phoebe and a black and white warbler in the cottonwood peninsula area on the west side of the lake.
Last week there were two American white pelicans at Willow Lake and just a few days ago three tundra swans showed up at Willow Lake. No two days spent birding are alike! From one day to the next, you never know what bird species might arrive or how long they will stay.
Over the last week, I’ve birded the west side of Willow Lake on three different occasions hoping to get a visual on some of the rare birds that have been reported. Last Wednesday, while birding at Willow, I saw forty-seven species in less than two hours. While I saw the pelicans, I didn’t see the eastern phoebe or the black and white warbler.
My best find of the day was actually in someone’s yard across the street from the small dirt parking area on the north side of Willow Lake Rd., opposite Simpson Lane. I had just gotten back to my car when I heard the vocalization of a common Sonoran Desert bird species, a verdin.
Where I grew up in Tucson, this was a very common backyard bird. They frequent areas with palo verde and mesquite trees with surrounding desert cacti such as sahuaros, cholla and prickly pear. I have never seen a verdin in Prescott in the thirty-three years I’ve lived here. But I knew it was a verdin when I heard it.
I’d already put my tripod and scope in the trunk, so I quickly grabbed my scope and placed it on top of my car and got the verdin in view. With a visual confirmation, in addition to hearing its vocalization, I had a solid identification.
I was confident that when I created my eBird report for my bird outing at Willow that the verdin would show up as a rare bird, requiring documentation. To my surprise it was listed as a “regular” or “normal” species for that location. I was shocked! Honestly, I have no idea why it is not flagged as a rare bird for this area.
Returning back to my hunt for the eastern phoebe, I went out on both Monday and Tuesday of this week hoping to see the Tundra swans, and to see if I could find the eastern phoebe and the black and white warbler. Looking for a single bird in a cottonwood gallery forest is like looking for a needle in a haystack.
However, I am happy to report that I not only saw the swans, but I also found the eastern phoebe, along with two other phoebe species: Say’s and black. I also found another flycatcher species (phoebes are in the flycatcher family), a Hammond’s flycatcher, that was almost in the exact same spot where I found the eastern phoebe on Monday.
Interestingly, I found a fifth flycatcher species this past week—a gorgeous male vermilion flycatcher along the eastern edge of Watson Lake. I saw it twice last week from the Peavine Trail. Seeing so many different flycatcher species in December is quite unusual, but our daytime temperatures have been very mild for this time of year.
Until next week, Happy Birding!
Eric Moore is the owner of The Lookout, in Prescott, where you will find a Hallmark Gold Crown Store, wild bird products, and Swarovski and Vortex optics. Eric has been an avid birder for over 55 years. Eric can be contacted at eric@thelookoutaz.com.
