Birds

Raptors overhead, quail underfoot, and everything between.

Key

Year-round resident

Summer — breeds in the warm months

Winter visitor

Common — you'll see these

Occasional — now and then

Seldom — keep an eye out

Elusive — you may never see one

Raptor — may take chicks or small poultry

Draws to water — comes for a feature or feeder

Beneficial — rodent/insect control or pollination

Heard more than seen — know it by voice first

subtitle = binomial (scientific name)

Raptors, Owls & Large

Golden eagle

Aquila chrysaetos

The famous eyes are twice a human's, not ten times, and the tested bird was a cousin. Twice is enough to read jackrabbits off the open desert all afternoon; the dive speed was never measured.

Red-tailed hawk

Buteo jamaicensis

The movie-eagle scream is really this hawk, dubbed over the eagle's thin real voice. The commonest hawk on the continent, riding lift the desert heat builds for free.

Ferruginous hawk

Buteo regalis

North America's largest hawk, yet only a winter guest: it breeds high and north and drops down here for the cold. Feathered to the toes like an eagle; overhead, a rusty V on a near-white bird.

Prairie falcon

Falco mexicanus

Filed next to the peregrine for a century; the genomes put it on its own branch. It hunts flat and low, arriving inside a flock's reaction time, or climbing into it from below.

American kestrel

Falco sparverius

Watch it hunt into the wind and everything works but the head, which hangs locked in the air: the eyes held still to read the ground. The commonest falcon, quietly vanishing.

Turkey vulture

Cathartes aura

Finds a hidden carcass by smell, and won't take a fresh kill, only a day-old one. A summer bird here that clears south for winter; the tell overhead is a teetering, shallow V.

Common raven

Corvus corax

Named for its croak, but the mind is the story: it plans hours ahead and remembers a fair trade a month on. Human subsidies have pushed Mojave numbers up over 700%, and the young tortoise pays.

Great horned owl

Bubo virginianus

You will hear it before you see it, if you meet it at all. Not the barn owl that hunts in true dark by sound; this one needs light, steals a hawk's nest, and regularly kills skunks.

Barn owl

Tyto alba

It doesn't hoot, it screams. In total darkness it catches a mouse by sound alone, aim under two degrees off, and a single nest box clears six to nine hundred rodents from this ground in a season.

Burrowing owl

Athene cunicularia

For years the dung at its burrow was read as camouflage. Tested, it proved to be bait: it draws beetles, and beetles are food. A day-hunting owl that squats in a hole it did not dig.

Quail, Doves & Roadrunner

Gambel's quail

Callipepla gambelii

A wet winter greens the forbs and the quail breed hard, a clutch of 10 to 12; a dry one and they barely bother. Why is still argued, and the famous plant-signal study was run on a different quail.

Mourning dove

Zenaida macroura

A seed-eater that still drinks nearly every day, head down and pumping the way the whole pigeon family does. Its whistling wings are a real alarm, and other birds have learned to read it.

White-winged dove

Zenaida asiatica

In Sonoran country it's nearly made of saguaro, half its summer diet. None grows here at 3,050 ft, so it's a plain summer seed-eater whose who-cooks-for-you call fools you into hearing an owl.

Greater roadrunner

Geococcyx californianus

It lets its body go cold on the desert night to save fuel, then unfolds a patch of black back-skin at sunrise like a solar panel to warm up. It would rather run than fly.

Canyon towhee

Melozone fusca

A plain ground sparrow that never leaves: one pair, one rocky patch, year-round. It feeds by a two-footed backward kick and keeps its bond with a squealing duet.

Songbirds

Cactus wren

Campylorhynchus brunneicapillus

Several football-shaped nests crowd one cholla, but only one holds eggs. The rest aren't decoys, whatever you're told. They're bedrooms: it sleeps indoors every night, all year.

Verdin

Auriparus flaviceps

Seven grams of songbird, squeezed by cold nights and dry summer heat at once. It can't change its body, so it builds thick-walled roost nests and sleeps inside them through the cold.

Phainopepla

Phainopepla nitens

For half the year it eats one thing: desert mistletoe. A weak little gizzard peels the berries inside the bird, then plants the seeds on the branch — parasite and disperser in one.

Black-throated sparrow

Amphispiza bilineata

The tidy story says it never drinks. At a desert spring, researchers watched it hit the water 143 times in one day, then quit the week rain greened the ground.

Loggerhead shrike

Lanius ludovicianus

A songbird that does a hawk's work without a hawk's feet: it can't grip, so it kills by a whiplash head-spin and hangs its prey on thorns. The talon it was never issued.

Say's phoebe

Sayornis saya

The phoebe that gave up water: its cousins cling to streams, but this one lives far from any, asking a nest site only for shelter from above. A porch beam is a cliff.

House finch

Haemorhous mexicanus

His red isn't his, it's food: a male house finch grows in whatever pigment he ate while molting, so the color is a receipt from last autumn, and the females read it before they choose.

Lesser goldfinch

Spinus psaltria

A seed is bone dry, and it eats little else, so this seed specialist has to live near water. His song is stitched from the neighbors: Arizona birds copy the Gila woodpecker.

Bendire's thrasher

Toxostoma bendirei

Arizona holds half the world's Bendire's thrashers, and still nobody has timed how long it sits its eggs. A plain grey-brown ground-forager, vanishing fast, easy to miss for its commoner cousin.

Scott's oriole

Icterus parisorum

Its nest is woven from the yucca it hangs in: strips of dried leaf-fiber set deep among the spines. No yucca, no oriole. A summer bird here; both sexes sing a meadowlark's fluting whistle.

LeConte's thrasher

Toxostoma lecontei

The palest of the North American thrashers, colored like bare dirt. It needs the emptiest ground of almost any songbird, runs instead of flying, and drinks only its prey.

Ash-throated flycatcher

Myiarchus cinerascens

It breeds in desert scrub without drinking, taking its water from the insects it catches, then squats in a hole it can't dig, from a woodpecker's to a mailbox.

Black-tailed gnatcatcher

Polioptila melanura

Two look-alike gnatcatchers share the scrub; one migrates, one never does. The black-tailed stays year-round on water squeezed from the bugs it eats. The tell is the tail from below.

Rock wren

Salpinctes obsoletus

A half-ounce bird hauls up to 1.4 kg of flat stones into a paved doorstep at its nest. The one tested reason it holds up: drainage. It also seems never to drink water.

Brewer's sparrow

Spizella breweri

The plainest sparrow there is, and here only for winter. It barely drinks, going weeks on a dry seed diet, and saves its long, canary-ish song for the northern sagebrush where it breeds.

Woodpeckers

Ladder-backed woodpecker

Dryobates scalaris

A woodpecker must chisel its own nest, and almost nothing in this desert is soft enough. The Joshua tree, a giant yucca, is the answer; its range and the tree's lie nearly on top of one another.

Northern flicker

Colaptes auratus

The woodpecker that came down off the bark to eat ants on the ground, probably more ants than any bird on the continent. Here it is a cool-season visitor from higher country, not a nester.

Hummingbirds

Costa's hummingbird

Calypte costae

His dive whistle is made by his tail, not his voice. He twists half of it up to 90° to aim the sound, and passes to her side so she can't hear how fast he flies.

Anna's hummingbird

Calypte anna

A recent, feeder-helped arrival, not a desert native. The chirp at the bottom of a male's dive isn't his voice but one fluttering tail feather, a 150-year mistake.