life list: 507

Starting this off with a disclaimer that I wrote this a couple months ago and somehow forgot to publish it! so here’s a belated post. Note that this trip was in February so if you try to jack my swag and recreate this day you will see different birds.

You may have read a recent-ish post of mine about birding in Patagonia, AZ where we went to Paton’s Yard. This day in Patagonia, our main event was Patagonia Lake in Southern AZ. Patagonia Lake is a manmade lake and has camping, hiking, fishing, boating, birdwatching, etc and is about an hour and 20 minutes away from Tucson, close to Nogales. It is also the top ebird hotspot in the entire state of Arizona! Around 330 species have been seen here. I hadn’t been since I got more serious about birdwatching, so we went out there for a fun little day.

We started this day at Paton’s, at the literal crack of dawn. After my Big Day, I felt very sure that the time leading up to the sunrise would be bird city. Unfortunately, it wasn’t and was also 25 degrees out (maybe these were related?). The birds didn’t start showing up until past sunrise and there seemed to be less of them then I’ve seen at, say, 11 am. This wasn’t super ideal, but we still saw 18 species, most excitingly some Lazuli Buntings.

Lazuli Buntings are beautiful and blue songbirds. From allaboutbirds.org:

Just like we each have our own voice, each male Lazuli Bunting sings a unique combination of notes. Yearling males generally arrive on the breeding grounds without a song of their own. Shortly after arriving, they create their own song by rearranging syllables and combining song fragments of several males. The song they put together is theirs for life.

I love a singer, especially one that is blueberry muffin colors!

After Paton’s we headed out to Lake Patagonia. It was still disturbingly early (around 8:15 AM) and very cold (around freezing). We first looked out at the lake from the Birding Trail trailhead. From there, we were able to spot about 25 Common Mergansers. Tragically I did not get a good pic of them here.

After some lake gazing, we went to the bird feeder amphitheater thing at the beginning of the trail. If you do nothing else here, sitting in this area is pretty fun and you’re likely to see 10+ different birds all hanging out together.

At the feeders, we saw a N2MB: a Green tailed Towhee. GTTs are the smallest of the Towhees. You may be asking, “what the hell is a towhee?”. I am too! Let’s learn together.

The name “towhee” is onomatopoeic description of one of the towhee’s most common calls, a short two-part call rising in pitch and sometimes also called a “chewink” call.

Wikipedia

Okay! That seems like enough learning.

At Patagonia Lake, we saw 33 species, including 3 N2MBs: Gray Flycatcher, Canyon Towhee, and Green tailed Towhee! After this day, my 2023 total (was) 155 and my life list (was) at 376.