Whew.  We pause today after two weeks of intensive birding during the "monsoon" season in southeastern Arizona.  The exercise has been demanding, frustrating, and immensely rewarding.  First there was a week at Amado from where we probed the Santa Rita Mountains and the frontier region along Pena Blanca Road.  Last week we joined the Southwestern Wings Birding and Nature Festival in Sierra Vista.  Volunteer and professional guides led us into the Huachuca Mountains and the San Pedro River Valley day and night.  We finished up with the keynote dinner on Saturday night and slept in on Sunday morning.  Still missing a couple of species, we again birded independently Sunday and Monday before calling it quits yesterday afternoon.  Today is a day of rest and recovery.  We had planned to move today, but delayed that until tomorrow.  Instead we do laundry, pay bills, catch up on news, and correspond.

We still have a few more days to explore the regional avifauna.  Tomorrow we will move, probably to Rodeo NM just across the border from Arizona.  We know an RV Park there that will serve as base camp for excursions into the famous Chiricahua Mountains in the southeast corner of Arizona.  This is the largest of the famous Arizona "sky islands" that provide habitat for high altitude birds, plants, and animals that settle there from points north and south.  Odd combinations include, among the birds,  pine grosbeaks, northern goshawk, Mexican jay, and red-faced warbler.  Similarly, the forest hosts subalpine fir, limber pine, Apache pine, and Chihuahua pine.  Among birders, the area is famous for species whose ranges barely cross into the United States from Mexico and for Mexican vagrants that often appear at the end of the breeding season.

We have found fourteen life birds here.  These are white-eared hummingbird, berylline hummingbird, blue-throated hummingbird, greater pewee, buff-breasted flycatcher, dusky-capped flycatcher, sulpher-bellied flycatcher, thick-billed kingbird, olive warbler, red-faced warbler, rufous-winged sparrow, Botteri's sparrow, five-striped sparrow, and whiskered screech owl.  Except for a few nocturnal species that have ceased vocalizing we have missed only one of the regular summer residents.  This is the Montezuma quail.  This secretive and uncommon bird must be chanced upon.  We hope to spot one in the next couple of days but may miss it. 

Among the hardest to get was the five-striped sparrow.  We hiked down a canyon for it.  The water was up and Anne fell off a wall trying to skirt the stream and floated through the gap we were trying to climb around.  Her camera did not survive.  We found the bird, but Anne managed only a glimpse.  Still, we enjoyed its simple song that sounds a bit like "steak tar-tare." 

We were also frustrated by the buff-breasted flycatcher.  We didn't take the Wings field trip for it assuming we could find it ourselves.  We didn't know that its breeding season is drawing to a close.  Two days ago, arriving at the location of one of the three or four colonies within the United States, we heard not a one and could not find the bird after waking a few miles of trail.  I had hoped to avoid going into Fort Huachuca where the most reliable location for this species is located.  Reaching the pine grove there where the flycatchers live entails the usual security hassles of entering a U.S. Army installation, carefully complying with traffic laws rigidly enforced by the military police, and driving a rough jeep road.   Our Ford Focus has neither four-wheel drive nor high clearance.  Crawling around rocks that could inflict fatal wounds to the oil pan and other guts of the car, I wondered if we would "dip" on the flycatcher there too.  Arriving at the end of the road, we heard none of the song of this smallest of the North American flycatchers.  Walking up the trail we captured only a glimpse of a bird that frustratingly flew off before we could savor a view.  Reaching the end of the reported range, we turned around without seeing additional birds.  Patience was finally rewarded when after pausing for ten minutes at each of several spots, we heard one bird giving a late season song.  We stalked it and found a pair of birds in a grove of Chihuahua pines.  The tiny orangish male shook as he called out a not very musical "pidew, pidew, piDEW" song.  Not sure that we will ever see this bird again, we followed him about his territory for some time to extend our brief acquaintanceship.

Although the almost daily showers of late summer revive avian activity somewhat, this is still August birding.  With breeding and nesting largely over, the birds quietly vanish into the bush and are hard to find.  The unusual species, including about a dozen different kinds of hummingbirds, make the birding special here, but the birding is not especially easy.  We really did earn our life birds here, and are proud of them.  The heat, spiny plants, abundant ants, intense sunshine, and biting insects in places add to the difficulties.  We hope for a few more good birds, mostly not lifers, in the next few days.  We know locations for short-tailed, zone-tailed, and northern goshawk in the Chiricahuas.  Of course we do want to find Montezuma quail, the last somewhat probable life bird.  We also hope that some oddball will show up, but lately there have been no postings of vagrants so that is unlikely. 

We are already heading home.  After crossing into New Mexico we will take several days to reach Colorado.  The weather will be cooler at Great Sand Dunes.  From there we plan to stop in the eastern Colorado plains to search for mountain plover.  Their nesting is over and so they will be hard to find, but we hope to find it with the help of local observers.  We plan a stop in Illinois in hopes of catching site of a buff-breasted sandpiper.  This species migrates in August down the Mississippi Valley from its nesting grounds on islands north of Canada to its wintering grounds in the tropics.  We have a decent chance of finding this hard-to-find bird.  As always, luck will come into play.

Our voyage continues well.  We are healthy and so is the RV.  The good ship "Harley" will need service when we return to port, but she has performed well on this major voyage.  We long to see family,  friends, and our little log house on South Mountain.  Homemade bread, granola, and cookies are sorely missed.  So too are Pennsylvania pretzels and beer.  A Sunday breakfast with scrapple will be relished.  We also have numerous Eastern birds to see before they flee to points south.  We left the East before they returned from the tropics this year.  We hope to add them to our list for what will undoubtedly be our biggest year for seeing birds.  We look forward to that as our expedition now draws to a close.  Still, our adventure continues for about two more weeks.  There will be grand scenery, great finds, and, hopefully, minor crises to manage before we find our way back to Loop Road.