Birds of the Sky Islands

A quest for rare footage of breeding birds

By Benjamin M. Clock

In May 2006, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library mounted an expedition sponsored by donors of the Sights and Sounds of America's Birds initiative www.macaulaylibrary.org/sightsounds. The initiative targets birds whose songs, calls, and behaviors still need to be added to the Macaulay Library's collection of video footage and audio recordings of North American birds.

I traveled to meet Larry Arbanas for a month in the southwestern deserts of Arizona and Mexico. Larry is a talented bird videographer, a Lab research associate, and an active contributor to the Macaulay Library's video collections. This expedition was designed to maximize coverage of the unique avifauna of Arizona's sky islands region, an area not previously well represented in our video archive. We set out to record sounds and images of the deepest possible diversity of the region's breeding and migrant birds.

View videos of Sky Island birds: Rufous-capped Warbler Elegant Trogon Blue-throated Hummingbird Brown-backed Solitaire

Starting off from Phoenix, we headed west to the wetland oases along the Colorado River. At Bill Williams National Wildlife Refuge we found an interesting arrangement of beautiful, vibrant green cottonwood-willow forest abutted against red rock canyon walls and stark desert uplands. The Bill Williams is a dynamic river, sometimes flooding dramatically and changing course through the green vein of riparian forest. Along the forest edge, we found Yellow-breasted Chats in abundance, singing from the cottonwoods, sometimes in chorus with Canyon Wrens chiming in from the edge the rock walls.

One of our priorities on this trip was to find nests and film breeding activities. Here at Bill Williams, we found our first two nests. Our first big success was filming a brilliant Vermilion Flycatcher pair with the male returning to the nest site periodically to feed his incubating mate. Next a Bell's Vireo, exhibiting its somewhat illogical behavior of singing emphatically while approaching their nest cup, led me right to its tiny silken nest a few feet off the ground. In the first few days our success in filming nests was exciting.

Heading south, we made a sweep through the canyon lands, arid lowland desert, and montane forestlands. In Madera Canyon, we found birds such as Flame-colored Tanager, the only pair of this species known to be breeding in the United States right now, as well as a very vocal Scott's Oriole and nest-building Hutton's Vireos. Along the main road, we spotted a migrant Olive-sided Flycatcher hawking bees and wasps from the air around flowering cacti.

A spur trip into Mexico was next on the agenda, heading to the southern part of the state of Sonora to visit a spot called the Barranca de Yécora where we found a wealth of tropical pine forest species such as Brown-backed Solitaire, Fan-tailed Warbler, and Red-faced Tanager. Rufous-capped Warbler and Slate-throated Redstart, species that occasionally make it up into southern Arizona, were also here in abundance. Wherever you find water in the desert or arid forestland, it is not surprising to find birds in great numbers. At a few spots east of Hermosillo, thicker greener vegetation grows in roadside gulches. At the bottom, a spring and tiny pools of water gave us great access to many birds coming in for a drink. Varied Bunting, Sulphur-bellied Flycatchers, and spectacular Black-throated Magpie Jays were highlights in these roadside haunts.

Back in the United States, we searched the Chiricahua and Huachuca mountains for a diversity of hummingbirds such as the impressive Blue-throated and White-eared. The higher altitude pine forest brought us close to foraging flocks of Olive Warbler, Grace's Warbler, and migrant Townsend's and Hermit warbler. A particularly hard fought addition of footage of the beautiful Buff-breasted Flycatcher came after several days of searching various canyons in the Huachucas. Finally, on one of our last days there, Larry and I were treated to the spectacle of a beautiful pair of Elegant Trogons investigating nest holes in river edge Arizona sycamore trees. The Elegant Trogon, perhaps the most characteristic species of these southwestern canyon lands, was a great capper to a successful field expedition.

View more photos of Sky Island Birds

The sound and video collected on this expedition covers more than 100 species, 55 of which are entirely new for the archives. We filmed more than 20 nests, adding many new behaviors to the archive. These media will be archived within months and available for viewing via the Macaulay Library's web site www.animalbehaviorarchive.org.

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Benjamin M. Clock is the assistant curator of visual media in the Macaulay Library.

 

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu