It’s a rainy morning in Estabrook Park, but I spent the weekend in Sedona, AZ, with a group of high school buddies, and we sprung for a guided birding tour, which was excellent, so here are some pictures from that.
We started on foot right from our Airbnb and headed up the side of nearby Sugarloaf Mountain. There were a lot of birds around, and here’s a male phainopepla (Phainopepla nitens), a silky flycatcher.
Here’s a female phainopepla, and you may recall that we also saw these in Big Bend National Park back in January.
A completely new bird for me, however, is this darling little verdin (Auriparus flaviceps), described as “one of the smallest passerines in North America.”
I also saw my first canyon towhee (Melozone fusca). They are not the most colorful bird, but they do show a “warm rufous patch under the tail.“
Despite the name, this female or immature lazuli bunting (Passerina amoena) was leaving the flashy plumage to the breeding males, of which I failed to spot an example.
The Woodhouse’s scrub jays (Aphelocoma woodhouseii), on the other hand, had color to spare, and here’s one fishing a pine nut out of a cone. Our guide, Tim, explained that they hide these nuts in caches.
They are said to devote a lot of time and energy to preventing other birds from finding their caches and searching out and stealing food from the caches of other birds.
Further, I read that “recent research has suggested that Woodhouse’s scrub jays, along with several other corvids, are among the most intelligent of animals. The brain-to-body mass ratio of adult scrub jays rivals that of chimpanzees and cetaceans.” Fun, eh?
Anyway, the pine nuts also attracted the attention of this juniper titmouse (Baeolophus ridgwayi).
There were several hummingbirds around, and here’s a female/immature male black-chinned hummingbird (Archilochus alexandri). It looks a lot like a female ruby-throated, which we see in Estabrook, but I read that “ruby-throated hummingbirds have a longer tail that extends beyond the wings,” and in another picture of this same bird, I can clearly see the short tail.
Here also is my very first female/immature male Anna’s hummingbird (Calypte anna). I was surprised to learn, when Tim pointed out the behavior, that hummingbirds are insectivores and we often watched them fly off a perch, catch an insect in midair, and return to the perch, just as flycatchers do. I haven’t seen that behavior in Estabrook, yet, but I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for it now.
Finally, we often heard them, and their image or silhouette appears in signage all over town, but it took me a while to get a good look at a Gambel’s quail (Callipepla gambelii). This dashing figure happens to be a male.
Signs of Life in Estabrook Park 
