Retirees are not the only “snowbirds” that fly to Phoenix in winter. The high desert, mountains, riparian ecotones, extensive areas devoted to farmland and plant nurseries, and municipal conservation areas provide refuge for a wide variety of avian life. As in any birding location, one should arrive near sunrise to see the greatest variety of birds, but late morning and early evening visits often provide prolonged opportunities to observe behavioral activities that can not be enjoyed during the early morning rush hour.
Birding hot spots in Phoenix
A hot spot is any location in which a large assemblage or great variety of birds can be found. There are many of these in the Phoenix area:
- Farmland Birds
The farmlands southeast of Gilbert provide forage for large mixed flocks of blackbirds that often include the great-tailed grackle that recently expanded its range into the Southwest from Mexico and Central America. Mid-day flocks wheel from pasture to field and may be composed of more than two thousand grackles with hundreds each of European starlings, yellow-headed blackbirds, red-winged blackbirds, and brown-headed cowbirds. Look for them especially near the stockyards and grain fields in this area.
- The Gilbert Riparian Preserve
Numerous golf courses with their manicured fairways and water hazards often are hosts to clouds of snowy and great egrets wading and feeding in the shallow waters. The Town of Gilbert's Riparian Preserve, at Guadalupe and Greenfield, often has hundreds of these egrets plus over 210 other bird species. There is usually a sprinkling of the more colorful herons: great-blue, tricolored, and green herons are common. Flocks of least and western sandpipers, long-billed dowitchers, and killdeer frequent pools through which gallinules (moor hens), American and black coots swim and glossy ibis, avocet, black-necked stilt, sandhill crane, and greater yellowlegs wade gobbling up invertebrates they find there. Observe closely, as snipe, rails, and American bitterns may move into the open from the grasses and emergent vegetation – but often only for seconds.
Ducks, geese, and swans, sometimes in modest sized rafts, frequent this center. Ring-necked duck, green-winged teal, pintail, mallard, and snow goose are common throughout the winter months, with cinnamon teal, northern shoveler, ruddy duck, fulvous tree duck, Ross's goose, Canada goose, greater white-fronted goose, and tundra swan also frequent visitors. Rarely, a feral Muscovy duck will fly in from one of the residential lakes they usually haunt.
- Desert Botanical Gardens
The upland regions of the Riparian Preserve and the Desert Botanical Gardens in southern Scottsdale provide glimpses of more typical desert avifauna. Their gardens are replete with cacti, sages, mesquite, aloes and agaves, and myriads of desert wildflowers and shrubs. Although Anna's hummingbird is the only regular hibernal species in the region, other hummingbirds are sometimes found on aloe and other cactus flowers in February and March. Gambel's quail bustle about under mesquite bushes, feeding on the seeds, and suddenly disappear into the underbrush because of some imagined or real threat when red-tailed or Harris's hawks or northern harriers soar overhead in search of unwary rodents, snakes, and birds. Gila and ladder-backed woodpeckers and elf owls often peer out of holes the woodpeckers have carved in saguaro cacti on the hillsides. Other species to be found in these parks are:
- mourning, Eurasian collared, Inca, ruddy ground, and rock doves
- savannah, song, swamp, white-throated, white-crowned sparrows
- Wilson's, orange-crowned, yellow, palm, prairie, and yellow-rumped warblers
- northern cardinal, northern mockingbird
- curve-billed thrasher
- black and Say's phoebes
- lesser goldfinch, house finch, verdin
- great-horned and burrowing owl
- peach-faced lovebirds (feral)
- tree, northern rough-winged, barn, and cliff swallows
- red-shafted flicker, belted kingfishers
- prarie falcon, American kestral, Swainson's hawk
- Birds of the Mountains
The dry washes along the Salt River bed near Apache Junction yield phainopepla, pyrrhuloxia, poorwills, and American robins as well as many of the birds already mentioned.
Birding in Arizona during the winter is enjoyable with comfortable temperatures (a sweater or jacket may be welcome some mornings and evenings), sunny days, and plenty of opportunity to add a new species or two to the life list of both beginning and long-time birders.
For more pictures of Arizona birds click here.
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