Camp Chiricahua Day 3: Travel Day

Welp what do you know? I procrastinated and school got in the way so this is going to be coming a long at a lot slower rate than I had hoped. Anyways, without further adieu I present Day 3 of 11 of Camp Chiricahua.

Day 3 of the camp was eventful, to say the least. Pretty much anything that could go wrong did go wrong (perhaps due to the fact that it was Friday the 13th). We woke up early again to go look for birds around the campsite, this time heading away from Rose Lake. We stopped briefly for surprisingly good looks at Olive Warbler and continued to hear the echoing, other-worldly songs of Hermit Thrushes before finding a hummingbird feeder at a campsite, which had two Rivoli's Hummingbirds, as well as several Broad-tails frequenting it. Apart from these, almost all of the Mount Lemmon standards were found, with incredibly good looks at Painted Redstart. We went to go get breakfast and pack up, and just as we were about to get in the vans, it was discovered that one of the tires on a van had become too deflated (there was a nail or some other object lodged in there) to continue down the mountain.

Olive Warbler

Painted Redstart

American Robin

Greater Short-horned Lizard

White-nosed Coati

While the leaders fetched a mechanic, the rest of the campers continued to look around the campsite, including our searching to herps, while aiming to find more birds. We were successful in both endeavors, finding a Greater Short-horned Lizard among the rocks, as well as another Red-faced Warbler in the area that we had looked in earlier in the morning. By the time the mechanic had put on the spare tire for us, it was already late morning and we hurried down the mountain to Tucson, on the way finding a White-nosed Coati and a Harris’s Hawk. Here we would get lunch, and the campers would go to Brian Gibbons’s house, while Michael took the van to patch the tire. It ended up taking around four hours for the tire to be repaired, and in the meanwhile, we saw a few species that we would only get very limited views at for the rest of the trip.

I personally had great looks at a pair of Lucy’s Warblers, a Rufous-winged Sparrow, and incredible shots of Costa’s Hummingbirds. A pair of Pyrrhuloxia was seen a bit off in the distance, and we also found a resident Desert Tortoise within the neighborhood. After a while of sitting outside in 100+ degree heat, we all went indoors and listened to Bryan tell us about his recent tour to Alaska (he had incredible shots of Ross’s Gulls), as well as the story of just how he found the Juan Fernandez Petrel (possibly one of the best yardbirds in the U.S.) fluttering over his yard in the hurricane just over two years ago now. ​

Lucy's Warbler

Costa's Hummingbird

Gambel's Quail

The tire was fixed late in the afternoon of that day, and we still had over three hours to go, not including a stop(s) for dinner and naturalisting. We essentially made a beeline for a Pizza Hut and arrived at around eight. In the parking lot, we found an Eastern (curviostre) subspecies Curve-billed Thrasher, an unusual, fairly far west location for one. After eating some food, we all went back to the vans and continued onward to the Chiricahua Mountains. Of course, our bad luck streak had to continue. Upon reaching New Mexico we promptly got stuck in a traffic jam on a two-lane road in a very rural area. To entertain ourselves, we decided to listen to terrible remixes of memeable songs, most notably AHA’s “Take On Me” and Smash Mouth’s “All Star”. After sitting in traffic for probably over an hour, we were finally free and heading back into Arizona (fun fact, we started on 7/13, and due to the one hour time difference between NM and AZ we traveled an hour ahead into 7/14, before going back into 7/13). It had become late on these rural roads, so those of us who were still awake managed to get out of the vans and see both a couple of owls (Barn and Great-horned) along with a couple varied bugs/mammals. By the time we finally reached Cave Creek, it was 11:57. We quickly decided to go to bed, and thankfully the wake up time was postponed slightly the next day.

Sunset over Southeast Arizona