The Big Yard: Birdwatching in a Time of Quarantine

Or: The Evolution of an Impenitent Lister

Coati—sometimes called coatimundi—are related to raccoons (and look like a cross between a raccoon and a monkey). Here, a family of coati searches for insects in my yard.

Day 186 of the Quarantine (September 16, 2020)

            I sit in the backyard in front of the fountain staring into the apple trees.  Not a single apple.  Dozens of red globes hung from the branches before I left for Oregon, and the Head Blond didn’t pick them.  “What happened?” I asked her.

            “Fox?” she said. “No apple pie again this year.”

            She swears a gray fox climbs into the trees and throws the fruit to the javelina waiting below, says she’s seen it.  I suspect another garden raider.

            “Probably coati,” I tell her.  “They enjoy your company when I’m gone.”

            This is a sore subject with her.  Since one moved into the house last year when I was traveling with Dick Shelton.  After clearing the trees of apples, it saw a good thing, slipped in through the kitty door and claimed squatter’s rights.  “It rummaged through the refrigerator,” she insisted. “And made a nest on the couch with my pillows.” 

            “I’m sure it was eating snacks and watching DVDs,” I said. “We had that ringtail drinking our wine, remember?”

            She was working long hours and coming home after dark to a stinking house and a smug roommate, one who was perfectly happy to unspool all the toilet paper “like a two-year-old” and spray the furniture with urine and anal secretions.  It wouldn’t leave and she couldn’t deal with it.  Even a thousand miles away, this was my fault.

            After three days of nearly being driven from the house, she called First Daughter who called her wildlife connections.  Officials from the Arizona Game and Fish and Federal Fish and Wildlife made an assessment and set a trap in our laundry room.  They caught it on the first try.  “Watermelon.  Gets ‘em every time,” the wildlife guy said when my wife called him to come get his prize, who was “spitting mad.”

              Despite Pandemic restrictions on tenant evictions, they hauled the coati away.  He is now “Cody the Coati” at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.

Cody the Coati. While females and their young live and travel in packs of up to 40, males are generally solitary.

            My Covid fountain sit amounted to 50 species today, which ties my one-day record for the yard.  It included a first-ever-for-the-yard Brewer’s sparrow (#141 life and #115 for the year) and a first-of-the-year yellow-eyed junco (#114).  The dark-eyed juncos, which my notes say departed April 30, have returned after spending the summer north of us. The flycatchers and vireos and warblers—six warblers including hermit, Nashville, and MacGillivray’s—are now mingling with the fall sparrows.  Birds in flux.

Brewer’s Sparrow is a common fall and winter visitor to southern Arizona.

The Yellow-eyed Junco ranges primarily in Mexico and just enters southeastern Arizona.

            Fifty species is high for me, especially while sitting in one spot.  When I checked these numbers on eBird, I was surprised to see my name at number 5 for Cochise County for the month. But it’s not the 98 species others in the county like Rick Taylor in the Chiricahuas regularly post.  Rick is usually the top yard lister.  In the county. In the country.   

            eBird puts competitive birding at my fingertips. I’m betting, for a day, perhaps, the right day in April or September, my yard might make it into the top ten yards in the country.

Dark-eyed Junco, gray-headed form, spends its summers from northern Nevada across Utah to Colorado and northern New Mexico.

Dark-eyed Junco, red-backed form (notice the bicolored bill) is a year-round resident of central Arizona and New Mexico and is rare in southern Arizona.

Dark-eyed Junco, Oregon form, spends summer in the Pacific Northwest and western Canada.

And then there are the hybrid forms of Dark-eyed Junco, like this Red-backed X Gray-headed form (notice the bicolored upper bill).

MacGillivray’s Warbler enjoying a bath in the fountain.

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