The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

The season’s first Summer Tanager (a female) appears in the yard today.

April 28, 2025

As April draws to a close, I write this from my pine-slab desk in the completed writer’s shed—which is not a shed at all but more of a cozy cabin with a sleeping loft, perched among the oaks on an outcrop of granite boulders above dry Banning Creek in the Mule Mountains. The place really needs a name. Hermit Thrush Lookout? Birder’s Refuge? Bisbee North? (I already have the sign.) Suggestions?

The son-in-law and master craftsman left for Flagstaff yesterday after five weeks of construction work—this last one finishing the roof and loft and installing antique oak file cabinets and hand-built pine-slab bookshelves. Filling them with books and boxes of research is up to me, but I’m loath to carry one more thing up that 100-foot path.

The place has already hosted its first overnight visitor, a friend from Flagstaff conducting cactus surveys along proposed transmission lines in southeast Arizona and New Mexico. “Excited to spend the inaugural night in the cabin!” Kyle wrote in the guestbook after an evening of pizza and stories.

I asked him to listen for elf owls and Mexican wolves.

Flycatcher Hideaway?

Below me, skipping among the parched branches and dipping its tail, a gray flycatcher chases insects. I hear the plaintive whistles of both ash-throated and dusky-capped flycatchers in the woodland. Just three of the 16 tyrant flycatchers that will visit here this summer. In the silverleaf oak outside my window, a ruby-crowned kinglet inspects every jaundiced blade for something too small to see with my eyes. With the incoming flycatchers, vireos, and warblers, the orioles and tanagers, all mixing with the holdover winter sparrows and thrushes and kinglets, April’s bird tally tops out near 90 species. This morning’s first summer tanager of the year made 87.

A Dusky-capped Flycatcher recently arrived from South America to breed in southern Arizona and New Mexico.

A Dusky Flycatcher, passing through from its winter range in Mexico.

Like the Dusky Flycatcher, the Gray Flycatcher also winters in Mexico and migrates in spring to breed in the western US.

Two recent hummingbird arrivals for April: A male Black-chinned Hummingbird and male Calliope Hummingbird (below), this one a one-day wonder.

If the sparrows hold, the Big Yard may see 100 species in May. Like last year. You might remember, I was attempting to reach an all-time goal of 100 birds in one month, and as the end of May approached, I was stuck at 99. Then, miraculously, on the last day of the month, a black-and-white warbler materialized in the chokecherry tree and scrambled for a drink and bath at the fountain.

The warbler was a new bird for the yard. Number 177. And, it was a new bird for me. Life bird #476. The eighth life bird I’d seen in the yard. In my PJs.

Thanks for supporting the Big Yard. Please join me for the month of May with its many warblers! Maybe a new one…more to come!