The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

Nightlife from the bedroom window. Better than TV.

August 12, 2022

This morning the hummingbird feeders are empty.  It must be August. Bat season.  I refill them, thinking it’s time to get the feeder cages out of storage, where the cylinders of garden fencing have hung since last year.  The wife will insist that one feeder remain unguarded.  She enjoys watching the bats’ aerobatics from the bedroom window.  I enjoy opening the window and watching the bats’ aerobatics from under the covers as they whirl around us in the darkness.

One quarter of all mammals on the planet are bats.  The number boggles the mind, which tells me that nature likes to go with what works, especially if it has wings.  Of Arizona’s 28 species, two feed on flower nectar rather than insects, trailing agave and yucca and cacti as the plants bloom in a northward wave out of Mexico.  

The Lesser Long-nosed Bat (Leptonycteris curasaoae yerbabuenae) wears the pantaloons.

The Mexican Long-tongued Bat (Choeronycteris mexicana) wears the skirt.

The feeders replenished, the hummingbirds stop chasing me with their complaints and dip their long bills into the sweet solution.  With nine species swarming the yard, my expectations rise.  Anything can happen.  Maybe a berylline, like the gorgeous male that visited my neighbor for one afternoon and evening.  Or a white-eared hummingbird, like those gracing people’s feeders in the mountain ranges on both sides of me.  Either one would be a first for the yard.

This week already has had some surprises.  For only the third time in 12 years, a yellow-billed cuckoo has ventured out of the San Pedro River to explore the upper reaches of our canyon, coo-cooing softly after sunrise and gulping down giant caterpillars plucked from the chokecherry trees.  The cuckoo flushes dozens of doves with each pass, its long, slender profile and sinuous flight sounding the “hawk” alarm in their little bird brains.

A friend who does surveys for yellow-billed cuckoos along rivers in southern Arizona says he loves hearing about sightings like mine outside their normal breeding range. The cuckoo could be branching out.  And looking for a mate.

Shy and secretive (and difficult to photograph!), Yellow-billed Cuckoos are uncommon in our oak woodlands, mostly favoring river corridors of willow and cottonwood. Below is a sound recording of its “coo-coo” call.

Then there were the hybrids.  Three different hummingbird crosses from birds that refuse to stay in their lanes.  I already knew about the Lucifer and Costa’s cross, pointed out to me on that extraordinary day of the nightingale-thrush.  But it seems Anna’s hummingbirds will breed with anything that flies forward and backward.  Lucifer, Costa’s, calliope, rufous, black-chinned, and broad-billed, with Costa’s being the most common cross. 

It was the all-black hummingbird that stumped me.  A hummingbird, as it turned out, that eBird had documented only four or five times.  And only in Arizona.  The obsidian-billed, iridescent-sequined hybrid visiting my yard was a cross between an Anna’s and a broad-billed hummingbird. 

As Ian Malcolm says, Life finds a way.  This is true because life explores every roadside ditch and rabbit hole.  Life takes risks.  This week, I witnessed the fluidity of nature in the appearance of dark shapes with wings.

A rare hybrid cross between an Anna’s Hummingbird and a Broad-billed Hummingbird.

A more common hybrid: Anna’s x Costa’s. Notice the blend of colors (Anna’s red and Costa’s purple) in the gorget.

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