The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

The first Berylline Hummingbird (above and below) documented in the Mule Mountains. (Photos courtesy Haley Smith)

July 22, 2022

Yesterday, I got a call from my neighbor while I visited my friend Dick Shelton in Tucson. 

“Are you home?” she asked.

“No. Why?”

“Because I’m watching a berylline hummingbird at my feeders.”

It has been a week for hummingbirds with nine species slurping up sugar and flower nectar in my yard.  The first appearance of an Allen’s, that rufous lookalike I can only identify with a photograph of the tail flared just right, capped off the dozen species that normally visit each year.  And then my neighbor sees number 13 when I’m 100 miles away.

I’ve expected beryllines for a decade.  The emerald-green birds, named for a precious stone that ancients claimed strengthens the belief in the gods, range from the pine-oak forests of Central America and Mexico to southeastern Arizona’s sky islands.  I’ve chased them in Alamos, Sonora, and in the Chiricahua and Santa Rita mountains (where the bird was first observed north of Mexico in 1964), and sightings regularly trickle out of the Huachuca Mountains since they favor these Madrean oak woodlands, even nesting here.  The Mule Mountains rise 7000 feet from a broad valley floor between the Chiricahuas and Huachucas, but there are no records of berylline hummingbirds in the Mules.  Until now.

Bullock’s Orioles are one of three different orioles that visit the Big Yard.

This morning’s Black-throated Gray Warbler comes to the fountain to drink.

This morning, I’m treated to a young Bullock’s oriole and a first-of-the-season black-throated gray warbler, absent from the yard since April.  The start of migration?  But my eyes keep returning to the hanging nectar bottles.  I scrutinize every shimmering, blue-green broad-billed hummingbird for red wings and tail.  Nothing.  Although the numbers are light, the variety remains robust: Black-chins and Anna’s, Costa’s and violet-crowns.  Rufous and a probable Allen’s.  When I hear the pitch of Lucifer wings, I swing my camera in his direction and add a few more images of his flaming magnificence to my hundreds filed away.

A male Costa’s Hummingbird, a regular summer resident of the Big Yard.

A male Rufous Hummingbird on the southbound part of its 4000-mile annual migration between Alaska and Mexico.

A female or immature Allen’s Hummingbird.

A male Lucifer Hummingbird, also a regular summer visitor in the yard.

My neighbor, Lucifer’s Mistress, calls me a “birder.”  She’s wrong about that.  A true birder would have abandoned dinner with his friend and cancelled his evening writing workshop and jumped in his car and driven back to Bisbee before dark.

A true birder would have dropped everything to see the rare shining gemstone with wings.

A male Berylline Hummingbird in the Chiricahua Mountains from the summer of 2020. One day, maybe I’ll see and photograph a Berylline in my own yard.

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