We are back home after a ten day trip to Arizona. It was a good trip, mostly focused on birding. We had some time around Tucson and Green Valley but most of the trip was spent in the Portal area.
Lise and Anita in West Lafayette’s own Triple XXX diner for breakfast before heading to the Indy airport.
We flew a Boeing aircraft and it looked like they put duct tape on a hatch window. Doesn’t give one warm fuzzy feelings.
This was a Road Scholar trip. Road Scholar was once called ElderHostel so that should give you a good idea of the clientele. Nothing too strenuous. Not our typical birding excursion but my sister Anita wanted to do the trip so we joined her. There were 17 participants and two guides. Temperatures were on the high side. High as in, hovering around 100+ Fahrenheit every day. One day we were going up to about 8,000 feet and were told it would be 20 degrees cooler. It was cooler but it was still 85 degrees.
Birding Road Scholar style. Only thing missing is gin and tonics.
Portal is way out in southeastern Arizona, just a couple miles from New Mexico. Think of wide open spaces and a really tough environment. Not everyone would want to live there. The nearest grocery store to Portal is over fifty miles away. God knows how far it is to a Starbucks. On a busy day Portal has a population of around 700 if you include the larger metropolitan area. It’s in the Chiricahua Mountains, at an elevation of about 4,760 feet, right at the mouth of Cave Creek Canyon. Up the canyon a bit is the Southwest Research Stations where I spent a little time in 2012. One of the Portal “neighborhoods” is a dark sky community of about 40 people living on 400 acres. They have no outside night lights and have celestial telescope observatories built in their homes.
The social center of Portal is the Portal Store, Cafe, and Lodge. Which was our lodging while we were there. Simple, but quite adequate. While it looks humble, they fed well and did a great job of catering to a variety of dietary restrictions. Portal residents would drift in and out for a meal or drink. There was usually someone working on a car. I’m guessing the lodge had the only pair of jack stands in Portal. Mostly though, it was birders staying there.
The Portal Cafe and Lodge
Portal is a birding mecca. There are a number of eBird birding hotspots in the Portal area including Bob Rodriguez’s yard (Dave Jasper’s old yard) and the Jasper/Moisan feeders. Which is Dave Jasper’s new yard. Both of these yards are world famous birding hotspots. Birding tourism is a major income stream for Portal and numerous other feeder spots are in easy walking distance from the lodge. The locals don’t bat an eye when they see people with binoculars and spotting scopes walking up the street and looking in their yards.
Bob Rodriguez’s yard. I recognize the table holding a feeder as an old Craftsman table saw.
Our tour also took us to Paradise, AZ, about five miles and a half hour drive from Portal. At the turn of the 20th century, Paradise was a mining boom town with close to a thousand miners, stores, bars, and a red-light district. The mining lasted only a bit over a decade and the town was eventually mostly abandoned. Now the permanent population is somewhere under ten residents. But we did get an extremely rare white-eared hummingbird there, compliments of the George Walker House bird feeding station. And they rent rooms to birders.
We also did a trip to the Slaughter Ranch (San Bernardino Ranch), about 17 miles east of Douglas, AZ. A good nine of those miles are on rough dirt road. It’s named Slaughter Ranch for “Texas John” Slaughter, a legendary lawman that bought 65,000 acres in the 1880s. Two-thirds of the original ranch was south of the border with Mexico. The ranch buildings are now owned by the Johnson Historical Museum and most of the north of the border acreage is part of the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge. And, being right on the border, the border wall runs along the back of the ranch buildings. This part of the wall was built with louvers so the Border Patrol can drive along it and see through it into Mexico. The migrants have figured out that a motorcycle tire can be jammed into the louver. Then you stand on that tire and jam another one on top of it. You stand on the second tire and jam another one on top of that. Continuing to the top. Essentially we built a couple hundred miles of potential ladders over the border.
Slaughter Ranch with the see through border wall right behind it.
Birding wise, I would say we had a successful trip. We got around 80 species for the year. Lise and I both got some lifers. Not much time for photography when shuffling people in and out of tour buses, but the birding was good. In addition to birds we saw various insects, reptiles, and mammals that can live in a harsh environment.
Birds and other critters.
Gambel’s quail
One of the flycatchers
Mexican spotted owl
Curve-billed thrasher
The ubiquitous acorn woodpecker.
Desert firetail damselfly
Familiar bluet.
Some kind of lizard, out looking for a babe.
Some kind of chipmunk or ground squirrel.
Coati. These guys got some mean looking claws and an attitude. You don’t want to try petting one.
And we got some time in very different terrain than here in Indiana. Living east of the Mississippi one can get spoiled. You’re rarely far from a gas station or a good cup of dark roast coffee. It’s hard to comprehend the open spaces and the tough environment of a place like Portal. No Starbucks on every corner. It takes a special kind of person to live in a place like that. Someone with a sense of humor.
The Minions – lit up at night for your enjoyment.
Pony rides. On the way to Slaughter Ranch.
Chiricahua Mountains
Desert around Tucson
Somewhere out in the desert.
A cactus I liked.
While we were gone the groundhogs residing under my workshop dined quite well. The hostas by my workshop were nibbled into leafless stalks. Some garden plants were munched into non-existence. There was a hole where a pumpkin plant once resided. I sprayed the plants with a varmint repellant before we left. Apparently it served as Cajun seasoning to the groundhogs. Might be time to get serious on these guys.
Munched on pumpkin plants.
Hosta stalks.
In the weird wonders of wildlife category – a brown booby has shown up in a southern Indiana State Park pond. Brown boobies are tropical seabirds. Not sure how the pond at Spring Mill State Park could be mistaken for the Atlantic Ocean but I guess anything is possible. It seems quite happy there too. No sharks, salt free, and lots of bluegills easy to catch. Maybe that’s better than fighting tropical storms. Needless to say, birders and non-birders alike were flocking to see it.
Brown booby at Spring Mill State Park.
Widow skimmer at Spring Mill State Park.
Eastern pondhawk at Spring Mill State Park.
Ed's and Lise's Biggish Years 