Last January 23, I reported Gilded Flicker as number 143 for the year. But after thinking it over, I realized I did not get a god enough look at it to eliminate the possibility of a hybrid with Northern Flicker. I need to get a good Gilded somewhere in or around Tucson.
I also need Barn Owl. I discovered that for two weeks in a row the field trip at Canoa Ranch Conservation Park in or near Green Valley had seen Barn Owl. They must know where one roosts. So I teamed up with my good birding buddy Joy in Green Valley to go on the Saturday field trip and then go search for the flicker.
On my way over to Green Valley I stopped in at Santa Rita Lodge in Madera Canyon to watch the feeders for awhile. Not much was happening until a certain bird caught my eye, one I had been looking for but had never seen, that I could think of:
Both birds are the same species but look how different they appear. The one on the right is the black-backed or Texas subspecies, psaltria, rarely seen around here. It’s hard to find birders interested in subspecies but we should be, it’s another layer of ID that takes you that much deeper. I like how the common green-backed subspecies just happens to be on the same feeder at the right time for comparison.
So Friday afternoon we scoped out the Canoa Ranch to see if we could find our own Barn Owl. Instead we fortuitously ran into Brian Nicholas, who leads the weekly walk here, who told us the owl wasn’t there yesterday and that it was unlikely they would search for it tomorrow, but he knew of another one and gave us directions. Saturday those directions took us to a certain train trestle where we looked up but saw no owl. The train action was good though, one west-bound freight and one east-bound Amtrak. From there we went up to Saguaro National Park – East for the flicker.
Our system was to stop at all the pullouts and scan the saguaros. At the first stop we found a distant flicker perched atop a cactus. It looked good. “Get your scope,” I directed Joy. Out came this clankety old device manufactured some time around the fall of the Roman Empire. “Where’s the zoom?”, I urgently pleaded. “There is no zoom”, came the somber reply. No zoom?!?!?! No zoom. Just because I could identify this bird with a zoom doesn’t mean I was disturbed. No, that’s ok, there are bound to be other Gilded Flickers much closer.
We continued on, stopping and scanning, stopping and scanning, for the whole length of the park drive. We heard some flickers, saw a few more, but nothing close enough to allow me to be certain. I didn’t come all this way to say: “close enough.” I missed Gilded Flicker all for the love of my spotting scope, you know, the one with the 60X zoom, that I forgot! I still have time. We are now early in the fourth quarter so there is plenty of time. Steady, my boy. I’ll just have to go back, bring my scope, and find Gilded Flicker.
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