Migratory birds don’t have a lot of good places to stop in Arizona when they’re heading south in the fall.
Whether they intend to ride out the winter or continue to points farther south, our feathered friends need landing spots with food and water to sustain their energy. So, most of our state looks pretty unappealing from a bird’s eye view.
This is why Greater Prescott, with its cluster of lakes in the high desert and inviting canopies of trees, is a magnet for birds — and birdwatchers.
The Prescott area has enough avian aficionados to support an active Audubon chapter and The Lookout, a Hallmark store that also sells locally customized birdseed blends, field guides and optical equipment like binoculars to bring the wild winged beauties up close and personal. Both are excellent resources for anyone who wants to learn more about the area’s always dynamic bird population and how to watch it from a safe distance.
Hatching your hobby
Lookout owner Eric Moore says it’s best for fledgling birders to begin their exploration of birds by flocking with more experienced birdwatchers, rather than venturing out alone.
“If you’ve never really done a lot of birdwatching and were to go to someplace like Willow Lake or Watson Lake by yourself, you’d see a lot of birds but wouldn’t necessarily know what they are, especially in wintertime when their plumage is sometimes different from summer,” he says.
His store offers weekly guided bird walks, which fill up quickly as they’re capped at 12 participants.
Laura Rhoden, a member and former board member of Prescott Audubon Society, agrees. The group offers free walks through Watson Woods the first Saturday of most months, which can draw up to 30 people.
“You don’t have to sign up, you can just show up at will, and it’s a way for people to dip their toes in, and we lend out binoculars,” she says. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, if you don’t know a towhee (bird) from this or that, then forget it.’ We try to be very welcoming and say the only difference between an experienced birder and an inexperienced birder is the experienced one makes more mistakes.”
Web-footed world
Typical fall/winter populations in Greater Prescott include dozens of waterfowl species mostly wintering from Canada or the far northern U.S., Moore says. “We’ll have many, many varieties of ducks — pintails, gadwalls, shovelers, buffleheads. We’ll have things like mergansers, maybe some grebes, there’s going to be ruddy ducks and of course mallards, ringneck ducks.
“There’s going to be so many different varieties of wintering waterfowl,” he says, also including geese, herons and coots. Many more types of birds also touched down here during August and September, ranging from sparrows to harriers, peregrine falcons and bald eagles.
There’s also the excitement of the unexpected if someone gets blown off-course. The eBird app is used by birders at all levels to record their findings, which can set off a small stampede, depending on who sees it, Rhoden says: “There are some people who, when they see a rare bird alert, they’re in their car, ready to go look at it. And there’s other people who say ‘Yeah, it would be nice to see that if it’s there in the next day or two,’ which it never is.”
Getting carried away
About 200 bird species are regularly seen in Prescott over the course of a year, Moore says, with about 100 of them present at any point. Major transitions come around March/April and August/September. In spring, Prescott and the Central Highlands become the “north” for birds coming from the tropics to feed on nectar and flowers rather than seeds — hummingbirds, warblers, vireos, tanagers, orioles and grosbeaks.
It’s easy to get involved in birding as a year-round activity, particularly with Audubon, which has a monthly speaker series, frequent field trips, chances to help with bird surveys and even relocating burrowing owls pushed out of the Phoenix area’s desert by construction.
To learn much more about birdwatching, visit Prescott Audubon Society at www.prescottaudubon.org and The Lookout at www.thelookoutaz.com. See the American Birding Association’s Code of Birding Ethics at:
www.aba.org/aba-code-of-birding-ethics.
