Western Bluebirds converge on something especially tasty at Catalina State Park.

Not a lot.

But this time of year in Tucson always reminds me of my years in northern Germany, when among the welcome sights brightening the darkening days was the arrival of the thrushes: Redwings, Mistle Thrushes, Fieldfares joined the Blackbirds and Song Thrushes, making up slightly for passing of summer.

Here in Arizona, we’re watching for a different suite of turdids, of course. It’s shaping up to be a good winter for bluebirds, I suspect, and Rufous-backed Robins are already installed at several heavily laden pyracantha bushes from Phoenix to the Sonoran border.

Yesterday morning I stood at the back of the regular Friday birdwalk in Catalina State Park, admiring with everyone else the half a dozen Western Bluebirds feeding beneath the hackberries. And then a larger thrush appeared in the sky; my mouth faster than what remains of my brain, I called it before I put my binoculars up–then quickly corrected my error. It was a male Varied Thrush, wing stripes flashing and breast band and eyestripe easily visible as it passed just over the trees. We held our breath but it just kept going, no doubt to ornament some over-watered yard in Oro Valley.

Varied Thrush is a regular low-density wintering bird over most of Arizona, but I can’t get enough of them. Maybe this one will come back to the hackberries tomorrow, when I’ll be looking for it again.

Oh, and Varied Thrush is also something Arizona and Europe have in common–though it’s a little more frequent here than there.

At first glance, I suppose, just your standard breathtakingly beautiful Red-naped Sapsucker, like any other of the dozens and hundreds in the Sonoran Desert this time of year.

But the red on the lower breast and throat is awfully extensive, and the black behind the eye is smudged with bright red “cockades.” Interestingly enough, big Sibley shows such patches in the illustration of male Red-naped Sapsucker, but the hybrid index in Johnson and Johnson’s “Speciation II” doesn’t seem to show any auricular red until you get down (or up, depending on what you’re hoping for!) to Category 7, almost halfway between “typical” Red-naped and “typical” Red-breasted.

Taking the view from eternity, it doesn’t much matter whether this fine bird is “pure” or not, but he does offer the reminder that things and their labels don’t always perfectly match up. Is he an erythristic Red-naped, a melanistic Red-breasted, a hybrid, an introgressant? Watch this video and see whether you really care.

This weekend has amply confirmed our wisdom, with great Sage Sparrows yesterday and a big surprise this afternoon. Darlene sent a note around about a Slate-colored Fox-Sparrow at a seed pile in the middle of a shopping center parking lot just up Oracle Road from us. So I threw the puppy in the car and headed up there.

The store staff had already taken the feeders in and gone home, but a small gang of Mourning Doves was still gleaning millet from under the petunias–along with the sparrow.

Slate-colored is the most common of the fox-sparrows in southeast Arizona, which is not to say that it’s anything like common. And near as I can remember, this was my first Passerella of any flavor in a Safeway parking lot!

The resident birds aren’t bad, either. This was one of eight Burrowing Owls we ran across in the course of the day.

But it’s the new arrivals that quicken the heart. Sage Sparrows are uncommon anywhere in southeast Arizona, so a count of 15 or more was a very happy surprise.

The birds were remarkably shy, probably in part the result of the constant presence of American Kestrels and Loggerhead Shrikes. But patience gave us some fine views of the sparrows, and watching them I learned a lot about  bird I really don’t know that well. I was impressed with how sturdy their flight notes are, almost junco-like in pitch and insistence. I knew about the typical Amphispiza tail flicking (a great way to pick them out when they perch high in the saltbush they favor), but I hadn’t known, or at least hadn’t remembered, how expressive that long, narrow tail is in flight. And it was great fun to watch them drop from a low perch to hit the ground running, like tiny thrashers or roadrunners.

The day’s other exciting arrival was Mountain Bluebird. We’d run across a few Western Bluebirds in pecan groves along the way, but true to form, the half dozen Mountain Bluebirds we saw, all females, were out in the bleakest of harvested and disked cottonfields.

They’ve been scarce so far this autumn, but perhaps these few individuals–and the other scattered birds reported over the past week–are the vanguard of an invastion. We’re due, after a couple of winters without these lovely, gentle little chats.

I left the house this morning in coat and gloves and hat, and still shivered when I stepped out of the car at Catalina State Park. But soon enough the sun crested the high Catalinas to the east, and with the other participants in the Friday morning walk, I shed my outer layers to soak up some welcome warmth.

We weren’t alone. A Greater Roadrunner emerged from the desert forest to seek a sunny spot, where it raised its back feathers to expose dark down and skin to the rays.

If you click on the photo, you’ll go to a video demonstrating just how bold this creature can be in its search for the sunniest possible spot–which this morning, apparently, was the spot we were standing on!

This pretty Wilson’s Snipe (well, all right, I admit it–I never identify snipe rigorously, so it could be just about any Gallinago!) was on the Evergreen Sod Farm last weekend. This is not an uncommon species by any means around Tucson, but a view like this provided happy consolation for missing Mountain Plover.

Yellow-headed Blackbird. Arizona, October

Yellow-headed Blackbirds are abundant and conspicuous winter residents of pastures, fields, and feedlots here in southeast Arizona–so common that a few minutes’ observation will give you plenty of views from angles you might perhaps have preferred to do without.

This first-basic male Yellow-headed Blackbird (note the blackish body plumage and the tiny white square at the base of the primaries) is readying himself to drink, in the process revealing the patch of yellow feathers surrounding the cloaca. This “anal circlet” (Twedt and Crawford’s kind of unfortunate term in BNA) surprises many birders when they see it for the first time–as it did me lo-these-many ago.

Yellow-heads are commonest in the West, of course, but this is a good time of year to be looking for vagrant individuals across the entire continent. There were three in coastal Georgia a couple of weeks ago, for example, and any big flock of Red-winged Blackbirds or Common Grackles is worth a look.

A common and familiar North American bird showing a field mark many birders don’t know. Whadday think?

Falcons are always good out on the flats, and today we found numerous American Kestrels, an adult Peregrine Falcon, and three Prairie Falcons.

It’s a tough life for the Vesper Sparrows, Horned Larks, and Lark Buntings that winter out there.

Northern Harriers were already present in good numbers, including a single silver male. One of the scarcest and consequently most sought-after Flats winterers, a White-tailed Kite surprised us at Red Rock on our return.

The season’s first Ferruginous Hawk was this pole-perched beauty just north of Marana.

These magnificent birds will become more common–but never common–over the next few weeks, as numbers of Red-tailed Hawks increase too. This afternoon, we found a dramatic black adult and three intermediate-morph birds among our Red-tails.

The great prize among the buteos, though, is this bird, Harlan’s Hawk.

Rare at best in the state, this boldly marked juvenile Harlan’s was a pleasant surprise on a warm fall’s afternoon. If recent experience has any predictive force, we’re likely to see a few more of these wild visitors from Alaska over the course of the coming winter, but Harlan’s is never expected and always greatly appreciated when it drifts southwest to grace the agricultural fields of southeast Arizona.