How I Taught Myself About Desert Birds

This is the first in a series of posts on bird watching.

When I moved to Tucson in 1989, I literally knew almost nothing about birds. I had spent most of my adult life in New York City, where the birds I saw were mostly pigeons and sparrows. (I have since learned that Central Park is an excellent spot for birding, but I was not tuned in to that when I lived there.)

When I moved into my small townhouse with real trees and a view of the mountains, I was thrilled to see something outside other than trucks or vagrants urinating in the alley. As I sat glued to the window, one of the first things that caught my attention was a black-and-white striped bird on the trunk of my young tangelo tree.

  White-winged dove and Gila woodpecker on saguaro blossoms.

I soon learned that the “black and white striped” bird was a Gila woodpecker, one of the most common desert birds. I put up a couple of hummingbird feeders, and soon was obsessed with watching these tiny jewels. In a previous post I described how I gradually learned to tell hummingbird species apart as I added more feeders and more and more hums came to sip from them.

To study the hummers, I sat on my back patio for an hour or two every day with a pair of opera glasses and several books I’d found on hummingbirds. I eventually bought a better pair of binocs and branched out to observing other birds. Because my office window looked directly out on the yard, I was able to see a lot of birds that I didn’t know, but was able to identify with the help of photographs and bird books.

This picture of a kestrel, eating a dove it had killed, was shot through my office window. It took me a while with some bird books to figure out what it was.

To attract more birds, I put up more types of feeders—seed feeders and a suet feeder. I put a tiny pond in my yard. More birds came, and I began to learn about mockingbirds, curve-billed thrashers, and Gamble’s quail. I bought more bird books, and read as much as I could. After a year or so, I knew a lot—about a small number of birds. It was time to branch out.

Next: Bird Watcher or Birder?

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