September 4, 2020 Cave Creek Canyon Area

On this day we headed back to Cave Creek Canyon to look for the elegant trogon family. We spent the morning looking to no avail. We left a couple of times to go to other areas and came back and never could find them. As a result, I spent most of the day making tons of observations everywhere we went looking for new and/or interesting species.

The great thing about this area of Arizona is you never know what you will find. The first find of the day was a rattlesnake right near the parking area where we were loading up the car for the day.

While I didn't get any great photos of new species, I did find several new ones. These included a Virginia's warbler, a Mexican Chickadee, scarlet hedgenettle flowers and a blue fungus beetle.

The reason I find inaturalist so great and the reason we should always be taking photos of things we see is that my horrible OOF photos of the tiny warbler I saw turned out to be a Virginia's warbler which I had never seen before. I did get a better photo of the Mexican chickadee than is posted here but used this one to show the identifying marks better.

In addition, the knowledge of the inaturalist community is great because what I thought was a thread waisted wasp turned out to be an endemic bee fly to the AZ area--a Systropus arizonicus.

Finally, if you haven't been to SE Arizona, you might be interested to know that the white-tailed deer there are a subspecies called Coues deer--they are very small and a large male typically is no more than 5 feet tall, if that. I'm sharing a photo of a cute fawn we saw.

Posted on 13 de setembro de 2020, 09:39 PM by