Day 2—Patagonia Lake State Park, Paton's Yard

Friday, April 20, 2018

We were on the road by 4:00, wanting to get to Patagonia and our birding site by sunrise. Passing the Stage Stop Inn, in the tiny cowboy town of Patagonia, we continued on to Patagonia Lake State Park.

The quail on this welcome sign are Montezuma Quail,
a bird of the higher elevations that we hoped to see,
but these birds are secretive and we saw nary a one.

Water is a precious commodity in the Sonoran Desert. Patagonia Lake, a man-made reservoir southwest of the town of Patagonia, was created by damming Sonoita Creek. The lake was constructed in the late 1960s by a group of citizens incorporated as the Lake Patagonia Recreation Association, Inc. (LPRA). They thought the 2.5 mile lake would be a good place for sailing and racing, so also built a tall humped bridge under which their sailboats could pass to dock. But, the wind was wrong and the venture failed. Eventually (1974), the lake, its recreational facilities, and surrounding land were sold to the state and Patagonia Lake State Park was born.

As it happened, we arrived at the lake  just before a group was led on a bird walk. We happily joined the group, each of us introducing ourselves and telling where we were from, There were birders from Wyoming, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Minnesota, etc. The group was pretty large and there were three leaders, so after awhile it split, and we found ourselves on a private guided tour with volunteer Carol Bylsma from Oregon. Carol later confessed that she did not like such big groups as they frightened the birds, so had deliberately hung back. Carol was an excellent birder and had a good ear, so we would often stand or sit for a length of time before the bird she’d heard appeared. Later in our birding adventure we called this waiting period a “Carol,” as in “Let’s do a Carol.”

Desert willow thickets and sandy trails became very familiar to us before our trip came to an end.

Some of the terrain we walked around the lake.The stream middle right is Sonoita Creek.
Because the area is open range we had to be careful where we stepped

At Patagonia Lake we saw Hammond’s Flycatcher (1),  Western Wood Pewee (2), many American Coots, Mallards, a small group of White-faced Ibis, one of which caught and ate a frog, its hind legs hanging from its bill; and scads of Rough-winged and Violet Green Swallows (3), Cinnamon Teal, Neotropical and Double-crested Cormorants, and many Lesser Goldfinch(4). Along Sonoita Creek we saw a Western Tanager(5), and the place was alive with Vermilion Flycatchers (6). On the guided walk we were shown the place where a Violet-crowned Hummingbird sat on her nest. She was difficult to see behind hanging seedpods and branches. Deb could never get on her, and so many people crowded around talking and trying to spot the bird that Carol led us away from the nest. The photo of the nesting violet-crowned at right is from the Internet.

I discovered that it was more difficult than I thought to replace Internet photos with Deb's so rather than laying out the blog again, see below Deb's photos of some of the birds above:

Hammond's Flycatcher c Deb Hirt

Violet-green Swallow c Deb Hirt

Western Tanager c Deb Hirt

Vermilion Flycatcher c Deb Hirt

My photo of some Rough-winged Swallows taking a break. There were so many that at times they looked like insects.

Female Phainopepla c Deb Hirt

Before leaving the lake, I realized that I'd left my i-phone charging cord in Tucson, so we were blind without directions from our AI. Fortunately, Carol volunteered to charge my cell back at the visitor’s center. This she did, and I met her husband, Paul, who gave me directions to Sonoita Creek Preserve, signed us up for a Sunday boat birding tour of the lake, and charged my phone while Deb and I ventured across the tall humped sailboat bridge—me timidly because of my acrophobia—to hunt down a Phainopepla, a black, long-tailed berry eater with red eyes and a crest; the female a dull greyish brown version. We found several phainopeplas dining on mistletoe berries. Soon they would dine on-ripe elderberries, another of their favorites. Deb got a distant shot of a female Phainopepla in the top of a tree, its crest blowing in the wind (above), and good photos of male and female Vermilion Flycatchers (See male above).

The tall humped bridge created by the original developers to allow sailboats to pass under and dock

After leaving Patagonia Lake, we drove to Nogales to a Quick Trip to buy a charging cord. Then we drove back to the small cowboy-style town of Patagonia where we checked into the Stage Stop Inn.

I had been in touch with Susan Wethington, the principal investigator on the 2006 Ecuador Cloud Forest Earthwatch Expedition I had attended. At that time, Susan was studying the Esmeraldas Woodstar, a tiny hummingbird found only in Ecuador. Stateside, Susan had founded The Hummingbird Monitoring Network and she lived in Patagonia. When I emailed that I was in town, she replied that she was working in the mountains but would be back Sunday afternoon. Would we like to visit her yard on Monday where she and a group were monitoring hummingbirds? Of course we would. So we extended what was to be a one night stay to three. We were still paying a nightly fee for our Tucson Airbnb and the StageStop Inn room rate was $139 plus tax a night, so this was an added expense, but then . . . it's only money and you only live once.

.

Our room, on the ground floor opposite the pool and cattycorner to the Inn’s restaurant, was fine but we visited it only briefly to unload our baggage. Immediately after checking in we drove to the nearby Nature Conservancy Patagonia-Sonoita Creek Preserve, but arrived only half an hour before closing so did not pay the fee to bird this preserve. Next we drove a couple of miles down the road to Paton’s Yard, which was open and asked only for donations for bird food.

Rivoli's Hummingbird c Deb Hirt

Anna's Hummingbird c Deb Hirt

Patagonia’s Paton’s Yard is famous in birding circles and here we got great looks at Broad billed, Violet-crowned, Rivoli's (formerly Magnificent), Black-chinned, and Anna's Hummingbirds. Particularly abundant were Broad-billed Hummingbirds. At Paton’s there were also Gambel's Quail with their bobbing topknots, White-winged Doves, Inca Doves, Green-tailed Towhees, Abert's Towhees, Least Goldfinch, and Black-headed Grosbeaks, Pyrrhuloxia, and several others I cannot now remember. This was a free and easy way to see many birds and we vowed to visit Paton’s every day.

Violet-crowned Hummingbird c Deb Hirt

Birders at Paton's yard enjoying a look at a Lazuli Bunting (Internet)

Dinner was a joke. Back at the Stage Stop, I walked a block to the Patagonia Market and bought two potpies to microwave for my dinners, as well as some cups in which to cook my oatmeal in the micro. Got back to the room to find that we had no micro. Returned to the store and returned the cups, heated up a potpie in the store micro, and carried it back to the room only to realize that I had no eating utensils. Ack! Deb ate half a pound of cheese and some nacho chips and salsa for dinner, so I managed to eat the pie using a couple of Deb’s nacho chips as a spoon. Next morning I heated water in the small coffeemaker so that I could prepare my usual cup (one of the paper coffee cups) of oatmeal, dried cranberries, and sliced almonds, which I managed to water down sufficiently to drink.