Yesterday, I finished my field work in southern Arizona on black-chinned hummingbirds. While I may not have filmed/captured as many hummingbirds as I was originally hoping, I was able to get some great data and will hopefully be back next year to finish up my work on the species. Now I am at home, for a few days, before I travel to South Carolina to visit my mom and attend a family reunion! After that I will be doing more fieldwork in Flagstaff, on broad-tailed hummingbirds, which I had great success with last year. So, lots of fun and exciting things to talk about here in the future! For now, here are some interesting things I saw during my time in Southern Arizona.
Here is a really cool stick insect I saw that blended in perfectly with the grass.
I always love looking into flowers while I’m hiking, because I’m likely to find a bee, like this one, enjoying herself some pollen and/or nectar.
This isn’t a hummingbird?? Gila woodpeckers were common visitors to hummingbird feeders, though they often become pests, because they would either tip over the feeder or destroy it by drilling their own holes.
Here is a family of Coati, which was a really fun find. The baby was quite adorable, but its watchful parents never took their eyes off me.
Pronghorn are, with help, making a great comeback in southern Arizona, especially in the area I was in.
Roadrunners are always interesting birds to see, but this was a really cool find. This individual has a mouse it recently caught in its beak, which it stopped to show me before it ran way.
The summer tanager, another colorful bird you can find in Arizona.
Here is another flower-bee picture, but I was told this bee is a bumblebee worker (thank you Meghan!)
When I sat down to rest during a hummingbird scouting trip, I noticed that I was sitting next to this web with two spiders in it. I sat there and watched them for a while, and tried to feed them some juicy flies that kept landing on me.
