By BILL DANIELSON
For The Recorder
During last week’s remarkable stretch of hot weather, I found myself reminiscing about time spent in places with extreme heat as the norm. The hottest place I’ve ever visited was Phoenix, Ariz. I was there to attend my brother’s wedding, and I remember walking off the airplane and experiencing 100-degree weather in April. That was an eye opener.
Another destination with extreme heat was Los Angeles, Calif., during the summer of 2015. That was a drought year and the sun beat down upon the landscape like a blacksmith’s hammer on a hot anvil. I remember getting out and seeing the results of a drought in an already arid region.
The plants were burned to a crisp and the soil was as dry and dusty as talcum powder.
I returned to Los Angeles this past summer to find a landscape that had largely recovered from that prolonged dry period, and when I retraced the steps of my previous visit, found the world transformed.
Where once there had been dry and crispy leaves on the trees, there was lush green foliage and there were even flowers blooming here and there. I also crossed paths with a beautiful bird that you may be completely unaware of.
Here in the eastern United States, we have a delightfully perky little bird called the eastern phoebe (Sayornis phoebe). I’ve written about this species many times, and every spring I dedicate a page to this bird’s migratory arrival on my website.
The eastern phoebe’s breeding range stretches from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia south to Georgia and Texas. If you’ve ever traveled the eastern United States, you’ve probably encountered an eastern phoebe.
Move just a little further to the west, however, and you cross a border as meaningful in the natural world as our state boundaries are in the sociopolitical world.
Suddenly, you leave the range of the eastern phoebe and find yourself entering the range of the black phoebe (S. nigricans). This species can be found from Mexico and west Texas into the southern portions of New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California.
I feel as though there is a memory of seeing a black phoebe in Phoenix back when I attended my brother’s wedding, but that was so long ago, I don’t appear to have any written evidence.
I didn’t start my obsessive note keeping until I started writing my column in 1997, and my brother’s wedding was in 1996. Too bad!
I do have written and photographic evidence for my first sighting of a black phoebe in California, dating back to 2008. That trip was so long ago that the photographs I took were all stored on 35mm film, if you can remember such a thing. When I returned to Los Angeles this past August, I was armed with a digital camera and that new lens I’ve mentioned in recent columns. The photos were much better.
The same basic size as an eastern phoebe, the black phoebe seems to live a very similar lifestyle as well. Found in areas near water — presumably where flying insects are plentiful — the black phoebe is an aerial hunter that uses the “hawking” technique. This involves finding an exposed perch and waiting for a suitable target to come within range before flying out to snatch it from the air.
The nest is made of mud and can actually be stuck to the side of a vertical wall. The eggs are white — the normal clutch is three to six, and the fledging age starts at about 14 days — all pretty much identical to the eastern phoebe. The plumage, however, is quite different. Where the eastern phoebe wears gray feathers, the black phoebe is dressed in black. The only other color is white, which is found on the lower belly.
My best photo of a black phoebe was that of a young bird. As with the eastern phoebe, youngsters have brown margins on the feathers of their wings, and the bird in my photograph shows those bars and a set of feathers that are ever so slightly ragged and charcoal gray in color. An adult would be crisper in appearance and jet-black.
By the time you read this column, our weather may have returned to something more reasonable for the season. I hope this will end the lull that we’ve all been experiencing at our feeders. We need some rain, and if it comes, I expect an explosion of mushrooms to appear. I’ll have my camera ready.