Some Call it Seredipity...
Others Call It Luck
By Mike & Cecil WilliamsOne week before our trip to our “real” home in Portal Arizona, we received many emails form friends and rare bird alerts about a Tufted Flycatcher (whatever that is) in the Portal area of SE Arizona. (For those of you that don’t know this is one of the top 5 birding spots in the US. It is close to the Mexico border and vagrants came over into the Arizona Mountains to escape the heat and dry of Mexico.)
The Tufted Flycatcher inhabits mountain evergreen and pine-oak woodlands in Mexico and as far south as South America. It is a small flycatcher, similar in size to the Empidonax flycatchers, with a spiky crest. The first US sighting was in Big Bend, TX in 11/3/1991. The current sighting is one of the handful ever in the US.
We were very excited, but didn’t really expect to see the bird. These very rare vagrants often seem to stay just 3-5 days. We arrived late Sunday and got up early Monday to look for it. We looked, we looked, and we looked. No luck. The wind picked up and was not blowing so hard the bird might be back in Mexico. There were no reports from anyone seeing the Flycatcher on Monday. Tuesday morning it’s even windier. We didn’t even bother to go out.
We got a phone call at 12:30 pm. “The Fufted Tycatcher is there” yelled Jackie Lewis, a very excited local birder and owner of a fantastic birder’s B&B. “Hurry, hurry, here are the directions…” We went up the mountain road to about 6500 feet elevation.
It was there! What a wonderful LIFE bird. It looks just like you crossed an Oak Titmouse with an empidonax flycatcher and colored it like a Rufous Hummingbird or a Cinnamon Teal. The crest stayed up all the time and was bright cinnamon. Breast was the same color in softer tones.
Thanks to Jackie Lewis and other that directed her and us to the bird. Birding is such a fun sport, especially when people are so helpful. And it sure helps to be lucky!