February 20 - The Thrasher Spot

I was up and going early.  Claire and Bob and I went out to breakfast at the Essence Bakery Café on Indian School Road.  What a great place!  I highly recommend stopping here. 

Photo shamelessly stolen from Frank on Foursquare

Taking my leave of “the Cousins”, Gilles, and finishing my coffee, I headed west on Interstate 10 toward Tonopah, then turned south past the Palo Verde Nuclear Plant in Wintersburg.  This is the largest nuclear plant in the United States, and is unusual in that it has no ‘natural’ water source to cool the reactors.  Instead, the cooling water is supplied from the treated sewage of Phoenix and surrounding communities!

There is an eBird “hotspot” on the Salome Highway at Baseline Road called the “Thrasher Spot”.  This place is famous in the U.S. for seeing the Le Conte's Thrasher.  It is open desert habitat with saltbush, and some mesquite and paloverde trees.  The site is purportedly excellent for viewing the Le Conte's and other thrashers, as well as other common desert birds.

Desert Habitat

As I started out, another birder, Julie Michael stopped to search for the thrashers.  We angled west and south of the intersection, and immediately found a flock of Sagebrush Sparrows.

After discussing how other birders had described the LeConte’s being so secretive, I saw a pale thrasher in front of an Atriplex bush.

Whoot!  I called Julie over and we watched a pair of LeConte’s Thrashers running through the desert before disappearing into the bushes.

Giving us "the tail" . . .

We continued out into the desert scrub, hoping to find a Bell’s Sparrow mixed in with the Sagebrush Sparrows.  The Cornell Lab of Ornithology notes that:

Taxonomy can be confusing, even for the experts. In the nineteenth century all the “sage” sparrows from the Rocky Mountains west to the Pacific Coast were known as Bell’s Sparrow, although ornithologists noted there were several regional forms. By 1910 they had split Bell’s Sparrow into the two distinct species we know today, but a revision in 1957 lumped them together as the Sage Sparrow. In 2013 they were split back into two species, now known as the Sagebrush Sparrow and Bell’s Sparrow.

The Bell’s has a much more distinctive and pronounced malar stripe (‘mustache’), and no streaking on its back.  Greg Gillson has a good web page for identifying "Sage Sparrows".  I saw several with fairly distinctive malars but light-to-moderate streaks on the back, and eBirded those as “Sagebrush/Bell’s Sparrow”, along with those I didn’t get a view of.

Sagebrush Sparrow - Artemisiospiza nevadensis

We saw and heard a distant Bendire’s Thrasher, sorted through the “Sage” sparrows, finding one that had an unstreaked back and a very dark mustache, that I eBirded as a Bell’s.  There was a flock of White-crowned Sparrows, and I heard the fussing call of gnatcatchers, and saw a few Verdins.  We then found another LeConte’s Thrasher that popped up to the west.

LeConte's Thrashers have nice, long, decurved bills

It was after noon that I decided to stop wandering through the desert and continue my route to the west.

Desert Globemallow - Sphaeralcea ambigua

The Thrasher Spot eBird Checklist is Here