Global Bird Day Count: Pinal Mountains, Tonto National Forest, Gila County, AZ

Saturday, May 14th
Just blogging enough to be on record as having participated in Cornell's EBIRD GLOBAL BIG DAY of counting that started in the Southern Hemisphere and rolled around to Arizona in the early morning hours today. Most of the birders in my team awoke in the wee hours to drive east to the Globe area by our start time.

Ten of us in three cars set out at 6:30 a.m. on the 20-mile road up Pinal Mountain to its peak of 7800 feet. Dave Pearson (ASU) in Car #1 and Mark Ochs in Car#3 were our leaders; Laura Ellis and I were riding with Susan Fishburn in Car #2.

Temperatures were comfortable on the mountain and while we would not quite reach Dr. Pearson's "Century Count" goal - he was only a few birds shy. In such good company, I managed to observe 90 species in seven hours including nine FOY birds: 
HAIRY WOODPECKER
OLIVE-SIDED FLYCATCHER
GREATER PEWEE
CORDILLERAN FLYCATCHER
MOUNTAIN CHICKADEE
RED-BREASTED NUTHATCH
VIRGINIA’S WARBLER
GRACE’S WARBLER
RED-FACED WARBLER


Photographing birds in a forest is not high on my skill set. The only "keeper" I have to show is a nifty bird that sat perched and singing in the distance for several minutes. The phonetic text for its song is:  "ho-sa, ma-re-ah".

Greater Pewee with its lower orange mandible showing well as it sings
Many of our birder friends were covering other territories throughout the state. When Cornell releases stats from its data base, I'll log it in here. For me, personally, it was a very good day of birding in the field!

Cornell's Lab of Ornithology has provided this information about the GLOBAL BIG DAY:

More than 15,000 birders around the world recorded more species in one day than ever before.  Total number of participants: 15,953 from 145 countries.

TOTAL SPECIES OBSERVED AND POSTED TO EBIRD:  6,263.  
(of which I contributed 89!)  There are approximately 10,000 birds in the world.



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