The Annual Tubac HawkWatch at Ron Morriss Park was a resounding success based on participation, birds counted, visitors, and general festivity. As it has been since its inception, the hawk counting was led by our own Peter Collins. He has help from various hawk counters over the month, both local and visitor. All of our counts are daily reported to HawkCount, a website for adding our counts to the Hawk Migration Association of North America's Raptor Migration Database.
This year Peter was approached by HawkWatch International to put the Tubac HawkWatch on their list of sites. They asked to increase the counting at the site from just the month of March, to Feb 15 through April 30. To help with that expansion, HawkWatch International assigned us two of their paid counters for the duration. Bob Baez and Harrison DuBois were the assigned counters and they were seen at the site with Peter almost every day.
This summary will be over the full count of 76 days rather than the 31 days of the previous years. As the longer count will be the normal system for the future, I included the number of days in the count in the summary charts.
The count in 2024 had a total of 4397 raptors. If we look at just the month of March, we had 639 less raptors. The raptors that had the greatest increase in numbers outside of March were, Turkey Vulture – 266, Red-tailed Hawk – 104, and Swainson’s Hawk – 88. We expect this with the Swainson’s as they are later in the migration. The interesting number was with the Broad-winged Hawk where all 30 were spotted only in the month of April. A Ferruginous Hawk showed up in early April, but this was not the first visit to the HawkWatch. They were spotted only in the first three years of our counts.
We had a new raptor reported this year, the Swallow-tailed Kite, which showed up on April 27.
The star of our HawkWatch is the Common Black Hawk. We counted 487, which was the third highest count over all of the years we have been counting. Interestingly, the 3 highest counts were the last 3 years. Are the Common Black Hawks that migrate through our flyway having more success raising young? Further counting at our site may tell.
The raptors with new high counts in 2024 were:
Our HawkFest Celebration day was March 16th and it was the most attended day of the watch with around 250 people. We had speakers, a raffle, and activities, and for 5 days we had 5 optic representatives, Tucson Audubon, and HawkWatch International at various tents in the park. It was a very festive atmosphere. Next year promises to be even better.
Mikey
FOUR YEAR CHART BELOW
I was recently asked by someone "how can I help the birds?" While it is sometimes easy to feel helpless, there is so much you can do!! Here are some tips:
- Vote for and support people and organizations who will fight climate change. Climate change is the number one existential threat for not just birds, but all living things, including us.
- Support bird conservation organizations at the local, state, and national levels.
- Keep cats indoors and learn how to protect birds from window strikes.
- Educate yourself about birds, as well as the healing and wellness power of birds and nature so you can educate others.
- Participate in HawkWatch, Citizen Science, such as Project FeederWatch and eBird so scientists can learn more about how birds are doing and what they need.
- Create a bird sanctuary in your own yard with native plantings to help resident, migrating, wintering, and breeding bird species.
- Feed the birds and learn best bird feeding practices to successfully attract the most birds and keep them safe.
- Mentor someone and help them learn about birds, including kids!!
Wednesday | May 15 | 6-10pm
Playground Bar & Lounge
ADMISSION: $65
SONORAN SUSTAINERS: $50
(Sustainers, check for an email with promo code)
Includes entry, food & 2 drink tickets
Enjoy and evening of music and dancing with DJ Xochique
while supporting the critical work Sonoran Institute
does in the Colorado River Basin.
Playground Bar and Lounge
278 E Congress St, TUCSON
Do not run. Running into a large predator in the wilderness will instantly trigger your fight-or-flight instincts. Follow the former; do not ever turn and run from a cougar. This is certain to trigger the cat’s predator response — they almost universally take prey by chasing and attacking from behind.
Look big. Make yourself look bigger to the cat. Open your jacket, raise your arms and spread your legs, and face the lion at all times. If you have trek poles or any objects handy, wave them around — and be prepared to use them to defend yourself.
Make noise. Speak loudly, and make as much noise as possible. There are plenty of anecdotes of people scaring away mountain lions with loud music (Metallica, in particular) played from a speaker or smartphone.
Maintain eye contact. You may have been told that staring down an animal is considered a challenge that could invite an attack — especially with dogs — but, in this case, maintaining eye contact with the lion is a best practice.
Stand your ground. If the lion challenges you by approaching from a distance, stand your ground. To the lion, only prey animals retreat. Lions don’t recognize a standing human as a typical prey animal. Standing your ground reinforces this fact.
Do everything to fight back. Adult male lions weigh 135 to 175 pounds, while females weigh between 90 and 105 pounds. These are powerful creatures with sharp claws and strong bites, but they aren’t insurmountable — and, if you’re attacked, there’s nothing better to do than to fight back. Mountain lions usually attack the head and neck; do your best to protect these areas by remaining upright and facing the cat during the attack. Use any weapon available to you. A sharp crack to the skull with a rock, or a blow to the body with a pocket knife or any other sharp implement, could be enough to end the attack.
If you see a mountain lion near any area frequented by people, immediately contact your local authorities. If you’re near a state park or forest, contact park officials or your state’s Department of Wildlife. If no contact information for rangers or DNR services are available, or if you see a lion near an urban area, contact your local sheriff’s office or police department — they’ll either respond directly, or contact the appropriate wildlife service.
While adults might be spending the weekend trying to remember where they have hidden a hoard of Easter eggs, the black-capped chickadee has no trouble recalling where its treats are stashed. Now researchers have discovered why: the diminutive birds create a barcode-like memory each time they stash food.
Black-capped chickadees are known for tucking food away during the warmer months – with some estimates suggesting a single bird can hide up to 500,000 food itemsa year. But more remarkable still is their reliability in finding the morsels again.
Now researchers say they have unpicked the mechanism behind the feat. Writing in the journal Cell scientists in the US report how they gave chickadees sporadic access to sunflower seeds within an arena featuring more than 120 locations where food could be stashed.
The behaviour of the birds and the activity at each cache site – be it the storage of food, retrieval of food or checks on a stash – were recorded on video.
The team used an implanted probe in the brain of each bird to record the activity of neurons in its hippocampus – a brain structure crucial for memory formation.
The results show that each time a bird stashed seeds, even if it was in the same location, a different combination of neurons fired in its hippocampus, resulting in a barcode-like pattern of activity.
The same “barcode” was observed when the morsel was retrieved as for when it was cached.
The barcodes were distinct from place cells – neurons in the hippocampus known to be involved in the formation of memories involving specific locations. “The two overlapped randomly so that neurons could be neither, either, or both,” said Dr Selmaan Chettih of Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute, first author of the study.
Indeed while place cell activity occurred every time the bird visited a cache site, the barcodes only occurred when the bird was actually storing, or retrieving, a seed. Overall, the team suggest a different mechanism is at play when the birds are making memories of specific events, as opposed to when it is making a mental map of an area.
“These results suggest that the barcode represents a specific episodic experience, unique in place and time in the chickadee’s life,” the researchers report.
Chettih added while not yet proven, it was possible the findings also applied to humans and other mammalian brains. “The message is that, when you form a memory of a specific event, your brain may generate a random label which it uses to store information associated with that event, in a way that is analogous to the way a store records information associated with each product to be retrieved when the label is scanned,” he said. “Perhaps another message is that the brains and mental abilities of these tiny, common birds can be quite remarkable.”
A mother and her three nearly full grown kittens paid us a visit for a drink from the birdbath. This wasn't the first time, since a few mornings recently I found the birdbath bowl tipped onto the ground. I thought it must have been deer but now I know who the real culprit is. We live in Rio Rico on the western slope of the San Cayetano mountains overlooking the Santa Cruz river. These beautiful bobcats are just one example of the abundant and varied wildlife we enjoy on a daily basis. photo by BRUCE TILDEN
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