After a last night of sleep in Madera Canyon it was time to head back north for one final location in Arizona. Catalina State Park is a marvelous jewel just outside of Tucson. It was another clear and dry day this time with the heat reaching up to early summer levels. Fortunately towards the end of the afternoon, some clouds rolled in to soften the light a little. The state park reaches into the Catalina Mountains offering some great hiking trails and desert landscapes.
Catalina State Park
One of the great things about clouds is that they can create shadows across the landscape. When the light is relatively harsh, as it often is in the desert, it can be hard to create a feeling of depth. The shadow of clouds can help to provide the depth you’re looking for if you wait for it to fall on the right places. Here shadows behind help to bring the nearby rock line.
Catalina State Park
Canyons are everywhere and I mean everywhere in Arizona. Anywhere that the rare water can drain it will form shallow beds. Most canyons aren’t those narrow slot canyons that you often see, but look more like gullies or dry river beds. The canyons also provide you with some shadows when the sun is low enough in the sky.
Catalina State Park
To be honest, I didn’t even know it was April Fools’. Camping out every day and not interacting much with civilization aside from maybe at lunchtime, really skews your sense of time. I understand now why prisoners kept for a long period of time just maintain a count of the days. That really was all I was doing – counting down how many days I had left to try and keep on schedule. It was time to leave Patagonia where I had had a wonderful time and photographed lots of birds. Yesterday I had been told by a person who was into bird photography that Swainson’s Hawks were feeding en masse on agricultural fields to the east of Patagonia. When a bird-watcher suggests birds to see, it may be worth trying to go after a photograph, but it may not. Not because the birds won’t be there, but because bird-watching goals and photography goals can be a bit different. A rare bird is a very hard one to photograph and usually will require a lot of time. Also, just because you can find a bird, it doesn’t mean there will be a situation where you can get quality photographs. But this was a photographer suggesting it and wide-open agricultural fields make for clean backgrounds. On top of that, hawks are birds I don’t often get a chance to photograph, except for the typical hawk on a perch shot. So today seemed like a good day to try it out – after all, if it didn’t work out, I’d lose less than a day and I was going to spend a good deal of the day travelling anyway. Well it didn’t work out – I did see a couple of Swainson’s Hawks circling high above the fields, but there were so few and with miles and miles of fields, my odds of getting a good photo of one feeding were slim to none. Timing is a funny thing with wildlife – a place that is just fantastic one day or even hours before can seem dead later. I cut my losses and headed back west towards the next destination – the famous birding hotspot – Madera Canyon. I spent a little bit of time walking the trails and hanging out at the famous bird feeders at a lodge within the canyon. Great for bird-watching, but unphotographable. The mountains that enclose Madera Canyon are quite pretty – if only I could have conjured up a cloud.
Outside Madera Canyon
Almost anywhere I go, I look to the water. Plant and animal life is always most abundant there whether it is a salt marsh, a lake, or a river. That is true in the desert too, but here water is so very scarce. One of the best places for photography in the Arizona desert is a small pond setup not far from Madera Canyon. Bill Forbes has created and maintained the Pond at Elephant Head especially for photography and it’s teeming with all sorts of birds. I had the good fortune to spend the day in a blind photographing wildlife as it came to the pond for a drink. It was my first experience with this sort of photography where you lots of control over the situation and can move around stones, logs, even plants. The star of the show was definitely the Gambel’s Quail. These attractive quail were everywhere. You know you’ve got a good thing going when one of your biggest problems is having too many birds around.
Gambel's Quail
In addition to a wonderful time with the photography, I also had the chance to talk with two great people. In the heat of the early afternoon when photography wasn’t an option, Bill Forbes and Scott Linstead took some time to talk to me about a wide variety of subjects. I learned volumes about the photography business as well as enjoying the long conversation we had. Together they run bat photography workshops at Bill’s place and Scott is a fantastic photographer specializing in capturing high-speed action shots as you can see at his website. At the pond, I was able to finally get some decent photos of one of desert bird that I had been trying to get for a while, the nearly impossible to spell Pyrrhuloxia. Like its cousin the Cardinal, this bird has a very thick beak for cracking open thick-coated seeds.
Male Pyrrhuloxia
It truly was incredible the amount of wildlife that uses this small pond as a water source. In one day, I was able to obtain some decent photos of nearly 20 species of birds, and that’s not counting the ones I missed. But it wasn’t just birds that came, there were a variety of mammals too. Harris’s Antelope Squirrels were nearly as abundant as the quail. These little balls of energy dashed all over the place and seemed to thing nearly everything was food.
Harris's Antelope Squirrel
At the end of the day, I had lots of images and a wonderful time. In between the morning and late afternoon shoot, I adjusted the positioning of many rocks, branches, and perches, but I would change it again if I had the chance. Even with all the mistakes I made, I left at the end of the day feeling satisfied and accomplished, regretting only that the sun had to set. Hopefully I’ll be back again soon to see more of the wonders of the desert that come to drink at the Pond at Elephant Head.
Desert Cottontail
After my luck yesterday with the trogon, I headed to the same area of the woods to see what I could find. The Cassin’s Kingbirds continued their avoidance of me and I didn’t get any great opportunities with birds. However I had the good fortune to run into some wonderful people who were out leading a guided bird tour at Patagonia Lake State Park. They graciously offered for me to join along and I was happy to spend the morning doing some birding with the group. The group was excited to hear about the trogon, although we didn’t run into it. The leaders were wonderful people and very helpful in telling me about some of the good sightings and locations in the area. I had a great time with both them and the rest of the group. After the tour ended, I swapped my gear to a macro setup and headed back in since by now, the lizards were active in full force. My first few lizards were a bit shy and then I ran into a curious fellow. It ran away when I first approached it. With lizards, if it runs away once, it usually is worthless to try again. But after he ran a few feet away, he stopped in his tracks. He heard the flies and gnats that were buzzing about me and turned around and came back. He then proceeded to run right up to me and spend nearly half an hour just inched from me. It was a great opportunity to frame this juvenile Elegant Earless Lizard in many different compositions and angles. He just seemed to be relaxing as if he was the coolest lizard on the block.
Beauty shot of an Elegant Earless Lizard
The day had some more wonderful surprises in store for me. I spent a little while photographing the same cooperative Say’s Phoebe I had last night as it did some more insect hunting over the riverside areas. And then the most unexpected thing happened. For my entire stay in Arizona, I had not seen a single cloud. This makes for landscapes that have an empty feeling to them if you include much sky. But as the sun started to go down, a band of clouds appeared near the horizon! I had almost forgotten what clouds looked like. As I made my near the waters edge, I was treated to a show of color as the clouds gave a dazzling reflection in Patagonia Lake. What an ending to a great day!
Sunset over Patagonia Lake