Birding in Tucson

I don't pretend to be a birder, but I do love watching the birds and listening to their songs.  When we were in Tucson, I was continually amazed by the thriving bird population.  By far, my favorite was seeing a Great Horned owl family when hiking in Honeybee canyon.  I adore owls!  Here is a picture of one of the adults.  The baby was perched up on a rock, and I only had my cell so I could not zoom in to capture it.  Still, so wonderful to see.

A palm tree in my in-laws' yard was hosting this mother dove with her two babies.  Aren't they beautiful?

On our hikes, I loved seeing all the birds living in holes in the saguaro cacti.  Here, a crow sits up top.  He has quite the view.

We also saw tons of roadrunners, but they were much too speedy for my cell phone.  I did catch this one on cell phone at the Arizona Sonora desert museum (more about that in a later post):

Finally, the quail families!  Oh they were everywhere and so cute!  One day, there was a bunch of distressed peeping coming from down in a storm drain in front of my in-laws' home.  We put down a ramp, but they didn't use it, and there were no parents to be seen.  So I got down in there.

 I used a pool skimming net to try to catch the baby quail.  I managed to pull up three before they took off down the drain pipe too far for intervention.

I set them into a region of desert where I had seen tons of other quail families.  I don't know if they were old enough to make it, but no doubt they had a better shot than down in a cement storm drain.

Readers, do you have a favorite bird?