Reach 11 Recreation Area

After spending some time this week helping @cflower and @sbeute establish a project for the City of Phoenix Parks and Preserves and populating it with past observations, I noticed that the Reach 11 Recreation Area had no observations. So I went out this morning to remedy that. Most of the area is open Lower Colorado subdivision vegetation, disturbed in many places. There is a developing mesquite bosque behind the levee protecting the Central Arizona Project (CAP) canal (Reach 11 refers to its CAP designation). Thanks to those trees, it's a pretty good area for birding. I heard and saw a number of species, including many hummingbirds. There's even a small pond in the area which is where I found the mallard.

Most of the annual vegetation was long past it. But I took some photos of them anyway, including seed where they were still present. Stinknet has established itself in force near 56th Street. It smells bad enough when fresh leaves are crushed. When it's drying in the sun, it smells even worse.

It's a pleasant trail, shaded through the bosque. If you have better luck than I did, you might even see the burrowing owls inhabiting the artificial habitat built by Eagle Scouts in 2003.

Posted on May 12, 2017 06:04 AM by stevejones