August 31 Los Angeles to Phoenix

We recently returned from a trip to Arizona. I had planned to write a summary of the whole trip but have now decided to write a summary of each day to make it easier to review interesting observations. On a travel day such as this, there are typically not many observations, but we try and take advantage of any interesting areas on the way to our destination. We had two stops in Arizona we wanted to make

The first was in Buckeye AZ where we were looking for a ruddy ground dove. These birds are native to Mexico but do appear in AZ fairly frequently. The area where they were supposed to was an agricultural community. While we saw a fair amount of wildlife there, we could only find mourning doves (and ibises, yellow-headed blackbirds and kestrels) and struck out on the ruddy ground dove.

Our other stop was in Gilbert AZ to look for the monk parakeets. Like California, Arizona also has its share of non-native parrot species. We found the rosy faced lovebirds on a prior trip but just discovered there is also a population of monk parakeets in the Phoenix area. The birds turned out to be just where we heard they were--in a shopping center area in Gilbert AZ.

Posted on September 11, 2020 07:23 PM by