Our final destination on this trip was the very small town of Paradise, Arizona which is situated on the eastern side of the Chiricahua Mountains, about 6 miles up the mountain from Portal. In the early Twentieth Century Paradise was a thriving mining town, but once the ore was worked out most of the people left and today it has only a handful of residents.
We drove from Miller Canyon to Paradise on 8 May (day 13), first taking routes 92 and 80 to Douglas next to the Mexican border where we bought some provisions and then took route 80 up towards Portal. The road between Douglas and Portal was very quiet and crossed an almost uninhabited part of Arizona. We had despaired of finding anywhere to have lunch but as we drove north we were grateful to suddenly come across the Sky Islands Grill & Grocery on the road from route 80 to Portal, which wasn’t on any of the maps we’d consulted.
After lunch we drove the remaining few miles to Paradise where we were staying for three nights in the Heller House, which is a separate building at the George Walker House accommodation.
The George Walker House is a good destination for birders as visitors can use the fenced yard, which has a range of seed, fruit and peanut butter feeders that draw in lots of birds. The star attraction is the Juniper Titmouse, which has a quite limited range in the southwestern USA. On our first evening at the George Walker House we were lucky enough to get good shots of this bird, along with Hepatic Tanager, Acorn Woodpecker, Western Tanager and a Zone-tailed Hawk in flight.
The next day (9 May) we were fortunate enough to get the help of a local bird guide, James Petersen, who took us to higher elevations to get some new birds. This was a very successful outing and we photographed Olive Warbler, Mexican Chickadee, Buff-breasted Flycatcher, Greater Pewee and a roosting Spotted Owl, which were all lifers for us.
In the evening we had arranged to meet James again lower down the mountain to see a Whiskered Screech-owl that he knew roosted in a tree just beside a road outside Portal. We met him just after sunset and as predicted the owl was there in his usual roosting spot.
On our last day in the Paradise/Portal area we started by spending some time at a private residence where the owners open up their extensive yard to visiting birders to enjoy the many birds drawn to their well-stocked feeders. The location is known in the birding community as Bob Rodrigues Yard (Dave Jasper’s Old Yard) where, according to eBird, 211 bird species have been observed over the years.
In the yard we’d hoped to see Crissal’s Thrasher, but we were told that we’d just missed the bird – an all too frequent occurrence for us! However, we did see Brown-headed Cowbird, Curve-billed Thrasher, Spotted Towhee, Ash-throated Flycatcher and Black-throated Sparrow.
We stopped briefly at a water storage tank south of Sky Islands Grill & Grocery on State Line Road, which was recommended as a good birding site, but by this time of the day the light was getting too strong for good photography. But we saw American Coot, Cactus Wren, Killdeer, Red-winged Blackbird, Curve-billed Thrasher, and got acceptable photographs of a pair of Blue-winged Teal.
After lunch at the Sky Islands Grill & Grocery we moved on to the Cave Creek Ranch, which has accommodation and lots of feeders, making it another magnet for visiting birders. There were lots of the common birds around, such as Hooded Oriole, Northern Cardinal, Curve-billed Thrasher, Acorn Woodpecker and Lesser Goldfinch, but a good lifer for us was a Blue-throated Mountain-gem. This bird is another Mexican species whose range extends into southeast Arizona in summer.
Another interesting bird was an Inca Dove, which has a range in the USA extending from Arizona eastwards to Texas and Louisiana. It is common across Mexico and we’d seen it previously in Costa Rica.
The availability of lots of food at Cave Creek Ranch drew in a very tame Coati, a small mammal found from northern South America to the southwestern United States.
As we were doing some late afternoon birding in the centre of Portal we met a fellow birder who kindly asked us to visit his yard on the eastern side of town where he maintained a number of feeders. After we’d finished in town we therefore called in and were impressed by the birds being drawn in to his yard. But the highlight was seeing a huge rattlesnake appear close to his house and then move across his yard causing a group of Gambel’s Quail to get extremely agitated.
