'Rarer creatures': Elegant trogons, hummingbirds alter flight paths as drought persists

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— Oak leaves crackled under foot as two birders trudged uphill into a canyon that, on a typical weekend near end of May, should echo with the squawk of one of America's least-encountered birds.

Among hundreds of minor U.S. mountain ranges, only five, here in southeastern Arizona's Madrean Sky Islands, offer a birdwatching enthusiast the chance to find the colorful and rambunctious elegant trogon.

It's a bird more associated with tropical mountains of Mexico and Central America, but that over the last century or so has established a seasonal breeding stronghold in the American Southwest by following the summer monsoon rains northward. Riding on winds that shift in late June or early July to carry moisture from the south into Arizona, the monsoon feeds the bugs that feed the trogons. The birds chomp grasshoppers and other big insects, as suggested by the Latin "trogon" in their name, which means "gnawer."

The other part of the name — elegant — honors the handsome coat of red, gray and green with tuxedo tails, the white collar, and the black face with yellow bill and eye rings. This bird's style and novelty helped fashion a handful of Arizona canyons into bona fide life-list hot spots for birdwatchers. Along with an unmatched diversity of U.S. hummingbird species, whose migrant hordes also hew to these mountains during southward summer flight so they can capitalize on monsoon-born gnats and nectar, the Sky Islands are a birder's paradise.

Except, that is, when the rains don't come on time or in ample waves. In some recent years, Arizonans have taken to referring to dry summers as "non-soons." And as the region's climate changes, projections for a shifting and diminishing moisture regime are starting to play out, with noticeable harm to the biggest stars on Arizona's birding circuit. The rising hazard is but one of many on a continent where, a study from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology has estimated, some 3 billion birds have disappeared since the 1970s.

The Sky Islands, so called because their forested peaks ascend from the flatlands like sanctuaries from a sea of desert grasses and scrublands, funnel summer thundershowers into oases of springs and pools that give life to swarms of hopping and flying insects, and even give rise to glowing firefly displays more commonly associated with humid climes east of the Rocky Mountains.

Jennie MacFarland and Richard Fray stalked up Lone Mountain Canyon in the Huachuca Mountains, near the U.S.-Mexico border in the early morning light, occasionally pausing to play a recorded trogon call and listen for the response.

"Quoink-quoink-quoink," the recorded bird squawked. In most years, they would be walking past puddles, if not a trickle of flowing water. They had expected that again this year, after decent winter rains had percolated into the slopes. But that water was not resurfacing, perhaps, they thought, because some brutally dry monsoons in recent summers had parched the soils before that. All of that winter moisture had simply sunken or slaked the thirsty vegetation, and vanished.

A Mexican jay cackled back. A northern flicker laughed. A dusky-capped flycatcher darted after an airborne insect and returned to it twiggy perch. But for long moments, the air was eerily still, and no trogon sought to defend its nesting territory against the imposters.

MacFarland and Fray had walked this canyon during the same week of May for years, working to document Arizona's nesting population of elegant trogons with annual counts in several Sky Islands ranges. MacFarland, a bird conservation biologist with the Tucson Audubon Society, and Fray, a birding guide out of Rio Rico, said they normally find at least three trogons in Lone Mountain Canyon.

Arriving at a pebbly confluence of dry creek beds, MacFarland recognized a trail cam pointed at the spot where wildlife might normally be expected to come for water.

"Usually, the camera is pointed at a puddle here," she said. "Nothing now." It could be why she hadn't heard an elegant trogon calling yet.

"This is the trick with trogons: They like confluences," she said. "They're big insect eaters, so when you've got more moisture everywhere, it bodes well for habitat."

Not today.

"It's been a weird spring," Fray said.

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How drought can affect bird migration

They hiked on up-canyon for another 20 minutes, occasionally playing the trogon call but hearing nothing in return. MacFarland couldn't help but wonder if more was at play than just the canyon's unusually dry spring. It could be, she said, that the far drier summer of 2020, part of the region's driest 12-month period on record, had conditioned elegant trogons to expect the worst here, and to stay away.

Up till then, Arizona's trogon population had appeared healthy, with at least 160 birds arriving at the Sky Islands in time for each May survey for several years, culminating with 201 trogons in the spring of 2020. The following year, after a likely failed nesting season in the state, only 68 returned.

Rain gauges up and down the Huachucas and adjoining valleys near Sierra Vista during that June 15 through Sept. 30 monsoon season all registered less than 10 inches, according to readings collected on rainlog.org, and many gathered less than 3 inches.

A more typical monsoon, 2018, brought readings ranging from 7 to 14 inches in that area. A wet monsoon followed in 2021, with nearby gauges gathering as much as 16 inches, and the population appeared to respond, with surveys numbering 121 and 183 over the next two springs.

But this year's count — the one MacFarland and Fray were working on that day — would drop back to 119. It would include 15 pairs but 88 solo males and one solo female.

The 2020 monsoon was brutally dry across the Sky Islands region. Gauges across Tucson, for instance, registered less than half the city's average seasonal precipitation.

"That drought was so severe," MacFarland said, "(this) could be lingering effects."

That year may have been an outlier, but no fluke. Annual monsoon precipitation maps posted by the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension Service show that since 2000, the region has been far more often bathed in the tan and brown colors indicating subpar rainfall than the green and blue indicating an above-average season. That time frame coincides with a broader Southwest megadrought in which rising heat and spotty snowfall in the Rockies have, for instance, drained most of the water storage in Colorado River reservoirs.

As with the Colorado, increasing warmth exacerbates drought in the Sky Islands, evaporating more of what falls as rain, and stressing plants so that they require a larger share. Southeastern Arizona has warmed by more than a half-degree Fahrenheit every decade since 1970, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data.

Finally, at 7:25 a.m., MacFarland played the recorded call and heard a solitary trogon faintly responding up the canyon. But it wasn't aggressively defending its turf, as MacFarland might have expected if it was nesting with a female. Elegant trogons make several noises, from the bombastic croak that tells other males to back off to a gentler coo that appears to be conversation with a mate. This one was just quietly croaking, and not flying near to chase anyone off.

"It's not a direct challenge," Fray said. "So interesting, isn't it?"

"They each have a personality," MacFarland said. Eventually, she would determine that his personality was partly affected by the fact that he had nothing to fight for. "He's, I'm fairly confident, unpaired."

Fray crouched into a parched depression where he would normally expect to find a puddle in May, and started digging. No water emerged, and he surmised it had taken years of drought to get to this point. "This is absolutely bone dry."

The two moved on, marking only one trogon for the canyon, in a mountain range where a host of volunteers would log 47 on that day. The Huachucas are still the most productive range during the annual trogon count. In 2020, though, they had attracted 65 of the birds.

An Audubon volunteer tracked bird counters' sighting reports on the eBird app to show the trajectories of dozens of birds that Arizona lists as Species of Greatest Conservation Need. Sixty-eight species from that list have declined over the last decade, according to the resulting spreadsheet, from Mexican spotted owls to scaled quail and blue-throated mountain gems, a coveted hummingbird species.

Among the species declines that have led to billions fewer birds in North America over the last half-century, grassland birds and aerial insectivores have been hit especially hard, having lost many bugs that once fed them.

"Just think of the splats on windshields," Fray said. In the 1980s and 1990s, he recalled, insect crusts caked cars traversing rural American roads in summer. Now the air is clearer, more sterile, a problem that studies and advocacy groups such as the American Bird Conservancy blame at least partly on widespread pesticides. (Certain insecticides such as neonicotinoids used in agriculture have also been shown to have a direct effect on the birds.)

The list of Sky Islands birds afflicted by the loss of insects is long. A University of Arizona Cooperative Extension Service video discussing the problem names several: Grace's warbler, Nashville warbler, Bell's vireo, summer tanager, Western tanager, black-headed grosbeak, to name a few. But for the out-of-state birders who Tucson Audubon says drive an estimated $300 million wildlife-watching industry in southeastern Arizona, the grand prizes are trogons and hummingbirds. Both suffer in drought, which has frequently visited the region since the turn of the 21st century.

Hummingbird populations are shrinking

Fray sees the results around the hummingbird feeders at Patagonia's Paton Center for Hummingbirds, an Audubon property where he brings clients looking to check certain hummers off their lists. Most people may associate those birds purely with flower nectar or the sugar water they put out for them, but they also need the protein from insects.

"Every year, there are fewer hummingbirds" in Patagonia, Fray said. "It used to be you'd see 10 hummingbirds around every feeder. Now, if you see 10 hummingbirds, it's a good day."

By that standard, July 27 was a very good day some 300 miles northeast of Patagonia in Arizona's White Mountains. But then, late-July days always are good for hummers on their way south from breeding grounds as far north as Alaska's Prince William Sound. It's why the experts at Arizona Game and Fish and the Southeastern Arizona Bird Observatory had scheduled the 21st annual High Country Hummingbird Festival for that day. Hundreds of people gathered on the meadow at Sipe White Mountain Wildlife Area.

Hundreds of hummingbirds zipping around feeders there enabled SABO co-directors Tom Wood and Sherry Williamson to put on a show while capturing and banding birds to help track their future migrations.

Wood waited for several birds to approach the nectar feeders, then tripped a remote-control trigger that dropped a net to create a small cage around them. He then gathered each by hand and put them in mesh containers for volunteers to deliver to a table where Williamson would check under their feathers for parasites or wounds before putting them in little mesh sleeves so she could weigh them. She then affixed a lightweight, numbered band around one of their legs and offered them a nectar meal before Wood again retrieved them, this time putting them on a spectator's hand to rest before flying away.

One of those birds awed Silvia Schreiber, a visitor from Wickenburg, as it sat a few moments in her palm. "ROO-fuhs," she cooed to it after learning its species name from Wood, and hearing that its annual migration could bring it 7,000 miles round trip.

One that SABO tagged in southeastern Arizona was recaptured and identified nine years later in Montana. Schreiber's eyes widened and sought out others in the crowd after the hummer erupted skyward.

"Wow!" She later said she had been fascinated to learn from Wood that hummingbirds ate insects, and she wanted to read more about them.

Inspiring as the annual migration may be, Wood said, it's not what it used to be. "Drought. Climate change. Things like that are a problem," he told the crowd.

Many of the specimens, like the one in Schreiber's palm, were rufous hummingbirds. It's a species with shimmering, rust-colored feathers, and is the U.S. hummingbird most affected by climate change both in Arizona and in northern breeding zones that range from Oregon and central Idaho through the Canadian Rockies and most of British Columbia to south-central Alaska's Prince William Sound. The bird still numbers 22 million, but has declined in surveys and is considered vulnerable, according to Audubon. While abundant at the Sipe stopover during the festival, they have lost more than half of their continent-wide numbers since 1970, Wood and Williamson said.

The Cornell Lab lists the rufous hummingbird as having lost about 15% of its breeding population in just a decade, from 2012 to 2022.

Heat stress takes a toll on birds

In southeastern Arizona's Sky Islands, Williamson told The Arizona Republic, unreliable rains are affecting flowering plants that provide the nectar to power them on to Mexico. Flowers that emerge on time may wither before the birds arrive if they remain dry. The timing of flowers' emergence in a warming climate may cause problems throughout much of a migrant bird's range, including to the north, Williamson said.

"Their breeding grounds may have thawed early, and the flowers that would normally greet them when they first arrive in the spring may have already bloomed out and that nectar source may not be available for them," she said.

In British Columbia and Alaska, Williamson said it's rising summer heat that most imperils rufous hummingbirds. A heat wave that baked the American Northwest and western Canada in 2021 caused much of British Columbia to soar past 100 degrees Fahrenheit, in one town setting Canada's all-time national record at 121, a reading that would be remarkably hot even by Phoenix standards.

"Rufous hummingbirds can deal with cold," Williamson said, noting that some breed in the Northwest at times when there's still snow on the ground and freezing temperatures overnight. "What they can't deal with are those super-high temperatures. And it's going to affect even the adults. It's going to affect the eggs in the nest, the nestling in the nest.

"You're going to have adults dropping dead from heat stress."

In the Sky Islands region that Williamson traps often and knows best, the mix of hummingbird species is shifting with the climate. There's been a "changing of the guard" along the San Pedro River since she started tagging birds there in 1990, she said.

The narrow river supports a ribbon of tall cottonwoods and clouds of insects that make it a prime migratory flyway just east of the Huachucas. Black-chinned hummingbirds dominated the zone in the 1990s, when it served as breeding territory for them, she said. Since then, the shifting climate has brought ferocious spring windstorms that rattle their nests high in the trees, and the species has largely vanished from the region.

In their place, broad-billed hummingbirds have arrived from Mexico, and may be better able to withstand the winds because they don't nest so high in the canopy. They nest early, in March, and need warm springs, Williamson said. "Fifty or 75 years ago, it would've been too cold for them to nest (in Arizona) that early."

Elsewhere on the continent, such as in Southeast Alaska's Tongass National Forest, Anna's hummingbirds have likewise capitalized on increased warmth to move their territories northward. Generally, though, Williamson said Americans — including Arizonans — will need to get used to seeing fewer hummingbirds. It would help if more people grew flowering plants in their yards, if cities dedicated more parklands to pollinator gardens to supplant what they have paved over, and if state and federal agencies protected more wildlands.

"We need to take more active steps to make the environments that we live in, that we manage, are better for hummingbirds and other wildlife," Williamson said. "Otherwise, they're going to not be as common as we have enjoyed them in our lifetimes for our kids and grandkids. They're going to be rarer creatures.

"You're going to have to make a much greater effort to see a hummingbird 20 or 30 or 40 years from now than you do today, just like you have to make more of an effort to see them now than you did 50 years ago."

Like Williamson, Audubon's MacFarland sees a route to better bird habitats running through Arizonans' backyards. It involves cutting back on pesticides.

"The space you control creates a refuge for insects," she said. "If enough of us do that and try to reconcile the loss of habitat and put resources like plants and water on our properties, that helps."

Audubon promotes such healthy urban landscapes with tips through a program called Habitat at Home.

'It's alive, isn't it?'

"It's beer time," Frank Morgan said after returning to his vehicle at the South Fork Cave Creek in Cave Creek Canyon near Portal, Arizona, at 3:30 p.m. on a Saturday in late May. "Maybe two!"

The occasion that called for the celebratory quaffs: the first elegant trogon on his life list. And he had only needed to walk a few meters to catch a glimpse and photograph the bird, if only its back. Now, he and his wife, Ann, could check into the lodge they had booked and think about returning in the morning to photograph the red-breasted side.

A former military pilot who later made medical flights and then worked as a pilot to the stars with NetJets said he's more grounded in retirement, and travels the country in search of beautiful birds. He splits time between Florida and Colorado, birding between and beyond those seasonal homes. Up till now, his prized snapshot was of a painted bunting in Texas. But this day's quarry more than measured up.

"I'm gonna say a little prayer," Morgan said. "I usually get skunked."

Morgan gazed around at the quaking cottonwood and sycamore leaves blocking out the sun there in the Chiricahuas, the tall Sky Island range in far southeastern Arizona whose year-round stream with picturesque cascades attracts migrating trogons and, in turn, trogon watchers each year.

"It's alive, isn't it?" he said of the refuge rising from the desert. "You wouldn't think so."

It was alive indeed, but not exactly teeming as in years past.

Up the trail on the next morning, Rick Taylor sat in the woods with his back against a rock ledge, watching for the pygmy owl he had just heard. He had seen more than two dozen species of birds since arriving before daylight, but not an elegant trogon.

"It was really tough going last year for (trogon) reproduction," said the naturalist and birding author who has lived in the Chiricahuas for decades and started the annual trogon survey that Tucson Audubon has since taken over. From his lookout that morning, he was aiding with Audubon's count, one of many volunteers spread across trogon range and seeking signs of nestings. It's the same half-mile stretch he tends for each year's survey, and often sees multiple trogons there. This time he was not hopeful.

A dry summer of 2023 had crashed the insect hatch, he said, which in turn increased mortality among trogon hatchlings that hovers above 80% even in a good year. Even though winter rains had blessed Cave Creek Canyon, the memory of bad times seemed to have made an impression on the parents. "Migrants have seemed a little reluctant to come through."

Taylor tends a rain gauge at his home just to the north, and measured only 2.26 inches during last year's monsoon. (The handful of rain gauges around the eastern Chiricahuas that report to rainlog.org ranged from 2.8 inches to 5.12 inches. In 2018, when southeastern Arizona saw a more typical monsoon, those gauges ranged up to 8.87 inches.) "Last year was a no-show monsoon," Taylor said.

But the readings elsewhere showed how spotty the monsoon can be, with potentially big effects on birds' favored canyons. West of the Chiricahuas, near the same canyon that MacFarland and Fray would find "bone dry" this spring, the nearest gauge in the Huachucas had received nearly 10 inches during last year's monsoon.

At Taylor's home, the hardest rain had dropped a third of an inch. For the year, he recorded 15 inches, compared with 34 the year before. The unpredictability may be causing elegant trogons to reverse what had seemed a substantial push northward from Mexico in the last century.

Elegant trogons were unknown in Arizona until a first report in 1885, Taylor said. The first documented nesting in Madera Canyon, another popular Sky Islands birding area south of Tucson, came in the 1930s. The first in the Chiricahuas was recorded in 1940.

"They were gradually expanding their range north, probably as a result of climate change, which was gradual then," Taylor said. Now, he fears, the warming's quickening pace threatens to push the trogons back.

At least for this year, he knew, the news would not be great. Other birding guides around Portal had already been searching for trogons that they might show to clients.

"They haven't been intercepting any females," Taylor said. "I'm not optimistic we're going to find a nest this year."

Ultimately, Taylor would not report seeing a trogon in his section of the survey, though other volunteers would indeed report seeing one pair down-canyon from him. Farther up the canyon, MacFarland, the Tucson Audubon biologist who leads the survey, would report a single male and write an encouraging notation for the survey log: "Habitat looks great."

In all, the surveyors would find only four elegant trogons in the Chiricahuas, a range where they had counted 29 in 2020, just before that disastrously dry summer "non-soon." Twenty of the birds had been paired up to mate that year.

Climate patterns are shifting, Taylor said, and they are altering food sources. It probably shouldn't surprise when fewer migrants show up to Arizona and the Chiricahuas, or elegant trogons don't luck into mates there.

"The birds are having to spend more time foraging," he said, "and less time traveling."

Brandon Loomis covers environmental and climate issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Reach him at .

Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.

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