PARADISE LOST: BIRDS PUSHED TO THE BRINK Migrating birds ‘out of sync’ and hungry (coming soon) | The remarkable migration of the black swift | How birds get their colors | Trouble in Arizona’s Sky Islands (coming soon) | The turkey vulture as meteorologist (coming soon) | A need for nesting | Plight of the last spotted owls (coming soon) | Bird counts at the dying Salton Sea (coming soon)
CORONADO NATIONAL FOREST — 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.”…