Best laid plans

I recently returned from a 7-week sound recording expedition to the southwest U.S.  From Carson City, to southern California, southern Arizona, southern Texas, western New Mexico, central and southern Arizona, a quick trip to Albuquerque to see friends, back to Arizona, and finally home through Utah and central Nevada.  Almost 7,500 miles, and almost all of it sleeping in the back of my car.

The trip was concocted by Lang Elliott and was originally planned to take place in 2020, until COVID happened.  But, with vaccinations in arms, we were able to do the trip this year.  The trip was a partial repeat of a trip Lang took in 2017, which I was able to accompany him on portions (see Chasing the dawn chorus, Night sounds in a desert canyon).  The original plan was for Lang and his friend Beth Bannister to leave New York state in early March, travel and record in southern Texas and Arizona until around the 1st of April, when Beth would fly back to New York, and I would meet Lang in southern Nevada.  From there, we would record in southern California, southern and central Arizona, then head to the southern Great Plains to record some prairie sounds.

But it didn’t turn out that way.  Lang and Beth faced day after day of cool windy weather that greatly hampered recording.  In addition, the birds that normally migrate north in the spring were not there.  The resident birds were even slow at getting breeding activity going.   So by the time I met up with Lang on April 1, he still had not got the recordings he was looking for, so when we finished some very so-so days of recording in southern California (except for some great times on the lower Colorado River), we backtracked his path to Texas.  First to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, then to Big Bend National Park in Texas, plus several other natural areas in Texas and New Mexico.  The winds died down a little, but the theme was the same.  The spring migrating birds were either not there, or just the very earliest had just arrived.  Dawn choruses, while still lovely, were a bit empty.

We developed a few hypotheses about why the birds were so late.  These are not mutually exclusive, and the trip was mostly over before we could really test them, and we are waiting for the results of the Breeding Bird Survey to see if our hypotheses have any merit.  First, an unusually cool spring simply delayed migration by 2-4 weeks.  Second, the massive bird mortality that occurred during last year’s fall migration may have significantly impacted populations of migrating birds.  And, lastly, the southwest is experiencing a serious megadrought (and we noticed everywhere that things were painfully dry); perhaps migrants were either not breeding, or moving to better areas for breeding.  It’s possibly that different factors affect different bird species in different ways, so at some level, all three hypotheses may be true, depending upon which species and location you are looking at.

We still managed to get some great recordings and had a great time.  It was just a nagging worry that what you consider to be an environmental phenomenon that you can set your calendar by, suddenly doesn’t obey the rules.  A colleague in Germany also mentioned that the swallows there returned a couple of weeks late.

We ended our journey together in Aravaipa Canyon in central Arizona.  This lovely place is wonderful to record, and during the week we were there, the last week in April, some of the more noticeable migrants like orioles and warblers were just staring to straggle in.  Planning a trip like this to the southwest is difficult, as you are racing against the bird’s breeding schedule (some birds stop singing while they are on the nest), and increasing temperatures that make camping, especially with a dog, more difficult.  For whatever reason, we pretty much missed the magic window.

So on May 2, we said our goodbyes, as Lang headed east to try to find birds in the eastern hardwood forests, and I made a few loops through southern Arizona and New Mexico for both recording and visiting friends.  I arrived home with more than 600 gb of recordings to process.  But, now that my book is completed, I’ll have more time to devote to my blog and recordings, so stay tuned!  In the meanwhile, here is one of my favorite recordings from the California portion of the trip: