Occasional Jots and Tittles

It’s two days before Christmas, and this is usually the time of year, rather than Thanksgiving or New Year’s, that I take stock of the year and life. Thanksgiving is really a Yankee holiday, anyway, and New Year’s always has seemed too busy with other things – in recent years, getting ready for the Christmas Bird Count, but even before that, it seemed like something was always going on. But nobody does much in the days leading up to Christmas, anyway (except last minute shopping) so it’s a good time for reflection.

As much as most people I know and I like to complain about this, that, or the other, we are all incredibly lucky and have so much to be grateful for. By a chance of fate, we were all born in the (loosely defined) West, where (compared with where about 75% or so of the world lives) we have unparalleled freedom. Even in a country where several million of us are denied the right to legally marry our partners, we at least don’t have to worry about being taken away in the middle of the night for protesting injustice. Though most of us don’t have every single thing we want, most of do have the things we need – food, clean safe water, shelter, clothing… Some of us may lose our jobs temporarily, but the chances are, in the long haul, we’ll all be fine; millions around the world will never have a job doing more than providing subsistence for themselves and their families.

I grumble sometimes about the quirks Jonathan has, but at the same time I can’t imagine what my life would now be like without him. For every little problem that comes up from a quirk, there are at least a dozen moments of joy that more than compensate.

I have a good circle of friends who enjoy my company and whose company I enjoy as well. Whenever I gripe that I haven’t gotten to see people lately, I need to remember that at the same time there’s nobody (that I know of, at least) who really detests me and I don’t have to watch my back around others.

I have only minor health complaints, none of which seems that serious, and the same is true of everyone in my immediate family – including parents, sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces, and nephews. Having lost a first cousin (just three years older than me) a year ago to a heart condition and an aunt to complications of renal failure, cancer, diabetes, and too many other problems to list, that’s no small feat.

And it’s not that I live a charmed life. As I noted above, most everyone I know has plenty to be grateful for. Christmas is supposed to be about the arrival of hope, but that’s something I have in abundance; it’s still a good time to be reminded of that hope, and all that’s good in our lives, not the petty stuff that we can’t control anyway and usually isn’t worth getting worked up about.

For all my friends out there – not that many of you will find this message, since my blog readership is relatively small – I hope you have as joyous a Christmas holiday as I hope to.

I’d honestly thought finishing the legislative session would have freed me up to have more time for my blog. Instead, it seems like it’s been non-stop one project after another.

First was the anniversary party for my folks, which took us up to July, and I hit the ground running launching our new software company. It’s one of those specialized products that only a handful of companies are likely to need, but for those who do, it could be a no-brainer to buy, so I’ve got my fingers crossed. The preliminary modules and the framework for the system as a whole have been released.

That’s involved Jonathan going to Houston for a week to train staff at one of our first installations, and I’ll probably get to go over there myself soon. Hope to head west from there to pick up some west Texas birds this fall.

Then there was the Feliciana Hummingbird Celebration, at which I’ve helped as a banding assistant for the last four years. Numbers were up this year from last year, though not to what they once were; we banded 18 new birds and had one returnee female from two years ago. It was an interesting turnout and I got to answer a lot of questions for folks. A crew from the Rural Broadcasting Service (which provides regional content to small cable system operators) filmed a piece on the festival, including a nice section on us banding the birds.

I’ve also been mapping out travel plans for the rest of the year. Originally I thought I wouldn’t be able to travel much, but I’ll be making a short trip to San Francisco and the Wine Country with my friend Damon in September. While there I’ll get in a few days of birding with my friend Kevin, and hope to have dinner with the Woofpup boy. Later in November, I’m going back to south Texas with my friends Jeff and Jerry, and my brother-in-law Mark, for some border birding. So vacation is taken care of.

Lastly I’ve actually been using my Facebook page to keep up with what other people are doing, although I haven’t posted much to mine.

I’m done.

Not with the blog, mind you; just with my annual 3 months of grueling work when I actually have to be in the office every day, all day (and well into the evening or night). This year’s legislative session went well enough for us, with few major glitches (a few here and there, but nothing too serious), and a lot of prospects for future growth. Can’t ask for much more than that.

Additionally, my parents’ 50th anniversary has come and gone. My sisters and I started planning a party for them a year ago, and were able to get a good many of our living relatives into town for it. Sadly, four of my father’s six siblings are now deceased, as are all three of my mother’s, so there were few people of their age bracket left. But my dad’s brother and sister (and their spouses) made it, along with a great many nieces, nephews, and cousins.

Given that for several years now, most family gatherings of any size have all been for funerals, it was really nice for this one to be for a happy event. The food was good, the company was fun, everyone liked Jonathan (many of them had never met him before), and my folks really liked the gifts we got them.

The best part for me was that with the session on until two days before the party, I could avoid any major work requirements (other than idea-contributing) until the morning of the event. During which time I pulled off carving a watermelon basket for fruit, making three pasta salads, picking up the main dish chicken, sculpting and decorating a cheese ball, and a handful of other details. It’s great to have a queer in the family when it comes to parties.

Unfortunately for me, this doesn’t mean I can now relax for the next six months. I’ve got to capitalize on those contacts made during session, and I’ve also taken on another software development project that threatens to swallow all my free time for the next month. Can’t complain too much, though, since this one may help Jonathan’s career along a good bit too.

Is it rude to say “Sorry, but there’s NO FUCKING WAY I would ever approve a friend request from you” to someone on Facebook?

In some respects, I suppose I had a miserable time in high school. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time. I wasn’t happy; I knew I was gay, I’d already started going out and meeting other gay people, and in 1979, in the deep south, that wasn’t an easy task, nor were future prospects particularly bright and cheery. Nevertheless, things should have been better. I was a smart student; I was in a pretty good high school (a magnet school with a broadcast public radio station and five or six foreign languages, including Latin, Greek, and Russian). I think we were the only public high school in the state at the time to offer physics, and there were so many students taking calculus when the state required only two years of math that it was embarrassing.

We even had a gymnastics team (although no football, basketball or baseball), and for a gay boy that was a major plus. As it turned out, my best friend in high school was team captain, and most of his teammates became friends of mine as well. But in terms of actually having friends, the kind you hang out with after school, well, that just didn’t happen. We lived in one corner of the parish (county), the magnet school was maybe 10-15 miles away, and kids were bused there from all over the place, so there weren’t any other kids nearby that I went to school with. My best friend, in fact, lived about as far from me as was possible and still attend the same magnet school.

And let me add–if you think not having football and cheerleaders would eliminate the cliques of “in” people that pervade high school didn’t know teenagers. True, there were folks who were both orchestra people and radio nerds, or fencers and Math geeks, but the cliques were still real. And you were either “in” or not – and I was a not.
I guess that’s why I finally “got happy” when I got to LSU and entered the Honors program. It attracted a quirky bunch of students who shared classes and who (mostly) hung out together before, between, and after classes in the Honors facilities. For the first time, I had an actual circle of friends, instead of just a couple of people who let me into part their lives. I belonged.

You belong to your family, of course, but that’s kind of mandatory. Unless they disown you, but by default you’re in. Belonging with people who have to choose to let you join is something else. It can be a life-changing experience. It was for me.

And that’s one reason I never looked back at most of my high school friends. (Another is that probably 2/3 or more of them went out of state for college – something a magnet school education made possible – and many more moved away after the economic turmoil in Louisiana in the 1980’s.) I haven’t been to a reunion yet, not even the big 25th. There were maybe two or three classmates I would see occasionally, but otherwise I lost contact with my entire high school class. Including, unfortunately, my best friend.

I rectified that part last summer, 27 years after graduation, by obsessively googling his name until I found him. I was surprised to find out he’s a psychiatrist – the real medical doctor/MD kind of headshrinker – and living in Alaska. This past week, my youngest sister (who went to the same school, six years behind) sent me a message about a classmate of mine who died suddenly last week. The message had been sent to a Facebook group for graduates of our high school. and mostly out of curiosity, I signed up.

Since then, I’ve gotten six “friend” requests from the group – a couple from people I had to look up in the yearbook to remember, a couple from folks I really wouldn’t have minded staying in contact with. One girl was a good friend of my cousin Mary, and she asked about her in her request. And one came from a former teacher, which stopped me in my tracks.

This man took over as my newspaper teacher halfway through my senior year. The class was designed to teach us journalism through producing the campus paper. It wasn’t a huge thing – tabloid size, I think eight pages each month. Maybe twelve. It’s hard to recall. But I do remember several things clearly. First, when he came in mid-year, he decided to institute a bunch of regular assignments, outside of publishing the paper, as a key part of our grades. Second, he made absolutely no effort to see that the student editors actually did anything towards producing the paper. Third, there were perhaps four of us in the class who understood that perhaps the key component in newspaper journalism is actually publishing a paper, and we did the work that the rest of the class of 30 or so should have been doing. Fourth, because of that, we often didn’t have as much class time to work on some of the added assignments. And Fifth, I remember getting a “C” in the class on my final report card – lowering my GPA just enough to knock me out of the running for some awards. As did the other students who, like me, had actually produced the fucking paper each month – writing the stories, typing them for the printer, writing headlines, doing the layout, choosing the pictures, writing the cutlines, even packaging up the entire mess to send to the printer by deadline.

When we confronted him about the grades, he prissily told us that he’d informed the class that the additional assignments would affect our grades. What he hadn’t mentioned is that failure to do anything at all on the newspaper – as was the case for over half the class – didn’t merit any grade reduction at all. If you turned in all your miscellaneous assignments and they were satisfactory, you got an A, even if that was the only thing you’d done all year.

Fine – it’s his class, he can set the rules, and I learned a valuable lesson: some people only care about process, not results, and as long as you sit quietly at your desk moving paper from the in box to the out box and you put the right color stamp on each, they think you’re wonderful. Those are the kind of people to avoid. Some people realize that while process is important, results matter too, usually more. Those are the people to learn from.

I haven’t responded to his friend request yet. I’ll have to think on it. I’m almost certainly not going to approve it, but I’m torn as to how much, if anything, I should tell him when I deny it.

There was a time when very little got past me.

I’m not sure when that time was, any more, but the change got past me, and a lot more since (apparently). My best guess is that as we hit our 30’s and 40’s, our brains just stop accumulating a lot of the smaller detail that fills our memories when we’re younger. For one thing, I guess there’s less room for it – or at least, adding too much more makes the brain’s index just too cumbersome to navigate the memories.

And interests change. So whereas 20 years ago, I’d still would know maybe 3 out of 4 of the top 40 pop artists, today I probably couldn’t recognize the names of 3 out of 4. Of the rest, I might have heard the name but wouldn’t recognize a picture. Or a song title. I’ve almost certainly never heard the songs.

Heck, at one time I could tell you if there was anyone new who’d shown up this week at the gay dance club in town. Today, not having been in at least five years, probably closer to 8 or 9, I probably couldn’t identify ten people there. I barely notice when someone new moves in on my block, and if the move happens in my busy season at work, I probably won’t know it for months.

You’d think, though, that I could keep track of who connects to my blog. Only a couple of friends are regular commenters (thank you, Mick and Brett) but I know that there are at least a few others who read it, based on the logs for the webserver–after filtering out the indexers and so forth. Apparently, there are gadgets you can install in Wordpress which will show you where the traffic to your blog comes from, and even (if you want) display that as part of your website.

I noticed this on Tony’s “West of Mayberry” blog recently–the most recent ten “hits” to his blog are listed, along with the (approximate) location of the viewer — in my case, my “hit” shows correctly as “Baton Rouge, Louisiana”. More interestingly, I noticed that it shows I arrived at his page from my own blog (because I use my blog’s links as a way to catch up on the others I read most often). Cool feature – I may have to include that somehow on mine.

But what really bowled me over is that I hadn’t noticed Tony’s updated blogroll. On his previous blog, he’d listed the blogs he reads most often on his “Large List”, and a longer list below of others he looked at as “Rolling Along”… neither of which included mine. Which I understood, because lord knows, I’m not that diligent about posts. I didn’t comment much on his old blog, either, at least not in comparison with his recent, revised edition.

Now, however, on the Mayberry blog, there I am: right on the list under Brettcajun (which, if anyone knows the history between Brett and me, is totally appropriate). I’m flattered that he noticed the posts I’ve made there, enough to come at least check out what little I have to say here. It makes me glad I still notice some things.

We had a party Sunrday.

It wasn’t to celebrate anything in particular, officially; we’d spent a good part of the weekend finishing adding another bed to the gardens and on the spur of the moment, Jonathan suggested we have a cookout and invite several of our friends, and even a few of our neighbors.

To understand why this was momentous, a little background is necessary – most of which you couldn’t glean from reading my blog, spotty even though it is. Jonathan and I have been partnered for a little more than four years now, and the last year, in particular, has been very tough for him. He’s been profoundly unhappy in general – not grumpy, just increasingly unhappy, manifesting itself in all the classic signs of worsening depression. Work, in particular, has sucked for him – he endured a three-month furlough at his office last year, was brought back primarily because his office knows they can’t function without him, and yet since then has been mostly treated like a red-headed stepchild.

Finally, a little over a month ago, he agreed to see his doctor and seek help. I’ve fought depression at times myself, and always managed to fight my way back to happiness on my own, but even I know that’s (a) not always possible for everyone and (b) a lot more work than it has to be.

Jonathan’s doctor gave him a screening test which showed – no surprise – serious depression and anxiety, and he prescribed some medication for him. It kicked in almost immediately, but after a week or so, it seemed to “plateau” in his system, and it wasn’t helping much any more. I pointed out that he was on the lowest dose of the medication, and perhaps it needed to be adjusted, but when the doctor didn’t return a message left for him with a nurse, Jonathan – again, no surprise – decided he was through dealing with the doctor. He stopped taking the medication altogether.

Luckily (or thanks to divine intervention, or serendipity, or something), he realized that even though the low dose wasn’t helping as much as it did initially, it was obviously still working – because going off made things worse, not better. On the second visit to the doctor to discuss his dosage level, I went with him, and was able to describe the changes I saw in his behavior – and the doctor agreed immediately that a higher dose was probably necessary. (In further discussions, he also (praise the Lord) agreed with me that if Jonathan improved his diet from the junk-food-dominated meals he was having, his body would feel better, and he’d feel better about it – something I’d been telling him for years but which he ignored.

He even agreed with me that Jonathan’s irregular sleep schedule – napping from the time he gets home after work until mid-evening, staying up till past midnight, then trying to sleep again until 5:30 AM for work – was not conducive to good health, physical or mental. And it’s funny, but when your doctor tells you the exact same things your partner’s been saying, and all of a sudden you listen…

No matter. I don’t need the recognition, really; the important thing is, Jonathan listened, and he takes his doctor’s advice. That was Thursday. So two new prescriptions later (one for a higher dose of his antidepressant/antianxiety medication, the other to help him sleep at a normal hour), Jonathan’s already almost a changed person again with a new lease on life.

So, the suggestion for a party was a sign, to me, of just how far he’s come. Two months ago, if I’d suggested having people over, the idea would have been met with an almost sullen, “I don’t wanna”, “please don’t make me endure that” attitude. Now, he’s suggesting it himself. This, in short, is the man I fell in love with.

What a wonderful way to begin Spring.

Tomorrow (Saturday) I depart on another birding trip, this one to Texas and points west.

Rob and Jon, who met me in Tucson to bird in Arizona, and Rob’s partner Tom will be driving through Baton Rouge from Birmingham to Phoenix, to collect the rest of Rob’s belongings (he’s resettled in B’ham). They’re detouring through the lower Rio Grande Valley, and when they mentioned the trip, I half-jokingly suggested they stop on the way and pick me up. They took me up on the suggestion, and I’ll ride with them down to Texas for the birding there. Assuming none of them are ready to kill me, I’ll ride on to Phoenix with them, and fly back from there – but I’ve got the option of flying back from almost any Southwest airport along the way since the only tickets available were refundable.

We’ll pass through New Mexico – my first time in that state – and I may end up staying through Sunday after Thanksgiving in Arizona to pick up some birds I haven’t seen yet. All in all, it should be a fun trip.

Saturday morning, we headed for Ramsey Canyon Preserve, a Nature Conservancy site which was once called the Mile Hi Ranch. The guest quarters are now a private concern (the Ramsey Canyon Inn). Twenty twenty-five thirty years ago, when I started birding, this was considered the hummingbird capital of the world, with as many as twelve species present regularly during the peak months. The preserve is still a birding hotspot.

Or rather, it can be, but on nice days like when we went, the place was overrun with families bringing children to experience nature. Unfortunately, most parents today don’t seem to grasp the concept that it’s hard to experience nature when your rugrats are running, screaming, and crying the entire time, as most wildlife quickly scatters and you can’t even enjoy the sounds of a creek rushing by.

Once we got far enough away from children, I did get a good look at more deer:

And even though you could barely hear it at times, the creek was actually rather pretty:

And we did see a fair number of hummingbirds, though virtually all were either Black-chinned, Broad-billed, or Anna’s – the three most common species in the region, and ones you can spot almost anywhere. It became clear that we needed to hit some of the more recently discovered spots, places where hummingbird variety is still the norm.

So off we went to Miller Canyon, to the Beatty’s Miller Canyon Guest Ranch, probably the best spot in the United States to see a diversity of hummingbirds. The Beatty family runs an apple orchard and bee farm/honey operation up in Miller Canyon, and many years ago, learned that their property was a key spot for attracting hummingbirds, including a few that are seldom seen elsewhere in the United States. In what has become a tradition for yards like this in Arizona, the Beattys opened their orchard to visitors. Not only do they accept donations for the sugar fund, but they sell apples, honey, and other products from the orchard from the front porch of their welcome building. If there’s nobody at the building, they leave a change box and ask you to write down what you bought and put the money in the box. I can’t imagine the trust that must require – and yet Mr. Beatty told us it’s seldom abused.

Anyway, a short hike up into the orchard (which grows on a hillside in the canyon) is a comfortable sitting area surrounded by about 15 hummingbird feeders. And scores of hummingbirds on the feeders at all times, probably representing a few hundred in the immediate area of the feeders all the time. I saw ten species at this one site–and finally, for once, I got pictures of many of them. They include the Violet-crowned, which we’d already seen at the Paton’s house, but which made for a good picture here:

In addition, we caught great views of the Magnificent Hummingbird, one of the largest in the United States. Here, one’s pictured with two Black-chinned Hummingbirds nearby for comparison in size:

There were also numerous Broad-billed and Broad-tailed Hummingbirds at the feeders. Here a female Broad-billed shares a meal with a male Broad-tailed.

Although I’m not as pleased with this shot, there were plenty of Anna’s Hummingbirds present as well:

But the star of the show at Beatty’s, as it is every year, is the spectacular White-eared Hummingbird. Although there are a few others every year in the region, finding them is incredibly difficult, if only because there is so much territory to search. But Beatty’s has hosted at least one or more of these birds for years now, and if you come at the right time of year, seeing it is a matter of waiting 10 to 15 minutes, rather than searching for weeks in the fields.

After a few hours of entertainment here, we finally left and headed to our final birding destination: still another yard, opened to birders by a gracious homeowner, this time the only spot easy to find a Lucifer Hummingbird. Unfortunately, lighting in this yard didn’t lend itself to taking pictures easily, but we still got excellent views of two Lucifers, male and female, along with the usual suspects.

At this point, we decided it was time to pack it in, get some rest, and prepare to return home the next morning. In my four short days in Arizona, I saw thirty life species, at least that many others I had already seen, and got my first taste of the mountain-desert region of southeast Arizona. I’ve already started planning my return in 2009.

For some reason, I didn’t take any pictures of the place we stayed the rest of our journey, but I also highly recommend it to anyone who goes to south Arizona for birding. The Casa de San Pedro is a small inn, run by a charming couple (Karl and Patrick) who, while not hard-core birders themselves, both enjoy birdwatching and know how to cater to birders. The guest rooms are more like a traditional hotel (in-suite bathrooms, modern amenities, etc.) but they’re joined to a wonderful great room / kitchen / dining room space, making it feel more like a traditional bed and breakfast. Speaking of breakfast – it’s not the typical buffet or continental much fest; it’s a sit-down, served full-meal breakfast that fills you up. There are feeders around the lodge, including outside the dining room windows, so birders can get an early start watching what’s outside before heading out to more exotic locales.

We chose to spend Friday focused more on historical and touristy pursuits, partly because I felt guilty about dragging Damon out to all these bird spots. So our first stop Friday was Old Bisbee, the original part of the town of Bisbee, once a major mining center in southeast Arizona. The old part of town is now a tourist attraction, mini-arts&crafts mecca, and all-around bohemian sort of place.

Nestled in the hills, Old Bisbee is marked by a giant “B” marked in the dirt on a hill above downtown:

And one of its signature attractions is the Art Deco-style 1935 statue “Iron Man” celebrating the mine workers:

One attraction we didn’t visit, mainly for time constraints, was the Bisbee Mining and Historical Museum. It looked like a pretty nice attraction, though – it’s a local affiliate of the Smithsonian, so I assume that means it has to maintain some standards.

However, we did make a quick pass through the local historical association’s “museum” – which, like many small-town historical association museums, is full of clutter and junk, arranged in a strange order and with no connection between items other than it all came from the locals. Don’t get me wrong – preserving this sort of stuff is important, and if you dig through it hard enough, a good historian could assemble some interesting exhibits on life in Bisbee at various points in the past – but it’ll take a long time and a lot of sorting to get there. (And someone needs to explain to these wonderful folks and all those like them that you don’t have to cram every single object you own into public exhibition space. You get people to come back by rotating exhibits and showing different things, with different themes, at different times.

Still, one artifact caught my eye. This early typewriter has the QWERTY keyboard layout we expect, but there’s no shift key function. Instead, there’s a second set of keys for upper-case letters. Additionally, the numerals zero and one are missing, because typists didn’t distinguish between a lower-case “L” and one, or between an upper-case “O” and zero. Instead, there are a variety of fractions (1/8, 3/8, 5/8, 7/8, 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4) and the cents symbol (¢).

So, we left Old Bisbee, and headed out towards Tombstone. We knew going in that Tombstone (and the OK Corral) would be a tourist trap, and in that, we were not disappointed. However, I was surprised how much I learned about Tombstone, the gunfight, and more.

For starters, I’d always pictured Tombstone as a town in the middle of the desert, the way it’s pictured in the movies, and the OK Corral as a sort of round, fenced enclosure for horses out at the edge of town. Kind of like this:

Surprisingly, the OK Corral was actually a stableyard, in town (though admittedly close to the edge of the town at the time of the gunfight). It was a place where carriages could be stored for people staying in the town’s hotels or other accomodations, and where horses could be stabled during a visit to town. In fact, most of the walls of the corral were formed by the buildings on either side of it, with only gates at each end (the corral reaches from one side of the block to the other).

More surprisingly, the famed gunfight did not take place in the corral itself. Although some of the gunfighters crossed through the corral on the way to the fight, the shooting took place in an alley between two other buildings, one of which also bordered on the OK Corral. Although I don’t think “Gunfight in the Alley by a Building Next to the OK Corral” would have been as big a hit as a movie title.

Anyway, the spot where the actual fight took place is marked on the sidewalk at the street:

And just down the street, a sign marks the location of the actual corral, which has largely been restored:

Naturally, the site’s kept closed off, so people can’t wander through without paying the admission fee, but for once, I thought it was worth it. Despite the tourist trap settings, including street vendors hustling carriage rides and such, it’s obvious a fair amount of research has gone into researching what actually happened at the gunfight.

At the time, Tombstone was the county seat of Cochise County, and it was a classic mining boom town, like San Franciso during the Gold Rush. Unfortunately, there were no other industries to keep the town going (unlike San Francisco’s shipping, for instance), and when the mines dried up (or, in one case, flooded out), the town almost died too. The handsome courthouse, however, has been restored as a museum.

Just outside of town is the famed Boot Hill Cemetery. I learned that this is actually a common name for cemeteries in the old West, where “dying with your boots on” generally meant you were killed, usually in a gunfight or other dubious circumstances, rather than dying peacefully in your sleep. Tombstone’s, though, is the most famous, partly because the dead from the OK Corral gunfight are buried there, partly because of some of the grave markers.

The three members of the Clanton “gang” killed at the OK Corral gunfight are buried side-by-side. Although general public opinion was that they got what was coming to them, one thing to remember is that family and friends generally get to write our epitaphs, and the Clanton gang made it clear what they believed happened (or at least what they wanted people to believe):

As for the other gravesites, they range from the quaint:

to the comedic:

to the poignant:

After Boot Hill, we headed back to the Inn, where we rested up for our final day of birding – with a special focus on hummingbirds.

When we left Tucson, my friends and I headed south towards the Santa Rita Mountains. On the way, however, we stopped at San Javier del Bac, a Spanish mission church on the Tonoho Odham reservation. It’s believed to be the oldest church building in the Americas still serving its original parishioners, as it was an Indian mission from the beginning. The church is currently undergoing restoration but is still in use and open to the public. One of the two bell towers has always been unfinished; the legend is that a mission church was eligible for subsidies from Spain as long as the church was under construction, but that operating funds after construction was complete were expected to be raised locally. So the church remained “under construction” for centuries.

Inside the church, it’s far more ornate than the typical Spanish missions in Texas, more in keeping with the missions along the California Mission Trail.

We left San Javier after a short visit and headed towards Madera Canyon in the Santa Rita Mountains.

We got great looks at a number of birds I’ve wanted to see for years, but as I mentioned in the last post, I was too busy looking to take many pictures. I did get some shots of a curious deer at one of our stops:

We stayed at the Santa Rita Lodge, one of three inns/lodges in Madera Canyon (and one I highly recommend). It’s simple but clean and like most lodging in southeast Arizona, it caters to birders, with lots of feeders on the property. We were in the left-hand building here, in the right-most unit.

Here’s a view of the main feeder area (non-guests are welcome to visit this part of the property):

And a view of the creek behind our room:

Thursday morning, we departed the lodge and drove further up into Madera Canyon. Again, more birds with no pictures, but I did get some shots from the parking area at the highest “driveable” point – several trails continue up from this spot.

Later in the morning we drove back down the canyon and decided to take what looked like a great shortcut on the maps. Going around the Santa Ritas was many, many miles longer than a straight-through drive on Box Canyon Road, or so we thought. “Straight-through”, however, is something of a misnomer as the road is (a) a mountain switchback road, curving back and forth as it makes its way through, (b) unpaved most of the way, (c) extremely narrow in spots, not really wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other, and (d) bordered by a 500-foot or more drop with no guard rail. What time we saved with the shorter distance was more than eaten up by having to creep along at 10-15 miles an hour. Live and learn. But at least the views were spectactular.

When we reached the other side, it was almost surprising to see (relatively) flat land. We headed into Sonoita for lunch, then went south to Patagonia to check out some more birding hot spots. At one of them, we got of these rock formations bordering a rest area pull off:

While in Patagonia, we stopped at the home of Marion Paton, who has opened her yard to birders for decades. Her yard is one of the few spots in the U.S. where one can see a Violet-crowned Hummingbird, and we got superb views of them here, along with several other species. Naturally, I forgot my camera in the car, and didn’t want to get up and get it while the bird viewing was so good. Imagine allowing strangers in your yard for 30 or so years, asking only that they latch the gate behind them, sign the guest register, and kick in a small donation for the bird food/sugar water fund. Surprisingly, there are many such sites in the southeast Arizona area.

As the afternoon waned, we left Patagonia for Hereford, on the east side of the Huachuca Mountains, where we were scheduled to spend the next three nights. The Huachucas would be the focus of most of the rest of my birding, although that would mostly wait until Saturday.