For more than 20 years, bird lovers in Arizona and beyond have celebrated the onset of the summer breeding season at the Verde Valley Birding and Nature Festival. As in the past, this year’s event takes place the last weekend in April and is centered at Dead Horse Ranch State Park, where fresh cottonwood leaves along the Verde River provide welcome shade.
This year’s festival features a celebrity guest, or bird of the year, whose habitat preferences closely echo those of visiting humans. As Arizona’s summer heat rises, people gravitate toward the few places characterized by both shade and running water. So does the Common Black Hawk.
Unlike humans, Black Hawks avoid drier places almost entirely. That’s because their diet is centered on water. Sometimes they capture lizards, snakes or insects in streamside forests, but they also hunt for fish and frogs in shallow water itself.
Common Black Hawks are pretty common in many places across their range, but quite scattered in the southwestern states. They’re really a tropical species, seen and heard often in Mexico and Central America, and even into northern South America. Many Black Hawks live year-round in those places; but for a relative handful, the summertime heat and moisture of southwestern riparian areas is worth a trip north.
If you find yourself at the birding festival, or in a central Arizona riparian area, keep your eyes and ears open for a big bird with broad wings and a shrill call. On a hot afternoon, it’s probably appreciating much the same landscape qualities as you.
This Earth Note was written by Peter Friederici and produced by KNAU and the Sustainable Communities Program at Northern Arizona University.
