I recently got to do one of my favorite things. Bird with my brother in Arizona. And a second favorite: get away in the back country. So he saddled up his 4x4 and off we scrambled onto some really bad roads on the San Francisco Peaks.
Just him. Me. And a few thousand fire fighters.
Five fires were burning in the region. Smoke darkened the sky like thunderclouds. Whole mountain tops were burning in the distance. Not ideal. But still fun.
The next day the plan had been to go down to the Verde Valley. Amazing birding there. But hot. It was something like 110 or 112 degrees. (Even so it’s where Phoenix people visit to keep cool.)
So now what?
Vermilion Cliffs
No problem. I still believe my big brother can do anything, so I wasn’t surprised when he announced instead of up or down, we’d go somewhere else. The Pleistocene era. Sort of.
Next morning found us crossing the Navajo reservation. That in itself was a glimpse of the past. Take away the pickups and Nissan Sentras, and it’s not all that hard to imagine it six or seven hundred years ago.
We continued north toward the Grand Canyon, me hanging out the window like a puppy, while more centuries peeled away. Eroded cliffs exposed thousands of years of geology. Beautiful. Amazing.
We crossed the Colorado at Navajo Bridge, 470’ above the Colorado River and stopped at the north end. The original bridge was built in 1929. In 1995 they built a new one. For Condors to roost on. (They didn’t know that yet.) And they left the old one as a spare. Now people walk out on it to observe the condors. And that is exactly where we went.
What we found was a TV antenna walking up and down the bridge. With a biologist attached. We stopped to talk. She was trying to find a female that had flown out of range. Part of a pair raising a chick on the nearby cliffs. She had left dad to babysit while she went for some groceries. And was late getting back. Condors were thick here just 40,000 years ago. They haven’t changed much. But now there are only a couple hundred-plus pairs in the wild. So biologists keep good track of them.
They are monogamous and work together to raise their chick. They only have one egg and fledging takes a long time. Sometimes it’s a year before dad gives them the car keys. While we were there the chick stayed well back in a little cave out of view. So we didn’t see it. But the biologist showed us a picture she had taken of the downy little guy. Now you might think that with parents as homely as these the chick would be downright ugly. But in fact condor chicks are kind of cute.
Like cuddly little Easter chicks.
Except gray. And 12 pounds. And bald. :)
