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Bird Habitats - Deserts


Melierax

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  • 8 months later...

Great Horned Owl, Prairie Falcon, Loggerhead Shrike, Red-tailed Hawk, Lark Sparrow, Western Meadowlark, Rock Wren, Lincoln's Sparrow, Nuttall's Woodpecker, Dark-morph Ferruginous Hawk, Ferruginous Hawk, Sage Thrasher, Merlin, and Vesper Sparrow.

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Please define "desert".  I think I live in one (Española, N.M.).  Does that mean any photo I take in my yard or around town counts?  Even ones on the Rio Grande or the fishing lakes and marshes (not necessarily totally natural) that adjoin it?  How about the water-treatment ponds where I work, south of Santa Fe?

(It's raining right now.  I'm very pleased.)

Anyway, here's a Curve-billed Thrasher in a very convincing cactus next to my yard.

Curve-billed Thrasher

 

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4 hours ago, Jerry Friedman said:

OK, since nobody answered my question, I'll just stick to reasonably deserty birds in reasonably deserty habitats, so no cormorants.

 

 

Sorry, Jerry. I missed seeing your question, which is a good one. I would take it to mean any bird seen in a desert environment, and I would say a desert is any environment which is normally arid and lacks permanent water holes or streams. That is a rather loose definition, since we know that deserts can and do get floods on occasion, and there are deserts that have rivers that run through them. 

You mentioned Cormorants, which made me think of the photo below that I took a few years back. I was driving on a long, lonely dirt road in N Calif through what fits the description of a desert. There was no water for miles and miles around to my knowledge. I spotted something sitting on the crossbar of a power pole up ahead and figured it was a Hawk. When I got close enough to ID it, to my surprise it turned out to be this Cormorant!! So I snapped this photo. While the Cormorant is not expected in a desert environment, there it was. I figured it flew up there, the highest point around for miles, to see if it could spot some water somewhere!!! ?

1-Yolo Bypass NWR 01-25-2013 022

 

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On 7/19/2021 at 11:30 PM, Jerry Friedman said:

Please define "desert".  I think I live in one (Española, N.M.).  Does that mean any photo I take in my yard or around town counts?  Even ones on the Rio Grande or the fishing lakes and marshes (not necessarily totally natural) that adjoin it?  How about the water-treatment ponds where I work, south of Santa Fe?

(It's raining right now.  I'm very pleased.)

Anyway, here's a Curve-billed Thrasher in a very convincing cactus next to my yard.

Curve-billed Thrasher

 

It's funny, I live in New Jersey & I've seen 18 of the species pictured here in New Jersey & the closest thing we have to a desert is the shore ?.

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