Sitting on Pins and Needles

(Cactus Wren)

Returning home from our birding trip to the storied bird refuges of the Gulf-facing Texas coast, we had the pleasure of spending a night with friends in their new Tucson desert home. The following morning our friend Bill recommended we ignore our GPS program and instead wander up State Highway 79 to Park Link Road, which would wind its way over to Interstate 10. The result was one of the best hours of our 4,800-mile round trip.

Park Link Road turned out to be a slow, two-lane blacktop that wound through miles of the Sonoran Desert. The scene on both sides of the highway for miles was vibrant, teeming desert. We visually feasted on stately Saguaro and white-bristled Cholla cacti and so much more we could not identify. In the distance, still shadowed in morning light, rose jagged, craggy remains of an immense caldera.

While Becky is a world-class 60-mile-per-hour, out-of-the-car window photographer (a necessary skill developed to counter her husband’s reticence to pull over once in gear), this landscape simply demanded a stop. Once out of the car we immediately heard the alternating chitter-chatter and ringing territorial warbling of a nearby Cactus Wren perched atop a cactus.

The magic of that call was second only to the question of how the hell these large wrens sit so comfortably on those cactus thorns.