CURWOOD: Let’s head to the dry sunny southwest of the US now. As Mary McCann explains in today’s BirdNote, a warm morning there brings out an abundance of eager songsters.

MCCANN: Have you ever heard a Roadrunner sing? That’s the maker of this cooing sound.

MCCANN: Want to hear more sounds of the desert Southwest?

MCCANN: Come along, as we walk along an arroyo, a dry, sandy creek bed. Arroyo means “stream” in Spanish. With mesquite, yucca, and cactus along their edges, arroyos in the Southwest fill with water only a few times a year, mostly during the heavy rains of late summer. Despite the arroyo’s lack of water at the moment, there’s a remarkable diversity of wildlife here.

MCCANN: That’s a Northern Beardless Tyrannulet singing, a tiny flycatcher with a very distinctive voice.

MCCANN: And there’s a Pyrrhuloxia singing from atop a yucca.

MCCANN: The Pyrrhuloxia looks a lot like a cardinal, except it’s feathered in silvery gray, with magenta highlights.

MCCANN: Birds here are most active in the morning, except those that are nighttime specialists.

MCCANN: Just after sunset, we’d hear the drawn-out trill of a Lesser Nighthawk.

MCCANN: And a cousin of the nighthawk, a Buff-collared Nightjar, might begin to call.

[Buff-collared Nightjar calls].

The sounds of life in an arroyo are magical, day and night. I’m Mary McCann.
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[Written by Bob Sundstrom Sounds of the birds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Greater Roadrunner song recorded by A.A. Allen; song of Northern Beardless Tyrannulet 40558 and song of Pyrrhuloxia 40568 by G.A. Keller; call of Lesser Nighthawk 118627 by G.A. Keller; Buff-collared Nightjar 40510 by G.A. Keller. Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Chris Peterson © 2018 Tune In to Nature.org April 2018 Narrator: Mary McCann]

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