IN SEARCH OF Arizona's Elegant Visitor - Just one look at the trogon is enough to turn birders into believers - behaviour and migration of bird to nesting area

National Wildlife, June-July, 2001 by Tim Vanderpool

EVEN WHEN he's talking birds-as he constantly does-Rick Taylor can suddenly pluck an elegant trogon's cry from amidst dense treetop avian symphonies. It's a striking, if somewhat unnerving, skill to observe so early on this soggy, hot June morning.

Perched at the mouth of a pi-on-whiskered canyon in southeast Arizona, the wildlife guide is passionately expounding on the trogon's qualities before he abruptly falls silent.

Five seconds pass. "Nope," he then says with a flinch. "Darn. Thought I might get lucky. But we are at the edge of their range."

The monologue resumes.

Some might label Taylor's fervor a bit eccentric. That's until they've seen an elegant trogon for themselves, or heard its bold call echoing through rugged canyons. Nearly mythical in repute, the species draws enraptured birders to these mountains like disciples to Mecca. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist-or a biologist-to understand why. Elegant trogons (and the rarer eared trogons) are shimmering jewels in shaded woodlands along the Mexican border. Measuring nearly a foot from stem to stern and wingtip to wingtip, their assertive nature and brilliant plumage make for one stunning creature.

Taylor, the owner of Borderland Tours, is hardly a shy partisan. "They're arguably the most beautiful birds in the United States," he says simply. "Just see one, and you're hooked."

He should know. If the trogon has sparked an almost cultlike following, then Taylor is its reigning guru. He was the first to make reliable trogon population counts while traipsing around southeastern Arizona as a U.S. Forest Service fire fighter in the 1970s. He later helped prod the Forest Service into protecting the trogon's prime nesting habitat, the South Fork and Cave Creek Canyon areas of Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains. And he sealed his status by penning the benchmark guide, Trogons of the Arizona Borderlands.

Today, he and 17 volunteers are commencing the yearly June trogon count around Cave Creek and South Fork. Taylor doesn't expect surprises; the region's population of about 50 nesting pairs "stays pretty constant," he says. "They're hardy, and they're smart." Even a growing stream of tourists hasn't had much effect-Taylor says the birds have learned to ignore foot traffic.

Nor is fascination with the species anything new. The Maya and Aztec Indians ascribed great spiritual power to the birds, and some believed trogons embodied reincarnated spirits of dead warriors. Modern perspectives on Trogon elegans date to 1884, when a worker reported "a kind of bird of paradise" in the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson-Arizona's first official sighting.

Elegant trogons remain rare in the United States. They're also quite picky about their breeding habitat, nesting each spring in tree cavities in just a dozen or so sycamore-lined canyons. In southern Arizona, suitable trogon habitat covers only about 1,000 acres in four mountain ranges along the international border.

When mating season ends, almost all the elegant trogons abandon Arizona. However, their overall range and migratory patterns aren't known, nor are their numbers in Mexico. While not great distance- fliers, Arizona's trogons may be found as far as 500 miles south of the border, Taylor believes. Elegant trogons are regularly seen along the Rio Cuchujaqui in southernmost Sonora during midwinter.

But one thing remains certain: Come spring, some 200 acres in the Cave Creek-South Fork area rank among the frisky trogons' favorite destinations. The dense canyons offer plenty of what they love best: a smorgasbord of juicy insects and flora such as the southwestern chokeberry tree, canyon grapevine and Arizona sycamore.

The trogons' tastes in habitat are not unique. They share these verdant canyons with 350 other bird species, from hermit thrushes to canyon wrens (both prime clues to good trogon habitat). In fact, Cave Creek ranks among the most biologically diverse spots in North America.

Many researchers consider trogons an indicator species, since they're found only in ecologically rich and healthy canyons. "That's one of the reasons we do this cursory monitoring program each year," says Gary Helbing, a Forest Service biologist. "Where we find trogons, we also find a high abundance of other species and a real quality of habitat."

Like Taylor, Helbing is also awaiting this morning's first trogon call. He's well-armed, with a parabolic dish and elaborate recording equipment. Taylor, meanwhile, is bounding up a nearby trail, hoping to find nesting pairs on the far reaches of their Cave Creek hub. He has the restless exuberance of a kid on Christmas Eve. "I was first drawn to these birds for aesthetic reasons, not for scientific ones," he says. "I still get excited every time I see one."

Not hard to figure, given that a male elegant boasts no less than nine colors, from its yellow bill and brown feet to a distinctive, orange eye-ring. The bird has a deep green back and throat, a shining white bar across the chest, a black face and black bars on the undertail. Its breast is crimson, its wings grayish. And the upper tail is metallic copper or olive green. But even a slight shift in lighting can transform the male's back feathers from opalescent green to gleaming sky blue.