Two in the Bush…by Brad Marks

Welcome to 2025 everybody!! Admittedly, I am now officially 0 for 2 in actually getting the date right, but don’t worry, the year is still young…there will be plenty more mistakes ha. The Intrigued holiday break is officially past and those not already assigned to the field are back in the office, stoking the fireplaces, cleaning up after the raucous year end party and based on the last weather report, shoveling the parking lot and salting the walkways. Fortunately, Linda and I are getting ready to enjoy the sun-soaked days of South Padre Island. Birding has been excellent so far including some very successful chases to pad the 2024 Average Year (not updated, link here) and getting the 2025 version off to a great start. Best of all, we have met some extremely kind and helpful birders on our trip down here! A big thank you and shoutout to Tim, Q, Tom, Tonya and Arthur – best of luck on your 2025 birding goals. While I dig out the sunscreen and finish up all the 2024 paperwork (hope I didn’t leave all those staff expense reports in the fireplace, wink), Brad is going to bring you a few finds from Sin City.

Take it away Brad…

As Brian has stated many times over the years, he has quite a backlog of photos to process and write stories about.  I’m nowhere near his backlog levels.  Even if I am, it’s only because of the grueling travel schedule Intrigued HQ has Jan and I on this year.  Looking back through the queue of stories, I found this one that I had started, but had “misplaced” and not taken the time to finish.  This story is from our trip to Las Vegas during September 2023. 

In the afterglow of seeing a Desert Tortoise (see here) in Red Rock Canyon outside of Las Vegas, Jan and I decided to drive to the Willow Springs Picnic area to see the Petroglyph Wall.

We arrived at the park late in the day, after 4:30pm.  Shadows were long in the canyon.  We weren’t hopeful of seeing many desert birds.  The shadows also helped reduce the desert temperature to a comfortable range while standing outside of the air-conditioned rental car.  Early Fall can be quite warm in the desert.  Forget about that “dry heat” nonsense, hot is hot.  While we did see a few musings carved in the stone at the Petroglyph Wall, that wasn’t the really interesting part.

As Jan and I walked further up the trails and into the shadows in the canyon, we were cranking up the ISO as we went.  Our cameras (replaced with the next model since writing this story, they did each have over 200K clicks on them) were most effective up to about ISO 3200, but past that it’s really an iffy proposition to get publishable photos.  As it was, I thought I was stretching the cameras to the max with high ISO, aperture as wide as the lens would allow and a slower shutter speed than I would like to be using.  Nikon’s Vibration Reduction (VR) helped a bit, but not nearly enough to keep the other settings low enough to catch spastic little birds in the scrub brush.

Sure enough, there were two little birds teasing us mercilessly.  These LBJ’s lived there and probably knew our cameras were being taxed.  Both of them were within feet of the ever-darkening trail.  Each would flit to the outside of their respective bush/shrub, pause for about 1/250^th of a second, and then bury themselves in the dark interiors again.

Hit the jump to read more about these very active finds.

This Bewick’s Wren (Thryomanes bewickii), a tiny +1, seemed to enjoy taunting Jan’s camera.  And by tiny, this little bird only weighs up to 0.4 ounces.  The Bewick’s Wren is the same size as the various wrens we have at home in Illinois.

Here you can see it bragging to its friends how the photographers can’t get a good photo through the brush.

I could hear Jan’s camera clicking away, trying to get a focus lock on the tiny little bird in the darkened interior of the scrub brush.  At this point, the Bewick’s had had enough, and jumped back into the center of the bush and was gone.

The cameras were having a hard time focusing in the dim light, even with the lenses wide open and high ISO.  I have our cameras set up to take photos on shutter release and not necessarily on focus lock.  I can sometimes fix a photo that is a little bit “off”, but have zero luck fixing a photo my camera didn’t take because it couldn’t focus properly on the first frame in a series.  All of our Intrigued readers know how little birds can be spastic and how frustrating it can be when you miss photos because of waiting for focus lock.  Editing pixels in a photo = easy.  Editing pixels on a missed photo = impossible.   Those should be new definitions in Websters Dictionary.

Bewick’s Wren is of Low concern because of their relatively stable population.  Their preferred environment which includes desert scrub brush, stands of prickly pear cacti, even mesquite.  They also favor evergreen forests but we weren’t really very near any at this point.  Bewick’s have almost disappeared east of the Mississippi River under pressure from House Wrens (they take over Bewick’s nests and toss the eggs) and, you guessed it, human activity related to their preferred habitat.

Full disclosure.  During the desert heat of the moment, I relied on Merlin to tell me what bird was singing 10 feet in front of Jan.  Turns out, the one singing was a Rock Wren (another +1) just out of frame.  The bird in the photos is really the Bewick’s Wren.  Thanks to Brian and the Avian Identification Department (AID) at Wildlife Intrigued, I can bring our readers the most accurate story about what Jan and I really saw that day.  The Rock Wren is mostly brown with a lighter breast.  They have a very slight stripe above each eye and subtle stripes on their tails.  The Bewick’s Wren, I’ve learned, are really brown above and lighter below with a prominent eye stripe.  Their tails are very obviously striped.  Best news is that I really had three +1’s from the trip and am still scouring the photos to find the singer.

While Jan was being teased by the Wren, I was tracking down another LBJ in the scrub brush.

This Juniper Titmouse (Baeolophus ridgwayi) took pity on me and sat for ½ second on an exposed twig.  But that ½ second was long enough to claim a +1.  The Juniper is a look-alike for the Tufted version at home, except this one is almost all grey; no dark forehead patch.

Then the Juniper headed back into the depths of its cover.

I was graced with what I thought was a final photo.  Now it’s wondering if I’m ever going to leave.

There were only a few other hikers on the well-maintained rock trail.  In the depths of the canyon, every footstep echoed off the canyon walls driving our tiny feathered friends back into the brush.  “Is that another tourist walking towards me?” this one seems to be thinking.  Or it could be asking its Bewick’s  Wren friend if there’s a photographer bothering it too.

The Juniper Titmouse is also rated as Low concern with stable populations, at least it was when one of the last surveys was completed in 2015.  Their referred habitat is . . . are you ready for this . . .  juniper-like bushes similar to sagebrush or Joshua trees.

During the original timeline, both Jan and I were photographing these birds at precisely the same time.  Timestamps on the photos are interwoven back and forth.  I thought I might induce too much reader motion sickness if I kept hopping between the birds.  I chose to report on them individually, even though that’s not really how it happened.  The whole time Jan and I were photographing these tiny gray-brown birds in the deep shadows, there was a Common Raven sitting high up on the canyon wall behind us calling to all of its friends.

It must have been the one that no one really likes in the raven world because it received no answers; not even echoes.

Thank you for reading.  If you want to see more Bewick’s Wren photos here, or more Juniper Titmouse photos visit here.

Credits: Thanks again to Jan for proofreading and editing.  Thanks to Jan for half of the photos in this article.