Ah Kah a Qual

The time has come to once again test my training, fortitude and based on my wife’s assessment – my sanity. Two years ago nearly to the day a rock lurking under some devious leaves caused 16 hours of rather excruciating pain giving way to 2 solid years filled with various medical procedures, recovery, therapy and training to get back to this spot, my return to the ultra racing circuit. Not sure what to expect really beyond the overwhelming feeling this is where I belong success or failure. My planned pacer bailed on me yesterday, so I will have plenty time in my head to figure myself out. The good news is Linda will be with me at the loop starts to keep me in the best condition possible. I have been working her day and night on the key verbal communications “Linda, now repeat after me if I whine about being tired or sore you reply: ‘You lily-livered POS, get your damn ass back out on the course, get it done and stop acting like a baby‘”. She still needs some work getting the right tone, but she should be good to go by race time! If you don’t hear for me in a while, assume the worst ha. As a way to calm the nerves, thought I’d work on a post, one about outing that felt as equally tough as this upcoming race. Please give it up for the latest featured feathered friend making its debut here at Intrigued. (including a special haunting surprise at the end!)

Any guesses? Probably beyond obvious, but as a hint it is a member of the Warbler family. Hit the jump to learn more about this rather monochrome looking specimen.

Let’s start with some background on how this Warbler got checked off my life list. A few years back we started adding a spring trip to Arizona in addition to our traditional snowbird stint in Texas. Not overly impressed with the Tucson-Mesa-Phoenix track we initially took, we changed course and headed south into Madera Canyon. To say I fell in absolute love with that area would be an understatement. In fact, it became the #2 option for our next residence. Note, after a deep dive, discovered AZ taxes pension so with absolute sadness it has been crossed off the list. In the past I’ve glossed over these locations and came to the realization that there may be readers out there wanting more info to possibly add to their own birding excursions. Here is a map grab that might help you out.

Just below the map pin is Madera Canyon which sits halfway between Tucson and Nogales (our the southern border). For those visiting this area we highly recommend basing at Green Valley which is where we were considering moving to – fun fact, Linda was responsible for the IT at one of our facilities there when we were in the grind. Madera has already been featured in several posts here and I can assure you there will be plenty more based on my last look at the backlog queue.

Our Warbler here was actually found a bit north in an area called Florida Canyon. If you want to keep your creds when visiting there, be sure and use the proper pronunciation – it is Flor-eee-duh. For those familiar with Madera, there is a washboard dirt road to the east that draws some very colorful words out of Linda every time we rumble onto it – Jeep country baby!

At the end of that “pay by the hour motel bed massager” of a road is a small parking lot at the Santa Rita Experimental Range. Take heed, I have no idea what they do there, but there are signs warning not to get close to their their cows – word has it they might actually glow. From there you take a small trail that leads up into the canyon … which brings us back to our mystery Warbler.

If you guessed Black-and-White Warbler you get an ‘A’ for effort. If you look just a bit closer you might see a feature that you will not see on those monochrome family members – see that small yellow dot just in front of the eye – that was the field characteristic I was on a quest for.

I mentioned this was a “tough” endeavor earlier and that was for two specific reasons. First, I was just out of ankle boot …for the first of two stints and trying to navigate my way on the rocky trail in a stiff brace. Blistering hot, not carrying nearly enough water, shuffling like Jack Torrance at the end of The Shining hunting for a tiny hyper bird with a speck of yellow in front of the bill.

Frustrated, I was about to turn back guessing Linda was getting annoyed back at the car when an interesting call rang out in the canyon guessing 150 or so yards up the foothills. The hunt was officially on. Cornell transcribes the call as a “zeedle zeedle zeedle zeet chee“, Audobon characterizes it as a “zee zee zee bzz bzz“. I’ll let your ears be the deciding vote (link here). Either way, it was close enough to know I was on it, what I didn’t expect was the difficulty of finally getting it in the tin!

Eventually hobbled up to the tree the call was coming from – my heart sank a bit as it was probably the most dense tree in the area – I could pinpoint the call, seeing anything close to a bird was a long shot. The amount of shots on our digital darkroom floor is staggering thanks to countless attempts to get something, anything in the tin in order to get the coveted check. Eventually it would pop out and instinctively the finger would start snapping away – no real idea if it was in the frame still or not.

Eventually I chimped the back of the camera and there it was – the Black-Throated Gray Warbler. A successful hunt!

First of multiple sidebars – curious, I tried to figure out what kind of tree this was in hopes of conveying just how dense this tree was. Grabbed a few screenshots of leaves and put Google Lens to work. First attempt – this is most assuredly a Mexican Blue Oak. Really, the shots I find on the net don’t seem right…let’s try again…oh, this is actually a Smoketree..really… Want to try for a third go at it…

I am NOT a tree guy, especially outside my home area so this might be right or entirely wrong … again. I mainly put it out there as ANOTHER reason why AI is a long way from ever having my confident on anything. To its credit, Lens was dead on in its “Fun bonus note” hehehe.

Okay, back to the Warbler. This little guy was busy foraging for insects all over this tree, zeedling here, there, everwhere. Cornell and Audubon both claim this Warbler is more intentional and deliberate than its other family members – maybe, but only because the rest of them are Pixie-Stik guzzling caffeine addicts. This one was doing plenty of bouncing around. What Cornell did get right is they are incredibly tolerant of humans – this one could not care less I was pointing a big black bazooka at it the entire time.

I left this last fuzzy picture in the mix as it was the best image I managed to get that shows the primary field marking that led to its name – the triangle shaped black throat. Definitely easier to see than those tiny drops of yellow in front of the eyes – those are a good field indicator to push you off the Black-and-White Warbler option though.

All of the websites I use for reference noted there is little known about this particular Warbler. The only research I could find on it was from back around 1990 and that was focused on their foraging and calls. They spend their winters in Mexico, but push up north following higher elevation all the way into the Pacific Northwest for breeding. In fact, we encountered several of them on our recent trip to that area. I will leave you (for the moment) with the fact they are listed as Least Concern on the conservation scale. To explain the title, the Chinook tribe had already discovered this bird before the ornithologists named it in 1837 – their name for it was Ah Kah a Qual

Now for an added treat. My partner in haunt Paul has once again worked his magic to bring you a recap of our Haunted Trail of Fears 2026!

One could say our trail was a little more “lively” this year ha!

At this point, feel free to get back to your busy day as this next part is just a sampling of some research work I’ve been focused on. More will be coming once the full research is completed and I am willing to publish the results.

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Okay, I have been debating on whether I want to go into this or not and decided to just give a taste of something I’ve been working on for a while now. More data being collected, more examples being cataloged and further analysis needed but.. I am getting incredibly pissed off about a trend I am seeing and NOT liking.. blind obedience to a narrative. Again, only bringing it up here as it came up during the research of this particular Warbler coupled with an experience that occurred both while setting up for the trail and planning out the upcoming run. It starts with the incredibly atrocious weather reporting since the pandemic. Case in point, in the week leading up to the party, the forecast bounced between rain and no rain on a daily if not hourly basis rarely being “right”. This exact same scenario played out this week heading into the race…rain, wait no rain, definitely rain, not a chance in hell of rain, wait, wait, rain, to the end when it simply reiterated the forecast from a week prior which was more accurate than any of the daily changes during the week. Assumption, the science of weather is an oxymoron.

Okay, now we pair that up with similar faulty info while researching our little Warbler. From information on Audubon, the population of the Black-Throated Gray has been increasing in abundance since 1966 with slight dips in 1990 and 2009 (yes, I looked up weather data for those years).

To me that is a healthy curve. Also recall in the formal post above that there is little to no studies on this bird, much less anything regarding adaptability. Even if you play the ridiculous Audubon game of predicting impact of same to 3 degrees C increases shows no impact for same and then maybe a slight shift northward at the absurd temp changes. Now I go to another supposed reference site which I am purposely leaving a mystery and this is one of the statements in the first paragraph…

“Despite their “Least Concern” status, populations have dropped nearly 50% since 1970 due to habitat loss and climate shifts.”

This is repeated in their key takeaways section along with further conjecture later in the article admitting there is possible expansion northward of their population…expansion is NOT automatically an indicator of population decline. I have many, many examples of this which was the catalyst for the personal deep dive. I am not saying this belief or that belief or any belief for that matter is wrong or right. What I am willing to say is we need to get back to critical thinking with true unbiased facts and data. To contradict the now infamous quote Science is NOT truth – it is the constant refinement of reasoning that gets you closer and closer to the current best representation of the truth. This is ALL a result of a basic concern I had related to AI.. more specifically the set of data and facts that AI is being trained on. You can come to completely different conclusions based on what is included or excluded from a training model. As they say, once an IT guy..forever skeptical of IT guy eh! Wrong, right, definitely no intention of starting that debate or discounting anyone’s hard felt positions with this …just providing insights to what rabbit holes I spend my “me time” on.

There I shall leave this topic for a later time…besides I really need to get some sleep before the torture..I mean run ha.

Take care!