White Tank Mountain Regional Park

White Tank Mountain Park, near Waddell, Arizona, is to be our home while we're here in Arizona visiting friends we haven't seen for several years. It's a "mini reunion", and lots to catch up on. 

Our site is in the Family Campground, one of many small groupings of campsites distributed along a winding road through some of the most beautiful Sonoran desert we've seen. 

The cactus and shrubs are beautiful, even though the area has been short on rain fall for quite awhile, and the birds are plentiful. Some of them have the strangest voice! I'm hoping the visitor center will provide names for them. They're rather bashful so I haven't been able to get a photo yet. 

Shall we dance?

There is a network of trails throughout the park, all clearly labeled on the park map, and ranked according to difficulty. The signage leading hikers to the trails and intersections along the way is clear and the map in the brochure exactly matches the Google map, so there's no confusion. That's probably the first time I've seen that happen! 

There's a brief description of the human history of the area here. And the White Tank Mountain Conservancy has more detail on the history on their website. 

Considering the numbers of birds happily singing their spring songs around our site, many of those birds new to me, I thought this would be a good time to try out the Merlin app I had downloaded a few months ago. It's a product of the Cornell Lab, and I've used some of their online resources before with good results.

The app, how it works and how to get it, are here. It took me a little while to figure it out and get my Cornell account set up, and then I went to work recording and trying to identify one of the really strange, gravelly calls I had heard frequently. Bingo! It's a cactus wren. 

Immediately after I played the third recording the system had offered as a possible match to my sample one of the wrens swooped in, landed on our retracted flag pole and started calling back to the electronic voice he had heard. I felt really bad that I had to disappoint him (or her?) but there was an answer from across the campground loop so I hope they met up. 

There are multiple ways to identify birds using the app, so I think I'll get a lot of use out of it after little more practice. 

There is a wide variety of wildlife in the park, and each has its own preferred "hours of operation". It wasn't until evening, coming home from one of the gatherings in town, that we saw a pair of coyotes near the road. They are smaller than those is some areas. These two had gray-tan coloring, and looked quite healthy, and calm, as they know they are safe within the park. Several times during the night we heard them singing. There seem to be several of them around the area, including several young ones that are still learning all the notes. Their presence probably accounts for the fact that we haven't seen many rabbits, chipmunks or other types of rodents.

We've had a good time here, walking the trails in the morning and then going in to Glendale to visit friends from the "old days" when we lived in Orange County, CA. Lots of stories to be told and things to catch up on.  We'll be leaving Monday for Indio, CA. to visit family. Our trail hikes led us to an area thick with ancient petroglyphs....see the next post for photos of those. 

The Old Timers Club

The Arizona and New Mexico album is here