A Panoply of Phainopeplas in Ash Meadows

We headed out to Death Valley National Park last weekend, but our real destination was the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge a little farther to the east in Nevada. Don't get me wrong, I love Death Valley, and we spent time there too, but this was my first chance to see Ash Meadows in a couple of years, and I've never been there in the early spring, and I was hoping to see some of the desert migrants that use the meadows as a stopping point.

Birders report 200-300 species of birds at Ash Meadows, so one can maybe forgive me for expecting to see dozens and dozens of species, but the birds sightings are strongly seasonal, and some, actually many, have only been seen a couple of times. In the end, I didn't see all that many species, just over a dozen, but some were pretty special.

If you follow this blog at all, you know that I love Phainopeplas (Phainopepla nitens), a member of the silky flycatcher family. They are a desert species that I sometimes see in my home territory, but they are more emblematic of places like Death Valley or Ash Meadows. I was watching for them, but didn't see any until we were leaving our last stop, at the Point of Rocks Trail. I saw a single male (the black ones), and we started driving towards the exit of the refuge, and we saw another, a female. And then another male a few yards down the road.

In the end we saw more than a dozen of them patrolling their territories along the road. It was a great way to finish our visit to this fascinating place.

Ash Meadows is a truly unique site in the desert of western Nevada. Faulting has forced groundwater to the surface in dozens of warm springs that put out millions of gallons of water a day, providing an island of verdant vegetation in the middle of a barren desert. It was severely altered by agricultural development in the 1960s, but overpumping of groundwater threatened the existence of what turned out to be the highest concentration of endemic species in the continental United States. There are more than two dozen of them, including the extremely endangered Desert Hole Pupfish (which live in the midst of Ash Meadows NWR in an outlier part of Death Valley National Park). Court action ended the agricultural pumping, but then the region was threatened by a proposed housing development for 30,000 people. The lands were finally purchased and given to the federal government, and Ash Meadows NWR was established in 1984. It's a fascinating place to visit.