I am officially half way through my hellscape with one event down and one event looming at the end of this week. We put an official wrap on this year’s annual Haunted Halloween Trail late Sunday night as we finished pulling all the props out of the woods. Based on the feedback we have received so far, the scare division had another successful year. I’ll let Brad weigh in on how he thought it went.
To be honest, the trail doesn’t happen this year without a lot of people pitching in to help me out. My injury really put a strain on all the things that needed to be done to put this event on: prepping the trails, pulling everything out of storage, loading up the power sources, organizing the items into their zones, hauling it all down into the valley, putting it up, turning it on and then in a state of total exhaustion, pulling it all back up. A special shout out to my brother Ron who came down several weekends including the three days leading up to the event to help work out the kinks and keep everything rolling. There will definitely be posts coming to cover the highlights of this year’s haunt.
With that out of the way, I can now focus on the upcoming 100K attempt that launches 5am Saturday. Like with the Halloween party, a lot of things will have to go right to get through that. Now doing my best to catch up on sleep and tamper down some pains and strains that cropped up from last weekend’s efforts. In honor of what has past and what is to come, I bring you today’s featured feathered friend.
Hit the jump to read about our rather pointy feathered specimen.
The Phainopepla would be a fitting mascot for our haunted trail as they are pretty evil looking with their dark cloak accented by their blood red eyes. Not to mention their “Exorcist” pose when they rotate their head 180 degrees (not responsible for resulting nightmares). In case you are wondering, the association to the upcoming event is how much I “strain” to spell their name right – would it have killed the bird naming org to just go with the “Shining-Robe” for the species name!?!
As a bit of background, this specimen was found while visiting a place called Sunset Park in Las Vegas, NV back in March of this year. This was our first time at this park and I need to give Linda full credit for discovering it. I was desperately hunting for a Gambel’s Quail thanks to failing to spot one at Henderson Bird Viewing Preserve. That is one of the sure things when we come to Vegas and for some reason they were nowhere to be found…at least on our initial visit to Henderson (link here). There were also eBird reports on some other targets at Sunset, so we made our way over there. As far as parks go, these one was particularly interesting. As we pulled in, there was some form of homeless encampment near one of the buildings (note, we later realized that was a police building of some kind which really seemed odd). That was quickly forgotten as we continued our drive through the park and spotted another +1 for the year just strutting around a parking area (future post). As I was tinning that bird I noticed a child “with” his parents near a large pond. I say “with” in the sense that for about 10 seconds he was by their side before tearing off after a flock of Geese chasing them to and fro until they had enough and flew to the middle of the nearby pond. Quite disappointing as I thought for sure there was going to be an Intrigued post on a kid getting a deserved mauling,
From that point, the park looked like a typical urban park. Central pond, various sized baseball diamonds, disc golf course, lots of trees etc. What I wasn’t expecting is what we found at the far end of the park. We came to another large parking area next to what looked like desert scrub. There were two paved trails there meandering through the desert setting. One was a 3/4 mile loop and the other a 1 mile loop, but they combined allowing you to take a longer path around the outside. They even had a large mound/hill area you could walk up to get a nice overview of the park. Can’t remember why Linda stayed at the car as I headed out to explore this new area. Nearing the end of the outer loop, I noticed this female Phainopepla singing in a tree not far off the path.
Although I already had the species checked off thanks to a prior visit to the Las Vegas Wash at the Clark County Wetlands Park, one cannot just pass up the opportunity to take time to visit with such a cool looking Flycatcher – especially a birder that happens to also be a Halloween aficionado. For the next 30 minutes, this specimen was incredibly accommodating shifting from time to time so I could get a variety of angles (except straight on for some reason). Decided to pull myself away when I remembered Linda was patiently waiting in the car. I really enjoyed my time at Sunset and you will be seeing a few more posts from additional tins during our visit.
I’ve already covered the finer details about this species in my previous post, so I’ll not keep you for another run through that. What I will leave you with is a strange thing I noticed on Cornell’s Phainopepla page (link here). I wonder why they chose a Cedar Waxwing as the profile silhouette for this species. Granted their nearest ancestor is the Cedar (per that overview page), but I have never seen a Shining-Robe drop its crest like that in any of my many encounters. If they were just being lazy, you would think their Northern Cardinal (link here) or Steller’s Jay (link here) would have been a closer match. What say you Cornell?
No, I do not expect an answer ha. Hope you enjoyed today’s featured specimen. Difficult to spell for sure, but I’m thinking this weekend is going to be a bit harder than that. Take it easy everyone and wish me luck. Brad is already standing by with new adventures just in case things go off the rails.
Life Intrigued 