The Arizona-Manitoba Connection

For many Manitobans, the only connection we might have with Arizona involves a certain hockey team that left Winnipeg in 1996 for warmer climes. There are, though, other connections that involve organisms from the natural world other than coyotes as mascots!

What possible connection might there be between the Sonoran desert and Manitoba's boreal forest?

I recently returned from a family vacation to southern Arizona where we were hoping to catch up with some of the local bird and lizard specialties, as well as enjoy the truly incredible environment that Sonoran desert has to offer.

Rufous-crowned Sparrow (left) and Chuckwalla (right), special but expected desert denizens.

Although we were a little early because of the mid-March timing forced by the school break, we had several species of hummingbirds, and I finally managed to see roadrunner – a “jinx” bird that I had missed on previous trips.

Southern specialties, a Broad-billed Hummingbird (left) and an Ash-throated Flycatcher (right).

But these were desert species we were expecting. For me, the strangest sight among all our bird observations was finding boreal and subarctic species of sparrows hopping among the cacti! In retrospect, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised – I know these species overwinter and migrate through the southern United States, including Arizona. And a few of Manitoba’s northern species have populations that breed in the mountainous areas of the south. Still, it came as a bit of a shock while tracking down Arizona desert specialities to instead run across White-crowned and Lincoln’s Sparrows that will be migrating through my backyard in less than a month! I hadn’t travelled all the way to Tucson to see them!

Lincoln's Sparrow (left) and White-crowned Sparrow (right), two species that occur in Manitoba but spend time in the Arizona desert, along with (occasionally) Manitoba Museum zoology curators.

The more I thought about it, though, I began to have a grudging respect for these common Manitoba species that kept showing up under prickly pears and organ pipe cactus. Many of the Arizona specialties basically hang out in desert all the time, whereas “our” migratory sparrows have to be able to deal with a huge range of habitat and conditions, from boreal and subarctic to desert. When we travel from north to south and are scrounging for food, we are relieved to find familiar forage in local produce stores carrying recognizable brands; these little sparrows manage to scratch up a meal whether under a saguaro cactus in a desert or a spruce tree in a bog – no shared seed or insect ‘brands’ between those localities.

A White-crowned Sparrow nest found in July 2008 at Nueltin Lake, Manitoba near the border with Nunavut, a long way and a very different place than the Arizona desert where they spend part of the non-breeding season. An arrow points to the well-concealed nest in subarctic scrub (left), and the nest with four eggs revealed (right).

So the Arizona/Manitoba connection runs deep on many fronts. Much as humans find a way to chase a puck in the frozen north and the Phoenix desert, our sparrows manage to raise a family in the north every summer and eke out a living in the desert in winter.  But unlike the puck chasers, the sparrows haven’t decided to move down to Arizona permanently.