The Aztec thrush isn’t much to look at. Neither big nor small, purportedly. Nor does it possess any curious anatomical features (bill, check; tail, check; wings, check—but nothing to get excited over). It’s a fairly drab specimen, by almost any criterion, lacking even the sunset breast of its close cousin, the American robin. “Male is sooty-brown above,” says the National Geographic Society in the second edition of its Field Guide to the Birds of North America. The thrush would strike the layperson, I imagine, as pretty much a generic bird.
What the Aztec thrush has going for it is its scarcity, at least north of the U.S.-Mexico border. The first reliable U.S. sighting of an Aztec thrush was in 1977, in Texas’s Big Bend National Park. There have been a handful of additional U.S. sightings since then, mostly in southeastern Arizona’s Huachuca Mountains, whose steep precipices and yawning canyons form abrupt interruptions of the desert floor below. Here the thrushes have appeared sporadically, and only for a mid-August week or two each sighting year. They have typically been spotted in small flocks, foraging amid chokecherry branches. Birders worldwide, hoping to fortify their North American life lists, flock to these mountains along the border yearly, armed with binoculars, hiking boots, sunscreen, and mosquito repellent. They come to welcome this tiny avian immigrant, hoping to avoid—or simply oblivious to—other immigrants from the south, the thrushes’ human counterparts.
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