Mary Ann and I made a visit to Tres Rios. This post has a description and some photographs.
Since my earlier Tres Rios post I got a permit to hike there, and learned the correct way to access it. It is a really awesome place! It’s large – about 2.5 miles from the east to west side, with a lot of ponds (about 15 of them) and running water between them. There are a lot of birds. Tommy DeBardeleben saw over 100 species in one day this December (which he posted at http://list.arizona.edu). At the city of Phoenix Tres Rios website (http://phoenix.gov/waterservices/tresrios/index.html) they said that they did a Christmas bird count on Dec 19 2006 that came to 147 different species. Tommy also has a great website with extensive information about a lot of birding sites in Maricopa County. Here’s a link to his information about Tres Rios: http://birderfrommaricopa.com/
We went on a Friday morning from about 8am t0 noon. In that time we only ran across one other hiker.
Mary Ann and I were there to enjoy the hike and scenery and get some nice bird photos, rather than get a count of birds we saw. I’m posting some of the photographs that came out OK (and a couple that didn’t).
Here are the pictures:
