This is bird note.

Have you ever heard a roadrunner sing?

That's the maker of this cooing sound.

Want to hear more sounds of the desert southwest?

Come along as we walk along in Arroyo, a dry sandy creek bed.

A royal means stream in Spanish.

With mesqui, yucca, and cactus along their edges,

Arroyos in the southwest fill with water only a few times a year,

mostly during the heavy rains of late summer.

Despite the Arroyo's lack of water at the moment,

there's a remarkable diversity of wildlife here.

That's a northern beardless tyrannulate singing, a tiny flycatcher with a very distinctive voice.

And there's a pyriloxia, singing from the top of yuka.

The Piroluxia looks a lot like a cardinal, except it's feathered in silvery gray with magenta highlights.

Birds here are most active in the morning, except those that are nighttime specialists.

Just after sunset, we'd hear the drawn out trail of a lesser

night hawk and a cousin of the night-hoc, a buff-collared nightjar might begin to call.

The sounds of life in an Arroyo are magical day and night.

For Bird Note, I'm Mary McCann.