Hassayampa River Preserve Birding Checklist
This checklist is a compilation of bird sightings accumulated during the first 30 years of the Hassayampa River Preserve under management of The Nature Conservancy, as well as records available from eBird, the Arizona Bird Committee (ABC), Arizona Field Ornithologists, and the third edition of The Birds of Phoenix and Maricopa County (Witzeman & Corman, 2017).
The Preserve's first checklist was curated by Jeffrey Cooper, Jean Arrowsmith, Dave Bradford, and others from 1987 - 2017. This new checklist expands beyond the Preserve to include the surrounding upland desert of the proposed Vulture Mountains Recreation Area and the adjacent town of Wickenburg to provide a fuller picture of the avifauna that occurs in our area.
Past sightings have also ben re-reviewed using available data from ABC and eBird to verify accepted records versus unsubstantiated reports. This current checklist consists of 294 bird species and arranged taxonomically based on the 59th Supplement (July 2018) of the American Ornithologists Society (AOS) checklist.
Hypothetical species are included at the end of the checklist. Many species are habitat-specific, thus some species may be more common in upland desert than in riparian habitats, and vice versa. For more information on biology and biogeographical distribution of these species, please consult other sources such as the Arizona Breeding Bird Atlas(Corman & Wise-Gervais 2005), and Birds of North America Online.
A copy of the checklist can be downloaded here. Please report unusual sightings to Preserve staff and consider helping with citizen science by submitting your sightings to eBird (ebird.org).