Usually towards the end of summer we take a trip to the White Mountains for a mushroom foray organized by the Arizona Mushroom Society. However this year it got cancelled due to the Forest Service refusing to issue permits so we decide to attend a hummingbird festival instead. And with the change in location we can also stay in a different place, we choose an AirBnB in Pinetop which is about three hours away from Phoenix. On the way we stop a few times, first to buy some food for dinner and breakfast and then for a geocache that the owner contacted us about to visit.
We stop one more time for one more geocache, it is an easy one but in a beautiful valley and we even see a turkey next to it. No luck taking photos though as it flies away way too fast.
And then we make our way to Pinetop and our two bedroom house, it looks like a prefabricated one but it is clean and has everything we need.
The kitchen is quite large with a huge refrigerator and a couple bedrooms including a smaller one and a larger one which is the one we used during our stay.
It even has some interesting details and what we like most is the artwork with many birds on some branches. We would buy it if we would find it for sale.
What we like most and why we chose this accomodation is because of the large patio which is private with some nice views of meadows with quite a few birds that we will look for the next days.
We eat breakfast and dinner if possible on the patio, driven away only by the relentless mosquitoes, one of us especially is a mosquito magnet so we try to avoid them if possible.
The best feature of the patio and the unfortunate source of the mosquitoes is the small lake nearby. We enjoy looking for birds and mammals here even at nights with a thermal camera. But the best wildlife sightings are in the morning with many starlings enjoying the warmth and many insects.
There are also House Finches and the bonus is a pair of Lewis Woodpeckers that we see almost every day. For us they are really a specialty and we enjoy seeing them flitting around looking for bugs.
There are also jays and flycatchers and lots of other birds and we enjoy watching them in the morning and in the evening while we are at the AirBnB before and after our explorations of the area.
We also keep an eye in the sky looking for birds like swallows but we also see Canada Geese and even a couple of ravens chasing an osprey one morning.
In the evening the mood of the lake changes with a heron hunting for fishes and something else stalking the lake, or so it seems to us but we cannot catch a glimpse of what it could be.
That is until later in the day when we finally catch the mystery guest, it is a muskrat enjoying the pond and swimming from one end to the other and hiding quite expertly from prying eyes like ours.
There are some beautiful views of the sunset from the patio and we really enjoy them, it seems the sky is catching fire as the sun is setting down, quite special.
One night we do a stretch of moth catching and the results are not that impressive, mostly beetles large and small.
But still there are at least a couple special moths like our first bird droppings moth and another Many-Spotted Tiger Moth we have seen a few weeks ago on a butterfly walk. And then it is time to return back to Phoenix after one more day exploring the White Mountains, if only the weather holds with us. It does not, there is thunderstorm and flooding warnings everywhere but we make it back safely after three beautiful days in cooler temperatures.
