We arrived at our highest campsite, Shannon Campground, at 9,000 feet. Among huge Douglas firs and Engelmann spruce, we settled in and ate dinner in the van to escape the rain as it arrived at sunset.

After another successful day, we drove to our last (and tallest) mountain range of the trip, the Pinaleños in Arizona, with a stop in Safford, AZ to stock up for the last time.

Day 8: We checked out more spots nearby, including this lovely trail, Little Cherry Creek. Here we caught a pair of painted redstarts plus a couple of neat "bycatch" birds: a black-throated gray warbler and a broad-tailed hummingbird.

...and back into the mountains. We stayed in Cherry Creek Campground again. Our only consecutive nights of the trip in the same place.

After a good morning catching birds, we drove into Silver City for a much needed shower in the van and laundromat visit.

Day 7: This was a lovely spot. Plenty of birds around and close to the road. Nice setting.

We triumphantly drove back west to Silver City, NM and up into the mountains to Cherry Creek Campground. We made dinner and fell asleep sleep with a spotted owl hooting in the canyon.

When we'd gotten our fill of warblers, I drove the van out of the canyon without incident, and on the unbelievably long, bumpy, dusty drive back to the highway, we found the gray water tank valve in the road.

Day 6: Bird fortunes reverse. Red-faced warblers were plentiful and easy to catch.

We arrived at Hughes Mill Campground frustrated after two one-bird days in a row and discovered the waste valve had fallen off our our gray water tank somewhere along the drive. That night I had nightmares of falling off the cliff on the way out the next day. This was the low point of the trip.

We climbed in elevation and then descended into Bear Trap Canyon. No pictures from this part of the drive as I was trying hard not to put the van over the edge of the cliff from the incredibly narrow bumpy road.

We got some free ice cream from a coffee shop in town(!) and crossed our fingers that the next spot would have lots of catchable birds. We headed up to the northern edge of the San Mateos. This was an unbelievably long, bumpy dirt road back into the National Forest.

Eventually we gave up and headed back to Truth or Consequences to refuel.

Day 5: We discovered that there was only enough habitat in this spot for one pair of RFWAs. We caught the female but the male eluded us all day. At least we had some interesting bycatch (hairy woodpecker) and a Western flycatcher nest in a wooden shelter nearby.

The van struggled a bit, but we made it to the southern end of the San Mateos at Springtime Campground just before dark and went to bed after a long day.

We headed up toward the San Mateo mountains. This was the most remote part of the trip and the part that would test our 21-foot van the most. There was wildlife along the drive. A pronghorn nearly rocketed into the side of the van.

We drove several hours through Hatch, New Mexico (where the chiles come from) to Truth or Consequences, NM, where we loaded up on supplies at the Love's truck stop and made use of the van's shower in their parking lot. Pictured: the van with Leilton showering in it.

But there was no time to keep looking. Goodbye to the Chiricahuas.

Day 4: We said goodbye to Sunny Flat and quickly drove up to the top of the road at Rustler Park and caught the only RFWA there. We had a Steller's jay for company while banding. We then failed to find any other target warblers on our way down the mountain. Only one bird today! Not ideal.

In the afternoon we headed to Sunny Flat Campground in Cave Creek. I mostly wanted to show Leilton the campsite where I stayed in 2024, which is the most epic place I've ever spent a night. The site was open, so we snagged it!

Day 3: West Turkey Creek and Morse Canyon. Here's my view when waking up in the van's popped-up top. We hiked a lot, huffing and puffing with the altitude. But we caught more birds!

We caught a redstart during our lunch break. Next we headed to West Turkey Creek, also in the Chiricahuas.

Day 2: Pinery Canyon and Pine Canyon. We got our first birds of both species. Look at those beauties. We take a small blood sample, full of DNA, and release them. We also saw a black bear, but it didn't pose for a photo.

Day One: We met up at the Phoenix airport, picked up our rental camper van nearby, and headed out, trying to grab food and supplies with enough time to make it to our first campsite in the Chiricahua Mountains before dark. Unsuccessful.

Our target sites and the RFWA distribution. In gray, the spots I visited last year with my postdoc supervisor, Dave Toews @davetoews.bsky.social. In blue, this year's sites. Chosen because these populations are well-represented among museum collections so we can observe decade-scale changes.

The learning will come later. First, the finding. These are the birds we were after. Red-faced warbler (RFWA, our main target) and painted redstart (PARE, secondary target).

This is me (right) and my buddy Leilton (left). @leiltonluna.bsky.social This summer we headed into the mountains of the American Southwest to find some cool birds and hopefully learn something interesting about them.

I particularly like this hypothetical rendering by Jillian Ditner of what might have made prairie warblers yellow. This is actually pretty plausible.

One other interesting tidbit. Looking at the phylogeny, we see two pulses of diversification. One at high elevations, which led to the divergence of all the Tepuis and Andes species, and another in M. miniatus, which hasn't split because they are more connected at lower elevations.

Finally, we also looked at a large region of divergence on the Z sex chromosome. It looks like there has been a lot of recombination suppression here. Whether it's an inversion or something else remains to be seen.