Arizona Surveys Find a Record-Low Number of Elegant Trogons, Raising Concerns About Drought Impacts

On a cool spring morning, soon after the sun’s rays illuminate a deep, wooded canyon in southern Arizona, nearly two dozen people wearing binoculars embark on a chase for a stunning, secretive bird.

Their goal is to glimpse the brilliant multihued plumage of the Elegant Trogon. From around April to September, the exotic-looking bird’s distinctive croaking call reverberates through the region’s oak- and sycamore-forested canyons. For birders, it is among the country’s most coveted species. “They’re big. They’re pretty,” says Dara Vazquez, while searching Madera Canyon in the Santa Rita Mountains. Adding to the appeal, they are a local specialty; aside from a handful of birds in a sliver of New Mexico, southeastern Arizona is the trogon’s only U.S. breeding stronghold. “So they’re exclusive in that way,” Vazquez says.

Participants in this day’s search, however, have a higher purpose than notching a new lifer. They have volunteered for a set of surveys conducted each May by the Tucson Bird Alliance, an Audubon chapter, that are helping shed light on the abundance and whereabouts of the species in Arizona. This year’s total count turned out to be the lowest since surveys began in their current form more than a decade ago, adding to concerns about the potential impact of a lingering drought on the species at the northern extreme of its habitat.

The Elegant Trogon is more commonly found in the tropical mountains of Mexico and Central America and was first spotted in Arizona in the 1880s. Since then the species has slowly expanded its footprint in the state’s portion of the Madrean Sky Islands, biodiversity-rich mountain ranges that rise from desert scrubland to forested peaks on both sides of the international border. Elegant Trogons stay put all year in most of their range, but birds from northern Mexico migrate each spring to five sky-island ranges where a relatively small population is known to nest, favoring tree cavities created by woodpeckers near water.

Tucson Bird Alliance conducts surveys in all five of these ranges. For the Santa Rita count, Vazquez and another volunteer, Jelena Grbic, drove some 150 miles south from the Phoenix area and camped overnight. Marie Davis, who lives in nearby Tucson, joins them as they begin their search on a Sunday morning. Gusty winds spread an earthy scent in the heart of the canyon and brittle leaves susurrate underfoot as the trio explores near a dry stream.

The desiccated leaves hint at how dry things have been here recently, even by this arid region’s standards. Before launching the surveys, biologist Jennie MacFarland, the nonprofit’s director of bird conservation, worried about the effect of parched conditions—part of a larger dry period afflicting the Southwest—on trogons. Since they began in 2013, the surveys have found that years with a weak summer monsoon tend to be followed by years with fewer trogons. “There’s a strong correlation between how much rainfall has come the year before and how many trogons there are,” she says.

Given the region’s below-normal monsoon rainfall in 2024, MacFarland figured this year’s surveys might yield a lower number of birds. Still, she was surprised that volunteers found just 31 trogons over three weekends in five locations—less than half the previous low of 68 in 2021. On average, the surveys record 136 trogons a year, MacFarland says.

That’s not to say the species is in trouble. Some estimates put the total Elegant Trogon population around 200,000 individuals, and BirdLife International considers it a species of least concern. MacFarland attributes this spring’s low count not to an overall population decrease, but rather to fewer birds migrating to Arizona because of the diminishing moisture. With scant rain in the past year to foster growth, the usually abundant wildflowers in canyons, along with the insects that trogons rely on for sustenance, are scarce.

Although adult trogons also eat fruit, “the chicks need insects,” MacFarland says. “And they have to be large insects, like walking sticks, katydids, large grasshoppers, cicadas. If we’re having a really dry year, they’re just not around in good numbers.”

Low numbers are not what MacFarland was hoping for, but she says they’re still important to document. The surveys also found more males than females and showed them venturing out beyond their usually small range, she says, probably in search of habitat with more moisture and food.

More trogons may arrive later in the summer with the projected heavy rains of a strong monsoon, she says—something that anecdotal reports suggest has happened before. For the first time, MacFarland is planning another round of surveys in July to see if it bears out.

If the Arizona population rebounds after a wetter monsoon season, it would lend further evidence to the idea that low trogon numbers reflect unusually arid conditions that also have affected other bird species, says Edwin Juarez, a biologist at the Arizona Game and Fish Department.

But if the counts continue to decline in the coming years, Juarez says, it would be a red flag signaling a significant and potentially worrisome shift for these northernmost birds. What that would mean for trogons nesting in the sky islands is hard to say—too little is known about all the factors involved—but the surveys can help detect population changes and guide conservation measures like those under the Arizona Important Bird Areas Program, he says. The science-based program was established by Audubon and the Tucson chapter and aims to benefit key habitats for the state’s bird populations of greatest conservation need—a designation that includes the Elegant Trogon.

Back in Madera Canyon, Vazquez, Grbic, and Davis come across 38 bird species, including a Zone-tailed Hawk, a Yellow-rumped Warbler, a Dusky-capped Flycatcher, and more than 10 types of hummingbirds. At one point, they hear a male trogon’s repetitive call that Davis likens to a dog’s bark, but they never spot the bird. Then, about a half-hour later, they jump at the fleeting sight of a darting trogon and follow its flight path with binoculars. But the bird—a female, as indicated by its more subtle browns and pinks—soon vanishes. “It landed in some tree and I never saw it again,” Grbic says.

The hours pass and trogons remain elusive. Vazquez says she would have liked to see one perched in a sycamore. But she, Davis, and Grbic all agree that their brief look at a trogon in flight was a thrill, and even hearing one bird call was worth all their effort. They feel good about doing their part to help protect the Elegant Trogon and other species sharing its habitat. They want to keep hearing its call echoing through these canyons.