Birds of the High Country — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.
Roll a window down at the next pull-off and listen, because this forest is loud, and southeastern Arizona is one of the great birding regions in the United States.
The obvious one is the Steller's jay — dark blue with a black crested head, extremely loud, and completely shameless about picnic tables. Its relative the Mexican jay travels in noisy family gangs lower down.
Listen for a sound like a squeaky toy repeated over and over: that's the acorn woodpecker, a clown-faced bird with a genuinely bizarre habit. They drill thousands of individual holes in a dead tree — a granary tree — and hammer one acorn into each hole, then spend the winter defending the whole absurd larder as a family. If you find a trunk that looks like a pegboard, that's them.
In summer these mountains fill with hummingbirds coming up from Mexico, several species of them, and the flowers along the roadside are why. Overhead, watch for turkey vultures riding the thermals and, if you're lucky, a golden eagle. And in the meadows at dawn, wild turkeys, which are much bigger and much more prehistoric-looking than people expect.
Two minutes with the engine off is all it takes.