We've found ours on the desert in the north east corner of the map. We've found it there once, but did not manage to trap it before the end of the heatwave and the ashes fell down and disappeared (fell under the mesh). We couldn't play for the next 2 days, and when we returned, there was no phoenix in the area where we sighted ours (during a heatwave, of course), so we figured someone else already tamed or killed this one or it moved.

A week later ... we saw a phoenix NOT during a heatwave, trapped partially under the mesh, VERY close to "our" phoenix. Probably it was our phoenix...

Long story short, we managed to build a trap around it and tame it during next 2 heatwaves, but when out of heatwave ashes disappeared ALWAYS, but sometimes (rarely) one of us would see a phoenix trapped partially under the mesh, flying. Of course, any interaction with this phoenix wasn't happening.

We both play on Nvidia cards with highest (Bob) or almost highest (me) video settings.

Soo, be ready for weird rendering occurrences, plus it pays to troll the phoenix spawn areas even not during a heatwave - if you happen to luck out with a rendering glitch, you will know where to build a trap and wait for the next heatwave

(Unless WC fixed that.)

BTW, I remember reading that there can be one and only one phoenix on a SE map. So what does culling other dinos do to help spawn one? Or was that changed and we can have several now?