Tag Archives: Butterflies

December 17, 2013

Seventy-five degrees again, bringing Mexican Yellow Butterflies back to the mud at The Stockpond (though they’ll be the last of the Sulphurs until next Spring), dragonflies there too; out on the pastures and over The Cienega they also swoop. The Cottonwoods that still have leaves are at their most scintillating, they shiver and pulse out their colors against the smokey blue of the mountains.

December 11, 2013

The news comes from Flagstaff that it’s four degrees below zero there … low 20s here in our mesquite bosque. Who would think of living north of the Gila? Here this far from The Rim at least, it seems there are creatures of interest abroad even if the nights are subfreezing: Sulfur Butterflies are on the wing, and a couple of dragonflies, and even a diehard katydid.

Pat and I saddle up and ride the high ridges of the A-7 Ranch on the West side of the San Pedro, from which we can take in a splendid view of our rangelands, and of neighbors’ homesteads. The afternoon is delightful, and we’re not the only ones who think this: a large rattlesnake is enjoying the friendly Sun of Winter and its balm, and we riders and horses have to step carefully around the snake’s stretched out and lazing body. Rattlesnake is very much awake, and isn’t there when we come on back through the spot now under a late afternoon 3/4 Moon, a pale island like something mythical, floating and Polynesian, just offshore of the canyon rim above us.

December 5, 2013

The new day brings an utterly different world: 25 degrees on the ridges, and in the valley below sparkling chips of frost fall from mesquite tips.  The bermudagrass pasture stretching out from the window of the Cowboy Caravan all the way to the huge saguaros on the far hill are white, icy, the Rincon above us dusted with snow.  Yet the air warms enough even in the El Potrero bottomland for Sulphur Butterflies to come to life, and an azure grasshopper.

Still-green and fresh leaves of the big Hackberries at The Stockpond start falling off their twigs by mid-morning–they never had a chance to turn color before the coming on of a night that was surely in the teens.  On the water swim a brace of fine Mallards, their wariness telling they are true wildlings.  A Wilson’s Snipe is there, too, and a large sandpiper with a long bill, also extremely wary: a Long-billed Dowitcher.  It takes off with a pained, “Pitty peet peet!”, showing a white slash of rump as it vanishes across the fields.

December 2, 2013

Ah … Diciembre, nuestra Arizona linda! … month of kaleidoscope sunsets and mornings beautifully crisp like this one.  A concerto plays on the radio as I drive up the River’s edge, glittering piano woven with glittering Cottonwood leaves, gold on the ear, gold on the air of early morning.

Red-winged Grasshoppers are everywhere in the pastures on this brilliant sunny morning of 60 degrees, dragonflies yet glide and shimmer over The Stockpond now long after the last damselflies have been among them.  A spare butterfly or two are there, too–the more common Sulphurs, and Mexican Yellows.

November 26, 2013

Lots of ducks whistling in, and fast–Mexican Mallards and Northern Mallards and everything on the “hybrid” continuum between the two.  A few small Bronze Dragonflies are about, and the giant Great Blue Heron who might want to snatch them out of the air.

Over the pastures: a Kestrel, yellow-green grasshoppers, a single pale yellow small butterfly, a single war-torn Pipevine Swallowtail, and Polka Dot Beetles seemingly well adapted to nights below freezing.  Large flocks of Winter plumaged Red-winged Blackbirds that hide in the silver-and-gold bermudagrass take off and do aerial moves wondrous to see, “pit-tickkk! pit-tickk!” they chatter.  They may not be as colorful as they are in Summer, but they’re just as elegant in their seasonally appropriate tweeds that set off so beautifully their black, much fanned.  They move around constantly, all fly out of sight, all fly back–but they’re less frantic to go to another pasture if the cows are with them.  The flocks come along horizontally, in a flat, broad bunches, then every bird drops suddenly like a stone and vanishes in the tall grass.

November 7, 2013

An exquisite Hawk Moth lands on the front of my shirt, and hovering there, shows hind wings of cinnabar.  It is caught in a stiff wind that pulls it away, is gone instantly.  I wonder if I’ll ever see another.  A large Fritillary and Checkerspots come to the pond mud with orange Sulphurs, and this makes for quite a show of sipping butterflies.  Ninety-one degrees!  Despite that, I am immersed in the notes of American Pipits, the largest number of the birds I’ve ever seen winter-ing in the Borderlands.  Wintering?

November 2, 2013

Hallowmas, Dias de los Muertos.  No matter the Winter trickling over this waning year, new flowers are come into bloom, vivid in color, huge in size: abundant plastic, freshly cleaned flowers suddenly burst from the roadside, where the families of the two lost vaqueros of this querencia have come to freshen and brighten the memorial to the deaths of their loved ones.  A tall crucifix marks where their men were swept from a hay-hauling rig after they made a move that couldn’t be retracted, of entering the Hot Springs Canyon, on that day a Crossing Too Far, when Monsoon growled a warning unheeded. The vaqueros didn’t make the other bank and safety and home and senoras.  They crossed to Eternity, instead.

Many many tracks that look like ancient pictographs of human hands are in the mud of the roads through Mason’s Pastures this morning.  I follow along where the raccoons must’ve been playing through the night, and scare into flight just as many Red-winged Grasshoppers from the sides of the tire ruts.

The day itself wings gently up to 81 degrees, and in the late light it is so warm that I sweat in my shirt, without vest or jacket on.  Gossamer catches that light and shimmers high over the grass, and a new hatch of bugs fills the air–glowing Sprites, with partners in the dance the Sulphur Butterflies in rich orange, or plain bright yellow.  Meadowlarks must rejoice in this Winter-long abundance of food for them.  Tall Conyza weeds are also glowing, the high, rock-strewn hills behind us lit golden, too, overarched by sky palest blue with half of it cobbled in little round, evenly spaced clouds.

November 1, 2013

Morning.  Crystalline.  Cloudless.  Blue.  The mercury has dropped through the floor of the 30s, to my fascinated horror it is trying to arrow on down right through all the 20s without a stop, and into the teens but stays just shy of that in the early sunrise hour.  The pastures are scattered with ice and I’m glad that their big irrigation hoses were emptied last night.  The wide swaths of Barnyard Grass I cross are still green but frost edges each blade–it is all so sun-dazzling that were it to take any more time getting to the other side of the pasture I’d come out from it snow blind.

The scenes change before my eyes, the visions of the pastures quiver as I watch ice begin to drip and hoarfrost vanish and the edges of all things dissolve.  Quickly strengthening Sun like an orchestra leader raises his baton, and the mercury responds: the First of November, the first day of the Sonoran Second Spring, whose arrival is told by the European Foxtail Grass and the annual rye volunteered by last year’s plantings, now re-sprouting suddenly and massively over half of #2 Pasture.  The grass returning to the wide pradera is already an inch tall … when did that happen?!  I didn’t notice it yesterday!

By noon a drowsy warmth is coming on, but rounds of chores are such that I don’t get to eat lunch for a good while; a Great Horned Owl calls in the hot 2 o’clock hour when I get to settle back into a steep bank of The Stockpond and open the lunch mochila.  It is almost 80 degrees; it is almost 60 degrees above the temperature at dawn.   All the water is a startling algal bloom color of antifreeze, and the heat has brought awake from their morning’s frozen stupor many insects to come to drink from it: Tarantula Hawks, dragonflies varied and beautiful, a Painted Lady butterfly.  What will it take to put them finally into dormancy, or death?

I doze off with head tilted back comfortably into a hollow in the level top of the dusty pond bank, winter Stetson lowered over my face to the nose.  Nothing matches the pleasure of such a nap mid-work in so peaceful a haven, nothing so good at restoring ambition!  Something wakes me, maybe my own snoring … and in the moment before I open my eyes I hear a huffing and growling even deeper than my snore, close by, and getting closer.  I lift the hat and stretch my head backwards for a nervous look, without turning over, and see a world of upside-down mesquite trees on blue sky, and the long face and little eyes of an upside-down champion-size Javelina coming at me all a-bristle, grunting, angry and meaning business, about ten feet away.  “WaaaaaahhhHHHHH!”, I belt out my own growl, flip sideways and let out another, but the single-minded critter’s brain seems to have shut down and it comes forward even more aggressively.  In another try at returning the animal’s belligerence in hopes of scaring it off ( <*<yawn>*> … how tedious to have lost my nap …) I stretch up standing as tall as I can, curve high my arms and open wide my hands while screeching like the mythical Onza and take a step towards the Javelina, but on comes the bedeviled thing that wants back this waterhole for its troupe.  I wonder if those animals drew lots to see who’d go do this–they sure picked the right one.  I back up a couple steps, do the bear impersonation again, the Javelina bristles up even more and quickens its step forward.  One more try at this bluff and I’ve backed into the edge of the pond, and the realization sets in with a sickening mental squall that there’s no choice but to run into the water–backwards–so I could keep steady eye on the situation, or at least try to.  Onward the unhappy thing comes, right to the edge of the water as I keep stumbling in reverse but now splashing and kicking up swirls of the blackest goo, blind to what is behind me, and I guess I’m going to have to skip out backwards into the middle of that mud and water I have never wanted to touch.  Just when Cousin Javelina starts to come on in after me, I hit a trip wire: barbed strands that stretch the tall pond-filling riser to the air pocket releasing sniffer a little ways down the water main that’s buried in the mud.  And … over … I … go, still screeching out, sideways and down and fall flat into water that must be a soup of intestinal parasites and who knows what else in the deep bottom of an age’s accumulation of black and syrupy cattle manure.  Oh the smell that welled into the air … the wild splashing to find the footing to get back up standing … the wave of black muck that covered me with an odor that makes me retch–NOW the Javelina decides this creature it’s decided to attack might better have been avoided, and after a quick panicked snort of “Why, just look at the time!”, it trots off fast and huffing, to the extended family on the other side of the grove of mesquites, and they’re gone.  The irrigation is running, and I realize I can turn the handle on that pond riser hydrant to get such a blast of water that I’m peeled of the mud covering boots, Wranglers, shirt, and what little skin that’s ever exposed anyway to the Sonoran Desert sun.  Though I’m clean in not much more than an instant with the convenient power washing, a certain miasmic smell lingers, as does an ear-pounding, worked-up tension that will take its time to fade off.  It’s not the first such event, and won’t be the last, I think to myself, and I also think to myself that the reason cowboys wore a side arm was to drop or scare off the Adventure of the Day–keep his skin, keep his life going long enough for the next horse to try to drag him across the rocks and cactus and that he must stop literally dead in its track if he is to live, or until the next skunk or bobcat wants to tear him up and get those clever rabies bugs into him, or stop a Mojave Rattler who has experienced a loss of composure and comes zinging after him.

More bugs, beetles, and spiders fill the air and creep in the grassland in the strong afternoon sun–around The Cienega, blue or green or deep copper dragonflies and one small one that’s pale bronze and very shiny, and blue damselflies … a gigantic katydid … a pale brown, very small jumping spider.  No matter the November date some of these are ones I haven’t seen heretofore, and that I suspect are just now starting their flickering candle quickly extinguished life on the planet.  Among the new ones in the bermudagrass are a few brilliantly colored, small beetles in shape like a blister beetle, green, with three pairs of black polka dots showing down the length of the “back” when the insects are at rest.  Afraid they are indeed blister beetles, I dare not harry them; I name them “Polka Dot Beetles”.

I am distracted by a Vermillion Flycatcher still hanging on in the valley, and almost step square onto the back of a Striped Skunk who–I am so thankful!–merely ambles off grumbling about its klutzy human neighbor.  I’ve lost count of the number of similar encounters I’ve had with skunks in the pastures on both sides of The River over the years, all of them without having come to an unhappy end.  Luck? or do skunks have a mostly undeserved bad rap, at least if they’re not rabid?

October 30, 2013

The clouds, round, leaden gray, are in piles across the sky, or scattered touching the crowns of the Rincon. They are clouds of Winter, and if I were up on those granite-spired heights, I’d no doubt be thinking, “Snow!” I can hardly grasp that this is only the day after yesterday; the temperature isn’t going to rise out of the 60s. The great fluctuations between days like Autumn and days like Summer have the insects coming and going in response, though one day soon they’ll go “for good” (that is, for however long our entertainingly short Vernal-winter lasts!) Only one or two dragonflies patrol The Stockpond, and one blue damselfly and one red dragonfly over The Cienega in the freezing morning. In #1 Pasture there are no grasshoppers on the bermudagrass, which remains green, but I listen to an under-concert of crickets; in the flats of dried Saltweed, a couple of dull-colored grasshoppers, and one bright Red-winged.

How can we be so far along towards Winter, if the “ephemeral” dirt tank in #2 Pasture still has water in it? A Tarantula Hawk is there drinking, and one brown-and-bluish dragonfly, and a Painted Lady butterfly. In that pasture stretching out from the tank more grasshoppers are active, including scattered Red-winged before noon, and as the day warms (well, as much as it’s going to) many more of them come out under the sun until their clicking can be heard across all the wide grass. Boy are they back.

October 25, 2013

Individual leaves on Old Man Hackberry by The Stockpond are turning yellow, dropping slowly one by one from the mostly green canopies to the ground. The cows are wild for them, crunch them up like bright little potato chips. A Buckeye Butterfly soars over the leaf litter, camouflaged by its wonderfully complex and colorful wing patterns of eyes, spots and bars.