Tag Archives: Devil’s claw

October 16, 2013

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A False Dawn, in wintry silence on The Ridge.

One can forget that the Mallard, that every-duck, is also one of the most beautiful of waterfowl. This morning an incredibly handsome male is palling around with a little Teal on The Stockpond water; I wonder if that one in eclipse plumage of four days ago is this one, now come into its own with a brand new, very natty courting outfit.

Joel gives a go at rototilling a stretch of mesquite-cleared pasture, to see if it’s moist enough to receive the tines deeply enough, but it’s not and more watering will have to be done. I watch the days go on, and the optimum window for winter graze planting slowly being closed. Fifty or more Chihuahuan Ravens materialize from nowhere, descend on that plot, and look it over hoping to find our oats and barley, only they don’t realize we haven’t planted any yet. The Ravens know we do this every year and can read the sign that will be hung out for the easy feast … they will have their pound of seed, and that must be worked into our sowing rate!

Cooper’s Hawks are terrorizing both ponds, thrilled with the constant arrival of more thirsty birds out of the North. Migrant “traps”, all right! I know not to bother trying to find anything around them if those Cooper’s are about.

Vermillion Flycatcher numbers are up again, all immatures, but no Kingbirds to be seen now for a couple of days. Tail-pumping Gray Flycatchers are looking green and not their namesake color, in their fresh Fall plumage.

Checkerspot Butterflies are on that #3 Pasture Burroweed, even though the crowns of the plants are offering mostly fluffy seed heads to the wind, and hardly any nectar to insects. There is much coupling of grasshoppers … scandal!

The pressure on the irrigation pump seems a bit low, and I wonder if the fix we did on the deep underground main in #4 has maintained its seal. The shaft down to the break was left unfilled so that it all could be easily watched for a while, but instead of water down there (and I’m happy about that) what I do find to my alarm is a hole-bottom filled with Box Turtles that had fallen in and couldn’t get back out. They are all very much alive and don’t seem worse for their ordeal, and they scurry smartly off in every direction when they’re got out of there. That shaft will be filled in but pronto!

Lots of Devil’s Claw in that overgrown field that we don’t irrigate, the plants luxuriated in the wonderful, now gone Monsoon. Their fruits are everywhere, dangling and green still (and looking like some exotic vegetable only to be found in the trendiest of farmer’s markets) or brown and dried, and scattered about …

[…]

Dusk comes on, a pair of Peregrine Falcons tussle with each other in the air over the roof of the truck while I wait at the pump at The Stockpond for it to use up the last of the lower electric rate minutes of the day. I turn it off, and make the rounds of emptying waterlines, a chore of real winter: it is going to freeze tonight, though I can’t tell how deeply and can’t chance swelling ice breaking the fabric of the hoses. It is almost dark when the last of that work is done, and the Mourning Doves are sailing in from all sides to drink at The Cienega. In the Bottomlands moves a cold like the breathed presence of a malevolant spirit by whom Summer has been overpowered, is helpless–taken–but such brutality will never keep Summer down, not in these Spanish Borderlands.

October 9, 2013

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The truck slips from the warm ridgecrest into the riverbottom, under some line of inversion and into temperatures in the upper 30s. I’m afraid there will be ice to be dumped from the irrigation hoses, not just because it would be another hard letting go of Summer, but because I don’t feel much like having to clear spraying water nozzles and getting a face full of wet even if the sun will just have arisen. Dark in the shadows of the eastern ridge, the pasture will take a while to feel warm; grasshoppers are there, asleep in the cold including the Mexican Generals in their habitual mesquite tips. I don’t know where the Red-winged Grasshoppers hide for such a night. A Swainson’s Hawk looks cold himself, hunched in a tree top where the sun will strike first. Last night will be the last he can stand, and he will head towards Sonora today and no more of his kind will grace our sky until Spring returns. Yet–the Devil’s Claw in that pasture still hangs out a blossom or two.

The afternoon, nevertheless, heads up almost to the 90 degree mark, the infamous wind of this season of the Southwest comes up and lasts all day, takes my light palm-leaf Summer cowboy hat in its abrazo and flings it far, time after time Wind plays fetch and I know she’s telling me I ought to change over to the heavier beaver Stetson. The first Western storm approaches but probably won’t bless us, the wind its harbinger. The storm swirls down from the North instead of up from the tropics nearer by us: for Flagstaff it will be snow, but mildness reigns here in our own Land Beneath the Rim, our own Tierra Caliente. It’s probably pushed along to us the lone Cassin’s Kingbird that I spy up in #4 Pasture. The hot afternoon brings out many Western Pygmy Blue Butterflies to the pond’s rim–haven’t seen one of those since Spring. Grasshoppers also love the day’s heat, tiny-sized pale blue ones fly abundantly ahead of my step through their pastures. A Great Blue Heron flies back and forth between The Stockpond and open water of The Cienega in #1 Pasture, where over the course of the summer native Willows have established themselves and grown upwards with surprising quickness. Snipe is less jumpy than the heron, and has grown so used to me that I’m able to walk past within ten feet, and it still sits there.

August 13, 2013

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The Devil’s Claws continue to grow and spread their branches, there are even more flowers now than a couple weeks ago. As I noticed before, only some individuals have the Paulownia-like fragrance and that only slight–one plant’s flowers are nearly raspberry red in color, look like Pansy (Miltonia) Orchids. Wild Tomatillo are at the height of bloom, rather a weedy plant but rather showy, too. After a night of 80% humidity, the dew is drenching everything and as I walk I am wet through from the top of the so-called knee boots to well above the knees. (Knee boots only come now up to about half way between the calf and the knee, which is reminiscent of what happened with two-by-four lumber. They seem no longer to be built to fit well, too, and are too floppy and open to keep out raspy grass seeds, sharp and impaling foxtail awns that can find their way all the way to the toes before becoming a splinter in your hide, or the marbles of White Horsenettle fruits. The “rubber” lasts all of about two months before its seams fracture. What do I want for $30? something that lasts??) More and more grasshoppers are flushed on such a walk through the deep pasture, today there’s a new straw-colored one with a black stripe, and large emerald katydids with a white stripe, trailing legs far behind them when they take off and buzz on ahead of me. A small black wasp is now very active, has a brightly contrasting red abdomen, connected to its forward parts by a thorax as thin as a hair.

I get back to the truck after closing down the riser valves just after lunch, slip off the rubber boots and shake them upside down before putting on regular cowboy boots, and out of them onto the ground falls a spider of astonishing color and shape: apple green, striped with a lighter fluorescent green, and the legs are feathered and ornate like those of deep sea crabs. How this Green Lynx Spider didn’t get crushed as it was jostled around in my boot is a question–it must be very nimble. I read that they can give a venomous bite, but that they have to be harassed into doing that. I should think that a ride with my foot far from home would constitute harassment. I do empty other critters out of those boots from time to time after I have finished crossing those pastures, and have always been happy not to know what alarming thing I was carrying around with me at the time.

Clear sky, temperature 104 degrees in the afternoon … the convection oven of the land bouncing back great heat into the air is setting up all for a big blow, it feels–but not today.

July 24, 2013

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A day to ride the range in air heavy and summer lush, in the light and cool breeze is the promise of rich downpours to swirl up from the Sierra Madre just over our horizon. Swirling up from below us on our horses already is the perfume of the large yellow nodding bells of Cuernitos, Proboscidea althaeifolia, one of the two species here that forms those whimsical fruits we call Devil’s Claw. This is one of the cleanest, richest fragrances of a flower I have ever come on in the world, though but for the level of its intensity, it would be indistinguishable from that of its relative the Paulownia tree of the temperate zone. It is fascinating also that the flowers of this Proboscidea and those of the Paulownia are also nearly identical in size and shape, but are opposites in color–the former, yellow, the latter, pale lavendar. It is a joy to ride on the desert when the Cuernitos is in bloom, as much for what you smell as for what you see, and this year with all its moisture that is especially so.

A totally blue sky arches over us during most of our ride, and then forms a little cloud over the peak of Mt. Lemmon, then another over the peak of The Rincon. By the late afternoon when I go to the pastures to check over things with the herd, those two little clouds have grown and fit themselves together, and grown rapidly then into a monster thunderstorm cell. It’s a Monsoon agate evening sky, the leaf blades of Barnyard Grass under the pink glow of the air above their wide meadows are the lurid color of lime popsicles, lit by the last of a sun about to be swallowed by a black wall of clouds. Swallows are flying, pobrecito Red-tailed Hawk is trying to ditch a kingbird who is flying just above it and delivering pecking blows to the bigger bird’s back, a pair of Great Horned Owls calls back and forth, mosquitoes bite my ears and forehead, a couple of nighthawks are scooping up bugs overhead.

Two nighthawks and a bat sip at the water, and then comes an early night.

July 10, 2013

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Cuckoo calls, but we seem to have half the number of those birds we did a year ago. We do have lots of young kingbirds colored much like Say’s Phoebes, young Lark Sparrows, many young Vermillion Flycatchers. An adult male of the flycatcher attempts to mate, but he’s rather tawdry; she can do better. Among the still small Palmer amaranths are the peculiar sharply-notched cotyledons of just-sprouted native morning glories, and the large first leaves of the other Devil’s Claw to be found here, Proboscidea parviflora, are also up and on a dash towards blooming. While the Sonoran Desert Toads have abandoned The Stockpond, they’ve taken up their nuptial swims in the still-full dirt tank in #2 Pasture. I can hear the River running again; it will probably come and go this way for the rest of the summer.

July 9, 2013

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It seems I’ve awakened again in Hilo, rain pattering on the window, mists and clouds settled upon the cliffs and hanging valleys above the San Pedro. Pat and I will saddle Nimby and Loompy, go up on the ranges with them and see how nine days of Monsoon rain will have brought change and green and flowers.

I pass under a soaring Swainson’s Hawk on my way north to El Potrero, and once there find Nimby looks surprisingly clean even though he’s black, but Loompy? He looks like a New Guinea [Asaro] Mudman, and it takes a good while to comb him out and get him back to his bright sorrel color. A glorious day to ride, even though humidity hovers around 100% and the temperature hovers near 100 degrees. All is riotous, lush, colorful, fragrant–Loompy chomps off a swatch of Desert Oregano that grows just at the narrow gate that is usually mine to dismount to open. Enveloped in the plant’s delicious spice, I swing into the saddle again, if it can be said that a sixty year old can “swing” at all … […]

Pink Mammilaria cactus in bloom just about everywhere … the vast flats of huisache no longer look furnace-dried and brittle (if not killed outright) by that late freeze and the ensuing drought, but are green with feathery new growth … the sproutlings of yellow Devil’s Claw of a month ago have spread into mounds of shiny green leaves … Three-awn and Muhly grasses are in near complete rebound from the winter grazing of the herd … and the rains have even tempted the Saguaros to push out a couple large and very late flowers.

The rains are coming evenly and are most welcome, but they aren’t giving enough accumulation for the needs of bermuda pasture and so I go to Mason’s to set irrigation for the night. Blue Heron is at The Stockpond, his usual jumpy self. A good number of martins are overhead but don’t give much of a lengthy evening show, male Vermillion Flycatchers are in a rumble of bluff, bravado and defense of the choice real estate–but then come in many more martins, five or six at a time, slicing the water across much of the pond or are more dainty in their approach and drinking, a few others splash onto the water like the Flying Boat landing on a lagoon. Only two nighthawks appear, at 7:30 in the last pink Monsoon light set with thunder from the higher country.

June 14, 2013

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Devil’s Claw (Proboscidea parviflora) are germinating and producing their first true leaves in tiny open spots out in the bermuda.

The shores of The Stockpond are massed with jumping, landing, and departing sparrows and warblers, towhees, Canyon Wrens, orioles, grosbeaks, the numbers of all of these increasing as the mudflats widen with the extreme evapotranspiration of Foresummer that sucks the pond into midair.

Thunderheads loom … a few drops of rain … the Mini Monsoon?! In a few minutes the heat drops from 107 to 85 degrees, enough to make one shiver!