Tag Archives: Hummingbirds

April 28, 2013

There are no wrens taking wing before wheel line irrigators as I move them across the pasture–they are gone! No Western Meadowlarks–have they gone too? In their place a dazzling and minute Azure butterfly has scattered itself, searching out small flowers that are struggling back from the cold.

The “regular” Mallards are gone, too, their place taken by a “Mexican” Mallard pair–appropriate to a day that will reach well above 90 degrees, and appropriate to that romantic Sonoran AM-radio station that I tune in again this Sunday after the early irrigation chores are taken care of. A pair of Yellow-breasted Chats come down to the Stockpond shore and drink; we have I think the most brilliantly colored of any subspecies of this bird that ranges over most of the country. The usual many hummingbirds are sipping or sparring for king-of-the-pond, the White-winged Doves cooing and calling in even greater numbers than before, in the bosque all around and the mesquites overhanging the water. Although I’ve read that it has spread through the South, the White-wing is still to me the embodiment of Sonora and these Spanish Borderlands we it must seem beyond reason love so passionately. The sound of them as winter ends immediately puts me at ease, assures me the valley of the Rio San Pedro is still a wondrous and different place. One hears their voice in the background of Tom Sheridan’s delightful book of the Sonoran village of Cucurpe, that place “Where the Dove Calls”, and I expect their sound inspired the huapango, “Cucurrucucu Paloma”. Joan Baez does a more than fair imitation:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xl84wjM8z8

Songs about Mexico, and Mexican music, avian and human, are whether or not Manifest Destiny wishes to face it a part of this very landscape stretching out beyond the Stockpond through monte and matorral to the Rincon and the Catalina and the Galiuro, and south to the Sierra Madre … […]

Me he de comer esa tuna, aunque me espine la manoNo matter the hand be pierced by spines, I can’t other than eat of that prickly pear. This is always sung with the exquisite pain of romance in mind, but it well sums up cowboy life as at least I have known it and still know it here, sums up the relationship those who make their living by ranching have with what is just another painful romance, one that in the end leaves you stove-up if not physically broken, likely penniless–but satisfied …[…]

April 21, 2013

The Mallard is out there, alone on the cold pond; in the 30s again. I sit in the pickup bird blind, the early Sunday “Domingo Romantico” out of Sonora bringing into the cab that finest 1930s and ’40s music of Mexico, while I watch Black-chinned Hummingbirds who seem utterly unperturbed by winter returning here right after they did. The males stream in and out from the bosque, land for the briefest moment in a bed of algae and pull single green strands from the floating mess, up into the air for a ways but then let go … or they try picking up a strand of it in the tip of the beak, as if they were pulling a thread to knot, but that gets dropped, too, though the bird can be high above the water before it lets go. Maybe the most surprising was the hummer who flew to the base of the tall riser that comes up out of the water near the pond edge, that is opened to let water flow in an arc from the top to maintain the Stockpond’s water level. As this stream hits the surface, a sort of ojo de agua is formed: a ring of water that rises with the impact of that stream. That hummingbird loved to hover just above this ring of flowing and bouncing water, then lower himself ever so slowly onto it with wings still a-whir above his back, and in this way he’d ride up and over and then slide into more open water beyond, then he’d take off. Humans are hardly the only animals that do things for the sheer enjoyment of them! I remember one Black-chinned last summer who’d come to the leaf tip of a millet plant that had sprouted from bird seed, if I had a sprinkler going and the leaves were wet and holding water in a bit of a cup at their base. That little bird played in the water, lowering himself onto the leaf tip when a stream would be running towards the base, and he’d “slide” all the way, then go back and do it again.

A first Wilson’s Warbler, a beautiful male, flies in, and numbers of White-winged Doves now coo from the bosque and from the wondrously large hackberries around the Stockpond … a probably long dead Mexican in gorgeous tenor croons with them, “Tell her … tell her I think of her, even though she doesn’t think of me … tell her that I die for her”–how different is that from what the doves are getting at? A just arrived Yellow-breasted Chat fusses and hoots, hidden deeply in a graythorn bramble.

I return throughout the day to change wheel lines and waters, and scare up a wren or two–today one showed the black stripes on its back as it flew off across the tips of the barley and oats, so I’m sure these are Marsh Wrens still.

The day ends with a Great Horned Owl silhouetted among the upmost snags of a dead mesquite, a black cut-out against the almost gone red light of evening, looking rather spooky.

 

April 14, 2013

[E]arly at the Stockpond, in the mobile bird blind of the pickup, on the radio the gorgeous music of Mexico’s “Age of Gold” coming out of Sonora and so well set to this grandscapes that were once not fenced off from that fair land. Hopelessly sad music, hopeless love for la Malaguena Salerosa, the cheesiest of organ arrangements that scream novella, and of course the tragically romantic, boleros in harmonies that drift over saloon doors of a cantina and into the street, Eydie Gorme singing that it is my inescapable fate to love her, corridos from The Revolution. White fluff from willows drifts past and lands on the water outside the truck windows. The track of a Turkey clearly marked in the dust makes the line from where the bird left the protection of the mesquital to cross the parking opening and down to the water’s edge; I haven’t yet seen one of these birds on the Mason place, but once in a while used to see them in the bed of the River to the south at Heaven Sent Ranch in the years I was a hand there. From the looks of those birds, I had thought then that they were Gould’s Turkey that had simply wandered north out of Sonora down the San Pedro. I wonder about this one.

Large flocks of Lark Sparrows, taking to the air in swirls as I wade through the grasses to open hydrants and set wheels for the day’s watering. I listened to a handsome one high in a mesquite top, by himself giving a concert like no other of his kind I’ve heard–I couldn’t tell it from the Summer Tanagers that were due to arrive from the south tomorrow. A Brewer’s Sparrow was also singing pretty notes in the mesquite saplings that are a constant battle to keep from taking over the grazing fields; right now is the end of that sparrow’s winter residence here and they usually disappear of a sudden. That summer song had me thinking they were restless now. That most exquisite bird of tropical hue and amazing grace arrived in massive number, hawking low over all the pastures: the Violet-green Swallow.

After having got three pastures’ irrigation up, I waited back at the Stockpond for the Great 2013 Wren Drive to start once the other Cascabel Wren Wranglers came along this morning–our eminent naturalists Ralph W. and Kathleen, and avid birder pard Bob E. Kathleen had suggested we play gamekeepers and walk in a line across the grasses, sort of beat the bush and see what flies up so more can be learned about this wren phenomenon that becomes by the day more astonishing. One of us might circle out and around to push a bird back towards the others … here at the water, though, I had merely to watch.

Lots of male Black-chinned Hummingbirds came zooming in to the water, hanging suspended and making acrobatic moves of incredible agility, each trying to chase off the other four or five so he could have the pond alone else he might not have enough water to drink! Sometimes this is out in the middle where the birds will drop and hover, drop again, hover, reach the water in this stair-step fashion and daintily break the surface of the pond with a fine bill-tip. At the edges where the water is only inches deep, the hummers drop themselves at hover right down onto the water, and slide themselves back and forth forcing the water to clean their keels, even landing for moments with wings whirring so they don’t sink; they look like tiny airboats. Some land in little pockets of shallow water that are cupped in the floating green algae, while keeping only the slightest of wing movement going so’s not to lose their balance. None of these things would go on for very long, not with their wing mates coming in at a divebomb to knock them out of the way with a chatter and whizz, “Hummbres, it’s goin’ on High Noon and this pond ain’t big enough for the five of us!”

On the strength of the experience of last week’s flushing of the Marsh Wrens by the moving wheel line, and the ease with which I saw those wrens a couple days ago, I’d promised the Wren Wranglers a good show but the little we saw turned out to be hard won. None of the birds showed themselves but for brief flashes of russet and brown and we were left with the frustration rather than the mystery now lost once I’d got that identity on them. Well, didn’t really matter to us, who all know that naturalists the country over dream of this place, and dream of being out in it of a morning just like this one. Not ones to give up, though, we moved on to other winter pastures to the north where there turned out to be few of the wrens but rather many more frustrating sparrows of who knew what species. How much time remains before all these LBBs (“Little Brown Birds”) give the place over to summer flycatchers, when the oats, barley, rye and wheat give the place over to bermudagrass and the main cattle herd comes back down to its lushness from higher, wild ranges? We used Kathleen’s roundup brushbeating until we got one of those elusive sparrows to light in a bare mesquite sprout, and we could get finally one i.d, Savannah Sparrow, which in past winters were much more numerous and might well have been so this whole winter but hidden themselves much more, too. Then too, wintering White-crowned Sparrow have been much less seen at least at Mason’s than in other years; we did come on a few of them today.

A Summer Tanager glows in a bare tree, when we return to the Stockpond and bid farewell to each other after a most enjoyable morning. The bird is a day early! That Lark Sparrow that was singing like one of that tanager kind must’ve heard him.

April 5, 2013

Song Sparrows, and Lark Sparrows, in increasing numbers come to drink or are seen in the pastures. The Song Sparrows are furtive and slip through the grass though also the wide-open edge of the Stockpond is much to their liking. The Lark Sparrows are bold and chatty, loud, with canary song to delight; they rise from the dirt tracks in a swirling cloud with the dust.

Almost a week on from when they’d started coming to the hummer feeders at El Potrero, a Black-chinned came this morning to hover over the middle of the Stockpond, drop to its surface, and take a long draught and then whir off. Yellow-rumped Warblers in elegant courting plumage came to the muddy edges to sip, too, and while Chris E. and I were lounging on the bank eating lunch, a completely unbothered Cooper’s Hawk also landed, and drank its fill, while a first spring large red dragonfly sailed out over the middle.

Not nearly so many Meadowlark as before, but still they’re here giving out their fluting notes and working over the grassland in shifts. A single Western Kingbird tells it’s about time for those meadowlarks to move away north. The wrens, meanwhile, are paying no attention to Kingbird’s hint that the bell’s rung and it’s time to change classes: the wrens are still well at home, and their species remains as mysterious in both pastures of green winter grass.

A species of White (butterfly) has emerged; they are few in number yet.

March 31, 2013

Black-chinned Hummingbirds are in their spectacular mating aerial dances at El Potrero. As they swing up and down on the wing they purr and putt, the quavering sounds grow louder and dimmer with the swing of the bird on its pendulum course, closer and then away and back again. Did the animation folks who created the Jetsons in the 1960s use this for the sound effect of the futuristic personal flying cars? No sightings or sounds of these hummers at Mason’s, either.

There is appearing a pattern here, of something that may have been happening with every spring, perhaps in reverse every autumn: the returning birds come north in their waves, and eddy and flow around (or over) places that take a little waiting for them to become more comfortable for them. El Potrero is warmer, more temperate than the Mason Pastures–certainly the thermometer readings show this and so singing and courting and avian housekeeping appear to start earlier those miles north at El Potrero. Do more birds come along from their wintering grounds at the right moment to occupy Mason’s areas directly, or are they already present somewhere east, west, north and they swirl on around back to Mason’s when conditions please? The number of species that are showing evidence of this keeps growing–something at least interesting is going on, but … what?

Winter seems about gone though of course we could (and probably will) have a couple snows yet on the higher country above us, and mornings that’ll make us grumble, “Oh this never happens!”, but yes, it always does happen. A lot of wintering birds appeared at Mason’s sparingly or not at all and now their season is winding down–they didn’t come far enough south because of global warming? Winter of 2011-2012 brought great and beautiful flocks of Lark Buntings to us; this year they appeared on only a couple of occasions and in much smaller numbers. Winter before last, often Western Bluebirds would alight all along the wheel line pipes and spokes around me, truly a glittering show and I’d hear their musical “phew! phheww!” overhead, and there were the many Mountain Bluebirds visiting and landing mostly on the open ground, but not a single of the latter species came along this winter. Both bluebird species can be pretty irregular, but the more to be expected flocks of American Pipit didn’t come this year to the irrigated grass, either, though I saw and heard a very few individuals–and no longspurs at all. Long before this time last year Tree Swallow and Violet-green Swallow were passing over our planted grass, but neither of these species has come through yet in 2013. With climate shifting northwards, what might the summer hold for birds on the place? What “Mexican” species might appear?