Tag Archives: Leguminous trees (Other)

August 2, 2017

We built it, but they didn’t come.

Not to Mason Pastures, at least–the Cassin’s Sparrows. Over the last year how we’ve worked at preparing for them a habitat they’d never resist settling down in! How many hours did Alex, especially, fork and dig and pull Burroweed in the top end of #3 Pasture to make swaths that would fill (we hoped) with native grasses, and so create a mosaic of plant cover the Cassin’s would surely be skylarking over once The Rains began? We’ve been like royalists preparing a palace for a monarch in exile and hoping it will be found acceptable and that he deigns to live in it. But no … unlike last year and the year before there is no sad, sweet notes lowering see-saw fashion, bursting out in joy from a descending Cassin’s Sparrow. Since the morning of our first Monsoon thunderstorm drenching my ears have been listening for that so lovely a song from that so plain a bird. This heavy-sweat morning I stroll through that now very natural looking mosaic, thrilled by just how splendidly successful those native grasses are. Their masses of flowers, of Three Awns, Spike Dropseed, Cane Beardgrass and various Gramas, wave in a saturated breeze, have waved to those sparrows as those birds must have passed overhead and on north.

They didn’t go much further north, though.

Soon after Monsoon began in earnest I caught through the open truck window those uniquely beautiful notes of this sparrow as I’d drive south from El Potrero for a work day at Mason Pastures. That was in the dawn of the 17th of July, when I heard two different males letting loose their courtship song, the first near Canyon Road and the second about a third of a mile further on. While famous for being a bird of the grasslands and prairie (and that is what we have been trying to recreate for them in #3 Pasture) in Cascabel they have a penchant for mounded slopes reaching up to mesa tops, covered densely in creosote bush filled between with the lush and varied grasses of Summer, tangled morning glories, Blazing Stars and the huge, fantastically fragrant flowers of yellow Devil’s Claw. Every passing week has brought more and more of this singing. Along with the heady perfume of uncountable small huizache trees in bloom, the music lilts in through the window in turns as I drive through the territory set up by one sparrow and into the territory set up by the next, until finally I no longer try to count how many birds there might be all along the way of my daily travel to the pastures. I presume other birds keep arriving and even now are setting up their courts. By last Friday there was one singing from a shrub-top or skylarking every few hundred yards from Canyon Road all the way to our horseshoer’s yurt, then well beyond that I heard one between the River side of the paved road and The Manor House of 3-Links, as I was making my way to check on the herd we have doing tumbleweed control and growing fat on the bermudagrass exploding in the old ag bottomlands there as the rainfall mounts. Cassin’s are singing at the bottom of Pool Wash, and as I drive up the steep track to Ridge House I hear scattered individuals singing at an agreed upon distance between them up that canyon and who’d know how far east towards the massif of Muleshoe? Not one has been heard again at our own irrigated pastures, not by me at least … maybe by a raccoon or coati or bobcat when I wasn’t there … now it is weeks later than when they’d been singing at Mason’s a year ago and I expect the birds are by this time all where they’re going to be, i.e., elsewhere. I’ll have to concede that these monarchs dressed as monks didn’t look with favor on that palace we built them. Ah yes, Nature bats last and will have things Her way no matter the hubris that is our planning and, good grief, managing. I’ll keep in mind that for three seasons the Botteri’s Sparrows were with us in the pasture immediately to the south, but stayed there only so long as its management was dictated by the needs of cows; it may be coincidence, but once I switched away from cows to published land use guidelines that cater to that particular bird whose conservation has naturalists fretful over its future, no more have been heard or seen by us …

If governance or stewardship must be management, then it is inherently destructive, for the same reasons that command economies are inherently destructive. Human beings can’t know enough to manage life on earth, and efforts to subjugate and reorganize life under human command oppose and destroy the very cocreativity that’s needed to cultivate the growth of symbiotic harmonies. But the problem here is in the concept of governance or stewardship. The problem is that benign command is the slavemaster’s misconception of stewardship […]
–Jim Corbett, “Sanctuary for All Life: The Cowbalah of Jim Corbett” [2005, Daniel Baker, ed.]

By the 29th of July El Potrero had had the great gift of more than nine inches of rain in four weeks, and Pat, [a friend] and I were eager to ride up on the Saguaro-Juniper wildlands on that morning and take in the splendor of the flowers and fragrances and green velvet mountains. We saddled our horses and set out with that kind of light heart uniquely born of the return of rain and that all people who live on this desert come to know, and as soon as we got to the first gate out there we began to hear Cassin’s Sparrows. Nowhere in this north end of Cascabel do their songs carry out to the road edge and so I couldn’t be sure if there were any of the birds in these reaches until being seated on that “princely thrown” that is a horse saddle. Last year we came on a couple of the birds singing on the Cascabel Pasture when Pat and I rode one day but this time around–there was one after the other giving forth love calls, every few hundred yards along the whole of our big circle of some miles. How far across these mesas and bajadas and grassy flats and knolls of Cochise County were Cassin’s also singing?

At least a partial answer to that would come when the day before yesterday five of us (Tom, Nancy, Pat, Sue and I) set out with a steer for Willcox, early as we could to manage the likely wrecked 3-Links Road over the pass and hope the growly Monsoon would hold off long enough for us to get home without a storm cell forming overhead and getting us. It was not quite the same kind of light-hearted setting out of the horseback ride three days before that: there’d been an inch of rain the night before and so there was the promise of adventure in the air on the unpaved road that is washboard, boggy, deep-sandy and deep-muddy in startlingly quick turns. Yet light out we did, open to what the day would bring but knowing there was no guarantee the big truck and a livestock trailer with large steer on board was going to get itself to where pavement resumed on that road on the far side down in the Sulphur Springs Valley, and then get back to the relative safety of the home ranch before sunset. It simply had to be done, and we kept our mind on the gorgeous green landscapes and the spectacle of that Monsoon sky–and on the Tuesday Specials of Big Tex Barbecue in Willcox and the pistachio ice cream next door. After I nosed the Silverado onto the 3-Links Road, though, my mind turned to Cassin’s Sparrows, for no sooner had we straightened our rig and got steam up the first slope did the songs start reaching through the windows. Never mind that those vast cattle ranges are locally notorious for being overgrazed and cow-hammered, they were thoroughly occupied by these Cassin’s, whose voices continued one after the other, ever did there seem to be one coming to us on the dense, wet air. Though–I’m not sure about that unsettling stretch of wildly slidey, deep mud where we lost the bottom of the road and my thoughts got off sparrows and focused on an earthquake-long minute of wrenching the steering wheel hard right and hard left and hard right, trying to keep us from immanent perdición; no way could it be allowed to have that whole rig end up skating to the side or jackknifing into the ditch, and that steer kept from getting to the Harris family’s “Willcox Meat Packing House and Wild Game”. Or worse!–getting to the ice cream shop after it closed. There was sudden, comfortable silence for a few moments in the cab when it looked like we were going to make it on from the end of slithering up that grade, then before long my mind softened back into listening for more Cassin’s Sparrows and sure enough, they kept coming almost without pause on one side or the other for many a mile, as we came down off the saddles and passes and to the edge of Willcox town itself.

Maybe it took me a long while to become aware of and learn that song of the Cassin’s and that in reality they’ve been around here in numbers and I didn’t know it, but there seems to have been an explosion of the species in the last few years–though its range maps show it to be more a Chihuahuan than a Sonoran Desert bird. Some writers and authorities are still in 2017 referring to it as a “Species of Concern” but what I’m observing here is apparently holding true enough in other parts of its breeding territory that some time in the last year other authorities have quietly dropped the Cassin’s Sparrow off that list. This gives our work at Mason Pastures less snap, I can’t deny, since it was pretty exciting that species of this kind of interest were finding a home in our irrigated pastures. But I’ll gladly trade that importance I thought we were gaining, for those songs we now hear all around us when we’re horse mounted and when we drive. “And we shall have music wherever we go” will be true for however long these numbers stay up. Fluctuating the Cassin’s Sparrow population historically has been, not unlike that of other Aimophila sparrows like our Rufous-winged and Botteri’s (the latter have also yet to come back to Mason’s), but the scientific and conservation world seems lately to be less panicked by those ups and downs of such species. The mildness of the year, the heat, the rains that have come to us have also made a world very safe for the Cassin’s. As it changes, the climate is bringing so many “Mexican” species more frequently north over that fiction known as The Border that sightings of Slate-throated Redstarts, Rufous-capped Warblers, Flame-colored Tanagers, Tufted Flycatchers, and insects lovely or nasty too from the more tropical south don’t raise eyebrows as high as they once did. Vampire Bats are reported from less than 200 miles south of us–and we thought those now eradicated screw worms were bad for cattle. (Talk about Nature “batting” last!) I’m watching out for things rather less disturbing, like the large and magnificently-branched etcho, that cactus icon of those forests surrounding Alamos in Sonora where 30 inches of rain fall in their three months of Monsoon. Can’t wait to see those etchos shooting their arms up through the pink or yellow mist of amapa trees in bloom! At the rate it’s all changing, will that be next year?

[here’s a visual and voice recording of the species, one in North Carolina–an accidental there. It sounds like all those we’re hearing here, in arrangement and length of song …]

October 19, 2015

When did we notice we weren’t noticing Monarchs any more?  At last! … yesterday Pat and I were returning to El Potrero over the uplands of our Cascabel Pasture and revelling in the splendor of this year’s range with thunderstorms round about the east and south horizons, when suddenly my attention was focussed away from getting toasted by a bolt of lightning to a single Monarch Buttefly sitting out on the tip of a Palo Verde branch.  Like many of us, I grew up with Monarchs: in mid 20th century they were as ubiquitous as white bread, so much so that a kid butterfly collector couldn’t be bothered with chasing, preparing and mounting one or giving one space in a display frame.  For Monarchs, all you had to do was look outside.  Who’d ever have thought that in our lifetime the taken-for-granted creature would become poster-bug of the environmentalist set?  Yet even I, who test for faddishness every threatened and endangered alarm that “trends”, was stopped in my and Loompy’s tracks by the shimmering and orange and black and leaded-glass window wings of old friend Monarch.  “Where have the decades gone?”, I asked him.  While I’ve watched and watched and watched over the summers and autumns, I was never able to turn any of our common Queen Butterflies into this now-charismatic Monarch.  I had forgotten how startlingly different the two species look one from the other, until yesterday when even from a good distance this butterfly was so obviously neither a Queen nor a Viceroy but yes, a Monarch.  It sailed off, looking for more nectar, which it sure won’t be having any hard time finding, the range is so in bloom and has been straight through from those first wildflowers of February to now even in October and likely on into November.  This seems to be another Spring for a number of those same earlier species!  I don’t see milkweeds in those uplands, however, though there is a boom in climbing Sarcostemma below in the valley bottoms for them.  We’re still riding Nimby and Loompy through gardens and seemingly arranged displays of pink Fairy Duster, purple, yellow, or blue “composites” in near overwhelming array, and even Ocotillo and desert Sumac coming back into flower.  It just fills one with wonder.

January 17, 2014

Hiroshige Moon-set
on opposite horizon,
in dawn-pink sky
against bare cottonwoods,
and walnut,
above penumbral shadow
dark blue.

Just within the fence on Cascabel Road I finally have to stop digging out an old T-post and go search out whatever critter is calling from the canyon and mesa to the east a long descending trill and chatter. I presume it’s a bird I’m unfamiliar with, who knows, something newly arrived from Mexico and, ahem, undocumented, now the climate of Sonora heads north inexorably. A wren? I have no idea what the Sinaloa Wren–a species new for the United States found the more frequently not much south of here–could sound like, and this voice certainly has a wren motif, or should that be a wriff? After scrambling through two sets of fences and into the rough hillside of Catclaw and Saguaros, I arrive near the source of the odd notes as best I can figure just when the hoot of a midday owl silences whatever it is, and I don’t hear it again. I ought to resist the drive to find out every last fact about this place.

Gray Flycatcher, pumping its tail …

A White Tiger Moth comes over, slowly, passes on by. Twenty Javelina bring their babies to the cool and green winter #2 Pasture, and tuck into the vast salad bar.

The balmy air of late afternoon is full of bugs dancing, on what elfin mission? They move in the orderly bounces of a pinball, or zigzag back and forth and back and forth … Phoebes chitter on the posts, then dive and sail into the shimmering horde, the birds’ moves telling me they can outwit and out maneuver any of these insects that know so well how to evade me.

The day’s become so warm that it’s a pleasure to go back to work on the fence in the shade of the old and giant mesquite trees, where I’m somewhat camouflaged. I hope to hear the mystery trilling song again, from those slopes rising steeply on the other side of the road. While I dismantle the fence that Mycha the cow makes shortcake out of when she wants to get mesquite beans on the outside, there comes a huge Accipiter swirling and diving into the road but apparently missing its target. Gambel’s Quail in the sunset light behind me scatter, and purl excitedly as they flee the raptor even though they’re a thousand feet away from us. The hawk is big and brown, with the bright slash of a white eyebrow over the most intense of gazes, lands on an electric pole almost overhead of me: a Goshawk! Is it what had taken down the Cooper’s Hawk whose feathered remains were on the pasture a month ago?

October 29, 2013

A most pleasant, warm day range riding the Sonoran Desert uplands, basking on horseback in 80 degrees. The season progresses undeniably, though, the colors of the dried and drying forbs, shrubs and grass autumnal. Most everything is fading from whatever color they were, towards a universal straw and bronze–even the Creosote Bush leaves–the Fairy Duster is purple, the Morning Glories are open brown stars holding seeds, they’re a haze of fuzz catching the light and as decorative as when the large blue flowers were open in a wetter time. Wind hisses through thorns in the narrow passages among one Saguaro’s impossible number of arms. Yet, the arroyo floors are bright green, where Palo Verdes and even the mesquites aren’t bothering to ready themselves for Winter. The main bed of the Rio San Pedro, much farther below, is still as lush and Cottonwoods down there as sparkling green as on any Summer day.

September 30, 2013

The bird who holds “Summer” in his very name and in his hot colors, a fine red male Summer Tanager, is singing in the edge of #1 Pasture but–he takes his season with him today, is the last of his kind I will see at all until the sun comes to warm this hemisphere again in a new year. A Dusky-capped Flycatcher is alone in the mesquite edge a little further along, and it will also be the last. Many kingbirds however are still putting on such thrilling aerial feats that it seems they have no plans of departing, not soon anyway; after all, it’s still 92 degrees today.

A friendly Shrike keeps me company as I dig and dig mesquite from these Augean Pastures, he is perched in lookout at the top of a piled jumble of the despatched mesquite that are to be hauled off. All the while the bird fusses, babbles merrily, calls, scorns his “SHREE Shree shreeee”, or cooes much like a Budgie who sits contentedly with its reflection in a little mirror. That Shrike is of Winter, will not leave us, then, until just about that week when the first Summer Tanagers will return to the bosque of Cascabel.

A late day ride on-range. The sky is Arizona Blue, a darker hue than that palest of blue that arches over the Mojave to the West, but paler than the blue that far to the East will stun the eye over enchanting New Mexico where flickering gold Cottonwoods will soon be set against it. The Light itself is of a different quality now, as it passes through air that through the day swings in temperature from 45 degrees to 95 degrees, air that is soaked in humidity in the morning but by the time a late sun slants through it, comes to feel parched. The clarity of the mountains and the immensely complicated and convoluted canyons and ridges all around us and above us is startling; there is much to distract from the stone piles, nasty Cholla stubs and Catclaw hooks and badger holes we need carefully to guide our horses around. The lands march away and upwards, blue ridge on endless blue ridge, layered, feathered. When we turn for home and our souls have taken in as much beauty as they seem able to bear, Old El Sol has lowered himself to that angle where every drying out plant, spine, fruit, seed and pod is set to incandescence, dangling or held above the golden carpets of Needle and Six-weeks Gramagrass that have now also dried and catch every particle of light. Tall Saguaro are each haloed in this light passing through their spines, the Creosote Bush hold their billions of fuzzy but glittering diamonds, Spiderlings have become drifts of twigs lit and glowing yellow on the ground, and everywhere in the fading mesquite are dense white silk webs that also shine in that low sun in front of us–another beautiful thing in that most beautiful light but I suspect the roving (and dreaded) venomous Burn Worms of the Mesquite Buckmoth have something to do with the sudden appearance of these bright silky tangles. Scattered everywhere are the Barrel Cactus, their flowers gone, crowned in fruit of a green that dances, the color is so bright; they look now more like they’re wearing Carmen Miranda headdresses than they did only a couple months back when in their bright colors of silky petals they looked more like they were wearing Sunday gospel hats. “Aren’t we lucky to be able to see This Arizona?” Pat says with a contented sigh. Though it is still nicely warm (well, outdoor-living Arizonans feel chilly if there comes a drop below 80 degrees …) there are no sounds of Summer, no cicadas, no werping flycatchers–just grasshopper-like tsking of Brewer’s Sparrows that have just arrived and flit from most every lit-up Creosote Bush …

[…]

September 13, 2013

A Poorwill-sung dawn, with a warmth that has Chris E., James C. and I on the early side saddling up the horses we’ll ride today on range–Chris on my Loompy, James on his Clu, and I on Pat’s Nimby. It will be in the 90s before we turn back on the trail home to El Potrero, the Barrel Cactus are still in their center-crown, late summer orange-petalled splendor, and of all the astonishing things that give one to know that Summer doesn’t let go, we find a Saguaro still in bloom. We pick our way carefully down a long rocky slope from a saddle between ridges, and come down into a broad, white sand bottom and when I nudge Nimby up that canyon to continue our ride just a bit further in the direction away from home, that horse I’m sitting decides to go into a run–backwards, towards home where he thought it was more reasonable to be going. Angry he didn’t get his way with a rider with whom he had almost no experience? Did he see a Jackrabbit, which can make him jump so that I’ve come to call them “Jack(theRipper)rabbits” or “Death Bunnies” as Pat calls them? A couple of hard bucks quickly following one on the other and my left foot is lost from the stirrup as the scenery and time fly past me only now in reverse … I’m still somehow upright in the saddle when his croup knows a sudden and violent comeuppance as we hit a deep wall of Catclaw trees and the sharp bank of the canyon bottom they’re growing against. He rears, tumbles, all is dust and billows of shaken-loose acacia leaflets, then I re-materialize out of that bronc-made haboob among splintering thorny branches and more rising dust, sitting in the arroyo sand with my legs spread out as wide as they were on either side of his flanks only a few calm, but very long-ago moments before. I’ve come to a standstill; Nimby has not. His is a body tending to stay in motion … his be-hind thud-lands between my far spread legs as he, continuing backwards, trips over a low horizontal branch but somehow even though it is Friday the 13th the horse hasn’t crushed me yet. Up he rises again, and up and up, towering into the sky or so it looks from my vantage point where I’m still trapped at his rear and flattened out on the ground. I concentrate on getting my right foot from the off-side stirrup, don’t know why it’s still stuck in there, but then every shred of my being comes welded to the vision of a black horse with head straight up, pawing into the empty air as if swimming for his life, he balancing there like that for a slowed-down second or two. The hands on my pocket watch stand still while he does. I stare up the line of his backbone–it’s not a question of whether he’ll topple, but which way will he topple. Something keeps me from getting out from behind him, maybe I’m frozen there in acceptance of my fate: if he comes back all the way it will split me right up through my middle, from stem-to-sternum, lengthwise, with saddle horn sunk into my chest as if I were a vampire. When for half a second that backbone of his begins tottering my way my thought is simple and resigned: “I’m about to be in the dark.” I’m still unhurt I think, but also still stuck, I scream out a long death wail, I know the last noise I might ever make and it’s from a place deeper in my soul than any where I’d ever brought anything up from or that I’d ever known was there to plumb. I guess there will be no more entries made in the nature journal. The scream startles him and he sways forward a bit, just enough that when he does come backwards it is now to the side, and all that wild horseflesh with its four flailing limbs plows into the sweet soft sand a little ways off my left shoulder. I don’t know how he misses me, he rolls away from me, jumps up, and is gone from my sight behind, down the canyon and I presume, home the way he wanted to go the whole time. My regular horse, Loompy, who together with Chris on his back has been watching, must have thought, “God, what a display. Tsk, tsk, tsk.” I wonder what rule of riding, or knowledge of horses I’m still ignorant of, has played a part in bringing about this wreck.

I live. No broken bones that I can feel, and my organs seem to be left whole, too. My spurs are shoved deeply in the sand, but I totter upwards myself and turn to see the horse not far off at all. He’s running in circles trying to get away from a wide Catclaw branch that’s deeply tangled in his tail and whose thorny twigs are poking the insides of both his legs … I give silent thanks when I see his reins didn’t break off, so I grab them but he keeps spinning away from me as I try to reach back for the branch that appears to be hopelessly knotted into his long tail. Finally I can grab the thick, woody end of that branch and yank hard, and the moment Nimby knows it’s gone he comes to a standstill. Nothing appears wrong with him, though myself I’m already feeling like I’ve been rear-ended at a stoplight with my head having popped out a back windshield; I turn him up-canyon and away from home, and with a laughably painful challenge I mount, and then as if not much happened we continue on our way, go to check whether the watergap fence at Saguaro Juniper’s border has remained intact through the flash floods of this Monsoon. “Do you compete in the rodeo?”, a woman once asked me. “No Ma’am, not if I can help it. That’s the kind of thing we pray at dawn Monday morning won’t happen this week, and on Saturday night following give thanks hadn’t …” […]

The morning excitement worn off, I go back to Mason’s to dig mesquite in the to-be winter pasture, and in the golden light of late Summer. There’s a pair of Mexican Mallard on The Stockpond and four Teal, and then I spot a huge turtle–probably ten inches across its shell–sitting on top a rock a bit off the mud bank out in the water. Trying to sneak up on it for a better look is useless, what with those ducks taking wing in an explosion and I am distracted by the splendor of those Teal spinning over me, turning to show blue shoulders, turning then to show their white underwings with black fore-edge. The turtle, which I’m never able to identify as anything native, is gone. How did it get there? I’m never to see it again, either.

Out where I head to start pulling mesquite, a pair of Chihuahuan Ravens are standing aside a cow manure pile, one bird on watch, the other picking apart the poop chunks and as I approach, the one not at work lets out an obvious warning, “Cheese it! The cops!”, and they both fly off squawling. This would not be the last time I’d find the birds doing this, for as long as the herd vacuums up mesquite pods, and shoot the now-shucked beans out their back ends, Ravens will come to pull out those beans the cattle kind have so nicely prepared, and gobble them down–all the fewer seedlings for us to contend with later! There is a reprise of White-lined Sphinx Moth larvae, now scattered over the grasses and larger than any that’ve come before, but I don’t see Ravens going for them.

A flycatcher I might take for an Ash-throated (which species has been strangely sparse here this year), comes for a few moments into the big mesquite edge, just long enough for me to end up thinking there was something … different about it. A Dusky-capped, down from the mountains and thence south far into Mexico, or migrating down from a bit further north in Arizona?

June 23, 2013

We take the horses on range out from El Potrero: we need to keep in riding condition and so do they even if there are no cows to check on up there until the “Fall” (the English sense of what is a season doesn’t work well here.) There are a few Saguaro in sparing bloom, and on the arm of one that still had a single blossom is the first open red fruit offered to most every sort of diurnal, crepuscular, and nocturnal wildlife by these cactaceous restauranteurs, these Saguaros on a thousand hills. It is eerily quiet among the giants and among all the countless Whitethorns that appear dead from the drought: no cicadas sing.

May 29, 2013

Bats and Nighthawks are taking their final sips as their shift ends, the woods around is dark and the creatures themselves invisible, but the pond surface catches enough dawn to show their reflections and so I can only see them upside down. Nothing is as it seems in the crepuscule.

I go about the usual circles, opening the irrigation, back to the pump to turn it on, out to the pastures to see that all is operating well and efficiently using that priceless water, adjust sprinklers, unscrew nozzles to clear out grit and pebbles the pump has sucked up and that will clog an opening (and so I get the usual soaking which still feels cold with the dawn standing at 50 degrees), then swing on back to The Stockpond to see who has come now the sun is heading towards the cliff bottoms. Just the usual neighbors hangin’ out at the cafe: warblers, sparrows, tanagers. Ernest Tubb undoubtedly in a cowboy hat twangs out from the dashboard and from 1950, “I Love You Because”. I sip coffee, munch a tortilla, munch on the day’s cow chores, munch on all the fences that are also twanging out and popping off their posts. I think back to when a ranch visitor almost twenty years ago asked me one dawn in the cooktent if I thought it was going to rain, and I answered him, “Yessir, eventually.”

No Western Tanagers, they seem to have left en masse.

The dark shade of large and dense mesquites invites me to take lunch up on the rim of an old stocktank that still collects the runoff from the hills across the road if a storm cell dumps water in just the right canyon above. I can look down from that bank top at the wheel lines and can see their watering stop when the pump shuts itself off before the 1 pm peak hour rates begin. The scenes below on the fields and above on the hills and mountains and the cool shade invite a siesta though I must beware the large ants foraging around me. At least I must not roll over on any. An orange from some place far from this foodshed is my desert, the peels are left for a favorite steer who has learned to eat them. A thought comes: we humans are no less (and no less legitimate) recyclers of biomass than are those mahogany-colored ants (or gophers for that matter), the difference being only of scale. We do it on a continental, even planetary, scale. I’ve been at the bottom of those orange skins becoming the humus of a spot very far from where they were brought into being by the natural processes and cycles in their homeland, or bioregion if you will, and I’ve been responsible for their being added to the biomass (and decomposing litter) in this one. Humus is neither created nor destroyed, but transferred from one place to another? Multiply that by the rest of what I eat in a day, and that again by 7 billion of us, and we will know that indeed we are changing more than just the Earth’s climate. Will the result be any less “natural” an outcome than what should have happened here without us?

The mesquites are gravid with pods, though many trees are still in bloom and I take in delicious, deep drafts of the sweetness, allergies be damned. The calves are eating the flower spikes as if they were popsicles, their mammas reaching higher for the even headier and protein-rich catkins of Catclaw Acacia, with blossoms that fill the air with an indescribably rich fragrance one might only come on in perfume shops hidden down tangled alleys of old Mombasa.

Seven almost-grown Mule Deer join me on the pasture as I head out across to turn down the risers to conserve untold thousands of gallons of water that would keep flowing out if I didn’t. It is always a big hassle to do this, but I don’t dare waver from the chore. The deer are unsure of me yet also quite unafraid and they let me approach closely as I tend to my own business at hand. They come to graze on the yellow sweet-clover which in its tall drifts is loudly abuzz with honeybees, and there is the maturing barley, oats, wheat and rye, the globemallow, bermudagrass and saltweed for them and the javelina, Coues’ Deer, jackrabbits and cottontails–and the cattle.

These Mule Deer have the same power to enchant as the Catclaw blooming at the pastures’ edges, are so startling in their near-tameness as to seem visitors from one of the Yaqui ania “dream worlds” (if dream they be) where all is flowery and the streams do run. The Yaquis would understand how all in the crepuscule here is not as it appears, living as they do at the other book-end of this Sonoran Desert where their own rio comes to the sea, or at least used to. As I learned from spending a winter in the extreme south of Sonora, everyday life at the opposite shore of this desert is in many ways like ours, at least here in this wild valley of unpaved roads and people who know that as with the word “cowboy”, “neighbor” is both noun and verb.

The physical surroundings of that far land in Sonora take little adjusting to if once you have become at-home on the San Pedro, and I look up from the Mule Deer to hills and peaks that remind me of that beloved part of Mexico. The colors at this season, above the lush riverbottom flats I and the deer stand on, are the same grays and pale browns of the monte mojino–the “tropical deciduous forest”–of Alamos, only here the trees and shrubs are shorter, with no closed canopy because we are much colder though that is hard to remember just now with the afternoon temperatures always in the 90s and very soon in the 100s. Our grays and browns are even more pronounced than usual, because the last rains of any note fell eight months ago on this range. We end up with no closed canopy here on our hills not only because of the cold, but because of the dryness: it looks like every last Foothills Paloverde up there has gone from green to brown and died outright from the drought. The O’odham believe that saguaros we see had once been individual people, and so I can imagine the few of these cactus trees that we look up at on those heat-shattered hills among the dead paloverdes are longing for the arrival of the temporales. The saguaros struggled to bloom this year, and none of them flowered right around here. Will it rain this summer? Will it ever rain again? Yessir, eventually.