Tag Archives: Snipes

October 3, 2013

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The Snipes are finding The Stockpond very much to their liking this Fall, and are there when I drive up to its edge in the pickup. A Mexican General Grasshopper staggers through the dust on the bank, it surely doesn’t like the temperature of lower 40s at least until the sun gets stronger. Bright orange or red House Finches are in the mesquite tops around the banks. Later, when the thermometer goes past 90, richly colored Sulphur Butterflies come to sip at their own lunch of minerals in the mud while I doze in and out. A color riot there–White-tail Dragonflies and bronze dragonflies and large cobalt blue dragonflies, young Western Tanagers with heads just showing the orange blush of their coming adulthood (these would be the last hangers-on of that lovely species), Blue Grosbeaks, immature Vermillion Flycatchers … pink beryl … sapphires … citrines …

Full-sized, outrageously ornamented and bizarre Mesquite Bugs are on the wing up in #3 Pasture; they amaze unendingly, fly through air redolent with the Victorian aftershave aroma of the well-named Camphor Weed that I’ve tromped through as I pursue those big bugs. Sulphur Butterflies rule the patches of what Burroweed are still in bloom.

October 1, 2013

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Crescent Moon, topaz chalice, hovering above the peaks that crest the Muleshoe country, all else is stars and constellations. Not a sound of bird, but the night is rich with chirps and singing of insects. Martins overhead are gone, flycatchers on the mesas are gone, Chats in the bosque below are gone, there are no calls of Sonoran Desert Toads, nor Spadefoots, nor Red-spotted Toads from the far flats. For crickets, though, it is their time, and they will only get louder as the months of the year wind down–all their predators having gone to Mexico or dug towards Hades. When light finally suffuses the sky towards the East where Dipper rises and sparkles, two Great Horned Owls hoot a duet. Cold air flows right through the house, to be captured by closing doors and windows early as a hedge against the still 90-degrees-hot and sweaty days.

It’s a madhouse of birds newly arrived and soon to depart (though I wonder when) at The Stockpond: Bell’s Vireos, Blue Grosbeaks, the first White-crowned Sparrows, the first Yellow-rumped Warblers–the comforting and at-home burrs and buzzes of those Vireos, though, will be the last that I’ll hear for today they vanish. Several Wilson’s Snipe take off with a much bothered, “Shrekk! Shrekk!”, circle, land again, crouch, freeze, tilt their back end at a 45 degree angle with bill pointed a slant the other direction to touch the mud. The ephemeral dirt tank sounds like a bird aisle in a pet store, with the chattering and whistles of many Lark Sparrows, Pyrrhuloxia, and the Brewer’s Sparrows that today arrive at the Mason Pastures. Gad, one of those Fall warblers, the ones to be identified in part by process of elimination … green above, yellow throat, yellow under tail coverts, grayish crown; I think I can take it for a female Nashville Warbler. A Rock Wren calls out a chittling note from the hillside scree on the other side of Cascabel Road. Cassin’s and Western Kingbirds, still aplenty on the fences and wires and poles, still entertaining with their boldness, their colors, their lusty joy of flight.

Those little frogs of Summer never grew up into Bullfrogs (it appears we are Bullfrog free, who knows how, or for sure?) and they’re still very active–I can never get “the jump” on them and have a good look. Not that frogs are so easy to tell apart, even if they’re in the hand. No chance of that happening, what with how they leap in panic from along The Stockpond edge even at my distant approach, scream an “EEEeeeep!”, splash and are gone. Today, though, while I watch dragonflies and stand completely still, one of the frogs rises submarine-like to the surface at my feet; I don’t dare blink, though it does, one eye looking up at me, then the other. It has a knobby face, with a beautifully bright green jaw, the top of the head green but duller, and it’s spotted on every limb going out onto the toes. Could these be Chiricahua Leopard Frogs, known to be making their last stand along The Border in about the only habitats left that are dependably wet year round, ranch ponds and cattle drinkers? I grow tired being motionless, move ever so slightly, and it submerges and is gone so quickly that it is as if it had never appeared to begin with though little swirls of mud show something had indeed been there.

A dear mamma cow, Brindle, looks a little odd, isn’t walking with the right rhythm, and while I try to divine if she has a problem or it’s my imagination, an immature Cooper’s Hawk hunts past us. Tom and I look over this herd later on, and find Brindle’s entire left side collapsed and enlarged; neither one of us have seen anything like it, and fear she will be carried off by it. Vultures have lately become thin on the air, not many around still to clean up a carcass, but one suddenly comes into view high over the cow and the humans now alarmed by her appearance. Everyone instantly has the same thought, endemic in this far country under the Mae West Peaks: “She’d better do it now before the Vultures leave.”–Kathleen. “Good thing the vultures haven’t left!”–Pat.

The last sun rays on The Stockpond light brightly, stunningly, the stripes on the head of a single Snipe, who probes the mud with its marvelously long bill, all the way up to its eyeballs!

March 23, 2013

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At El Potrero a Yellow Warbler singing, and the first buzzing chatter of Bell’s Vireo. I’ve heard neither of these birds singing yet at Mason’s […] The first time catching any of their notes, of these two and the Lucy’s Warbler, will always bring one relief that the world is brought back to rightness again.

Ralph W. and I set out for a morning’s survey of our acres of grasslands that are a refuge for wintering birds down from their far off north prairies; I like to think we’re providing for them a habitat that was once much to be seen in southern Arizona but is now largely gone. I’ve noticed far fewer of the sparrows and finches lately, surely many have left but still, the edges are alive and the fences often lined with them. I think the Savannah Sparrows must have moved on already, which might not have been expected until late April (eb’ry’teeng change-up!) but I also suspect that many of the birds we saw today moving like mice through the taller grasses were still this species. In other winters I’ve seen as many as fourteen species of sparrow here (fifteen if you include Chestnut-collared Longspur), but today and this year many fewer, among them Lincoln’s and White-crowned, and we wondered if some of the tinier birds that fluttered up and dropped maddeningly down out of range as we moved through the green of the winter pasture weren’t Grasshopper Sparrow if not that Holy Grail of South Arizona, the Baird’s.

Ralph stopped us dead in our tracks with a call to check out some raptor we could hardly grasp was sitting in the eight inch tall barley and oats not far away at all: a Zone-tailed Hawk that had landed and was, as we found out once it took off, going after a young gopher. In a “normal” year this bird is considered rare in March though now of course all bets seem to be off in this. Beautiful, black, shiny, a golden cere, golden legs, a piercing eye–it lifted off and flew low right over us, circled higher until converting itself stealth-bomber like into a zopilote, or so the late gopher must’ve thought.

In the old lane running down to The River, many sparrows flit in and out of the tall, thick, dried and prickly tumbleweeds. Lark Sparrow are abundant here, and they fill the mesquite edges with their spring, canary-like song.

Later we moved through the most mature of the winter pasture areas, that’d been planted in October and were now about knee-deep and lush; we found it just jumping with little rusty-brown birds. One wren after another took up, made an arch, and dropped back into the deep blades of dark green and of course wouldn’t show themselves again. Some seemed larger than others, and it being the wrong time of year for juveniles to be about, I suspect there are (at least) two species of wrens there enjoying being snowbirds. House Wren? Winter Wren? both? Two species of the same (larger) size and one much smaller? I tried to figure them out this time last year when such wrens were occupying the far north winter pastures instead, but couldn’t do it then, either. Both Ralph and I like the mystery of it, though.

No mystery was attached to the final great sighting of the morning’s birding with Ralph, whom I’d invited on the walk especially to try to “nail down” the confusing and abundant sparrows: when we swung back past the stockpond to see if anything had appeared since earlier in the morning, there in the muddy edge was a Common Snipe and like most such visitors to this rare open water, it seemed not to notice us at all, and we could stare and study Friend Snipe all we wanted at a short distance. While we sat in our bird blind, there came in fast in a silent roar a Great Horned Owl who looked for one frightening moment like he was going to shoot right through the cab of the truck, then zoomed out over the stockpond and was gone. Ralph’s eyes grew wide as this bird that I couldn’t see approached, and both their pairs of eyes must’ve bored into each other as Ralph was thinking uh, oh, there’s about about to be three of us watching that snipe… […]