Tag Archives: Sparrows

June 2, 2016

The ryegrass of the Winter Pasture (a quaint term! it’s 102 degrees …) is producing its countless flower spikes, and green grain too, and those pastures are alive with Lesser Goldfinches giving out their lemon twist chitterings, and bright House Finches feasting on the plants of the small grains.

A Chihuahuan Raven flies down The Lane, low and just in front of the windshield of the slowly moving Silverado: what a great view of prowess airborne! but the bird is up to no good at least from the point of view of other species now frantically planning for the families that will come in with the time of plenty that they and I hope is on its way. Pow, a Kingbird bonks Raven on its crown, the blow having no effect on the grace and intention of its flight, Raven without loss of the rowing of its wings can still forward navigate the air of The Lane with its head straight up in the air at right angle to its body, jabbing those big black mandibles at the Kingbird. Pow, a Mockingbird bonks Raven on its crown, Raven looks up in defiance again and glares menacingly at Mockingbird, while it still rows its wings and doesn’t in the least wobble … it stabs the weapon of its bill into the air but misses this second and also most agile bird who “ain’t nothin’ but business”. All three crash through the wall of mesquite leaves and out of sight while other birds throw themselves into a fray now invisible inside the tree … seconds later Raven shoots out of the large and very dense mesquite, a nestling dangling from its bill, the Mockingbird in lightning, angry pursuit, the two birds and the doomed baby disappear over a far pasture with it seems the whole bird neighborhood in uproar behind them.

A single Vesper Sparrow is still here! Bob helps me determine that there are no records of the bird in the first week of June in southern Arizona. “Global Weirding”, I suppose.

February 4, 2014

Twenty-four degrees this clear blue morning, a cold to assure that Winter, though much threatened, is not yet an extinct species. The new snow dust gives The Rincon a pale shimmer in the first sunrays.

Not much going on at the edge of the cold Stockpond, just a Rock Squirrel stretched out almost flat trying to reach the water, and a few nondescript sparrows I decide are not Brewer’s on the strength of their having gray rumps, but think instead they must be “Pale 1st winter” (as Sibley puts it) Chipping Sparrows. The book says they don’t weigh much … imagine, at less than half an ounce they are yet creatures complete.

Haven’t seen the beautiful Polka Dot Beetles for more than a couple weeks, the cold of the nights must have set them groggy, but in the late light during as much warmth as is going to be mustered by the day (50s) one of them appears–it carries not six black spots, but eleven! (One entomologist has sent word that what has been seen over most of the winter with those six spots were just a form of the common and universally-resented garden Cucumber Beetle, and this new one today certainly looks a lot more like any illustration one might find of that pest. Yet another entomologist, whose specialty is beetles of southern Arizona, tells that he doesn’t believe Cucumber Beetles would have one race with a very different number of spots active the first half of their season, and change over to one with almost double the number during the second. He thinks it’s a different, maybe even undescribed, species. I wonder which I’ll be seeing from here on, and for how long into spring …)

January 24, 2014

A whole flock of Abert’s Towhees races up and down the banks of The Stockpond in their frenetic way, and out on the water, three beautiful Ring-necked Duck.  Song Sparrows, Phyrrhuloxias, and a Green-tailed Towhee also come.

Cold wind, cold air, icy skin after I get wet clearing debris from running sprinkler nozzles–though the mornings have begun to warm to where at least they start out above the teens.  The ant circles are without sign of life on the pastures on this day that will barely reach 60 degrees.  Our now-resident Heron stalks the tall grass looking for mice or gophers, both of which there are in plenty!

The plants of Spring that emerge and slowly develop during the cool days of Winter are stirring to life, unsettlingly early it seems … a London Rocket holds up its first flowers, and, oh no! Malta Star Thistles  … Malta Star Thistles are popping up their so-innocent looking rosettes.

Digging out more posts in my work that I hope will foil Mycha’s fence jumping and escaping this summer, I toss from the shovel a stripy Whiptail Lizard, sluggish and still in its winter nightcap (I feel guilty for having awakened it) and then a Twin-spotted Spiny Lizard who is very much more active and downright peeved about having been unearthed.  I can almost hear it grumble, “Well didja hafta do that?!” as it runs off at full speed before some Roadrunner can arrive.

A day of sullen sky, gray to its end.  Many, many doves whistle overhead as they go to The Stockpond when it’s almost too dark to see them, as I finish getting the wheel lines ready in case there is much of a freeze tonight.

January 13, 2014

Predators are the Presence on this beautiful, frigid (19 degrees) morning with all puddles iced over: a Red-tailed Hawk huddles atop a wheel line tractor, a Loggerhead Shrike pursues a sparrow who is weaving and ducking and chirping out notes full of panic and plea.

Common Ground-Doves …

Luna,
almost-full Orb,
the Presence on this mild early evening,
sky pink below,
bare trunks and tracery of mesquites,
glowing disc hung behind–
winter Hiroshige.

January 8, 2014

Chipping Sparrows, lots of Chipping Sparrows, at The Stockpond, as bright of eye and wing and life as a flock of tropical finches. Gambel’s Quail drift in and out nervously for water, Abert’s Towhees though own it all, arrive, chase each other off, come back, squabble and squeal their notes, bomb back and forth at each other low-profiled and fast like brown-feathered torpedoes.

Javelinas, now with babies, mow and mow the winter pasture, but after all, they must be allowed their pound of greens. I and the cattle are growing impatient, though, for the time when the crop has outgrown this constant porcine pruning and the pastures can also be a bovine buffet.

Still I haven’t found a way to catch a Polka Dot Beetle to have a close look–they know well how to evade a predator, fly off faster if you just stare at them, seem to fold wings and drop to the ground if you make a move to scoop one in the air, then they scramble off quickly in the thatch or scurry along the underside of a leaf and vanish.

Pillbugs are active, I turn up numbers of them in the course of digging out mesquites large and small in front of, behind, and beyond the fence of The Stockpond in anticipation of the return of Purple Martins in a few months. Those charismatic birds need a wide, clear approach and runway as they come to drink, as do the various swallows of summer, swifts, and bats, and if the mesquites are left in place it will be not much time before their crowns have grown across into a wall that would be a menace to the flying creatures’ navigation and swing.

A Gray Flycatcher has been at the water’s edge all day, and is joined after sunset by one Mexican Mallard who comes in for the night.

January 1, 2014

We were sittin’ round the ranch house some twenty
hands or more
most of us Americans but a few from Arkansas
one Dutchman from the fatherland one Johnny Bull
from Leeds
a Cornishman from Cornwall all men of different creeds
they were a sittin’ an’ a arguin’ busy as a hill of ants
how they’d get rid of the money they had buried in their
pants
that they’d made by hard cow punching work all
the year around
from sunup until sundown an’ a sleepin’ on the ground
where at night the polecat saunters round the chuckbox
after grub
and in passing by your hot roll gives your head a friend-
ly rub
where the rattlesnake lies dormant his fangs are like
a lance
’twas with them that I attended The Cowboy’s New
Years Dance

–Mark Chisholm, pre 1908, “The Cowboys New Years Dance”

Big Mahogany Ants are in wild and mad, kettle-a-boiling wakefulness at their wide hole–something about which I’m not thinking I needed to have a care (it is Winter, right?) when I open the truck door and drop a foot onto the ground in The Lane where I seek out the first bird of an informal First Day of 2014 bird count, a Brewer’s Sparrow. The ants, which aren’t amused by my presence, are sending out gatherers on this warm, sunny, blue spectacle of a New Year’s morning. I will keep chores to a minimum today, only check over the herd and water these pastures for neither kine nor grass have a horse in my race of trying to relax as best the day allow or quietly reflect on this year beginning and last year seamlessly gone. Saltweed splashes its tiny green and purple seedlings under a fence.

Mesquite rows full of singing Lark Sparrows …
Chipping Sparrows …
Say’s and Black phoebes …

Sparrows uncountable, flying up in masses, I turn the truck around to have the sun positioned so they’ll show better–most are Vespers and Larks, but I may suppose Savannahs and Lincolns and Songs are among them …

Western Meadowlarks …
White-crowned Sparrows, abundant in thicker edges …
Female Ladder-backed Woodpecker …

Sixty or so Red-winged Blackbirds in those splendidly understated winter clothes of theirs, crowning a lone wide-spreading mesquite …

Red-tailed Hawk …
Flicker, red-shafted …
Mourning Dove …

Brightest of red House Finches, knocked off his perch by a male Phainopepla with drama and flourish; I have for a very long time seen precious few of these Silky Flycatchers and their almost impossible elegance …

Gray Flycatcher …
Cardinal …
Chihuahuan Raven …

Until a breeze springs up from the North when Sun brushes down on the ridge of the grand Rincon I am comfortable without a jacket through a day that itself brushes 70 degrees. Bugs are aloft, gleam in the last rays and many meet their end as a Gray Flycatcher stokes its belly with them to make the freezing night pass the more bearably.

December 14, 2013

Sad sweet notes of White-crowned Sparrows come on the 26 degree morning air. A pudding skin of ice covers The Stockpond and the bermudagrass is a filaree of white crystals of frost with Red-shafted Flickers looking bright against the tall white weeds.

A lot of the herd from the Mason Pastures will be moved downriver on the road over the next couple of days, to be settled then on the upper grazing ranges for the Winter; surely we’ve just brought them down from there only last week in that great heat and dust of June! The first waterer for them must be topped up, there fairly high up above the dry Hot Springs Canyon. Lesser Goldfinches drink eagerly, boldly, at the cracked hose filling that metal stocktank: on the desert, those who delight in having a garden or patio be visited by the variety of birds here that is the marvel of these Sky Islands and bajadas need only fill a pan with water, sit back, sip a bacanora, and enjoy.

Back at Mason’s at the end of day, the tiniest of midges dance on the surface of a now-thawed puddle in the native grass planting, each minute form catching the late sun before the very cold and long night comes down.

December 10, 2013

In the dark of madrugada, scattered snow crystals drop straight down, they are so large that they hit the walkway and the mesquite trunks with loud crackling.

The day lightens to an even gray, all the sky, to every horizon. The color of the bermudagrass is as half-toned as hay, the hoops of the Cottonwood crowns are gray though those yellow swaths of leaves still in them are bright even with no Sun … the mountains and cliffs are gray, and the great rock monoliths, and the snow that wants to shimmer when Sun appear … all is muted, understated, in Winter’s elegance. At Mason Pastures it is well above freezing, but there is a skin of ice on The Stockpond, and the puddles out on those pastures have sheets of ice over them a quarter inch thick. I turn on the irrigation, hoping that no nozzles have become blocked but one is, and I’m forced to feel that Winter elegance deep into cracked fingers while whatever is stopping up the water spout is cleared away by a poke with a wire.

A Snipe, striped like the brown and tan reeds, is near invisible where it stands. Masses of Lark Sparrows arrive or fly out, Red-shafted Flickers hunt something on the ground, and Say’s Phoebes catch the bugs that might be able to escape great cold but not the snapping bill of something consummately agile of wing. The day is cold and cloudy to its end, never getting out of the 50s, but despite that there is a surprising evening show of insects suspended on air.

December 3, 2013

Pyrrhuloxias male and female, and Chipping Sparrows, drink among dragonflies at The Stockpond.  Seedlings wild and encouraged are developing rapidly in the Vernal Winter: oats and barley have shot out two or three true leaves, the rye shows one or two, and out of the fresh mounds of gopher-dug soil spring grass seedlings with stems and blades fully formed.  Millions of perfect Valentine hearts of Cheeseweed Mallow cotyledons are making green patches on the wide, open ground.  Javelina are already grazing heavily on the fruit of our works long before cows will get the chance!