Monthly Archives: April 2014

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 13, 2013

A honeyed and calling fragrance in the air, sweet, drifting to the Stockpond from the direction of the San Pedro, which river wanders by close to the west. I presume it is from the clouds and sprays of pink tamarisk blossoms in the reaches of the bottomlands, where there is now a show of color that can be seen from Cascabel Road from enough of a rise.

The lone male Mallard still floats on the pond, he’d been kept company by an adult Black-crowned Night Heron until I drove up. Night Herons being a jumpy sort, it vanished quickly not to reappear. Was this the one that spent a few days here last June when in immature plumage but by now should have matured into an elegant adult bird? Northern Beardless-Tyrannulets (the name is longer than the tiny bird itself–is that true of the Southern Beardless-Tyrannulet, too??) gave their wheezy, sneezy whistles from the bosque and later as I made rounds I could hear them all along the River; I guess they’d arrived together in the night. They can be called down from the trees if one wants to get a close look; I must’ve hit on their territorial call. This is another creature that in late years could be come across in every month of winter, but this season’s frigid air must’ve driven them far to the south, maybe completely out of Arizona. Their arrival in numbers should also in a “normal” year have come about two weeks ago but they were loathe to leave wherever they were.

The wrens began their usual flying up from my footfalls as I walked along the wheel line to open a hydrant, but this day they didn’t fly off quickly nor drop out of sight maddeningly. Several of them flitted off only a few feet, then landed on the spokes of the irrigators so close to me it was hard to focus in with the glasses, jumped around, looked for spiders and such in the corners of the aluminum. There were the white spots I’d been told about, but most amazingly, there were on each of their backs lines of pretty black stripes. I could hardly grasp this, because it identified these little mystery birds that are everywhere in the deep winter grasses we’d planted in October and December as the Marsh Wren!

We have in our way recreated long-vanished cienegas with these winter leafy pastures for the cattle, by bringing water up from 25 ft. under ground and spreading it over these acres. It may be that rather with the grazing schedule, the wrens move from one area of these winter cereals to another with the waterings, which make of them a marsh about a hundred feet wide that stays wet in the shade of the plants for a few days at a time, this cycling accomplished through all the acres over a week’s period. By now the wrens have become used to my tromping through and didn’t go so far off before slipping back beneath the grass canopy. I’d hope Iris Dement would approve of “allowing” the birds to show themselves in their own time like that. Letting their “mystery be” was a pleasure.

After a winter that had the Lark Buntings abandon us, they are passing back north through the pastures. Many females, many males in an eclipse plumage but not a few in their startling and sharp black-and-white courting outfits. I watched one of those fine males for a while, who was moving along the ground looking for insects and seeds in remarkably plover-like actions. Then he and several others flew up and arranged themselves artfully in a round young mesquite tree, and these immediately joined by other birds each competing in beauty: Lazuli Buntings as bright as blue reef fish, numbers of sorrel and white and black-pointed Chipping Sparrows in their full fresh spring plumage, a single Vermillion Flycatcher for a tabasco splash, unfurling pastel mesquite leaflets a foil for all these colors of a Mexican tin Tree-of-Life come brightly to life.

April 12, 2013

One Mallard, the male, on the water today. A pair of Yellow Warblers are in chase with each other, around and around the Stockpond, and around … and around …

Another kingbird, I think a Western by its voice, arrived. Rough-winged Swallows have been increasing, but none over the pastures this whole day. There are a few Meadowlarks, though. Many Vesper Sparrows in the weedy edges and on the barbed wire crossfences, surely they are about to become more scarce; this was the most abundant of the wintering sparrows this year. The wrens, ah yes, the wrens, still tease in the pasture of lush winter graze, to which they’ve all moved over from a couple risers to the south. Seems they prefer yet-to-be-eaten-off, above-the-knee-deep bluegreen oats and barley, the cattle having gone into the wrens’ old area and taken it down to about one foot tall with all the efficiency of a tractor mower, leaving the stumpy culms from the tips of which will sprout a new shoot and then sets of leaves.

A fearless and friendly Gray Flycatcher pops up here and there as I do one chore or another, on a fenceline or in the mesquite tangled edges, pumping its tail as the species so distinctly does. They must be on the move, I hadn’t seen one the whole of winter here. Another species, an insect, came along today, one that in all other years I have seen in every month: the Tarantula Hawk. Those January days of a cold that froze over the Stockpond must’ve had an effect on their movements, if not their survival. It’s the first I’ve seen since Christmas.

Field Bindweed coming into bloom in the pastures–a noxious plant, but pretty as any hanging basket flower in a garden center and cattle are mad for it. Pat often wishes there were enough of it to bale, and use later.

A Red-tailed Hawk is acting like no other in my acquaintance, though the behavior is reported in mountainous territory with knife-edge ridges and strong updrafts. It was back again today, facing into the wind with all the moves of a Kestrel–barely flapping, suspended in one place with tail fanned out widely and using it brilliantly as rudder, hangs high up there for a long time, then drops like a stone from that place stationary in the strong spring gusts and onto some witless creature on the ground.

April 10th

Irrigations set, I can break away and wander off across Pasture #1 to see what’s up with those vultures attending something unsavory. Eighteen of them took up as I approached, from the corpse from whose ribcage they were picking the last shreds of flesh, most of its bones were clean but all were red-painted with blood. A perfectly whole racoon’s  face stared up uncannily from the tip of an empty backbone. I shuddered, as much as I would had I come on a ghoul; but … we are the racoon and the racoon, we, this the truth that drifts round the graveyards in Mexico’s Dias de los Muertos. Later in the morning I saw the ravens had come, but I couldn’t imagine what was left for them. These avatars of War who once raised blind fear as much as would distant cannon that signaled them to their meal kept respectful distance in a circle outside the now-smaller vulture ring at the late racoon…

[…]

April 9, 2013

I arrive at the Stockpond and scare off a put-out, cranky Green Heron, have a glimpse of it for only a few seconds–well I’m grumbling too over a temperature that hovers at freezing. This, too, is Sonoran spring. A front came over us in the night, blue sky gone, but not exactly cloudy either: all is silver and glowing, the light, the air itself, it is stunning, like being in the Waiting Room for Eternity. The birds trickle north in ones and rarely twos, their kinds arriving today for the first time, and maybe regretting their haste as a little drift of sleet begins to pelt the brim of my Stetson … a lone Barn Swallow (“about time, friend Swallow!” I send thought to it on what wings I have, the species is so late this year); a lone Swainson’s Hawk has arrived and with a flourish of masterful flying, dips, parries, folded wings and mournful whistle, he escapes the harassment of a Redtail and is then gone into that silver air above me. A lone Cassin’s Kingbird, gorgeous in this strangest of light around me, whurp-whurpping from a fencepost where he might stay for the rest of the summer once he stops regretting leaving Old Mexico. The sleet sets in, the mid-seventies of yesterday too long gone and it will be a mercy if I forget them. The ice balls bounce off my shoulders as I open an irrigation hydrant and have water shoot up through the frigid air and into my face out of the tottering equipment. Oh my yes! … the vida vaquero loco, romantica, libre.

[…]

As the irrigation water rolls from my face after hitting me squarely in both eyes, I hear my father telling that poem of an April bedtime more than fifty years ago, hear him quivering out the “poor thing” part to add just that extra fear, pathos and doubt, and hear myself crying back, “No Daddy–no! … will he make it to spring??” I wonder if I will. I hope that Cassin’s Kingbird sticks it out.

April 8, 2013

Pat and I rode looking for cattle on the higher mesas that earlier in the year had fair moisture. Prickly pear in their diverse species were coming already to be encrusted with small buds, which promises a real flower show not long from now. Down Mason’s way, there seems none of this and rather, the plants are shriveling. Cactus, even cactus, need water but we, however, are enjoying exceedingly this cloudless warm and beautiful day of Sonoran spring.

[…]

April 6, 2013

Wrens … those wrens are becoming my psychosis. At least fifteen take up here or there with my walking flush, as I go out to the tractor of the wheel line irrigator. I just get the glasses on them when they drop like a stone and are gone. No attention is paid to my best Dudley Do-Right impersonation, “Come out of there … youuu!”, which I give while standing at the place where one disappears. A chitter back from the deep grass twenty feet from there is all I get. The wheel line, which runs the length of the entire field, is fired up and the joystick thrust forward to run it all north across most of the pasture to where the new watering cycle is to begin, and as it rolls it scares up one after another wren who bounces off before it. That pasture is just full of the birds! They flee in an edged line before the advancing aluminum monster, it seems by the time I’m near to finishing the move the birds are as thick as grasshoppers pushed off before a prairie fire–and still I can make out nothing in the way of markings that would without doubt tell which is its species.

[…]

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.