Mallards, even more beautiful than they are common.
Mesquites are still sprouting from seeds, to become future painful problems to skin, wheel lines, and irrigator’s boots. A Copper Mallow pushes out one brilliant and welcome orange flower; a two or three day Spring has such amazingly rapid effects.
Mallards are increasing. Nancy sees a frog jump into The Stockpond, but it is the last until we welcome back another Easy Season next year and warmth returns. Dragonflies have whittled themselves down from their broad variety of Summer to a single species, the bronze one–and only one of those appears today at the water.
The news comes from Flagstaff that it’s four degrees below zero there … low 20s here in our mesquite bosque. Who would think of living north of the Gila? Here this far from The Rim at least, it seems there are creatures of interest abroad even if the nights are subfreezing: Sulfur Butterflies are on the wing, and a couple of dragonflies, and even a diehard katydid.
Pat and I saddle up and ride the high ridges of the A-7 Ranch on the West side of the San Pedro, from which we can take in a splendid view of our rangelands, and of neighbors’ homesteads. The afternoon is delightful, and we’re not the only ones who think this: a large rattlesnake is enjoying the friendly Sun of Winter and its balm, and we riders and horses have to step carefully around the snake’s stretched out and lazing body. Rattlesnake is very much awake, and isn’t there when we come on back through the spot now under a late afternoon 3/4 Moon, a pale island like something mythical, floating and Polynesian, just offshore of the canyon rim above us.
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.
In the shimmering blue morning most of the Cottonwoods are now appearing in their delicate gray winter cloaks, leafless, and some of these look a bit like they’re even in bloom (though they’re not, but who knows how long it will take for that very thing to happen in early December with the way Winter is changing …) New cotyledons of annual weeds are still appearing, and to my dismay I find Milk Thistle in this stage in #2(south) Pasture. Is this a new infestation arrived from afar? Even after these repeated temperatures in the mid-teens of the last few nights, the Caribbean Horseweed is still green–it obviously can adapt to more adverse conditions than its Canadian cousin. The bosque itself also remains green despite the freezes! Only one dragonfly ventures out along The Stockpond edges.
18 degrees at first light!
The new day brings an utterly different world: 25 degrees on the ridges, and in the valley below sparkling chips of frost fall from mesquite tips. The bermudagrass pasture stretching out from the window of the Cowboy Caravan all the way to the huge saguaros on the far hill are white, icy, the Rincon above us dusted with snow. Yet the air warms enough even in the El Potrero bottomland for Sulphur Butterflies to come to life, and an azure grasshopper.
Still-green and fresh leaves of the big Hackberries at The Stockpond start falling off their twigs by mid-morning–they never had a chance to turn color before the coming on of a night that was surely in the teens. On the water swim a brace of fine Mallards, their wariness telling they are true wildlings. A Wilson’s Snipe is there, too, and a large sandpiper with a long bill, also extremely wary: a Long-billed Dowitcher. It takes off with a pained, “Pitty peet peet!”, showing a white slash of rump as it vanishes across the fields.
The peak of the Rincon and its cliffs and boulders are white and dancing on the eye in the sun, making those evergreen forests on their far heights look so much the darker. A shining white cloud crowns all, itself under a long clean blue sky. Cottonwoods glow yellow below. Doubtless a storm comes: the air is warm, yet has some tang to it, is even salty, and there is a strong waft of change. Caribbean Horseweed on the pastures grows on as if none of this is happening, and even shows fresh flower buds, and on the irrigation hoses are the black spiders of Summer. Canadian Horseweed, presumably more attuned to North America has already turned into seeds or dormant biennial rosettes and thus is well ready for Winter.
American Pipits drop in again–they’ve been elsewhere lately, probably over on the just-germinated seedling alfalfa pasture of our fence-neighbor ranch. Midday 70 degrees, I am still eating lunch with dragonflies.
The last bat before the year’s deep freezes come on flies down the Cascabel Road, ahead of the truck in the dusk
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!
Ah … Diciembre, nuestra Arizona linda! … month of kaleidoscope sunsets and mornings beautifully crisp like this one. A concerto plays on the radio as I drive up the River’s edge, glittering piano woven with glittering Cottonwood leaves, gold on the ear, gold on the air of early morning.
Red-winged Grasshoppers are everywhere in the pastures on this brilliant sunny morning of 60 degrees, dragonflies yet glide and shimmer over The Stockpond now long after the last damselflies have been among them. A spare butterfly or two are there, too–the more common Sulphurs, and Mexican Yellows.