Yearly Archives: 2014

November 30, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

Just as I had when the season of the Red-winged Grasshopper started almost four months ago, I find a blazing scarlet wing lying on a path, then see a single live grasshopper on this another sweetly warm afternoon in the mid 70s.  Polka Dot Beetles are also out, massing again in great numbers everywhere; they are hovering up to ten feet over the grass.

A Mountain Bluebird drifts down out of the sky, lights atop an irrigator wheel.  A chip of blue ice, Prince of the High Country, color of a glacial rivulet.

Sun is gone behind leaden clouds long before its moment to set.  In an astounding silence on the pastures, a pair of Great Blue Heron hunt–I’d bet they’re angling not for frogs but for gophers!  They’re colored the very grays and blacks of the sky above them.  The Tamarisk trees drift orange, and yellow, long avenues and rows and single Cottonwoods are nearly wholly green or green-and-yellow or gold, some are become empty gray crowns of twigs with their edges hoops of rich butter, others are artists’ wide brushes dipped in all these colors and stood upright in a jar.  The River is a palette of Thanksgiving hues.  The gallery forest’s colors are delicate, on this last day of November muted, like Christmas lights already placed but waiting to be lit with great fanfare by December Sun tomorrow.

November 29, 2013

Nature Jottings, ,

A sweetly warm day, with insects coming back around to be more lively.  A docked pair of dragonflies suspend themselves over a puddle in #2 Pasture.  Polka Dot Beetles also continue appreciating the nice weather.  Days pass during which I don’t see the Red-winged Grasshoppers and I’m sure they’ve all died, but then their clicking will be everywhere and they will be putting on a colorful show out ahead of me as I walk the miles of a day doing rounds.  Today that distinctive snapping sound of theirs drew me to the only one out on the wing, and I wonder again how much longer they’ll be part of the scene.

November 27, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , ,

Dia de los Birds of Prey, this must be.  My eyes come to be welded to a Merlin doing a thrilling slow, then rocketing, then suspended-in-air ballet and when I turn my head to the side what I look right into are the eyes of a Harrier sailing in straight for my face, something that’s become a real habit of this bird!  It tilts slightly, glides over my head, as laid back as a stoned hippie.  It obviously doesn’t care what my business may be, and goes about its own chores unperturbed by my presence.  A short while later there comes a Peregrine in a stoop down over the pastures, it races over the Meadowlarks who scream out and bolt blindly off in different directions to be anywhere but there.

The globs of silk webs that have lately been appearing at the tips of small mesquites in the pastures are decorated with the tiny dried mesquite leaflets, much as are the coverings of bagworms.  Inside there is no worm or larva–but spiders, very showy spiders, black with white stripes and spots.  Their silk hiding place must be a tight little shanty for them on these cold nights.

Mesquite seeds are still sprouting fresh green pairs of cotyledons from cow poop, to give us joyous chores of some Christmas Yet to Come when the trees they’ve grown into have to be pulled with incomparably more effort.

Not a grasshopper, not a dragonfly.  These fields can be almost motionless for days, and silent, and then suddenly as happens today a tree will fill with Lark Sparrows and their whistles, cheeps and bright chattering.

November 26, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , , ,

Lots of ducks whistling in, and fast–Mexican Mallards and Northern Mallards and everything on the “hybrid” continuum between the two.  A few small Bronze Dragonflies are about, and the giant Great Blue Heron who might want to snatch them out of the air.

Over the pastures: a Kestrel, yellow-green grasshoppers, a single pale yellow small butterfly, a single war-torn Pipevine Swallowtail, and Polka Dot Beetles seemingly well adapted to nights below freezing.  Large flocks of Winter plumaged Red-winged Blackbirds that hide in the silver-and-gold bermudagrass take off and do aerial moves wondrous to see, “pit-tickkk! pit-tickk!” they chatter.  They may not be as colorful as they are in Summer, but they’re just as elegant in their seasonally appropriate tweeds that set off so beautifully their black, much fanned.  They move around constantly, all fly out of sight, all fly back–but they’re less frantic to go to another pasture if the cows are with them.  The flocks come along horizontally, in a flat, broad bunches, then every bird drops suddenly like a stone and vanishes in the tall grass.

November 25, 2013

Nature Jottings,

Dawn is sparkling clean, a Great Blue Heron is at The Stockpond and the new snows on Mount Lemmon and the Rincon peaks shine down from that giddily high country.  Even down here the morning air is a deeply cold 20 degrees, but by 9:00 am when the irrigation can be started it’s enough above freezing that the water systems can function.  The big hoses will certainly have to be emptied this evening!  Though Vernal Winter is looking more like plain old Winter, there are moths lit in the headlights at day’s end.

November 23, 2013

Nature Jottings

Rained in the night, the dawn is colder, the rain continues through morning.  The cold increasing as the hours move along tells it is the moment, then, when Autumnal Spring becomes Vernal Winter.  The high of 55 in the wet feels downright frigid.

November 22, 2013

Nature Jottings

I wake in the Cowboy Caravan (the RV most everyone else calls, “The Chateau”) in a cozy, humid warmth, with rain pattering down through mesquite, rain that brings in the delirious fragrance of Creosote Bush drifting from far off in the deserts that surrounds us.  It is dark all day.

 

November 20, 2013

Nature Jottings, ,

The Arthropods have stripes today, including a spider in a web in the little mesquites, with zebra legs.  Rain could be felt a-building, maybe not today but the sky all around and the odd light on the land announced it, and I check the rain gauge to empty it of dead flies.  There are no flies, but instead in the bottom are two dead little bees, and two that still live.  One is frantic, angry, half of it metallic Mallard green with the other, rear half black and white zebra-striped: that most perfectly named Metallic Green Sweat Bee.  The two dead ones lie curled up below, their bodies instead are ultramarine though equally metallic, equally beautiful.

It’s still pleasantly warm enough that frogs are jumping into The Stockpond at my approach, the cold that will come at the trailing edge of the expected storm will put an end to their very long party and these are the last I’ll see and hear.  No dragonflies buzz along over the frog-rippled water today.

November 19, 2013

Nature Jottings

As I scurry about opening hydrants to get the day’s seedling pasture watering started, I spy something that stops me cold for a second: what looks like a puppy obviously dead, out in the field edge quite far from the road.   Once the irrigation chore is got into motion, it cannot be stopped without dire consequences and I can tell from the angle of the limbs that the poor fella will be no less dead if I concentrate on getting the irrigation properly going.  In some little while I hesitantly approach it, only to see that it isn’t  something that had ever been animate: it’s a stuffed toy!  How, oh how, did this end up there?  I find something else to do on purpose and so stall returning until I’m nagged too much by curiosity, and with a mixture of fascination and creepiness I walk up to it with a long stick, and turn it over.  Will it blow up?  Did it fall from a plane?  Was it dropped by a Mexican child who had to let it go and is right now suffering from the loss of this friend … or suffering far worse things?  It’s not a puppy.  It’s a cow, and not just any cow, but a purple cow!  Well, actually a white Holstein with large lavender spots.  I name it Ogden.  I just can’t bring myself to touch it for most of the day, it’s all so disturbing.  Finally I come back and carry Ogden to the fence along The Lane and leave it still within the pasture, and plan to pick it up from there later.  Our cow Mycha, however, in the meantime had noticed there’s something new there, and when I come back later I find her with her head pushed as far as she can stretch it right through the barbed wire fence, with Ogden’s head inside her mouth, and she’s chewing him like cud.  “Damn it, heyyyyy! Get out of there!” I bark … Mycha has chewed off both of Ogden’s little Holstein horns, nearly severed the left ear, and eaten off his right eye though he is rather cleaner from all the slobber.

I take Ogden home and sit him upright on a shelf in the window of the new Cowboy Caravan, despite the risk of his coming alive at Midnight.  If he does he’ll be able to function pretty normally, after Pat made him new horns and got one ear reattached …