Yearly Archives: 2014

November 18, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , ,

It’s not cold, oddly, after the “winter front” passes through.  Is it a specter of Global Warming, and what does that portend?  Instead, the day soars to 80 degrees and this brings out great numbers of dragonflies around The Stockpond, and massive flights of the little Polka Dot Beetle.  Some of those beetles sport brilliant blue abdomens.

The miniature annual “Mediterranean Grass” (a Schismus sp.), most beautifully green, is germinating in every bare spot across the pastures.  It is tiny, but the cows will avidly seek it out.

Only two Poorwills in the road dust on my twilight drive home–and they will be the last of these mysterious yet engaging birds that either take a long winter’s nap here, or slip into Mexico in the night while we ourselves sleep.

November 16, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

The day’s range of temperatures spans only 15 degrees–neither cold nor hot–and so with this second Pacific front the Sonoran Desert year’s quiet season’s weather pattern is set.  A sprinkle comes to us and our ranges, but no more than that; all that’s really to be had from this storm is a high and annoying wind who desiccates the germinating pasture grasses.  A few dragonflies manage to hover on through it all.

Mesquites are sprouting from the seeds left behind by cows in piles of manure.  London Rocket (mustard), too, showing millions of pairs of cotyledons; Sweet Clover is in lush, sudden renewal low to the ground in #2 Pasture; the handsome flat rosettes of what will be tall Gaura next warm season suddenly are just there, having scattered themselves through the native grass plantings.  So are woven together this year and next, on the loom Arizona’s multiple and complex seasons, a marvelously eye-catching quilt that decorates no other land but ours.  Just now it is Autumnal Spring–sometimes long lasting, always delightful, sometimes regrettably short.

November 12, 2013

Nature Jottings

The vibrant blue sky of morning turns to a limp gray, and a strange light like that of a solar eclipse comes over everything: a dust storm, haboob, tormenta de polvo.  The Galiuros fade into ghosts, their peaks into wraiths there and not there.  Ravens knew that the aerial surf was up and where they’d catch righteous waves, and 50 of them come to roll in the wind and clamor out their fun.  Were they still-photographed, the dozens in the flock would look like a Liszt musical score, if filmed as a motion picture would look like a symphony playing a wild rhapsody, with how the birds move in great wheels, always some to be seen rising, always others falling, others weaving together the whole.

November 11, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , ,

A Great Egret–pure water-reflected magnificence in The Stockpond–hunts delectables in a lively manner for it must have worked up quite an appetite by the time it found this unlikely wet and muddy place.

Rusty Harrier, owl-like in movement, aspect, and silence, from far off comes directly to me.  I stand still, and it veers at almost the last moment it could, but only to correct its course so it doesn’t hit me in the face.

The big, late day bug hatches continue and as I do the last work of the day with all those insects also barely missing my face, the sun goes.  I still have wheel lines to move, but it is not a bad thing to be out with such chores that shouldn’t be left for tomorrow:  the sight of the Galiuros in their evening smoking jackets of mulberry and peach is a rich reward for the overtime.  I am descended on by doves, who come to The Cienega just before complete night.

A few minutes rest at The Stockpond is in order before I tackle the much longer road to where I’m now living.  I drive up to the water and turn off the pickup engine.  The quiet is wondrous.  Crickets murmur around the edges where Egret had spent the daylight hours, a single Coyote woof-barks far off, for all the world like a dog.  Half Moon over all, in the balmy dark and a breeze that is only enough to be called a caress.

November 10, 2013

Nature Jottings,

A Teal on The Stockpond, it’s been weeks since the last one stopped in.

After holding water for more than four months, the dirt tank has finally dried and is likely to remain empty and cracked until next year’s Monsoon will gather into it the splash and runoff from waters roaring down from those ridges to the East.  Coyote comes to check for even a single gulp left him, but he finds none and goes on.

 

November 9, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , ,

The last few nights have been mild, no ice and the days are more quickly warming through the morning and so they start off with a grand chorus of crickets.  In these the six more subdued months, bird song is low on the pastures and not high overhead, not of the woods of the riverbottom and side canyons and washes.  The Meadowlark is the voice of the goddess worshipped by human snowbirds, Winter Sun.  The pastures are getting greener, but not from seeds sprouting: it is from bermudagrass that’s come back to life after only a few days with temperatures hovering at 90.  Millions of heart-shaped cotyledons of Mallows are also adding verdure, the frogs are active, and the aluminum flow pipes for the irrigators come back to being too hot to pick up with bare hands.  It is so warm at sunset that the cold air stealing down the bottoms is something refreshing and welcome.  Ah but the Vermillion Flycatchers are not deceived by all this and give up the idea of staying on and winterkeeping with us, and today they move out entirely, southward, knowing as it seems they must of the predicted cold for tomorrow when the mercury is unlikely to break 70 degrees.  (When those flycatchers have spent a winter away, and return in flaming new waistcoats and black Zorro masks, we Cascabelenses will remark on it with joy, and spread the news.)

November 8, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , ,

Ravens playfully chase after a Red-tailed Hawk, they’re too smart, too agile, or too revolting in taste for the hawk to bother itself with them I suppose.  In the warm morning after a night without a freeze, the little black spiders of Summer are out on their usual perches on the surface of the irrigation hoses, and among them are dark grasshoppers (or crickets?) apparently just hatched and impossibly minute in size.

Autumnal slanting sunrays are caught in everything, light up everything … the broad, high and long avenues of watersprays of the wheel line irrigators made incandescent by them … a large pink dragonfly … the wings of the Pipits … some insect so fast of wing that they look like tiny hovering balls of light, the air over the whole broad pasture is full of them.  The ridges piled high toward that lowering Sun are dark mounds, each sharply defined by crests white, shining.

November 7, 2013

Nature Jottings, ,

An exquisite Hawk Moth lands on the front of my shirt, and hovering there, shows hind wings of cinnabar.  It is caught in a stiff wind that pulls it away, is gone instantly.  I wonder if I’ll ever see another.  A large Fritillary and Checkerspots come to the pond mud with orange Sulphurs, and this makes for quite a show of sipping butterflies.  Ninety-one degrees!  Despite that, I am immersed in the notes of American Pipits, the largest number of the birds I’ve ever seen winter-ing in the Borderlands.  Wintering?