Monthly Archives: February 2015

February 26, 2014

Snipe on The Cienega, creeping, hiding, like a mammal in green tussocks.

The blue-green Stockpond is lightly ruffled by Spring breezes, on it bob a pair of Mexican Mallards and a pair of Cinnamon Teal. The male teal is a color deep and rich, carnelian and that very rich cinnamon of theirs.  The black bill is set off by a red eye startling as a jewel set into the idol, Matrix, the Mother–Nature–from whence we came, to which we go, in which we are.

In what is called “Winter” here this landscape is as richly toned as the great black-and-white Hollywood romances of the 1930s–but that is gone by this last week of February, the Cottonwoods are already a splash of watercolor green and now they remind me of my mother tinting with Easter egg dye the black-and-white kodak snapshots of the 1950s (who could afford color film then?), green for a dress, red for her lips.  While Arizonans pride ourselves on toughing out some of the wildest heat on Earth, we also resist letting go of the precious cold, but the season is being overpowered before our disbelieving eyes.  It’s sinking in that we are not this year to have the dramatic canvasses to treasure of stark white Cottonwood trunks against a frigid blackening sky as snow flurries sweep in, no, not in this Winter That Never Really Was.  There will be no dawn of surpassing enchantment of Silver Fog this year, when a white cloud is snuggled down over the mesquites and rises in level blanket to just above the treetops, each tiny twig and large limb feathered with frost that picks up and holds within it the sunlight sifting down into the mist from an utterly clear blue sky above the roof of that fog blanket.  I realize sadly that neither are we to see the high double mountain to the south be draped for a day (or even two) in a stunning and surprising blanket of snow: no, Mae West will not be donning her white angora sweater.  It is 77 degrees, on the radio the KXCI deejay tells that orange blossoms are perfuming the air in Tucson, the flower buds of lilacs in Cascabel yards are showing color, violets have been in bloom since December in Pat’s dooryard garden at El Potrero, Bladderpods are in flower in our seldomly used #4 Pasture, and Loggerhead Shrikes are already wandering off and becoming more scarce–been weeks since I’ve seen one–and I expect they’ll move out soon to wherever it is they do go for their own Arizona Summer.  I already miss their sass and chatter and their cheery greeting and know that we’ll probably not hear much more of that until about the time the pastures are to be made ready in September for another Winter’s planting.  Into the ears of even those whose ignorance of the Earth’s climate change is willful are coming these whispers–and shouts–of the possibility we come to be driven out of this already challenging place that ever has been close to the edge of uninhabitability to begin with.  Or … will we find we are going to lose it all through one catastrophic change or another anyway, we who stay on here now and live in the wonder of how this naturalist’s and historian’s and cowboy’s paradise remains what we’ve wanted it to and what we love?  Freeway bypasses … bedroom community subdivisions … drone test range proposals … the road getting completely paved some day … and now: SunZia’s massive sets of high tension electric lines tall as a high-rise, the construction effects collateral that will come with the installation of those lines, the ongoing access needs to service them, with the vehicles to do so, the warning lights that will flash atop them in what was once a desert of darkness inviolate.  I am emotionally unable to watch this happen yet its coming is apparently unstoppable, with likely its first destruction flowing into this valley through the saddle between Mason Pastures and the Mae West Peaks, after the towers make that wildland pass from Willcox over which year after year we carry our grassfed beeves on the last trailer trip of their lives.  SunZia would be a pill deadly to each of us here in personally different ways; for me the gaul in it is that I am expected to surrender with grace and peaceable resignation what is left in my life to love above all things, surrender it to someone else who through power-sucking video games and consoles can only live through a screen’s virtual reality a life as exciting as the one I do in real reality.   My ranching existence as it presents in the Contemporary West will be sacrificed to someone else’s artificial existence as it presents in a fabricated Old West of, e.g., the gunslinging and fabulously popular, fabulously and deeply disturbingly violent game (complete with human gore oft-splattered onto the screen) set in an imagined Southwest borderland, “Red Dead Redemption”, which enthusiastic gaming reviews say “expertly captures the Wild West.”   What it really captures is the market demographic of young males who are the usual rattlesnake bite victims hauled off to the emergency room.  Cascabel and my life under the Mae West Peaks will be sold for a mess of wattage.

Not that I haven’t thought of leaving, or haven’t tried to leave and more than once, but … well, I’ll go, but will this be the year like 2001 when wildflowers bloom spectacularly again, so I ought to wait and see if they do, I mean, that can’t be missed … oh but then the warblers are soon to pass through after that, well, I can stay at least long enough to enjoy migration one more time, and the arrival and singing of our Mexican bird specialties … and calves! who’d want to miss the calves? … and oh yes, scattering the herd on the range, well I want to do that one more year, give one more go at it, I can hang around that long … the sizzling Foresummer, with all the world looking to the sky for the first grand thunderheads to form … the season of delicious and beautiful red Saguaro fruits … no, can’t leave when the Monsoon is about to make every creature human and otherwise happy, and excited, and bring raging washes and flashfloods to liven up the day, or night … wait, the Barrel Cactus are really going to go nuts with flowers this summer, you can see all the buds and it’s so much fun to ride out and compare them all one to the other … ah, no, better not leave now, maybe I’ll go next month, can’t do it with the skies of September about to bless us with their O’keefe cloudscapes and dazzling huge moonrises … oh hell, leaving can wait until after we watch the pastures we’ve seed-planted sprout and thicken and become as emerald as Ireland … got to see the snow return to the high country around us in all directions, then I can go … but look, there are so many millions of wildflower seedlings, this could be the best year yet for The Show though it had better rain damn soon or we’ll lose it …  I’ll leave after that!

[…]

Sunset is fire, and lilac.

February 25, 2014

Much cooler today of a sudden (only in the low 70s, hah!) but this makes for a heart-singing ride on range for Pat and me to check on cows whose calves will be coming as Spring progresses.  The Ocotillo are in the most spectacular bud we’ve ever seen: “It’ll be quite gaudy!” says Pat … “Sure will!” say I.  But all is already become gaudy, with the blues and violets of Lupines, white of Desert Chicory, White Pincussions, yellows of the subtly beautiful Desert Dandelion, Bladderpods, shining golden Blazingstar, Creosote Bush in its own bloom of Chinese yellow, yellow Evening Primroses–most everything the color of Sun who has come home to Its desert fastness.  There are splashes of many other colors, too: Three-awn Grass in bloom, and purple Phacelia, the bright green of Acacia coming into leaf, the pale green of “Pale Face” Hibiscus’ new leaves.  Both the Christmas Cholla cactus and the low, round Mammilaria are gloriously decked out in their red fruits.  The incredibly fleet of foot Zebra-tailed Lizards shoot off in different directions as we help our horses place their feet in spaces between flowers, those lizards popping and whip-jumping their tails around in the air over their backs like cats do when they stare at something on which they’re about to jump.  We come to Fenceline Drinker to water the horses (I remember one of my old cow bosses saying, “Never pass water without offerin’ ’em some!”), find the bright green water scattered as with the petals of apple blossoms but what is a-swirl on it are little pink moths, some flapping their spread out wings in sad effort to lift off the surface they’ve fallen into.  Most are already still.

In the evening at Mason’s, a bat comes flying down The Lane to The Stockpond I’ve just filled, and laps the fresh water …

 

February 24, 2014

An odd little song, “tseeee-burr-REEP … tseee-burrr-REEP”, repeated and repeated, ventriloqual, of an elusive bird leads me around and around the bigger mesquites at El Potrero early this morning but I finally track it down to a small, greenish fluffball: Hutton’s Vireo.  It looks so like a Kinglet, whose numbers are increasing here too, eight miles north of Mason Pastures.

I stare and stare at them (who could help it?) but I still can’t take seriously that the glowing embers of Vermillion Flycatchers are so soon back on what seems to be every fencepost at Mason’s.  Their numbers have increased to the crowding point, and now pairs of males are already eyeing each other resentfully but don’t know why.  There are no females yet, and when they arrive, oh buddy, watch out!

Three Flickers are in the native grass area, where the many sprangletops, gramas, bristlegrasses and dropseeds planted there last year are doing passably well and might even bring seeds for their own natural increase this Summer and Fall.

Only one pair of Mexican Mallards swims this morning, but brown duck feathers are spread all along one bank …

I’m resigned to the job of raising the stock fence along the Cascabel Road never having an end, but at least there are always many interesting creatures winged and running and burrowing to be a distraction between jacking out posts, or being wrapped round about with devil-inhabited coils of barbed wire, and the fuss of measuring the distance between each of the five ranks of wire that need attaching.  The day is hot–over 80 degress, again we’re not yet at the end of February–and from across the road and out of the Saguaro Canyon comes that mysterious, descending singing again, only now I know this is not a bird, but a mammal: the Harris’s Antelope Squirrel.  (A few words in a websearch line led me straight to recordings of various Arizona squirrels and chipmunks, and there it was to be heard at the click of an audio link!  I already feel keenly the loss of that mystery, though.)  The work of leveling the old ridges of grader-piled rocks and sand digs out many panicked centipedes, sundry bothered spiders and many Whiptail Lizards (undoubtedly Desert Grassland Whiptails) that run off lightning fast and which I’m always glad I haven’t accidentally cut in two with the shovel blade.  And scorpions … lots of scorpions … two species at least, one kind gruesomely fat, cold blue with big yellow forceps-like pincers, the other small and black but no less fearsome.  None are killed, of course, though maybe I’ve done so to others unknowingly as the project has continued over many a day.

February 22, 2014

Crescent Moon looks like an illustration in a children’s book, distracts me from the dream I’ve just awakened from in which a Screech Owl was in her bare, spare tree-hollow, reaching up, being fed by her mate a Bewick’s Wren.  One is a Rancher, one an Environmentalist.  Will they be fertile?  The offspring from this pairing coming to fledge is the only hope The West may have as a place to be authentically occupied.

 

Broad-billed Hummingbirds are sipping at the nectar feeders of El Potrero, Cottonwoods are now a glowing green that equals the glitter of the little birds.

 

A pair of what must be Mexican Mallards are there when I reach Mason Pastures, and around the edges of The Stockpond in the mesquite branches are Ruby-crowned Kinglets, now appearing in greater numbers with the movement of the birds north out of Mexico.  The sprouts of Toloache are a few inches high, there near the bank, and out on the Cascabel Road.

 

At lunchtime–another pair of the Mallards joins the first, each set of birds perfectly matches the other: in both, one of the partners has a bill of lovely olive green with black nostrils and a black hook on the end, the other an orange bill saddled across in black.  These look to be ducks very much devoted to their mates, as if they are true male/female sets but since none of them look at all like a male Northern Mallard should at this time of year, I wonder if these bill colors can’t be found along an intergrade between the two forms that formerly were considered separate species.  I’ll let the canard illuminati continue their squabble over that, and their endless lumping and splitting of the two mallards, Mexican and Northern.  The legs of all of these are bright coral-colored, drawing the eye sharply to them.

February 20, 2014

It is already time to watch for departures of “resident” birds considered common year-round in southern Arizona, but which disappear from The River for months at a time every year: “Red-shafted” Flickers (and there was a wonderful pair of them today, jumping around on the ground going after ants), Say’s Phoebe, Phainopepla, Loggerhead Shrike; Mexican Mallards will be here for a good while yet, they go somewhere else during June, July and August … there is a pair of these ducks on The Stockpond today.

Brindle the Cow, at last at last! has made it through the long months’ recovery from the bite of (we think) Phat Phreddie the Rattlesnake, and she is skipping, joyfully running now with the herd when they’re all whistled into a pasture of welcome fresh graze.  In a couple of months she’ll give birth to something, more than likely a little mummy calf–or will it have fangs and serpent eyes??  If it is alive and thrifty, we should name it Milagro but if it’s not, we may wish that Death hadn’t spared Brindle over, too, til this other year.

February 19, 2014

Ladybugs in their tens, Horseweed seedlings in their millions.

The first Vermillion Flycatcher of the Mason Pastures is there in the top of Grandfather Hackberry, was not very long away from us and not far to the South but still, I wouldn’t want it to be away any longer than it was.  The sight of it gives me to feel a combination of excitement, great pensiveness, and relief–that I’ve got through javelina, skunks, rattlesnakes, blows to the skull and snuffy horses to live to see this glowing coal of a little bird return.  Then there is another one perched on the top of an electric line post.  I’ve been granted a common enough wish, it seems … “Oh, Death, won’t ya spare me over til another year?!”  In the pleasant warmth of evening another of the flycatchers sings from aloft over El Potrero.

 

February 18, 2014

Spring, as announced by Roadrunner who is calling out to the hills his territorial claim, the tone, timbre and pattern of it pronouncing the bird unmistakably a cuckoo. A fox hunts mice among the cows. Big Pinacate Beetles are on a walk-about, or on the raise-a-butt, threatening to shoot something foul on me when I blunder too near them.

The most spectacular bug-hatch yet adds sparkle to the late light, of who-can-count how many different species? Dragonflies, and of course Cucumber Beetles … Phainopeplas are out hawking in the increasing bounty, calling their soft “Purt!” when they’ve gone back to a branch tip, sunlit windows in their spread wings flashing as they show off graceful aerial skills.

February 14, 2014

Spring in the air, spring in our step as we the more lightly for our joy in the season swing into stirrups, go see what the herd is up to on the mesas and arroyos, and what the drifts and sweeps of wildflower seedlings are up to. The first Vermillion Flycatcher returned from the south burns and flames at a mesquite tip at El Potrero, after a little more than three months absent. On range the Barrel Cactus fruit bowls are beginning to be picked over, and some are even emptied now. Poppies are showing their colors and are unfurled when the thermometer hits 85 degrees, and Fiddleneck is in bloom, and the Ocotillo wands hold masses of porcelain buds at their tips–but the rains have withdrawn, enough to jolt realism into those high hopes that we every year carry for color to blanket the hills and lush Fillaree be there for our wildlands cattle.

February 13, 2014

I set into digging out the next of many T-posts along the road that have long been half-buried in rock and silt by the sheet flooding of decades, and with the trench shovel pop out a beautiful, large white-bellied mouse, who lands next to my feet and is very friendly for some moments–then the poor thing’s daze wears off suddenly and it bounces off in lightning speed, aware obviously of how many and how varied are the creatures that would swoop and zero in on it. A tiny green winged aphid is on my shirt.

The pasture grass shines back the late rays so intensely into my eyes that I’m left green-blind for long moments, but I make out the many dragonflies, Sulphur Butterflies, mists of Cucumber Beetles a-hovering and drifting, little golden beetles, and in the last hour of sun, a big bug-hatch of black gnats that must be slipped through to get to the wheel lines to be moved for tomorrow’s watering.

After Sun slips just under the highest ridge, six Mule Deer, six dark bodies, each with black ears in a V, are there against the broad dark green, graze eagerly the oats and the barley they seem to know somehow has too been provided for them. Winter feels to be vanishing in all other ways but in this sunset, and once again with arms embracing our Querencia the mountains all around are shining and dark, but tonight it’s the Galiuro that are bright in their last moments of Sun, the Mae West Peaks lit too, with all the other ridges high and low, east and west, but Sierra Blanca tonight is dark. The Stockpond glows azure, coral and flamingo, as does the sky over it. Dark has almost completely settled over us as I get the last wheel line moved into place but the air is downright hot, though it cools quickly after that to become very pleasant. Everybody is talking about the weather, realizing the more that only Winter’s horse has come back in, dragging its saddle with rider lost, and there is unexpressed worry. A bat flits over the Cascabel Road, James and Chris tell that they’ve been seeing them, too. 82 degrees in the valley here today, while 18 inches of snow fall on the East Coast.