It is still Summer: a Rufous-winged Sparrow perches for a moment on a fencepost near me, and it’s carrying nesting material in its beak, flies off into the Saguaro Canyon across the road. I wonder again if this sparrow’s long breeding period from early Spring to the late Monsoon, and the fact that it is in one of its high-population phases now for a couple years, doesn’t have an effect on the other rarer sparrows’ Summer presence here. Do the Cassin’s keep checking back and find that the Rufous-winged have yet to check out, so they keep looking further?
A dragonfly different from all I’ve ever seen, comes to The Stockpond for one day: the “Widow Skimmer”, with wings banded in black and very pale azure at the tips so bright those spots appeared to be white; the body is dark. It would be a dragonfly collector’s treasure …
More Gray Flycatchers (but looking rather more green than gray), I hear their friendly and familiar, frequently called out “chee-bik! chee-bik!” in most every kind of cover, or fenceline.
A Western Wood Peewee now, down from the higher, moister canyons and mountain parks a full month earlier than the arrival of that species a year ago. An autumnal August indeed but the wobbles back and forth around the 100 degrees mark. The bugs are awful. Send more Peewees, please!
Still another winter resident bird returning: the Gray Flycatcher, a little bit ahead of his crowd. Yes, August must be rethought as much a month of Autumn as it is a month of Summer.
Seven young Mexican Mallards splash in The Stockpond, and a Great Blue Heron is frozen-still, aware of a Bull Frog … and there’s a splendid, be-plumed Snowy Egret …
The first returned Loggerhead Shrike fusses and chatters a sassy greeting down to me from a mesquite top at the edge of the Dirt Tank. “Wull what’s takin’ ya so long ta git that fence rebuilt? I need to hang some meat!”
The rain has been sent to the righteous and the unrighteous, fallen on the just and unjust. The large sign that had appeared in a bottom along the Cascabel Road, the sign that gleefully, evilly added salt into wounds never to be healed, the sign sent as harbinger of this valley’s doom by SunZia announcing it’s on its way with twin rows of powerlines that will rip out our beating hearts alive as these canyons and flats are gutted and flayed in sacrifice to their god, Video Game Console and its insatiable desire for fresh energy blood, the sign telling that a comet will come of a sudden to bash out in an instant this existence of ours so rare as never to be duplicated again, that we and the wildlife have enjoyed, the sign … is gone. Uncannily accurate was the narrow, deep flash flood that must have come down out of the arroyos to the East with Biblical flare and in determined, righteous anger swept away all before it. So direct a hit was scored on that cursed sign that it seemed there was Divinity behind the event. It was pulled and torn into shreds, which we can see deposited down this old wash that hadn’t run in years, towards The River. Seeing the mangled pieces that were left as we drove by was like having had a deep and festering splinter removed from our spirits, but this relief is, we know, to be short lived.
The level of the rain water rises still–more in the gauges, more in the ponds and dirt cattle tanks, and in the two-track road ruts. A glorious mess! It feels a real “day after”, the grader working itself everywhere too, putting the road back together, fixing up one arroyo or canyon bottom crossing after another in front of me which allowed the drive south to be made, and I increasingly wonder what has happened at Mason Pastures. I find the arroyo upstream of us that was new last year is now several times wider and with a beautifully smooth, fine-grained-sand bottom left behind. As in that big storm of the Monsoon of a year ago, this flood came roaring off from the slopes of the watershed of the ranch to the East and across the Cascabel Road and on to us, but it had to have been even deeper water this time judging by the flotsam line on shrubs and fence wires, and carrying much larger rocks and debris irresistibly along that route whereby it unconsciously tried to find the Sea of Cortez. There had been a stout berm along our side of the road, outside our fence and which was meant to keep this from happening again by shuttling the flow down the bed of the road, but that wide bank now was cut right through and broadly, and the water had swept in a torrent underneath the fencewires until it had inundated the upper reach of The Lane. When that wild new river hit the next fence across its path though, the rocks and ripped out and tangled cholla from who knows what far off range, and branches and my own tree trimming piles, had come to catch on the bottom wire of a long stretch of the bottom wire I’d intended to raise to a proper height, sometime. I guess that sometime will be now, and all other projects dropped in the face of this cow-management emergency. That piled up debris had formed a dam, and when it finally burst the water then leapt over into the next pasture in what must have looked like a tidal bore 400 feet wide … the bosque was swept pretty cleanly of shrubs and Burroweeds and grasses, as was a lot of the other land beyond for a good distance towards the River, and in the place of that verdure now was a hardscape and pavement of shining sand and gray gravels and large tumble-rounded stones. It would have been something to see, but I’d probably not have lived through it to tell the tale of it. A hundred and fifty feet of the cattle fence would have to be dismantled, the posts jacked out and re-set and all of it put back together before cattle could come to the area again, which was supposed to have been today! I did not want to see what was the state of The New Canyon, that headcut that formed along the far west fenceline at the edge of the riparian woods and that was a year ago suddenly so deep where the day before was normal looking flat pasture, that a t-post and attached fence was left dangling in the air high over its wide and deep exit to The River. Sure enough there must have been an almost inconceivable amount of water funnelled to that place from all the uplands above us, even more water than last year, plus the sheet flooding of a quickly-fallen 2″ rain that came down evenly over the whole upper end of that #3 Pasture. So now New Canyon was even deeper, and some feet wider, and a couple of the mesquite trees that had collapsed off the now even higher bank had been punched out the opening and swept into The River, as was also most of the mesquite brush we’d piled across to keep the cows from escaping during the last year into the jungled thickets in that bottom. The headcut had migrated another fifty feet upstream as well and of all these outcomes, that was the most concerning. Instead of being ripped out or undercut, the 100 feet of fence starting at the south rim of New Canyon was left buried enough that its top wire came to a level below the bottom of my belt, which meant that any number of our cows could simply step over it and into the riparian forest, and there aren’t any of a rancher’s many sins than that would be. This stretch of fence too would have to be rebuilt before the herd could go safely back into that pasture and the hole out to The River filled with a wall of thorny mesquite branches.
And so I go back up to the Tall Water Tank, letting out sighs of resignation and buckets of sweat in the close air of the morning, to start somewhere, anywhere, removing piles of cholla and sand, pulling the supply hose for the water flow out of the horribly prickly tangled mass of cholla and rocks in which it’s buried in great knots or stretched out through and under rock piles on the wrong side of the fence. I hope it functions right away soon as this is straightened out, the cattle need that metal stock tank’s level to be raised or they’ll all go into The Stockpond and churn it into a quagmire. I’m surrounded by wreckage, but can’t let myself imagine the amount of work nor exactly what it will take to bring this all aright, when we already have so many other things long waiting to be done or fixed …
Well the creek come up
took the water gap down
our yearlings were nowhere to be found
it had only taken us a week
to gather ’em all
it’d be easier
to gather ’em
the second time around
at least that’s what I thought until
I seen Shorty there lookin’ blue:
just before we’d left for town
he’d turned our horses out there too–
they went with the yearlings (heh hah) …
naw, the romance ain’t completely gone
to this cowboy life we’ve chose
but the bliss that I was countin’ on–
well it comes and then it goes …
–Gail Steiger, “The Romance of Western Life”
The Romance of Western Life
www.youtube.com
Provided to YouTube by CDBaby The Romance of Western Life · Gail Steiger The Romance Of Western Life ℗ 2007 Released on: 2007-01-01 Auto-generated by YouTube.
And the level of the rain water in the gauges rises … and rises, most every day more added. Nice rains, slowly soaking rains, lots of rains. And then–this wild day, when I holed up on Firesky Ridge to which I had speedily to flee north from Mason’s ahead of the wall of clouds whipping up from Sonora that would make the washes and arroyos run with enough violence to close off the roads behind me, and to have The River sweep down out of Mexico at last …
The chubascos come and they come, stirring the largest and most massive eruptions of flying ants I’ve ever seen hatch on the Desert. They simply fill the air, and getting through them on the roads in the truck is like driving through dark snow squalls, with black ice pellets rattling on the windshield. The sound makes my skin crawl. I race along to the Community Center under a sky that means business, walk quickly as can be managed up the rocky slope above and have some unreasonable hope that we’ve got somewhere with eliminating Buffelgrass up there and I won’t have to be delayed into being bait for the lightning that is already a-flash. And–there is no Buffelgrass! not a plant, not a seedling. Native grasses in new and surprising variety blanket everywhere, including the spaces we’d made by having pulled out Buffel over the last couple of years. A Cassin’s Sparrow sings out across the gulf of that wide arroyo as I rush into the truck! (The bird is all over the place this year, every spot but Mason’s that is, where I most expected them to return.) I have to get up the wash bottom near El Potrero to see about that formerly serious Buffelgrass colony I call Yvonne’s Buffelgrass Gulch, once full of the dangerous plants that had stair-stepped up from the sandy bottom flat right up to the mesa crest. Do I have a brain? Why do I end up doing this thing so often when there is the threat of getting turned into burnt toast by lightning? It’s not like life in these wilds isn’t thrilling enough that we need to search out even more excitement.
The lightning is coming in pairs by the time the search for clumps and seedlings of that Buffelgrass is wrapped up and the slope gives me to know the plants, here too, are gone!
Looks like it will be a year of Lark Bunting irruption again: a large flock passes overhead at Mason Pastures. We never hear their sweet song hereabouts, that is a pleasure known to their High Plains breeding grasslands but their funny rubber-ducky call notes tickle as they rain down on these their wintering grounds. The birds are still in incredibly dapper black summering grounds plumage, with gleaming white wing patches. Here is another bird come to teach there are only the briefest of weeks that are purely Summer, as there are only the briefest of weeks that are purely Autumn, or Winter, or Spring.
The naturalizing Bull Frogs have got themselves somehow up the sheer sides of the “new” metal stocktank that was rehabilitated to help the Stockpond keep from getting sullied by the cattle herd–one huge frog sits balanced facing outwards, perched on the rim, contemplating the scenery and probably feeling pretty easy about no herons ever going there to clean out frogs. Several Summers have passed now since there was a large turnout of chortling, mating Sonoran Desert Toads in the “real” pond and I miss their spectacle and their lascivious inflating and deflating gurgles. It may be coincidence, but their numbers have declined with us in proportion to the increasing balance the Stockpond has found as its water slowly became clear and even healthy enough that aquatic plants have colonized it. Or are there no more of the huge, water-dancing desert toads because the Bull Frogs have out competed them?