At the far west end of the Botteri’s Pasture, an electric fence has to be unhooked and moved, where the line of it comes to the end insulator I find a very small woodpecker intricately patterned in black and white, headless and hollowed and left like a taxidermy skin, obviously left impaled there by one of the shrikes that have become so friendly towards me. Black and white bars, beautiful indeed, and Nancy confirms it with the Sibley’s as an immature Ladder-backed.

Huge hornworms of a strange shade of violet, with lateral light-colored stripes, are on the move across the pastures looking for–? more solanaceous plants to munch before they might turn into an equally huge hawkmoth? the right place for Gaia to wave Her wand and the worm become pupa, become moth?

A Harris’s Antelope Squirrel sings like a bird from the rubbled slopes of Saguaro Canyon, off to the East. The acoustics in there are like an amphitheater’s, how that little critter’s voice can carry, it blasts from the opening like a wind out of a tunnel.