All posts by Cindy Salo

January 15, 2014

Nature Jottings, , , , ,

Great Blue Heron in #2 Pasture’s winter grass startles me, it’s unafraid, looks like an ornament on some other green lawn in the Gnome Belt.  It moves leisurely to the other winter cow graze in #1 Pasture.

The Stockpond is completely frozen over in the morning, by noon completely thawed.

Northern Mockingbird …

Lesser Goldfinch …

I continue pursuing the Polka Dot Beetles, hoping someday to have one in hand for a real look, but they are so wary and their talent for escape nearly incredible.

A Peregrine comes from behind and, off to my right, rockets past in a horizontal only a few feet above the pasture I stand in, slices into the next through a narrow gap in mesquite, any Meadowlark in there won’t know what hit it.  It then circles high, high, out of sight of my naked eye, steel gray, like a Phantom Jet with an “Off I go, into the wild blue yonder!”

Say’s Phoebes have paired up, joyously chase each other up and down the hall, er, from one post or sprinkler head to another, even their calls lascivious.

Verdin …

Waiting on one leg in #1 Pasture is the companionable Heron.  It decides to follow me on my rounds into the bermuda grass of #2.  Maybe my footfalls flush out mice towards it?

Six Mule Deer, against the sunlit arcs of irrigation in the waning afternoon …

January 13, 2014

Nature Jottings, , ,

Predators are the Presence on this beautiful, frigid (19 degrees) morning with all puddles iced over: a Red-tailed Hawk huddles atop a wheel line tractor, a Loggerhead Shrike pursues a sparrow who is weaving and ducking and chirping out notes full of panic and plea.

Common Ground-Doves …

Luna,
almost-full Orb,
the Presence on this mild early evening,
sky pink below,
bare trunks and tracery of mesquites,
glowing disc hung behind–
winter Hiroshige.

January 11, 2014

Nature Jottings,

Alex and I hike on up the scree and loose rock and ledges above those deep arroyos on our higher range that rises from the edge of the Cascabel Road, and we’re delighted to find that there are so few buffelgrass plants that it takes some hunting to come up with any, and even better, none show evidence of having let seeds go into the wind. We’ve caught this lot before it could get into that invasive species’s gleeful mischief! They were all green, actively growing, several even with fresh purple inflorescences that would soon enough bear and drop those dreaded viable seeds. Heads with that propagation potential are nipped off and go into the trash bag, the plant from which it comes grubbed out with a dandelion fork and left to dry, die, and return its nutrients to the native wildflowers whose space it intended to usurp. Those wildflowers, by the way, are really developing! Lupines vigorous though still small, and lots of seedlngs of poppies, and green lacy seedlings of Phacelia. Oh, somehow to get those wildflowers their next drink, before it’s too late, but there’s nothing to give hope in the 10-day forecast. We come up with only eight buffelgrass plants in the whole area, none of them very large, all of them despite the precarious footing for us humans are easily, um, neutralized.

January 10, 2014

Nature Jottings, ,

The silvered Harrier is just full of fun and mischief today–I watch him do moves I didn’t think his species had a penchant for. He dives and pulls up in steep curves then low over the bermudagrass, making the Meadowlarks wild with panic. He doesn’t catch any.

At sunset when I’m getting the wheel lines drained (as night approaches the smell of a deep freeze down to the teens is in the air) the Bobcat so lusted after by that hunter is with me, keeps moving off lazily as I slowly come along, keeps itself at a hundred yards or so distant, looks back, stops. I say, “Meow!”, and it seems fascinated.

January 8, 2014

Nature Jottings, , , , , , , , ,

Chipping Sparrows, lots of Chipping Sparrows, at The Stockpond, as bright of eye and wing and life as a flock of tropical finches. Gambel’s Quail drift in and out nervously for water, Abert’s Towhees though own it all, arrive, chase each other off, come back, squabble and squeal their notes, bomb back and forth at each other low-profiled and fast like brown-feathered torpedoes.

Javelinas, now with babies, mow and mow the winter pasture, but after all, they must be allowed their pound of greens. I and the cattle are growing impatient, though, for the time when the crop has outgrown this constant porcine pruning and the pastures can also be a bovine buffet.

Still I haven’t found a way to catch a Polka Dot Beetle to have a close look–they know well how to evade a predator, fly off faster if you just stare at them, seem to fold wings and drop to the ground if you make a move to scoop one in the air, then they scramble off quickly in the thatch or scurry along the underside of a leaf and vanish.

Pillbugs are active, I turn up numbers of them in the course of digging out mesquites large and small in front of, behind, and beyond the fence of The Stockpond in anticipation of the return of Purple Martins in a few months. Those charismatic birds need a wide, clear approach and runway as they come to drink, as do the various swallows of summer, swifts, and bats, and if the mesquites are left in place it will be not much time before their crowns have grown across into a wall that would be a menace to the flying creatures’ navigation and swing.

A Gray Flycatcher has been at the water’s edge all day, and is joined after sunset by one Mexican Mallard who comes in for the night.

January 3, 2014

Nature Jottings, , , , , , , ,

Or–can Winter be denied? A Bronze Dragonfly zooms over the water, past a single Green-winged Teal stretching its wings and flashing the radiant-cut emerald of a wing speculum. The duck doesn’t fly off when I pull up to the bank, which isn’t like this species that is normally wilder than wild.

The irrigation hoses are peppered with grasshoppers that are not so minute as before–they’re growing. The still unidentified Polka Dot Beetles fly and drop and zoom past, and even the little black spiders of Summer are come back to their perch on those hoses, oh goody, I can be nipped by them in January as well as in June! It is 75 degrees …

Bewick’s Wren sings, a Ruby-crowned Kinglet pokes about the mesquite branch tips. As the Galiuro cliff face catches the last sunlight and the rest of the valley around me falls into deep shadow, a welcome coolness comes in waves. Black Phoebe sings out tsip … tsip … tseep, on wheel lines where I empty water for a freeze that likely won’t come this night.

January 2, 2014

Nature Jottings, ,

Five Phyrrhuloxia at The Stockpond’s edge, a Shrike on a T-post, Redwings aloft against sun with wings white as light passes through them, their bodies black in silhouette.

Though late in the afternoon the air is 71 degrees, Winter cannot be denied: the Conyza has finally given up trying to get through to Spring, and the mesquites are at last bare in the sunset light of the mirror of the pond.