All posts by Cindy Salo

January 1, 2014

Nature Jottings, , , , , , , , , , , ,

We were sittin’ round the ranch house some twenty
hands or more
most of us Americans but a few from Arkansas
one Dutchman from the fatherland one Johnny Bull
from Leeds
a Cornishman from Cornwall all men of different creeds
they were a sittin’ an’ a arguin’ busy as a hill of ants
how they’d get rid of the money they had buried in their
pants
that they’d made by hard cow punching work all
the year around
from sunup until sundown an’ a sleepin’ on the ground
where at night the polecat saunters round the chuckbox
after grub
and in passing by your hot roll gives your head a friend-
ly rub
where the rattlesnake lies dormant his fangs are like
a lance
’twas with them that I attended The Cowboy’s New
Years Dance
–Mark Chisholm, pre 1908, “The Cowboys New Years Dance”

Big Mahogany Ants are in wild and mad, kettle-a-boiling wakefulness at their wide hole–something about which I’m not thinking I needed to have a care (it is Winter, right?) when I open the truck door and drop a foot onto the ground in The Lane where I seek out the first bird of an informal First Day of 2014 bird count, a Brewer’s Sparrow. The ants, which aren’t amused by my presence, are sending out gatherers on this warm, sunny, blue spectacle of a New Year’s morning. I will keep chores to a minimum today, only check over the herd and water these pastures for neither kine nor grass have a horse in my race of trying to relax as best the day allow or quietly reflect on this year beginning and last year seamlessly gone. Saltweed splashes its tiny green and purple seedlings under a fence.

Mesquite rows full of singing Lark Sparrows …
Chipping Sparrows …
Say’s and Black phoebes …

Sparrows uncountable, flying up in masses, I turn the truck around to have the sun positioned so they’ll show better–most are Vespers and Larks, but I may suppose Savannahs and Lincolns and Songs are among them …

Western Meadowlarks …
White-crowned Sparrows, abundant in thicker edges …
Female Ladder-backed Woodpecker …

Sixty or so Red-winged Blackbirds in those splendidly understated winter clothes of theirs, crowning a lone wide-spreading mesquite …

Red-tailed Hawk …
Flicker, red-shafted …
Mourning Dove …

Brightest of red House Finches, knocked off his perch by a male Phainopepla with drama and flourish; I have for a very long time seen precious few of these Silky Flycatchers and their almost impossible elegance …

Gray Flycatcher …
Cardinal …
Chihuahuan Raven …

Until a breeze springs up from the North when Sun brushes down on the ridge of the grand Rincon I am comfortable without a jacket through a day that itself brushes 70 degrees. Bugs are aloft, gleam in the last rays and many meet their end as a Gray Flycatcher stokes its belly with them to make the freezing night pass the more bearably.

December 31, 2013

Nature Jottings

The topaz jewels have all fallen from their settings now on this New Year’s Eve, and that splendid necklace of glowing Cottonwoods along The River is now a different but an equally splendid and rich coloring, of two tones of gray, high above the miles long ruff of pink and orange-brown Tamarisk withies. The tall trees are bare finally, each their proud individuality show. The Mesquite hold on, late to leaf out and the last to shed, some now dried and yellow, some withered though green, but some with leaves succulent enough as if still to be able to gather to their tree the gifts of that pale winter sunlight. They took us through that Solstice night and now like the holly of the Green Knight carry life across the Great Divide of one Border year on into the next.

December 30, 2013

Nature Jottings, ,

It is so cold that even in late morning ice still edges The Stockpond, where a Black Phoebe and a Yellow-rumped Warbler are duking it out over something in the overhanging mesquite branches. The temperature in that last dark hour before dawn here likely had dropped to about 15 degrees.

Yet another large bird has been brought low, this one a now torn-apart Mallard whose remains I find in their wreckage field stretching out from the pool at The Cienega. Well, not remains really–whatever it was that got it took away completely the bone, flesh, beak and quack, and left only lovely feathers. Some are small and bottle green, and there are larger ones of iridescent aquamarine, each tipped with a round white spot which when arranged together across a line must have formed the blue speculum with its white bar. Peregrine on the lurk? Woe to the ducks! (I’ve witnessed in a past year one of those falcons’ most accomplished hunting feats when it chose a female Baldpate from the buffet at The Stockpond, then on a patch of bare ground in #2 Pasture dined in blood and drifting duck feathers only about a hundred feet from the windshield of the truck. Oh the luck of seeing that!) It’s been over a month since I’ve seen a Peregrine, though.

December 28, 2013

Nature Jottings

Out of the corner of my eye I catch sight of a tall hunter in camouflage waving to me it seems in something of a panic, or at least with enough urgency that I wonder, “Good grief, now what?” and I pull the wheel line tractor joystick into neutral to stop its roll across the pasture. The man stands within The Lane (he had to have hopped unseen the fence along Cascabel Road) and then drops flat out on the ground–I think he must have been in physical trouble and has fallen with a heart attack! But no … he rolls under the fence along the #1 Pasture and bounces back to his feet, runs towards me in great agitation … “Oh oh oh oh oh, that Bobcat! that Bobcat! I’ve got to get him!” “What Bobcat?” I say. “The one that’s right behind you, been staring at you from that row of mesquites! Don’t you want me to get ‘im?” (He brought to me warm and fond thoughts of Black and Tan Coonhounds we farm kids snuck into bed with us, dogs that had to be encouraged to keep themselves calm, thoughts of duck dogs you had to see didn’t chomp down too hard on the teal he was retrieving …) “Well no … the policy of this place is to let things be and see if the herds and the predators can’t work it out among themselves first out in the parking lot …” I don’t tell him that Bobcat and I have had something of an each-mind-our-own-business relationship for a good while now. The hunter stiffens, pulls himself even taller than he was already, and slowly lets out with managed aggression and the slightest of menace that since we don’t have “No Hunting” signs close enough to each other to meet the law’s requirement out on the road fence, he could just come in and take that critter as he like, but–not to worry!–he’ll be gracious enough to honor the policy I told him about but I’d better get more notices up on those fenceposts.

New, regulation every-quarter-mile signs will be up by New Year’s Day! Turns out the man was indeed within the law of Arizona, and I’m grateful to have had his instruction.

December 27, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , ,

A night down near 20 degrees has left The Stockpond half frozen over, and it’s not out of the 30s yet when the irrigation nozzles need to be cleared of debris; they give my face a soaking in a cold, cold wind.

Shaggy Miner fungus, acting and looking so like their namesake as their tall heads pop up suddenly from below ground, are hard to take seriously as the desert inhabitants they are. Coming up in Winter the way they do makes them all the more unlikely.

The day breathes with just enough warmth to stir creatures six-legged and eight-legged: a black jumping spider springs from the mesquite to the handle of the shovel I’m using to remove ever more mesquite trees, and still the Polka Dot Beetles are a-flight. Removing the bermudagrass mounds from the bases of the little trees I dig out reveals that the grass is already putting out little green points of growth, there under the deep and warming quilt of old blades. Burroweeds are also sprouting fresh greenery (at their bases at least) and a Bronze Dragonfly is at The Stockpond–this species is apparently the only one that is active right through the Winter, though a week or two can go by without any of them venturing out. Just on either side of 11:00 am the warmth is sweet and the air moves in zephyrs, not in cold slaps as it had earlier.

At day’s end, the tiniest grasshoppers I’ve ever seen (and I mean minute, I can scarcely believe they’re real but sproing they do, so real they must be …) line up on the top of an irrigator’s hose that I must empty of water if it isn’t to freeze solidly in the deep cold of the night coming on.

December 25, 2013

Nature Jottings

On Christmas Morn’ the San Pedro receives a gift of great splendor: the finest-wrought of shimmering topaz Cottonwoods, arranged along the valley at an artful and satisfying distance one from the other, set most skillfully in pewter strands of branches and crowns. And at day’s end, a star shines out over The Rincon in the dark blue upper sky, and below, the peak ridges are sharp against a bright aura of last, lingering sunset. Could any star over Bethlehem have been the more beautiful?

…]

December 23, 2013

Nature Jottings

Even colder, the dawn sits her horse stiffly, at 27 degrees. Lady bugs appear at noon, though, when I find them on the wheels of the irrigators that must be cleaned of the deep ruffs of mud picked up by swinging across the pastures that haven’t filled in yet with a sod of barley and oats.