18 degrees at first light!
All posts by Cindy Salo
December 5, 2013
The new day brings an utterly different world: 25 degrees on the ridges, and in the valley below sparkling chips of frost fall from mesquite tips. The bermudagrass pasture stretching out from the window of the Cowboy Caravan all the way to the huge saguaros on the far hill are white, icy, the Rincon above us dusted with snow. Yet the air warms enough even in the El Potrero bottomland for Sulphur Butterflies to come to life, and an azure grasshopper.
Still-green and fresh leaves of the big Hackberries at The Stockpond start falling off their twigs by mid-morning–they never had a chance to turn color before the coming on of a night that was surely in the teens. On the water swim a brace of fine Mallards, their wariness telling they are true wildlings. A Wilson’s Snipe is there, too, and a large sandpiper with a long bill, also extremely wary: a Long-billed Dowitcher. It takes off with a pained, “Pitty peet peet!”, showing a white slash of rump as it vanishes across the fields.
December 4, 2013
The peak of the Rincon and its cliffs and boulders are white and dancing on the eye in the sun, making those evergreen forests on their far heights look so much the darker. A shining white cloud crowns all, itself under a long clean blue sky. Cottonwoods glow yellow below. Doubtless a storm comes: the air is warm, yet has some tang to it, is even salty, and there is a strong waft of change. Caribbean Horseweed on the pastures grows on as if none of this is happening, and even shows fresh flower buds, and on the irrigation hoses are the black spiders of Summer. Canadian Horseweed, presumably more attuned to North America has already turned into seeds or dormant biennial rosettes and thus is well ready for Winter.
American Pipits drop in again–they’ve been elsewhere lately, probably over on the just-germinated seedling alfalfa pasture of our fence-neighbor ranch. Midday 70 degrees, I am still eating lunch with dragonflies.
The last bat before the year’s deep freezes come on flies down the Cascabel Road, ahead of the truck in the dusk
December 3, 2013
Pyrrhuloxias male and female, and Chipping Sparrows, drink among dragonflies at The Stockpond. Seedlings wild and encouraged are developing rapidly in the Vernal Winter: oats and barley have shot out two or three true leaves, the rye shows one or two, and out of the fresh mounds of gopher-dug soil spring grass seedlings with stems and blades fully formed. Millions of perfect Valentine hearts of Cheeseweed Mallow cotyledons are making green patches on the wide, open ground. Javelina are already grazing heavily on the fruit of our works long before cows will get the chance!
December 2, 2013
Ah … Diciembre, nuestra Arizona linda! … month of kaleidoscope sunsets and mornings beautifully crisp like this one. A concerto plays on the radio as I drive up the River’s edge, glittering piano woven with glittering Cottonwood leaves, gold on the ear, gold on the air of early morning.
Red-winged Grasshoppers are everywhere in the pastures on this brilliant sunny morning of 60 degrees, dragonflies yet glide and shimmer over The Stockpond now long after the last damselflies have been among them. A spare butterfly or two are there, too–the more common Sulphurs, and Mexican Yellows.
November 30, 2013
Just as I had when the season of the Red-winged Grasshopper started almost four months ago, I find a blazing scarlet wing lying on a path, then see a single live grasshopper on this another sweetly warm afternoon in the mid 70s. Polka Dot Beetles are also out, massing again in great numbers everywhere; they are hovering up to ten feet over the grass.
A Mountain Bluebird drifts down out of the sky, lights atop an irrigator wheel. A chip of blue ice, Prince of the High Country, color of a glacial rivulet.
Sun is gone behind leaden clouds long before its moment to set. In an astounding silence on the pastures, a pair of Great Blue Heron hunt–I’d bet they’re angling not for frogs but for gophers! They’re colored the very grays and blacks of the sky above them. The Tamarisk trees drift orange, and yellow, long avenues and rows and single Cottonwoods are nearly wholly green or green-and-yellow or gold, some are become empty gray crowns of twigs with their edges hoops of rich butter, others are artists’ wide brushes dipped in all these colors and stood upright in a jar. The River is a palette of Thanksgiving hues. The gallery forest’s colors are delicate, on this last day of November muted, like Christmas lights already placed but waiting to be lit with great fanfare by December Sun tomorrow.
November 29, 2013
A sweetly warm day, with insects coming back around to be more lively. A docked pair of dragonflies suspend themselves over a puddle in #2 Pasture. Polka Dot Beetles also continue appreciating the nice weather. Days pass during which I don’t see the Red-winged Grasshoppers and I’m sure they’ve all died, but then their clicking will be everywhere and they will be putting on a colorful show out ahead of me as I walk the miles of a day doing rounds. Today that distinctive snapping sound of theirs drew me to the only one out on the wing, and I wonder again how much longer they’ll be part of the scene.
November 27, 2013
Dia de los Birds of Prey, this must be. My eyes come to be welded to a Merlin doing a thrilling slow, then rocketing, then suspended-in-air ballet and when I turn my head to the side what I look right into are the eyes of a Harrier sailing in straight for my face, something that’s become a real habit of this bird! It tilts slightly, glides over my head, as laid back as a stoned hippie. It obviously doesn’t care what my business may be, and goes about its own chores unperturbed by my presence. A short while later there comes a Peregrine in a stoop down over the pastures, it races over the Meadowlarks who scream out and bolt blindly off in different directions to be anywhere but there.
The globs of silk webs that have lately been appearing at the tips of small mesquites in the pastures are decorated with the tiny dried mesquite leaflets, much as are the coverings of bagworms. Inside there is no worm or larva–but spiders, very showy spiders, black with white stripes and spots. Their silk hiding place must be a tight little shanty for them on these cold nights.
Mesquite seeds are still sprouting fresh green pairs of cotyledons from cow poop, to give us joyous chores of some Christmas Yet to Come when the trees they’ve grown into have to be pulled with incomparably more effort.
Not a grasshopper, not a dragonfly. These fields can be almost motionless for days, and silent, and then suddenly as happens today a tree will fill with Lark Sparrows and their whistles, cheeps and bright chattering.
November 26, 2013
Lots of ducks whistling in, and fast–Mexican Mallards and Northern Mallards and everything on the “hybrid” continuum between the two. A few small Bronze Dragonflies are about, and the giant Great Blue Heron who might want to snatch them out of the air.
Over the pastures: a Kestrel, yellow-green grasshoppers, a single pale yellow small butterfly, a single war-torn Pipevine Swallowtail, and Polka Dot Beetles seemingly well adapted to nights below freezing. Large flocks of Winter plumaged Red-winged Blackbirds that hide in the silver-and-gold bermudagrass take off and do aerial moves wondrous to see, “pit-tickkk! pit-tickk!” they chatter. They may not be as colorful as they are in Summer, but they’re just as elegant in their seasonally appropriate tweeds that set off so beautifully their black, much fanned. They move around constantly, all fly out of sight, all fly back–but they’re less frantic to go to another pasture if the cows are with them. The flocks come along horizontally, in a flat, broad bunches, then every bird drops suddenly like a stone and vanishes in the tall grass.
November 25, 2013
Dawn is sparkling clean, a Great Blue Heron is at The Stockpond and the new snows on Mount Lemmon and the Rincon peaks shine down from that giddily high country. Even down here the morning air is a deeply cold 20 degrees, but by 9:00 am when the irrigation can be started it’s enough above freezing that the water systems can function. The big hoses will certainly have to be emptied this evening! Though Vernal Winter is looking more like plain old Winter, there are moths lit in the headlights at day’s end.