A full flock of Yellow-headed Blackbirds passes over, which gives a sudden boost to the numbers of individuals and pairs that have been straggling into the area for the last month or that even stayed locally right through Summer.
Another Great Purple Hairstreak, one to raise the envy of a collector, its wings are set with blue opals and nacre irridescent, laid into the richest of all blues I may have seen in nature anywhere across lands of palm or pine.
Whole lot of kingbirds around, they don’t seem to be planning to leave soon, like surfers loathe to give up waiting on that last wave of Summer. The 96 degrees today tell they are not unreasonable, and even I must start closing the windows again in the morning to keep the house from overheating while I’m gone.
A very green-looking oriole, was it an Orchard Oriole? I don’t get to look at it long enough ever to know, but also don’t know what else it could be.
Wind blowing through the night had me closing windows and shivering, the thermometer at 52 … news out of Phoenix just before sunrise announces it has dropped below 70 there (69 degrees! they must be celebrating), and that Flagstaff sits at 32, with a “freeze warning” in effect. Our pearly dawn sounds with the notes of Phoebes, the whispering of Vesper Sparrows, Raven chortles.
I walk through the weedy parts of the pastures, through patches of dried lanterns of Husk Tomatoes, my nose running now not from pollen but from cold, or at least what we can come to think of as that. The big ants scattered over their circles stand there in suspended animation. Mexican General grasshoppers clasp hard to the tips of amaranths, they are so cold and in their own suspended animation that they give no reaction if poinked with a finger. Summer birds, of which there are still a number around, are lying low til the warmth comes in and the temperature is raised almost another forty degrees in midafternoon. House Wrens are out, though, and a pair call from their own amaranth tops.
Sparrows are arriving, still more birds that need time to identify than can’t be spared by a work day. I check the Burroweed in #3 Pasture for things more easily nailed down, and there I find that fluttering jewel, a Great Purple Hairstreak butterfly. Scattered through that pasture now are the blooms of a pretty Composite, its flowers tiny, bright blue. A Western Wood Peewee is on the fence, the same bird of the day before yesterday at The Stockpond, or another one passing on south–way, way south–and another flycatcher relative, the Ash-throated, flashes out of the larger mesquites. That bird should’ve been long gone by now, maybe it is the last?
The birds at The Stockpond decrease when come the two or three day rains, because they can find water everywhere for a few days. I have the news from Ralph W. that the beaver dam on the San Pedro at 3-Links was blown out in the floods, the pond that was behind silted in, gone, and that fact has likely had the effect of more birds and other wildlife coming to us now that the other “natural” pool is lost. It will take a few days of drying out and running water to die off for avian numbers to go up again, so still today there isn’t much to be seen but a butt-bobbing Solitary Sandpiper (acting like a Spotted) in the mud, an immature Vermillion Flycatcher and a young Western Kingbird that is a perfect small version of a cleanly plumaged adult.
As this first day of calendar Autumn winds down, I move the wheel line all the way across #1 Pasture towards the south, to have it in place when the next irrigation cycle comes as the ground dries and no more storms sweep up from Mexico. As that wheel line blunders along, it pushes before it a storm not of rain but of wings and chitin: swarms of different grasshoppers that catch a lowering sun that makes them glow white and incandescent, with larger Red-winged Grasshoppers that are incandescent pink-orange swirling through.
The evening Stockpond is lonely, quiet–no martins, no nighthawks. None of the latter have been seen for a few weeks now and I’ll conclude that they’re well gone and indeed, they will not to be seen again here until Winter is also well gone.
A second Swainson’s Hawk has this evening joined the one I see most every morning in the same mesquite on the Cascabel Road, at our northmost, unirrigated #4 Pasture.
The last storm drizzles down, fades away, and along with it fade the hours of this last day of Summer. We’re left with almost an inch of rain in the final benediction! Bird activity at The Stockpond has dropped off startlingly since yesterday’s wild show of feathers and colors, now there is water puddled everywhere for miles. A Great Blue Heron is there, and the pik-tuk-tukk of Summer Tanagers come to the ears but no bird catches the eye. The mesquite trees around the bank are turning pale early it seems, and suddenly, as if the Monsoon’s farewell soaking was too much for their vegetal emotions to take and the tiny leaflets are dropping into the pond where they collect into little bands on the surface. A Western Wood Peewee looks it all over from side to side on a branch tip above, where it sits sullenly and must be feeling a push towards South America.
Calls out a Poorwill in the evening, “Persephone has left the building.”
On the edge of #3 Pasture I find a returned Marsh Wren that lets me approach within a couple paces, close enough that I can see the white stripes on its back. I also find the place in the fence on the road (well, one of the places in that fence) where Mycha the Cow took advantage of how the whole line is being buried in the mud and rubble of sheet flood after sheet flood. The top wire is now so low that Mycha just springs over with ease and nonchalant grace, to vacuum up the mesquite beans that those other, mere mortal cows who don’t have the nerve to follow (gracias a Dios!) can only dream about getting to. I haze her up the long road stretch to The Green Gate, she traipses back in, I pull up to The Stockpond and lose Mycha’s grand, teeth-grinding irritation in a water’s edge once again so alive with birds that I don’t know what to look at; I’m still so worked up and shaking over the chase with that cow that I can’t hold the binoculars still for a while anyway. Once I calm down, the birds all set themselves before me beautifully: pairs of Wilson’s Warblers, pairs of Black-headed Grosbeaks, sets of Lazuli Buntings, kingbirds, a bright female Bullock’s Oriole, Bell’s Vireos, an Orange-crowned Warbler, Abert’s Towhees, Blue Grosbeaks, a Nashville Warbler, immature Western Tanager, a Black Phoebe, McGillivray’s Warbler, a Swallow bombs in and bombs out too fast to see what species. A pair of Lucy’s Warblers are the last I’ll see in what seems with them a true farewell-to-Summer (I thought they’d all gone by now, it’s been so long since I’ve seen or heard any.) The flock of Brewer’s Blackbirds passes overhead.
The cows have been set to graze down the bermudagrass in #2(north) Pasture, to make easier its preparation for the planting of winter small cereals, as wheat, oats, barley and rye plants are called when used for grazing. Another Marsh Wren is there, and from the uncultivated other side of the River fence slides along another snake, who crosses bare patches of ground and pops down into a hole in the tufts of bermuda. This Ring-necked Snake is more mellow than yesterday’s Rattler (though it, too, is said to be venomous) and a handsome reptile it is: lead gray, with an orange band around its neck worn like a fine piece of jewelry.
The Monsoon, the Summer, end with a bang literally, as thunderstorm cells sweep in and over the Mason Pastures …
As I drive away from the house I look up to the Rincon, where Full Moon sports with the highest peak, is shining out from a mother-of-pearl sky; thrashers scold, sparrows tsip and cheep. The season is on the other shoulder, in the bottomland it is 57 degrees, while it was 95 degrees when I left The Stockpond at 5:15 last night.
A Great Blue Heron this morning at that pond, and at least four Summer Tanagers call around it, some are adult males in bright red plumage. A large “finch”, white below, gray above, and with conspicuous large white eye ring is there too, who knows what it is, leaves before a better look and a determination can be had. Many things will remain unidentified in this pretty good group of birds–Little Brown Jobs, Little Green Jobs, Little Yellow Jobs. There is too much ranch work needing tending to, to give time to sorting out even a few. The aquamarine-colored Damselflies still swarm around the mud edges, and bottle green ones hover there, too. A folded-wing Skipper Butterfly skips from mud to mud, it has dusky brown wings, the lower ones with white trailing edge.
In one mesquite edge or another seen as I make work rounds are Green-tailed Towhee, McGillivray’s Warbler, another Dusky-capped Flycatcher … and along the Cascabel Road at the Mason Pastures’ north end is a fine adult Gray Hawk, the final one I’ll see in the Season of Plenty now winding down. Bug kind flies on, clicks, chirps, as if les bon temps will forever roule: small grasshoppers with turquoise hind wings, gorgeous nearly-hovering Lubbers in 1957 Studebaker color combinations of pistachio and melon-pink, black and yellow, the still-sweet Sweet Clover racemes of blossoms flickering with many Sulfur Butterflies.
Other residents are out that I’d rather see with more distance between … as I barge through the tall grass to get a wheel line moved, I nearly step on top a skunk, who takes the surprise good naturedly though the canopy of entwined grass stems might be what keeps it from being able to raise a tail well enough to add even more interest to the afternoon. Then something else moves itself, parting that grass in a long line as it comes towards me. Must be a snake, I think, and then its diamond pattern can be seen through openings in the blades, and the head, and the rattle-ended tail of a fella who’s all business and thoroughly p.o.’d. I tear off. It keeps up, just behind and for longer than I want. A Mojave Rattlesnake would be the first conclusion out here that would be come to, though Wikipedia says, “Although they have a reputation for being aggressive towards people, such behavior is not described in the scientific literature,” meaning, I suppose, that not enough scientists have moved wheel line irrigators.
The afternoon brings 100 degrees, the humidity builds and builds to a swelter. Monsoon is fixing to let loose on us one last blow.
One or two individuals of a broad array of birds decorate The Stockpond, all nicely plumaged: Wilson’s Warbler; Black-headed Grosbeak; Bell’s Vireo; Brown-headed Cowbird; McGillivray’s Warbler; Vermillion Flycatcher; young Western Kingbird; Blue Grosbeak; a female Lazuli Bunting (though plain, still pretty with that blue tail of hers); and Gray Flycatcher–the first returning individual that I’ve seen, pumping its tail down in that distinctive way of theirs that is a godsend of a diagnostic “mark” for this species in a crazy-making genus. The more-greenish-than-grayish little flycatcher jumps off a branch time and again, drops and splashes in miniature belly flops into the pond, and is up then on the wing quickly enough to avoid sinking.
Blue Grosbeaks out in the pastures, who seem still to be unaware their endless Summer will indeed have an end, cavort on the wheel lines, bathe at the tops of the wheels in water that stays collected in the grooves with the constant passing around of the arcs of spray. The shining, sapphire birds stand and let themselves be hit by the waterdrops thrown over them, shake themselves off, then slide down the incline of the wheel to land in another puddle when they want even more fun!
Atop one of the plastic (insulated) electric line posts a large Apache Jumping Spider hangs out, waiting for some bug to land haplessly. It jumps inside the hollows of the post where the wires pass through when I come close for a better look at this most beautiful of Southwestern spiders, and then it comes back out and stares at me through all those eyes as if trying to remember where it knows me from. It is all black velvet and red velvet, most elegantly patterned.
Harvester Ants are cranky after the irrigation leaves their big, bare circle drenched, they swarm all over the place and I know they’d find me trying if I came any closer, but there is a very large, pale brown Swallowtail butterfly who keeps flitting around them. It’s a female Pipevine Swallowtail, the only one I’ve seen this year–and usually males are everywhere through Summer but they were scarce this year. She has cream spots striped between with blue on her underwings, and flashes amythyst on her upper surfaces–a very different color than that indescribably tropical blue of the males. She lands all over that circle, throws out a proboscis to the mud but is only relaxed for a second or two before she has to hot-foot it as ants try to latch on to her tiny feet. She seems to know just how much she can get away with before she’s got to take wing and try another spot.
Though the goblets of Toloache blossoms are still fresh, abundant and fragrant on plants outside the fenceline along the road as if Summer were never to end, the bosque and ponds are without birdsong now in the dawn. It is quiet but for crickets, and a couple of chip-notes of arrived Fall sparrows.
Swainson’s Hawks continue to pass through, though in fewer numbers than I might expect–then today we make a field trip to the Nature Conservancy’s Cobra Ranch by way of Willcox and it is revealed that a main column of this bird must follow the Sulphur Springs Valley as a route south, rather than the San Pedro. Outside Willcox we pass a wide field, and on it there are mind-teasing numbers of Swainson’s Hawks at rest on the ground, the unmoving, standing birds evenly placed as if the whole were a vast farm of fighting cocks or a garden gnome storage lot. For a moment I almost unconsciously passed off all those hawks as just decoys someone had placed a little too carefully; I’ve never seen so many birds of prey in one ground spot before!
Yet another dawn called forth by the Poorwills, after an evening before also filled with their cheering whistle. The rains drizzle off and then end for now, I guess “for good”.
Kingfisher at The Stockpond, and still vireos, and a Great Blue heron comes gliding in like the Flying Monkeys. Brown-headed Cowbirds are out beyond on the pastures, where suddenly, too, there are lots of Vesper Sparrows where none had been yesterday and even though the days are getting hotter and hotter, and stay just shy of 100 degrees. No nighthawks in the early evening sky overhead, but one does appear at The Stockpond, eminently lonely, reminding me how often one who is leading my kind of life can be, too. There is no opportunity to be maudlin, I am driven from the water’s edge by the sickening drone of mosquitoes thirsting for blood.
If nighthawk numbers are decreasing, the calling of Poorwills is obviously increasing on the evening air up on the mesas around Ridge House. Must be that our resident Poorwill are being joined by others coming south, or being replaced by them–maybe ours have themselves already flown over The Line into Old Mexico.