All posts by Cindy Salo

August 24, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , , ,

Dawn raindrops are falling on The Stockpond, 68 degrees feels cool, Killdeer call out mournfully from the native grass planting beyond the pond fence and the circle of mesquite trees is full of the music of young Yellow Warblers trying out their repertoire. The pasture itself is dark still, the sun not having got high enough above the ridge to shine down onto the grass, but the cottonwoods in their line along The River are dazzling and quivering in those first rays that also make the cliffs glow startlingly white, while all this brightly lit landscape is backdropped by the black sky of a very promising temporal.

Chris E. and James C. in their digging the endlessly thorny mesquititos from the bermudagrass in #1 Pasture come upon one of the showiest lepidoptera larvae any of us have seen, apparently feeding on mesquite leaves. It is green (of course) and looks to be some extreme hornworm with not just the one horn on its posterior but also with horns in clusters and singly along its length but especially on the head. It is like something from “Where the Wild Things Are” … the hornworm horn, not quite at the end of the critter, is curved, purple with a yellow tip … a bunch of such horns on the head … and most amazingly, rows of glittering silver-foil decorations all down its sides, as if inset by a Navajo jeweller. We suspect this is the larva of some moth, and can only wonder over what the adult could look like, and suspect that it will be just as magnificent a creature as its younger self had been.

Rain is never assured no matter how dark and promising the sky (we almost never use the word “threatening”, not out loud anyway, afraid as we are of offending the powers that bring us this life), and though it may come down hard in a real chubasco later today or tonight, that is not assured and the pastures are irrigated anyway. If the promise of those clouds does hold true, waterings after this will be decreased proportionate to the amount of rain that falls by the end of the rain wetting. Kingbirds, mostly Westerns, are having their mad fun on all the barbed wire fences, and Rough-winged Swallows in a flock are low over the pasture. Under the swallows I push through the waist-deep Barnyard Grass, out to a nozzle that’s jammed itself stationary on one of the tall grass inflorescences. The whole pasture is a waving sea of these pale seed heads caught in the sun, just below this glowing blanket is an under-wave of bright green leaves, themselves glittering with the morning rain that has passed. We don’t have to have a Monet on our walls, because we live in one.

I read the sky later, know I must flee if I am not to risk being swept away by a flash flood coming down an arroyo that crosses the gravel road, or just as irritatingly, having to watch a flood’s lapping edges for hours as the calculation is made that it is safe enough to enter and cross and then get home. In the next twenty four hours another wild storm leaves us with almost another inch of moisture. Our offerings must have been found acceptable.

August 23, 2013

Nature Jottings,

Baby Gambel’s Quail spill and tumble and roll out of the border shrubs on The Lane, swept along with and trying to keep up in the panic of their parent flock.

A large Black Swallowtail butterfly with wide yellow bands set in its dark upper wings, teeters over the pasture wildflowers, a large species of White is there too. At The Stockpond, which now has floating in it chunks of malachite-colored algae, the dragonflies are getting more diverse and today there is a miniature gold one, and a bright red damselfly.

August 22, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

Poor Red-tailed Hawk. I admire it as it perches on a fencepost, then it flies down the line of posts, with a lot of Kingbirds on top of it that come out of nowhere. The hawk turns sideways, this way and that, pulls its head into its shoulders but this doesn’t slow the attack. It’s close to an exact repeat of what I saw among these same two species of birds a month back, though this time there are more young kingbirds present and eager to try. They act like bored delinquent teenagers, who when they saw that Redtail exchanged among themselves, “Hey! Here comes a drunk! Let’s roll him!”

A new, beautiful large dragonfly comes to The Stockpond and Jimmy M. and I see one land near us on the sideroll wheel in the native grass pasture area–it is a startling color, one I can only call Dunkin’ Donuts Pink, deepening to magenta in places.

That bull calf suddenly realizes that he can get the milk fountain to work whenever he wants it to! and does he ever take it from there so it will be a summer without anyone having to raise a bottle calf after all, thanks to Robert F.’s patient involvement in this. I hope it turns out to have been the biggest of the cow events of summer. Molly with her retained placenta still hanging to the ground, however, looks almost as ghastly as ever now the strands have dried: when she walks they tinkle like one of Anna May Wong’s beaded curtains. (She will end up losing this in a couple days, at last.)

August 21, 2013

Nature Jottings, ,

Crossing over a fence between #3 and #2 pastures, I stub my foot into a rock that was to my memory not there before, and, well, that wasn’t there before, because it changes into a visiting Western Box Turtle. A large flock of swallows is out over the pastures, haven’t seen many for about a month. Chats are probably just as plentiful as they’ve been earlier in the summer, but are a lot more quiet now. Red-winged Grasshoppers have quickly built to large numbers, and will be abundant for the next couple of months.

 

August 20, 2013

Nature Jottings, ,

Song Sparrows have returned to the muddy edges of The Stockpond for the first time in at least a couple months, though I know they hadn’t left Mason Pastures. I scare up some unidentified sandpiper, which flies off rapidly without giving me a chance to put the glasses on it–probably a Spotted Sandpiper from the voice (“Pweeeeep! Pweeeep!”) but there are many others that are already visiting agricultural ponds in Arizona in their transit south.

Lesser Goldfinches are on the wheel line irrigators, sipping water that dribbles from seams and nozzles.

August 18, 2013

Nature Jottings, ,

Hornworms marked with rows of evenly spaced diagonal white stripes are growing fat on the White Horsenettle. These are the Tomato Hornworms justly loathed by Arizona gardeners; they will grow into Five-spotted Hawkmoths, justly loved for the grace of their nectar-sipping evening dance. The revoltingly huge worms don’t just eat up the Horsenettle and other things solanaceous, but also devour plants in the Bignonia group that people treasure in their gardens, like Desert Willow and the Chitalpa trees numbers of Cascabel folk are struggling to get established here. What they’re struggling against is this hawkmoth. Those plants can be defoliated almost overnight, while the eye is tricked in a way that have the worms staying about invisible. A Cape Honeysuckle I had trained up to the eaves during this summer and that was just about to burst into an amazing show of flowers, has over the course of a few nights been skeletonized, most every leaf gone–not until then are the the varmints suddenly visible. Pulling them off is a challenge, they have such a grip, and it’s time-consuming. I’ve found a good whack with the back of a plastic dust brush obliterates them with the satisfaction video gamers must have when they blow away a zombie … Night of the Living Dead Hornworms.

The Sonoran Toadlets are also growing fast, into Toadlings, and they have come to take over the actively-watered area of the native grass pasture project where the soil is moist, the ground soft for easy burrow digging, and there is shade from sprouting amaranths and the already established Six-weeks Grama and Rothrock Grama. It’s a better paradise than any Toad Hall.

The colorful sunset is one to compete with any in the tropics, the temperature’s dropped from 104 degrees all the way to 96! As I make the last work rounds, lightning zips skyward from the Galiuro Wilderness peaks and cliffs where a storm cell has made itself cozy. Lesser Nighthawks are pleasant company tonight, as is Moon, la Luna Llena, who comes to greet from over the ridge to the East and who shines in a thick, humid vapor. The many Nighthawks dip low near and around me and tilting their wings, fly back up in a sweep to crest over the lines of mesquite trees between the pastures. The mosquitoes, though, are a trial with how their whining becomes incessant and my hands, neck, ears and face–the only places not covered by clothing for ranch work–are turned into pincussions.

I stop at The Stockpond in the last moments before it’s too dark for a human to see, and find many bats, small, fast bats this time, making quick circular forays over the water, making a dent in that explosion of mosquitoes. Plenty of Nighthawks are coming for water, bombing in through the bats to get their drink.

At Ridge House, Poorwills call across the mesas in their moonshadows, through a steady hot night breeze.

August 17, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , , ,

The night air is about 75 degrees, the casa hotter than that so it feels like the Palm House at Kew. I simmer in bed with coffee and KCBS AM radio news coming across the deserts from that station’s chilly San Francisco home. The skin prickles with heat. Moths flutter all over the rooms, on the lampshades, the insides of screens, on my arms, float on the sink dishwater left over from last night, are in the refrigerator where at least they’re rather sluggish, even drop in through the narrow spout of the glass coffee pot, fall in there, drown, get poured into my cup. It’s the season of towering, lit clouds in the day and at sunset, but outside the night in the hour before dawn the sky is completely clear, a rarity. Flashes of light rise from below the horizon, telling of storms far out of sight over The Rim in a higher, even more lightning-prone country. As the stars fade a very few Purple Martins sweep for bugs overhead; lately their chatter is overwhelmed by the songs of Black-throated Sparrows who live all across these mesas and ridges of Pool Wash and Sierra Blanca. The Martin activity in these hours of madrugada continues to diminish.

No, no way to go back to trying to do a quick and intense documentation of the species at this true height of summer here–I have to be content with what can be noticed and caught sight or ear of during the long hours of attending the cow and calf, which include the lessons necessary to give that bull calf that we hope will get him to find mamma’s milk fountain more attractive to suck on than my knee, her leg, her flank, or the pedal squeeze on the cow chute, which are all things he tries laying his lips to enthusiastically while he ignores Molly’s milk fountains. (I absolutely drew the line on the calf’s “cheekiness” when while I was bending over to fill his bottle the he whipped around behind me and tried to latch on in each their turn to both halves of my, um, back side…) I hope soon it will be possible to go back to the usual chores whose everyday demands do at least expose a hand to what’s coming and going and staying in Nature on the Pastures–the irrigating and the making sure that irrigation stays efficient, the cow moving, digging mesquite, trying to fix cursedly disintegrating fences or fences buried in silt from summer sheet floods, fences pushed over by cattle who’d rather skim that buffet than this one, unloading and stacking hay, putting gates that cattle have torn to pieces back together, keeping horses in rein and in practice, rounding up and returning bovine escapees, ingratiating one’s self to newborn calves, filling the pond with water, controllng alien weed species, checking on cows in our other “units” scattered over miles of Cascabel Road, filling holes in the roadway of The Lane, moving wheel lines, oiling drive chains, raising, lowering, building portable electric fences, rebuilding blown out water mains, hauling steers to the packing house … … …

Young Summer Tanagers are wheezing, hidden away in the thick bosque canopy, giving out those sounds that for years tricked me into thinking there were an awful lot of Tyrannulets around. A Western Tanager flies down The Lane, a common enough sight there in the migration of spring but it’s been a few weeks since the last was here and in my notice; more should be coming down from the mountains, though. Every one of the five pastures has its own Western Kingbird family, soaring, parrying, ducking, flashing and twisting in flight, playing–I don’t hold a doubt about the Tyrant Flycatchers having a sense of fun and even mirth!

August 16, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , ,

Although all feels normal (that is, the temperature’s gone above 102 degrees), the air has changed. A finger can’t be put on this exactly, nor can it be described but, we are headed towards Equinox.

There are odd moments to listen for and watch for birds away from tending to the crisis of Molly the Cow and the difficult birth calf that will starve if we don’t continue milking mamma and getting more of her into him, while we hope the little lightbulb goes on over the dimwit’s head and he realizes that he’s the one got to nurse on her. Among a number of complications of the blessed event, the afterbirth isn’t ejected and it’s obviously not about to disattach–it falls from her tail to the ground in dreadful bloody ribbons into which are tucked sails of white tissue. People gasp in horror when they see Molly. I don’t know when this will be over, the manuals say could be eleven days, but a number of folks are in on seeing it through, and this allows me to slip away now and then so a few more birds can be added to the Ides of Summer list. I’m sure I will miss many species, nonetheless, as preoccupied as I am with the latest stock problem that isn’t going to allow me to continue with the idea of actually going out and putting together the mid-season equivalent of a Christmas Count for the Mason Pastures that I’d wanted. At least these are added, most of them through song or sound:

Ladder-backed Woodpecker

Common Ground Dove

Song Sparrow

Yellow-headed Blackbird

Northern Beardless Tyrannulet

August 15, 2013

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

The Ides of August, the Ides of Summer for birds and the wildings, but the appearance of those Red-winged Grasshoppers tell that the nagging of winter pasture preparation and seeding and irrigating will soon be more shout than whisper. We’ve got at least as far as confining the Mason Pasture herd to one 350 ft. X 850 ft. swath (about seven acres) of bermudagrass, between two lines of electric fence with an exit to the pond, so cow folk can eat off the crop almost to the ground and make that ready for tilling six weeks or two months from now, clean out around the mesquites that must be pulled or dug out so that the rattlesnakes coiled below them will be more visible.

There are many baby birds cheeping away in the mesquite branches, probably second broods all. I want to spend two or three days right now, though, making a bird list, during these last moments when the summer still feels long and sweet …

Yellow Warbler (singing)

Yellow-breasted Chat (singing)

White-winged Dove

Lesser Goldfinch

Vermillion Flycatcher

Bell’s Vireo

Blue Grosbeak

Purple Martin

Summer Tanager (singing, and call notes)

Mourning Dove

Bewick’s Wren

Verdin

Abert’s Towhee

Lark Sparrow

Gray Hawk

Cardinal

Red-tailed Hawk

Gambel’s Quail

Crissal Thrasher

Black Phoebe

Western Kingbird

Savannah Sparrow (rare–but not unknown to be arriving now for winter)

The River is running, madly … many large blue dragonflies on The Stockpond, and “Whitetails”, or as I call them, Saddle Shoe Dragonflies. Bugs that like to harass humans are doing that, aplenty, worst of them are the tiny loudly singing gnats that fly into the cavern of an ear opening, get louder and louder but then their whine is suddenly cut off when they ditch into the pool of sweat that’s collected just inside the earlobe’s tinaja. This unpleasantness is made up for when the air is thick with the incomparable sweetness of huisache acacia blooms.

One of the cows, Molly, has had a bull calf and I’m worrying over both of them–the baby doesn’t know how to suckle, or maybe even that it’s supposed to. Mamma’s not looking all that good either, uh oh, a big chore coming on. I think she had it Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. … Save the life of my child/cried the desperate mother …

August 14, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , , , ,

A Great Blue Heron that’s supposed to be uncommon in the summer here is at the northern dirt tank catchment pond, the water is clean and clear now there’s been no storm or wild muddy runoff from the canyons for a few days. The bird is beautifully reflected. Off across all the pastures to the south is the buzz and murmur of crickets, grasshoppers, katydids. Moisture is enough that with the decaying plant matter come very showy mushrooms popping up: stems of pure white, jet black caps speckled white. There is a little similarly colored and patterned butterfly, black, with a crescent of white stars on its forewings, the delightfully named Funereal Duskywing. It has taken up life in that area where we’re coaxing the native grasses to sprout from seeds.

I notice that suddenly the Brown-crested Flycatchers aren’t flying and hawking around in the pastures and desert edge any more. I was just thinking it must be time to take stock of the birds here, now has come the Ides of Summer when the breeding birds are all still showing themselves and none have left but may be about to, and fall transients and winter residents are still far off. Sure enough, a look in the bird calendar for Southeastern Arizona reveals that the “neotropical” Brown-crested would be the first to leave, and precipitously: once the first of August has come the species goes from common to uncommon, and by the end of the first week, to be rare though a few may hang on til mid-September.

I make the mistake of leaving on the ground and out in the sun the nails for a fence repair I’d like to get done before the storm approaching from the horizon gets here. It’s 102 degrees, and the nails are too hot to pick up with bare fingers, and have to be splashed with canteen water as if they’ve just come out of a forge! When the mesquite pods start falling and stir into the air the sound of a kalimba as they hit the ground and bounce off each other, plainly it’s time to get out of here and through all the washes and outflows of canyons and besides, all the windows and doors are open back at the house! I just arrive there and don’t get them all closed before It hits, the Mother of all Monsoon Storms this Summer. It’s been on its way up from the South, and from the East, and from this high spot I watch each valley and ridge and washbottom vanishing from sight in its oncoming, go completely gray in a wall of wild rain from the ground up as high as can be seen, and it’s not slowing down or thinning. I get to the door on the south side of the house a moment after the house is slammed by the front, the door is hard to close and click against it and the space that narrows as I push funnels the air and wet into the room the harder, increasing the blast that sweeps everything off the kitchen table, and for at least the third time this rainy season, the refrigerator is cleared of most of the pictures and mementos held there by magnets. The sun still shines for a little while through the pounding sheets of rain, the landscape 360 degrees around the house glows as if it sits inside an incandescent bulb. Suddenly, all becomes much darkened. The Creosote Bush outside is bent in the wind to the point of almost being flattened to the ground, though I can’t see beyond a few feet from the windows so much like a blizzard has this come to be look. I can’t believe the eaves are able to stay attached to the house … and then, it’s all gone as quickly as it came, moving along in a way that the windows on each side are battered and draining water and when the storm cell reaches the bottomlands to the West, all that land fills like a newly laid out lake, one that later reflects the glow of the sunset for weeks.

Over the course of the storm the temperature has dropped to 74–almost thirty degrees cooler than an hour before and in that hour, 1.35 inches of rain has fallen. Doubtless no one will be able to get in or out of here for a while … when it’s done and the rumbling is drifting off to the northwest, I can hear and see that this long ridge has become an island: Pool Wash and Sierra Blanca wash are white and rushing and their murmur comes up to me from below, water boring wildly past me on either side. I can see trucks and a stocktrailer for now stranded down there but hoping to be able to cross when the grader comes or more people with shovels in their vehicles do (most carry one for this kind of affair)–but there’s more trouble this time than usual, because the electric company left a bunch of line poles in the bed of the arroyo last week, up stream from the crossing. All of those creosoted poles are now gone and swept west down and to the San Pedro, except for one, which is left a anchored lengthwise crossing the road. That’s gotta be fun! Cascabel folk will talk about this great storm for days, about the mess and the damage and the glorious refill of rain which everyone will take any time and any how it will be offered even if it comes with ripped off porch ceiling fans and lawn chairs lifted, taken, and dropped off in the desert. Bob E. reports that his house was saved by his anemometer: lightning hit it, and followed the metal pole it was attached to down to the ground. He couldn’t tell what the blasts of wind ever ended up registering in speed because the bolt shattered everything into pieces. The wind couldn’t have been less than 60 mph …[…]