All posts by Cindy Salo

August 13, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

The Devil’s Claws continue to grow and spread their branches, there are even more flowers now than a couple weeks ago. As I noticed before, only some individuals have the Paulownia-like fragrance and that only slight–one plant’s flowers are nearly raspberry red in color, look like Pansy (Miltonia) Orchids. Wild Tomatillo are at the height of bloom, rather a weedy plant but rather showy, too. After a night of 80% humidity, the dew is drenching everything and as I walk I am wet through from the top of the so-called knee boots to well above the knees. (Knee boots only come now up to about half way between the calf and the knee, which is reminiscent of what happened with two-by-four lumber. They seem no longer to be built to fit well, too, and are too floppy and open to keep out raspy grass seeds, sharp and impaling foxtail awns that can find their way all the way to the toes before becoming a splinter in your hide, or the marbles of White Horsenettle fruits. The “rubber” lasts all of about two months before its seams fracture. What do I want for $30? something that lasts??) More and more grasshoppers are flushed on such a walk through the deep pasture, today there’s a new straw-colored one with a black stripe, and large emerald katydids with a white stripe, trailing legs far behind them when they take off and buzz on ahead of me. A small black wasp is now very active, has a brightly contrasting red abdomen, connected to its forward parts by a thorax as thin as a hair.

I get back to the truck after closing down the riser valves just after lunch, slip off the rubber boots and shake them upside down before putting on regular cowboy boots, and out of them onto the ground falls a spider of astonishing color and shape: apple green, striped with a lighter fluorescent green, and the legs are feathered and ornate like those of deep sea crabs. How this Green Lynx Spider didn’t get crushed as it was jostled around in my boot is a question–it must be very nimble. I read that they can give a venomous bite, but that they have to be harassed into doing that. I should think that a ride with my foot far from home would constitute harassment. I do empty other critters out of those boots from time to time after I have finished crossing those pastures, and have always been happy not to know what alarming thing I was carrying around with me at the time.

Clear sky, temperature 104 degrees in the afternoon … the convection oven of the land bouncing back great heat into the air is setting up all for a big blow, it feels–but not today.

August 12, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

A hot night, awake with sweat and the poking and biting of “bugs”, but an eventual falling to sleep. The feel of one more crawling on me makes me give up and I turn on the early news out of San Francisco–crackling radio AM in the a.m., giving that flavor of coming from some far off, exotic place–and bring coffee back to bed. I sip in a large moth that in the dark I couldn’t see had bumbled over the lip of the mug. Pppphhhthtwpp! how … Silence of the Lambs.

I admire roadsides of that finest of this wet season’s annual wildflowers, the Summer Poppy that is glowing everywhere; in places its orange petals are entwined with the blue wide trumpets of Tall Morning-glory, these colors with the early sun shooting through them would have moved Tiffany to some new creation in glass. At Mason’s I find the young and still very cute Sonoran Desert Toads have moved away from The Stockpond altogether, spread themselves over the south end of #1 Pasture but especially taking up in the new native grass pasture we’ve planted and that we are now watering every day there is no Monsoon storm of any account. A cuckoo calls from the pond where the tadpoles swam so briefly, though his calling for rain won’t be working during this, one of those five to six day spells between widespread temporales. The skies, the clouds, are most magnificent and sometimes there’s a bit of thunder, but Earth-maker isn’t at the moment roused to anger and I can relax without worry of being hit by lightning. One is caused to raise the eyes often, to see how much it has all changed in the last few minutes, how the sky has piled high itself with clouds that then vanish, threaten and boil up again, vanish again.

August 11, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , , , , ,

A return walk to that blown out irrigation main in #4 Pasture to see if it’s holding pressure gives an impression that all the world is being devoured by those White-lined Sphinx worms. There are at least four or five to the square foot of Boerhavia that they are quickly decimating, but they leave alone the related Annual Windmills (Allionia choisyi) that are growing among them and showing their pretty, tiny lavendar-pink blooms on widely sprawling plants. The worms are fabulously beautiful: lime and yellow, with black stripes and red bars. I imagine them in their not millions, but probably billions, this year when every flat is massed with their host plants from here up to the canyonlands and over to the far-off Pecos. If any Elf Owls waited out the dry spring with its lack of flowers and thus lack of insects for them, they will be feasting on hornworms this year no doubt. (I once had a pair come down to visit a number of evenings in a row years ago, when one of them brought its own dinner, a huge Tomato Hornworm that it held in one foot while it balanced on the branch with the other. I watched the last of the sunset while only a few feet away from me the little toy owl bit off the head of the hornworm and working from the bottom up squeezed out the liquid green contents and slurped them–a sort of slimesicle–while I toasted the sweet little creature on its hunting prowess, raised my glass of wine to it with a “Bon appetit, frere!”) Also no doubt, there will be a bumper crop of hornworms of various species and the Screech Owls will be seen aplenty around the spotlights on garages and house walls, flying out of the dark of a sudden to snatch a large hawkmoth adult and vanishing back out of sight where it will munch away leisurely on a branch.

One of the few butterflies that are common this year, the Orange Sulphur, flits over all the pastures, sipping at almost any kind of flower they can find open. Grasshopper numbers are still growing, and don’t seem about to decline. In fact I wonder if this year they aren’t going at some point to reach a critical mass and then mow off all the bermuda we have spent our time and our wealth growing. At least for now, there appears to be not a single leaf chewed off, and I wonder what they’re doing. They’re certainly leaving behind a real mass of grasshopper excrement, which must be as good a fertilizer as any cricket poop that is a product of growing popularity among the organic set lately … […]

The mesquites are hung (already!) with whitening beans, they look as pretty as any cultivated flowering tree, as tinselled as any fir at Christmas. On one of these, bright Lark Sparrows perch on each branch tip to complete the look, as if someone had attached to the mesquitebaum the finest of Austrian ornaments, ones that wind themselves up and sing. The second week of August, our Sonoran Summer, perfected. All that has come before from those first days when the mercury shot over a line into the 90s, the wicked Foresummer, the first wild storm and haboob wall of dust, the first flood of The River, have built to this. A pleasant, 96 degrees late afternoon, the Saguaros on the hilltop are stark against giant white Monsoon clouds, the clouds themselves hard against an impossibly blue sky. All things looked at, in every direction, are as if viewed through a stereoscope. The White-winged Doves do yet call and coo, as if spring has not gone to high summer of Los Temporales. Their notes wonderfully blend with far away thunder.

August 9, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

Some Saguaro Juniper members and supporters are setting up a new native Arizona grass pasture project at the south end of the fields, a couple of risers’ worth of fallow land has been seeded with a wonderful variety–sixteen species–and now, to water it. Then … we blow an entire riser out of the ground right from its base at the irrigation main in #4 Pasture in the far north of Mason’s: well that pipe, metal cap hydrant-fixture and all, must’ve shot high into the sky as if from a missile silo–at least the hole left behind looks like one, filled and overflowing with water welling out and up from the 4″ opening in the pipe three feet down. This forms a very attractive and natural-looking ojo de agua. Today we try fixing this again (second attempt) but the fun is interrupted by something of an anguished yelp from Jimmy M., who with a high kick flips away from his bare shin something snake-like that then goes flying end over end into the Boerhavia being munched by uncountable hornworms of White-lined Sphinx Moths all around us. We’re aghast to see that this is one of those offputting Giant Desert Centipedes. Well, at least the centipedes here aren’t in the perpetually bad and aggressive mood that the Hawaiian species seem to be, and Jimmy doesn’t get sliced by the pair of venomous fangs of this one.

August 8, 2013

Nature Jottings,

I hear on the radio that this dawn slugs at Phoenix with 82 degrees already in place; here it is “only” 64. My Thursday segundo, Ellison from the Froggy Farm, and I find a huge, oh-so-evil looking insect with striped legs that has climbed to the top of the reeds on the north shore of The Stockpond. Ellison says, “I’m sure that thing wants to stab some tadpole with that beak it’s got, and suck out its life.” We slip away from it, glad we’re the size we are, go off to take care of the tractors on their wheel lines and we trudge across #3 Pasture to change the oil on that one, and oil its drive chains.

Two days after I saw those disembodied brilliantly colored wings of that Red-winged Grasshopper, we come across an entire section of that pasture jumping and pulsing with them, and now we know that earth is turning away from the hemisphere’s Summer even though by this hour the heat approaches 100 degrees (which will make that engine oil particularly slippery and easy to drain …) We’re not scaring them up, or driving them in front of us to settle and then rise again as grasshoppers do–these very beautiful insects are obviously in full advertisement to females, or maybe in full territorial declaration. They rise, circle, vault, arc, come to the ground again where they immediately stop their clicking. Always some are lifting off or in mid-flight or landing, showing off their colors, all of them letting out a wing song that for the world sounds like Sandhill Cranes calling out from some great height and indeed there is something crane-like about this display dance. Both bird and bug are “doing” the same thing, after all … And that’s why birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it, let’s do it–let’s fall in love.

A Swainson’s Hawk whistles down to unfortunate earth-bound creatures from its own great height, but even seen from our distance away from it the grace of its flight makes me stop to admire, and to wonder what it is he takes in with those raptor eyes from one desert horizon to the other.

August 7, 2013

Nature Jottings,

Through air cleaned and freshened by yesterday’s wide storms a Yellow-billed Cuckoo hoots out a chuckle from the cottonwood bosque at El Potrero. Pat and I saddle up, fit our horses with bits and reins, mount and ride out on the morning to see how waterings have changed life on the mesas and low canyons on our range. If Summer isn’t ending, and Autumn not really beginning, then this must be one of our three Springs that come in the year. A green glow is over everything, from deepest river channel across the valley pastures it spreads up the foothills, over buttes and canyon rims and flows around the knuckle ridges, and up, and up, to ponderosa and high Rincon timberline. We ride through cholla in bloom, Manzanilla del Coyote (or “Chinchweed” in less musical, harsh-sounded Teutonic, er, I mean, English) in their endless golden carpets that let up spice into the air as horse hooves crush their leaves and flowers, white Desert Zinnia, and barrel cactus with their coronets of large brilliant flowers golden, orange, yellow, red, garnet, all with satin shine petals, or rather, “tepals”. (I am reminded of the Wiliwili trees on wild Hawaiian slopes and in the canyons of those islands, individual trees holding flowers that closely match this same range of hues.) “I’ve always thought Easter should be in July in Arizona!” Pat tells with joy in her voice.

August 6, 2013

Nature Jottings, ,

High columns of flying ants on the move pick up the morning sun that gives the see-through assemblage a bronze glow. The River is loud! A Spotted Sandpiper is at The Stockpond, only a few weeks after the last one was seen, but now such a visit would be more expected as the birds start to move perhaps all the way to the Southern Hemisphere. It takes a long time to get to Chile, might as well leave now. Summer is hardly about to end, but the days trickle from her, neither is Autumn about to begin, but her whisper is there. If one tramps these pastures and the grasslands over years, feels the sun and comes tuned to the subtly changing angle of its light, there comes a day of a sixth sense that brings one of those whispers: “And the Red-winged Grasshoppers? They’re about to be here …” I look down only moments after having this thought, see on a bare patch of dirt a set of scarlet and black wings that can only have belonged to one, its body already cut up by ants and carried away by them.

A magnificent sky for the whole morning, clouds towering into blue, thunder far off and harmless now but giving fair warning. By noon is a fearful storm, by sunset the clouds drift apart, and openings show sky again. I get home to Ridge House and find the great cliffs of the Galiuro Wilderness shining alabaster in sun, against the dark storm beyond them in this landscape that can only be called gigantic, one in which man’s size still shows true: small.

August 3, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , ,

Never have I seen such a beautiful alignment of The Heavens as arranges itself on the low horizon of the East at 4 am, a while before first light … Jupiter … Crescent Moon … Orion … above them all, the Pleiades. The martins do not add their own vocal sparkle until 4:30 or so; something changes with them, they fill the air later, closer to sunrise which is itself coming later but not so markedly as to explain the change in the birds’ schedule.

The morning air is thick, thick with humidity, thick with Mourning Doves, thick with the whistling of dove wings. I find a single Kochia scoparia–“Poor Man’s Alfalfa”–a Eurasian amaranth brought in long ago in hopes of improving cattle grazing but now widely invasive on The River not far from Mason’s. It hasn’t been noticed right here before, and we may not welcome it particularly given the reports of its toxicity if not given tedious management. Oh goody, another weed problem. “Oh well, at least we’ve got the flowering stage Bull Thistle in here taken care of,” I gloat to myself of course just before finding one of those. Hubris, and payback.

As this humid day winds down, but long before sunset, I sit in the truck at the edge of The Stockpond and listen to the mellow whistles of a Blue Grosbeak still singing out his mating song and territorial declarations. Then, out from the grove of mesquite and hackberry to the right comes floating–for it seems barely to move, and is more suspended in the air with how it can fly with hardly a wingbeat–a bat larger than any I’ve yet seen in Arizona. Oh it is superb, of a strange color and pattern, flashing pale brown and darker brown and I suppose it is a trick of the light that makes its wings looked striped as it comes back and forth across the pond. In this flight it is slow and graceful, its wings whose whole span must measure at least a foot across are hardly pumped; it barely dips in its slow and level movement to the water for a dainty, quick sip. All this would be incredible enough, but the ears–the ears look impossibly large. They are very long, and stick out in front of the head nearly horizontally or at not much of a raised angle, with ends flipped out and up like a pair of antlers! After good long looks at it with binoculars, I see it alight in one of the little mesquites on the bank and swing there for a while, lick and groom its wings and body happily, with an uncannily friendly look on its face. It drops out into air and swings low back over the water for another drink, and does this repeatedly until thirst is quenched. [This habit before the light was gone will not match anything I can find on large Arizona bats with huge ears, but Nancy F. helps with the identification by contacting her bat biologist friend Ronnie S., who kindly gave advice and thinks it likely is the Townsend’s Big-eared Bat. Everything I read about the species does confirm this; I never see another, it is amazing luck to have been there for this one’s visit.]

August 2, 2013

Nature Jottings, ,

The Camphorweed now is popping into bloom all across #3 Pasture. It is a plant of the most formal architecture, pleasing to the eye if somewhat revolting to the touch, sticky and clammy as it is. It makes a pretty and long display, but only in that pasture. There are also many large ant circles there, and this seems beneficial to the native grasses: the outer foot or so, just beyond where the ants have cleared everything to bareness, is a wreath of vigorous Threeawn, some species of Aristida. The ants have weeded out every bit of bermudagrass that could’ve been there (and indeed does still grow deeply all around), and left the Threeawn to thrive and drop seeds from there.

Black Phoebes seem to be multiplying lately, they perch and hawk from one end of Mason’s to the other, especially around the ponds and places that’ve caught water.

August 1, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , ,

Grasshoppers … pistachio green grasshoppers, vanilla striped. It is a month of insects, and we see new ones every year no matter how many years are spent on The River, some we only ever see once, some are greeted like old friends when they return, some of course bring an “Eww! not them again … forgot how much I can’t stand those things. When is it they leave?” On the Sphaeralcea mallows have appeared in their annual clockwork way pillbug-sized and -shaped larvae of something, in masses on the stems and leaf nodes–black or dark brown in body, covered in what look like should be nasty stinging hairs. They’ll be around for some weeks, grow a lot larger and be everywhere and then suddenly disappear. Tom O. finds out that they are the young stage of that very beautiful golden bug I’d last seen a couple weeks ago, whose intricate patterns gave me to dub it the Tao Bug. Their scientific name has a beauty equaling their colors and patterns, and is a very apt one: Calligrapha serpentina.

A Gray Hawk comes bursting out of the mesquite branches and woods edge, with many tail feathers missing and the rest of the bird looking pretty ragged, too. Earlier that was its sad, pained wail I heard, as if it were pleading, “Can no one stop this??” … two insanely angry kingbirds burst from those branches now behind him, dive on him, shriek out in this hawk drive of theirs, delighting in their work and the opportunity this presents for them to show off their aeronautics