The County Agent in Willcox, Kim M., lets me know that if it were she, she’d go with caution and pull out that single Rushpink growing and flowering in #3 Pasture … but when I go back up there to do just that I can’t find a trace of it! Did it already disperse all those seed parachutes, then in its ghost fashion become invisible? I guess we’ll find out next year if we’ve yet another invasive to worry about in that field.
All posts by Cindy Salo
June 19, 2013
White butterflies are probing the Sweetclover–but only the few white flowered ones–out where the deer take their rest. Those white blossoms are as fragrant or even more fragrant than are the yellow.
An all gray, very large Sphinx Moth is about, with a row of amber spots running the length of both sides of its abdomen. There are several species with these markings, though I think this must be the common Tobacco Hawk Moth, that scourge of tomato growers everywhere.
June 18, 2013
Lizardtail (Gaura mollis), a common but distinctive tall wildflower of irrigated pastures hereabouts, is coming into bloom with delicate small pink flowers. In Spanish its name is much the more poetic, less grating in both sound and meaning than in English: Linda Tarde.
Five Mule Deer of the herd of seven come to eat, in the pasture where they bed down in the Sweetclover. They’re a bit bigger than they were a few weeks ago, and more shy though they do continue grazing with me nearby. What has happened to the two missing ones? Some have fine sets of antlers, others with antlers only beginning to show.
Today The Stockpond is ringed not with yellow birds (chats) but by a great number of blue ones (grosbeaks). Hummers galore zip down to the water surface, even more of them than I’d seen doing this before if that be possible. For the next two weeks–or until the sweeping in of the first couple of monsoon storms–The Stockpond will be The Place for birds. A couple of pairs of eyes pop up from below the pond’s surface, jut above and out into the air, and they seem to be taking a knowing look at the world. They are of frogs or toads coming up for air, and their monstrous size says that this must be the first appearance of the Sonoran Toad. Once the toads start splashing around in ponds and puddles, garden fountains and jacuzzis, it means the temporales are on their way and that, we hope, nothing will stop. As with the first showing of Gila Monsters, local people celebrate this moment of The Arrival of the Toads but also worry about it if they have pets that will worry this very toxic toad and mouth it.
June 17, 2013
The portable electric, car battery-powered fence needs to be stretched down Pasture #2(north)–the last of the growing grass blades of winter’s “small cereal” graze should be eaten down by the newly enlarged herd or it will be wasted, and the live fenceline will keep them in there (if I rub a lamp) until that’s accomplished. As I set up posts and string the single wire on them, I come along to the broad patch of Yellow Sweetclover in the center of the field, blooming and sweet-smelling all right, and find it pressed in here and there with the bed grounds of the deer that visit occasionally. There must still be quite a few. Stretching out from that side of the electric fence, too, are the older plantings of the winter grasses, now not much more than straw crowned with nodding heads of leftover grains. It is glittering with Blue Grosbeaks, feasting on the seeds.
Something new appears in Pasture #3, a single plant of a pretty composite, with small pink flowers on thin and ghostly stems. I take a sample to study at home, and over the course of a few hours that cut and dying sample in a panic revs up the production of seeds with little fluffy parachutes that become airborne in the manner of the world’s worst weeds, as buoyant and uncatchable as dust. By this time I’m jumpy about new weeds appearing, though this one turns out to be a native, at least elsewhere in The West: Lygodesmia juncea, “Rushpink”. The species has been moving this way for years down from far to the north of us. All this kind of stuff is just plain old evolution and natural change in phytogeography, though I even include humankind’s role in that as “natural” when a plant comes from across the world and then goes into takeover mode. Some references mention possibile toxicity to livestock, but information is minimal. I’ll write to the County Ag Agent, Kim, and ask if she’s heard of the plant becoming a problem or if it is even being recorded elsewhere in Cochise.
June 16, 2013
Poorwills, which I haven’t heard in a long time, are calling in the dawn saturated with a humidity of 86%.
The Stockpond is ringed with chats, hunting, jabbering, bathing in the water-filled craters left by cattle hooves in the muddy edge. Most birds though are sticking to the branches overhanging far out on the pond, down which they hop and creep until they reach the water where the branch tips allow them to touch it. I come to be conscious, suddenly, of something that apparently had been there the whole time: a large brown feline sitting statue-still at the trunk of one of those mesquites across the pond. I suppose the cat could make birds nervous. A beautiful thing, it must be a Bobcat though the face is strangely shaped and not quite right for one. The head swivels in 180 degree arcs, level, taking in everything, but that is done as slowly as a revolving restaurant. It’s young, still has spots up the legs, and it shows no hint of being aware of my presence. The rather pointed, rather heart-shaped face intrigues me, and I slip as quietly as I can out of the door of the pickup. It seems still unbothered. I want to see what the tail looks like, something I can’t do with the animal in the position it sits in slightly facing me. My slow creeping along the edge of the pond still doesn’t bother it! A few more feet and I’ll risk lifting the field glasses. I look down for a split second to be sure I don’t lose my footing and slip into the pond, look back up–it’s gone. Vanished, and I mean vanished; I get to the spot in a few moments and there is no sign of it across any of the wide pastures that stretch beyond, and no sight of it on the open floor of the bosque.
June 15, 2013
The Yellow-billed Cuckoos are long overdue … was that the first I just heard, calling from the bosque? No, but it seems the Yellow-breasted Chats have learned to work cuckoo notes into their songbook. Where are the cuckoos?
This time many White-throated Swifts come to The Stockpond, descending with long approach to the water with bold chattering–how did they have it communicated to them that the water hole was open, besides the fact that the algae had parted enough to allow easy drinking? Obviously through “Twitter”.
It’s raining across the Rincon peaks, and the moistened branches and leaves of the Creasote Bush of their vast bajadas puts out on the wind that most wonderful of scents, the smell of The Desert in the rain. It does not rain at Mason’s, though.
June 14, 2013
Devil’s Claw (Proboscidea parviflora) are germinating and producing their first true leaves in tiny open spots out in the bermuda.
The shores of The Stockpond are massed with jumping, landing, and departing sparrows and warblers, towhees, Canyon Wrens, orioles, grosbeaks, the numbers of all of these increasing as the mudflats widen with the extreme evapotranspiration of Foresummer that sucks the pond into midair.
Thunderheads loom … a few drops of rain … the Mini Monsoon?! In a few minutes the heat drops from 107 to 85 degrees, enough to make one shiver!
June 13, 2013
It’s too hot to fight over space and water, so the hummers male and female only drink. The red algae has about taken over The Stockpond, and the hummingbirds have to force their bills down through the surface of thick scum. A couple of White-throated Swifts come in with a terrible whistle and whine, curve to the pond but scream off at the other without drinking, at least at first. Finally a few of them open a bill and plow through the thick covering, and get enough drops to keep them going. They are magnificently graceful, and so bullet-fast that there is no way to lay the binoculars on them in time before they’re gone and back to the slot canyons and cliffs rising on the other side of The River.
Though the Cascabel Weather Station registers something cooler, my thermometer says 110 degrees. It’s fortunate that Phat Phreddie has disappeared, for the work of clearing the last of the bolting, flowering Bull Thistle in that heat stuns me beyond caring whether the rattlesnake is there or not. Those goldfinches are all around me still working happily on the Malta star thistle seeds, oh bless them! The sky is not blue–it is incandescent. There are thunderheads in the East!
June 11, 2013
House Finches come in a swarm, jabbering and singing, to clean up on the seeding heads of barley and oats and wheat that are starting to turn gold. 2013 House Finches come in a swarm, jabbering and singing, to clean up on the seeding heads of barley and oats and wheat that are starting to turn gold.
June 10, 2013
I’m buzzed by the summer’s first brown and yellow, large wasp, which I call a “Brown Man”, the Jamaican name for a similar species. They will have to be watched for now every time a covering on the wheel line tractors is lifted: from the ceiling of those covers these wasps love to suspend a nest, and they don’t like it much when the lid is rudely yanked up and banged over on its side when the engine needs to be started. Another smaller, all-yellow wasp lands on an irrigation puddle, and floats on the water’s surface film while taking a drink.
Caribbean Horseweed, as I call it, (Conyza bonariensis, or less flatteringly, Asthmaweed) is coming into bloom; it is not as sought after a graze as is its northern cousin, the Canadian Horseweed (Conyza canadensis) that is also shooting up abundantly but flowers much later atop neck-high stalks. The beautiful deep magenta-maroon tiny carnations of Scarlet Spiderling (Boerhavia coccinea) hover in a mist of the thinnest of stems over bare patches of ground in #3 Pasture. The handsome Malvella (Malvella lepidota), which has the not so handsome common name of Scurfy Mallow, holds hibiscus-like, chaste white cups of flowers on plants sprawling through the low places at the top end of #2 Pasture. It deserves being brought into Arizona gardens, should be in hanging baskets in the Tucson nurseries.
The temperature the narrowest slice off 107 degrees … cowbirds, buntings that for some reason are still here, various flycatchers, warblers, all crowd into the shade of the wheel line wheel rims, sitting out the heat of the day perched on the upper spokes. At The Stockpond, Martins that appear black in the midday glare swing in to skim the green water where it’s open among the drifts of red algae, all this a pattern of colors of jewels and precious stone … jet … peridot … carnelian. Now the female hummers come in numbers to point their bills into that open water, driven so by thirst I guess as to risk the usual male divebombing. Black-throated Sparrows, rarely seen in this spot, also come to the water’s edge, and Cardinals too, and many Yellow Warblers, one of which has a crown and face with a glow of orange.