All posts by Cindy Salo

May 15, 2013

Nature Jottings, ,

Dragonflies are reappearing this year in rather slow fashion, not very many of any one species are there over the water of The Stockpond. Too many ducks eating the larvae? Not as much underwater tangles of roots and stems of rushes and cattails as formerly, for the aquatic stages to hide in and hunt from? (The cows have developed quite a taste for the green parts of those plants.) One of the most beautiful of our dragonflies on the San Pedro, a “Desert White Tail” put in its first appearance today. It’s colored in dark red-browns and white, in pattern looks like a saddle shoe from a 1950s Catholic girls’ school.

As with the dragonflies, the butterflies this year are also coming back into sight slowly, sometimes a single even common species only being seen once or twice and then not for a long time after that. A single Buckeye was low over the pastures, but I don’t know which of the two Arizona species it was because I failed to look at it closely enough and I wasn’t aware that a tropical species reaches north to the state. A large and already much-tattered and color-smudged Black Swallowtail also came past–it looked like it may have had a hard time of it with so many kingbirds around. Field Bindweed has suddenly become the most abundant flower for butterflies to visit, in the grass there are many of these in bloom, and they have the nostalgic look of appleblossoms drifted down from orchard branches. This Convolvulus is another adventitious plant that cows at least in the Southwest make great use of, and many ranchers welcome its presence so long as the vines are grazed back enough to keep the (reputedly) poisonous seeds from developing in numbers, or getting into cropped hay … […]

As have so many other migratory bird species this year (perhaps every year?), Purple Martins arrive at Mason’s a week after being seen first to the north, in the Pool Wash area. They remain far overhead, but their high-pitched, tight guitar-string twangs are unmistakable, and hearing them makes me smile.

May 14, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , , ,

The Stockpond is perfectly still, and perfectly reflected in its dawn-pink mirror is the pair of Mexican Mallard … in the bright green mesquites all around the chats are doing what they do best, chatting. The air has a comfortable coolness to it but by afternoon will reach nearly to 100 degrees.

At lunchtime a Pine Siskin alights in the branches of one of The Stockpond mesquites, just above Tom O., Nancy F., and me, while we eat lunch on the bank.

A first cicada for this place (they were active on range a week ago already) splits that afternoon heat with a long wailing rattle, this sound the faultline where spring ends and a summer begins that seems never will end. Blossoms on the spikes of Copper Globemallow (Sphaeralcea angustifolia) are beginning to open, now the plants finally have recovered from those two deep freezes that had killed most of them to the ground, if not altogether. (In other, milder years there can usually be found a flower or two on the plants in every month of winter.) This much-favored browse of our herd and the deer who also live with us is nutritious for four-leggeds. It and other members of the genus Sphaeralcea are important to livestock from here down through the Mayo lands of Sonora and far into Mexico and they respond in a positive way to the animals’ pruning.

Small Azure butterflies, showing copper on wings above, and below a sheen of silver-lavender laid over black zebra striping, are coming to the yellow Sweet-clover flowers.

Western Tanagers are becoming much more noticeable, and in patterns of black, white, yellow and orange-red they flash down The Lane in front of the truck.

May 13, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , ,

The temperatures begin today to cross into the 90s, pushing the vegetation along into Summer that a calendar claims falsely will not come to us for more than another month. The Stockpond’s surface is covered with a film of pollen. Even the cattle are coughing.

On the pastures yellow sweet-clover (Melilotus) is growing lushly, tall, and blooming abundantly, its fragrance carried on the wind and inviting in the Mule Deer whose favorite graze it seems to be. Our cattle go right after this naturalized plant as soon as they’re rotated into a new pasture with it, too, even though it has coumarin within it that supposedly can affect an overindulging animal badly. I’ve never seen any such outcome with the plant, though, I guess because the toxin cannot become active without enough humidity for a mold to grow on the plants. (Humidity will at least half the time register in the single digits this month and next; so much for mold …) Cowbirds have come along in numbers, and true to their name are attending the cows. A last flock of Chipping Sparrows came down to one of the large puddles around an irrigation riser: the birds will be gone any day to the North, or leave for the oak woodlands at higher elevations here where they spend the summer in spare numbers. In Pasture #3 a pair of Brown-crested Flycatcher are purrrrtling and courting, at least I think they’re Brown-crested going on the strength of that rolling purtle, but I wasn’t able to see those tiny details of how far towards the tip goes a darker banding on the tail feathers. The other calls don’t match exactly those described for either Ash-throated or Brown-crested, though are closer to “whit-will-do” than to “ka-brick”. The field guide isn’t very helpful, either, with,

Ash-throated Flycatcher:
smaller bill than Brown-crested;
very pale gray [breast];
very pale yellow [belly]

and,

Brown-crested Flycatcher:
larger bill than Ash-throated;
pale gray [breast];
pale yellow [belly]

Truly a “dastardly duo”, as Tucson Audubon Society calls such confusing pairs of species. If I accidentally left the big hose out of the port on the wheel line irrigator, those birds would immediately take up housekeeping (or at least house building) inside the pipe-axle’s ready made cavity. Sometimes I find the cows have unhooked that firehose from the port and left it flung out on the grass to the side, which also leaves the inside of the axle/pipe open to the househunting flycatcher pair. Years ago I hooked up a water hose to an open port of one of the units elsewhere across The River, turned on the pump, and in a few seconds had distributed a nest in pieces into a couple dozen sprinkler heads and there was the devil to pay to get them all cleaned out again. You only have to do that once before you flush out a system like that first with the endcaps off, should you have found one of those ends open or that a hose had been off for a few days! As much as these flycatchers are among my favorite birds, I want their attention be focused elsewhere for nest sites such as “natural” holes abandoned by the woodpeckers who had excavated them in the saguaros on the slopes just above us.

May 12, 2013

Nature Jottings,

For a good while I suspected there was a leak in the underground irrigation lines, but where it was didn’t become known until an entire riser finally disattached itself all the way and must’ve blown like a missile from a silo into the air in Pasture #4. Once that was fixed, the increase in leftover psi was enough to have the pond-filling hydrant continue to spray a little shower out over the water through the night even after the system was shut down. A fine male Black-chinned Hummingbird liked this a lot, and was there darting in and out of the little arcs of droplets when I arrived.

Sunlight is just hitting the tops of the cliffs when I return to The Stockpond after I get the irrigation up, and I stop to eat a bowl of oatmeal and watch birds through the truck windshield, too shaky to continue the work I’d been doing on the energy of the one banana eaten before I started at that moment an hour before when there was hardly enough light to see. I come back to find one of the hummingbirds lowering himself into a Sitzbad at the water surface at the base of the riser and though one might think this would be sufficiently satisfying to him, oh no!–he spied a female who’d come along to land on the hydrant base to get a drink, and he flew up without delay and chased her right off the pond. (Females are still to be seen almost exclusively coming to that hydrant, knowing as they do what will happen to them if a male sees them drinking from the pond itself or even approaching its surface …) A half dozen or more male Black-chinned come along to the now much heavier shower spraying out of hydrant ‘s mouth, dance back and forth through the spray mid-air like a team rough-housing it in the shower, no females allowed. It is sheer exhibitionism, Life’s Will to Life, a chittering enthusiasm of Mind. I am reminded that in the tropics few birds come to waterfalls because of how the sound muffles the approach of a predator, but that this doesn’t apply to hummingbirds there, either. What can touch them? Well, I did once see children in Jamaica knocking off the eye-popping endemic ribbon-tailed “Doctor Bird” hummers from the acalypha hedges with slingshots, to take home and make shish-ka-birds. In Costa Rica I came on a lovely high waterfall in a jungled setting just back of a beach and sure enough, the only creatures around that water were hummingbirds, which came tumbling into the void before the cataract out of the air over the stream above, like jewels spilled from a green velvet bag.

A pair of Gray Hawks have been calling back and forth for three days.

May 11, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , ,

The Spotted Sandpiper is gone. A tadpole looking up through the water where the sandpiper had stood might this morning be fooled into thinking it was seeing an innocent white cloud rather than its doom, a cloud that can fling out a mortal bolt at lightning speed to grab the tadpole for breakfast. It is a Snowy Egret come to spend a single day with us. Wearing golden slippers it walks across the muddy bottom with consummate grace, a mist of aigrettes suspended over its back and all this beauty doubled perfectly by its reflection. This picture on a 1950s Florida postcard is jumpy, and flew off with a sharp bark, landed for only a moment then took off in panicked flight as if it had seen a plume hunter. When I came back a long time later to turn off the irrigation, though, it was much less bothered by me and I could watch it at leisure while it was cleaning up the pond of every vertebrate and invertebrate that could be snagged.

A first migrating Western Tanager arrived for a drink, to remind me that it is one of the most beautiful of North American birds and one on a par with any of its spectacular wholly tropical relatives. A Lesser Goldfinch alights on top the pond-filling riser, and sips from the dribble there.

Out on the pastures other Lesser Goldfinch graze on Wright Saltbush, (“Saltweed”) which plant happens also to be my favorite spring green and a pleasure peculiar to these Borderlands, delicious with a little olive oil drizzled through … gather it early while it’s tender and not very tall, with a tug of the fingers at the tips of the sprawling plants the best leaves and shoots will break naturally and these be thrown in a pot with a little water, brought just to the boil then heat turned off and left covered a while but eaten while still hot. The cows go crazy for it, and, happily, they find it in abundance …

[…]

Numbers of javelina are out there too, but what they’re grazing is the bolting wheat and barley and like the grosbeaks with whom they’re in competition, the animals are about mad for those grass heads coming into seed. The plants are so tall that all that can be seen of the javelina are ears and noses, as they reach up as far as their bodies allow them to get at the crop.

May 10, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , ,

An oriole is piping in the bosque despite the cold before sunrise–and cold it is, the upper 30s again! Yet by mid-afternoon the air will reach the mid-80s. Myself I’m grousing, not piping, over having to get wet in setting up the early sprinkler irrigation. The pair of Mexican Mallards that are on The Stockpond these mornings are swimming and foraging when I arrive, but are gone when I get back to the pump to check pressure and oil drip. I’m sure they take off when the water comes shooting out of the pond outlet with the noise of Old Faithful. This becomes their habit during this period of irrigation, and they often don’t return before I leave at day’s end. The gush of water doesn’t bother the Spotted Sandpiper cutting a rumba along the shore, it must be grateful to find this mud no matter how cold it is, or how noisy the riser’s spray or ominously moans the sniffer that lets air pressure out ahead of the nose of the water rushing down the main. All the Yellow-rumped Warblers seem gone, or at least their absence is conspicuous. I expect they’ve found streams and conifers more to their liking now high in those mountains above us, in the Rincon and the Santa Catalina and the Pinalenos.

Not a male, but a female, Redwing sits on a wheel today. She shows orange before the eye, and a little red shoulder herself and both make her sure-enough pretty as the male is handsome. It’s a monsoon sky overhead full of beautiful clouds that long ago had became rare, and late in the day there is thunder from afar. Is this all we’re going to be getting out of Mini Monsoon this year?

May 9, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

The Lucy’s Warblers continue the symphony, broadcasting from the Concertgebosque at those same northern double gates at first light, though this day it’s all drowned out for a moment by a Stiffwing Hawk carrying passangers high overhead towards Tucson.

The Northern Mallards are gone, but Mexican Mallards have come back to The Stockpond. (This pair will be on the water most every day for the rest of the month.) White-crowned Sparrows have become rare enough that any lingering here are notable, this morning a pair of them drink at the pond’s edge; Lark Sparrows have by and large replaced the many wintering related species that’ve now left for the Plains or the Tundra or summer life Above the Rim.

Blue Grosbeaks, my … oh … my. There was a single one here for a day a week ago, but this morning the pastures are from out of the “blue” filled with them, they sit all along the wheel line axles taking in the luxury of this their Summer Place though the records have it that this shouldn’t have come about for a few more weeks. With them are many Lazuli Bunting (Nancy F. pointed out that the two birds, grosbeak and bunting, are in the same genus) no less beautiful or calling of one’s attention, and these should soon become more uncommon as they also leave for lands north of the Mogollon Rim but for now, they still seem to be everywhere I look.

In an afternoon Monet light, the gross of grosbeaks works over the heads of barley and oats going now to gold and going to grain, and that grass is alive with the birds who flutter while climbing the stalks from the ground to reach the fruiting spike, there pick out the goodies and are slowly lowered back to the ground as that stalk bends with the weight. A lone and very handsome male Redwing sits atop a wheel and watches all that going on below him.

May 8, 2013

Nature Jottings,

First light of dawn at the double gates at our north entry from The Road into Mason’s, where in all the trees up and down sing Lucy’s Warblers. Theirs are wind chime notes scored for a spring orchestra, in a symphony coming to my human ears alone, Live from the Concertgebosque.

Later with the temperature perfect in the 80s, Pat and I saddle Nimby and Loompy and climb up to the ranges to search out the main herd where it has spent the winter and spring, see what kind of flesh they’re keeping in, what calves might’ve been born since last we rode that circle. The saguaros there are some of the most beautiful on the Arizona desert, and they are among the most densely-growing and grandly-sized ones anywhere. Just one of them showed off a first flower of the year, a single huge blossom, the only one to be seen: a green sport coat, and a white carnation. A gorgeous fruit salad of colors of prickly pears in bloom in their several species is flung across the flats, down the slopes and in the canyon bottoms … Chinese yellow and lime glowing chalices, peach, apricot, orange, lemon ones, lime-tinted ones, the startling cerise of cholla flowers thrown in because, well, what’s fruit cocktail without maraschinos? One prickly pear looks like a Peace Rose. I’ve never seen pads so laden with flower buds, the outcome of rains that fell here–but not at Mason’s. A cicada goes off suddenly, and we know that summer is truly on us, with all the glory and all the difficulty that comes with that.

[…]

May 7, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

The first Purple Martins, considered rare here before mid-May, towards sunset swoop over the patio of David & Pearl’s burrito-wagon-home-home-on-the-range nestled in its arroyo just north of Pool Wash, but none have been seen at Mason’s yet, nor have their metallic calls drifted down to my ears there from birds high unseen.

A few Lesser Nighthawks appear of a sudden at The Stockpond as dark comes on, a bird that always makes one feel happy seeing return from Mexico. Though a bug-hatch is going on, they are not just “hawking” insects–they approach the water surface with great delicacy, appear to land on the water for the briefest moment, and they drink. Many swallows join them, one following after another in orderly file, swiping the water for a few inches with bills dipped and open. Later, almost dark, come the bats, who slow as they approach the pond’s surface now a mirror of the last pink of day set in a darkened bosque. The bats make the slightest of curtsies just above the water after they come almost to a gravity-defying stop and are suspended above the surface, drop their heads, take a sip, then are quickly off over the far bank. The cattle for whom this pond owes its existence have drunk their fill and gone back out to graze. The night comes on warm and soft, and continues full of the rustle of wings avian and mammal (who can tell how many of the 28 species of bat that live in Arizona fly above these pastures and pond?) at this only open water for quite a distance around. The greenery adds its humid fragrance to the tangy odors coming up from the water, dust blowing in from here to Mojave, of algae starting to grow and rushes poking up through the slime, minerals in water brought from 30 feet below ground, and my nose takes in something unchanged since long before humankind ever existed: briny, something untellable, ancient, a broth that sparked life.

May 4, 2013

Nature Jottings,

A pair of (Northern) Mallard are on The Stockpond; it’s been a couple weeks since any were here and I thought they’d left. These could be semi-wild ones, I suppose.

Many turkey tracks, in the mud around a riser mid-field. Wanderers from the restocking program on the Sky Islands roundabout, or wanderers coming down the San Pedro north out of Mexico?