All posts by Cindy Salo

July 20, 2016

Nature Jottings, , , , ,

A little more rain, the first in almost three weeks and not enough to stop fretting about the state of the Native Grass Planting with its desiccation and shriveling continuing apace. Water it and encourage too-rampant growth of competing Palmer’s Amaranth, Copper Mallow, and Bermudagrass, or hold off and risk the loss of the precious clumps of gramas, bristlegrasses, sprangletops, beardgrasses, dropseeds and three-awns? All is wet enough, though, and I hope to hear Cassin’s Sparrows again in #3 Pasture but no, only many Rufous-winged Sparrows trilling, or doing their convincing Eastern Towhee impersonations. It must not be enough for the Cassins’ to ask their partners after their singing dive and mating display, “Did you feel the earth move under your feet?” but that they have to hear a certain number of real thunder rumbles … as some human desert rats tell the mud-buried Sonoran Desert Toads must? Maybe not enough rumbles have come on us yet? Or are they troubled by the population boom of Rufous-winged Sparrows still in their dense population cycle here?

The handsome, shrubby Composite in The Lane near the tall water storage tank is as alive with a species of native bee as that Graythorn has been with Tarantula Hawks. These bees are ones I’ve never seen before. Short and stocky, golden in the fore-half, black behind, with slanted greenish eyes: they look like the Roswell Alien and they fly like little spaceships themselves, very fast, in a frenetic zig-zag pattern. They’re as handsome as the sprawling plant and its showy yellow rayless flowers, where they’re joined in the nectar feast by only a few butterflies, and a Tarantula Hawk or two. I think the plant is False Boneset, Brickellia eupatorioides but oh, those Composites, what critters to key out and identify they be–even more fun than grasses. Whatever this is, it might be the longest-flowering and most attractive “pollinator plant” wild on the range and should be propagated and disseminated widely.

Not one rattlesnake to be seen this Summer at Mason’s–the Roadrunners are many and large and often accompany me in groups of three or more as I scare up bugs and lizards in my own frenetic zig-zagging and flying saucer zooming across the pastures to get the endless rounds of chores done …

July 16, 2016

Nature Jottings, ,

An adult Say’s Phoebe is back on a top fencewire: the birds must be done with their nesting among the buildings of neighboring ranches and homesteads.

Cecilia and Cecil Roadrunner become the bolder as the July droughty spell continues, though she is the more friendly and calls from off in the garden edge to announce her arrival and tell her hope that I’d be putting out water for them. I’ve stopped keeping the hanging bird bowl full, the honeybees have become so thick flying in and out to it and fill the rim inches deep with their vibrating bodies, and fill the patio with a too discomfiting noise. They must have a hive down over the ridge-edge in the canyon below to the northeast, not far away–I can make out their coming and going in that direction. Cecilia will come quickly to the water I pour into a deep plant saucer (I try to make as much splashing noise as I can doing that, to alert the other Roadrunners), she’ll run in to drink as soon as I go back in the house, but Cecil is much more wary than that though his wariness in the end is overcome by his thirst if I don’t hang out right there. Cedric is another case, the young and disheveled and gangly bird if he knows I’m inside will come to the porch step and look in through the screen and clack his bill rapidly and give out a Roadrunner trill until I come out with the pitcher of water. He does not move off, but follows me over to where the saucer lies and drinks at my feet as soon as his dish is full. He won’t do this if the bees come in too quickly for him to have the water only to himself. I make a burring sound with my lips when he’s underfoot, and he crouches, and lowers and quivers his wings and lets out Roadrunner mews and burrings himself, then drinks his fill before the bees zoom in and scare him off.

July 14, 2016

Nature Jottings

The adult, full-plumaged and handsome Vesper Sparrow is still here! It’s hard not to think this is the same bird of June 2nd, which was a rare-enough occurrence then. There is no record of the species having been seen in southern Arizona in July, will this mean something beyond global weirding? Has the constant and herculean effort of improving and restoring these river-shelf pastures so paid off for grassland birds that this species didn’t feel the call of its cooler summer home above The Rim this year? In the era before the great degradation of the Southwestern desert ranges by robber cattle barons and this endlessly fickle climate, would the Vesper Sparrow have been here–if sparingly–in July? Or is there a factor in play, of not many binocular-toting observers being on the ground outside an air-conditioned car, or tractor cab? Would it have been here now if so many Cascabel people and Saguaro-Juniper members and Tucson folk and even visitors from far away States over so many hours of the past ten years not dug and pulled and pricked their hides on the mesquites of every size that had to be removed if this grassland were to become whole again?

July 13, 2016

Nature Jottings, ,

Sprawling over the ground in #2 Pasture, a spectacular star-leaved melón de coyote gourd is in bloom; the fruits to come may taste beyond horrible but the yellow flowers are gourd-geous, worth a spot in anyone’s garden.

The Tarantula Hawks are still mad for the nectar of that Graythorn at the gate of the Botteri’s Pasture and the whole bush flickers with their wing shimmer–and aha, two adult orioles fly across that grassland, an almost-adult cowbird in aerial tow cheeping petulantly–the three disappear into the mesquite edge, more cheeping, they all come out again with the “parents” trying every move they can to ditch the pesty baby, all of them fade out of sight towards the far gallery forest along the San Pedro.

July 12, 2016

Nature Jottings,

Spotted Sandpiper still in smart breeding plumage pokes and teeters around the marsh-edge of The Stockpond. And so it is here: Summer is already winding down like a party whose hosts you notice with sudden regret are giving hints are getting tired. Summer lets go sweetly here and we will have it for a good long time yet, Summer is kindly but it does know that there is also woven within her height the end of her glory.

The Ducklings have been gone about a week now …

July 7, 2016

Nature Jottings,

A single heron this time, but then it is joined by the other (I’ll presume it’s the same pair as yesterday’s); they appear to be immature siblings still together.

A huge, impressive squadron of Tarantula Hawks masses over the flowers of the large Graythorn at the gate into the Botteri’s Pasture, sipping nectar … a beautiful, unsettling sight and sound.

July 6, 2016

Nature Jottings, ,

Chat
on a wheel line sprinkler
beetle in bill

Cuckoo
kuk-kuk-kuk-kaow’ing
in the Sunrise

but Bull’s a-Moon-in’
and a-spoonin’
the cow, Flame,

“Come wiz me to de cowzbah!”
he chortles to his latest squeeze …
birds, and bees

The first maturing mesquite pods are turning color, the cycles of the years come around faster and faster and it is time already to keep the herd sequestered here or there so that the seeds are deposited where we’d like them to be, either in the path of the big rototiller come September (if it comes) or where the winter pasture a year from now will be laid out and cleaned of its erstwhile bosque-ette before that cultivation and seeding of grasses is done.

A pair of Great-blue Herons fly away from The Stockpond.

July 5, 2016

Nature Jottings, , , ,

The scolding and hissing of Black-tailed Gnatcatchers comes from the scrubby mesquites and the Graythorns, the bird rather uncommon from my observations on this side of las Rincones Altas.. There are lots of little notes and clicks from other small birds, a pack of Bushtits are fluffing around (they look like dustballs with bills) and many immature Black-throated Sparrows are opening green mesquite pods for the still-tender seeds. They leave the chaff on the ground like peanut hulls on a honky-tonk dance floor.

I look down into the opening at the top of that iron gate post in which the Ash-throated Flycatchers have set up home, to see if that big baby had fledged yet from its solar oven nursery. I’d certainly want to get out of there! What?? … the bird is indeed gone, but I realize what I had been looking at a week ago wasn’t a baby, but the mother–I’d forgotten about Myiarchus moustaches! This time I had a better entry of light into the shaft to see, and thought it was sweet that she hadn’t shot upwards then with bill aimed into the eye of the cyclopean monster. Curiosity could have at least blinded this cat prying into their affairs but the pair of flycatchers have got completely accustomed to our coming and going and working right there, and seem undisturbed by our being near, even this near. What I did see this time charmed to no end: three beautiful small speckled eggs, perhaps just the beginning of a clutch.

Immature Hooded Orioles enliven the mesquites and the tall grass and forbs in the north of #2 Pasture, and among them is a large “baby” cowbird (cue the villain music?) begging and seeming to be communicating with an answering adult oriole but, I don’t witness enough to be sure it was that bird who raised it.