Category Archives: Nature Jottings

December 30, 2013

Nature Jottings, ,

It is so cold that even in late morning ice still edges The Stockpond, where a Black Phoebe and a Yellow-rumped Warbler are duking it out over something in the overhanging mesquite branches. The temperature in that last dark hour before dawn here likely had dropped to about 15 degrees.

Yet another large bird has been brought low, this one a now torn-apart Mallard whose remains I find in their wreckage field stretching out from the pool at The Cienega. Well, not remains really–whatever it was that got it took away completely the bone, flesh, beak and quack, and left only lovely feathers. Some are small and bottle green, and there are larger ones of iridescent aquamarine, each tipped with a round white spot which when arranged together across a line must have formed the blue speculum with its white bar. Peregrine on the lurk? Woe to the ducks! (I’ve witnessed in a past year one of those falcons’ most accomplished hunting feats when it chose a female Baldpate from the buffet at The Stockpond, then on a patch of bare ground in #2 Pasture dined in blood and drifting duck feathers only about a hundred feet from the windshield of the truck. Oh the luck of seeing that!) It’s been over a month since I’ve seen a Peregrine, though.

December 28, 2013

Nature Jottings

Out of the corner of my eye I catch sight of a tall hunter in camouflage waving to me it seems in something of a panic, or at least with enough urgency that I wonder, “Good grief, now what?” and I pull the wheel line tractor joystick into neutral to stop its roll across the pasture. The man stands within The Lane (he had to have hopped unseen the fence along Cascabel Road) and then drops flat out on the ground–I think he must have been in physical trouble and has fallen with a heart attack! But no … he rolls under the fence along the #1 Pasture and bounces back to his feet, runs towards me in great agitation … “Oh oh oh oh oh, that Bobcat! that Bobcat! I’ve got to get him!” “What Bobcat?” I say. “The one that’s right behind you, been staring at you from that row of mesquites! Don’t you want me to get ‘im?” (He brought to me warm and fond thoughts of Black and Tan Coonhounds we farm kids snuck into bed with us, dogs that had to be encouraged to keep themselves calm, thoughts of duck dogs you had to see didn’t chomp down too hard on the teal he was retrieving …) “Well no … the policy of this place is to let things be and see if the herds and the predators can’t work it out among themselves first out in the parking lot …” I don’t tell him that Bobcat and I have had something of an each-mind-our-own-business relationship for a good while now. The hunter stiffens, pulls himself even taller than he was already, and slowly lets out with managed aggression and the slightest of menace that since we don’t have “No Hunting” signs close enough to each other to meet the law’s requirement out on the road fence, he could just come in and take that critter as he like, but–not to worry!–he’ll be gracious enough to honor the policy I told him about but I’d better get more notices up on those fenceposts.

New, regulation every-quarter-mile signs will be up by New Year’s Day! Turns out the man was indeed within the law of Arizona, and I’m grateful to have had his instruction.

December 27, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , ,

A night down near 20 degrees has left The Stockpond half frozen over, and it’s not out of the 30s yet when the irrigation nozzles need to be cleared of debris; they give my face a soaking in a cold, cold wind.

Shaggy Miner fungus, acting and looking so like their namesake as their tall heads pop up suddenly from below ground, are hard to take seriously as the desert inhabitants they are. Coming up in Winter the way they do makes them all the more unlikely.

The day breathes with just enough warmth to stir creatures six-legged and eight-legged: a black jumping spider springs from the mesquite to the handle of the shovel I’m using to remove ever more mesquite trees, and still the Polka Dot Beetles are a-flight. Removing the bermudagrass mounds from the bases of the little trees I dig out reveals that the grass is already putting out little green points of growth, there under the deep and warming quilt of old blades. Burroweeds are also sprouting fresh greenery (at their bases at least) and a Bronze Dragonfly is at The Stockpond–this species is apparently the only one that is active right through the Winter, though a week or two can go by without any of them venturing out. Just on either side of 11:00 am the warmth is sweet and the air moves in zephyrs, not in cold slaps as it had earlier.

At day’s end, the tiniest grasshoppers I’ve ever seen (and I mean minute, I can scarcely believe they’re real but sproing they do, so real they must be …) line up on the top of an irrigator’s hose that I must empty of water if it isn’t to freeze solidly in the deep cold of the night coming on.

December 25, 2013

Nature Jottings

On Christmas Morn’ the San Pedro receives a gift of great splendor: the finest-wrought of shimmering topaz Cottonwoods, arranged along the valley at an artful and satisfying distance one from the other, set most skillfully in pewter strands of branches and crowns. And at day’s end, a star shines out over The Rincon in the dark blue upper sky, and below, the peak ridges are sharp against a bright aura of last, lingering sunset. Could any star over Bethlehem have been the more beautiful?

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December 23, 2013

Nature Jottings

Even colder, the dawn sits her horse stiffly, at 27 degrees. Lady bugs appear at noon, though, when I find them on the wheels of the irrigators that must be cleaned of the deep ruffs of mud picked up by swinging across the pastures that haven’t filled in yet with a sod of barley and oats.

December 19, 2013

Nature Jottings,

When I go out across the Bermudagrass Triangle to try to find the pair of pocket binoculars that yesterday had fallen out of, well, my pocket, I stumble on a large Cooper’s Hawk lying dead, its flesh picked about clean but the feathers still beautiful in its wings that are nearly three feet in span. What monster is abroad to have taken down this master bird of prey?

Azure sky, from zenith to horizons all around the same hue, a singular small lenticular cloud on the South but it evaporates like one that dares wander in during Foresummer to be extinguished in a near instant in air almost void of humidity. The 71 degrees today feel as ferociously hot as any dished out by the Foresummer, too: it is too hot to work in anything more than a workshirt alone.

December 18, 2013

Nature Jottings,

More Red-winged Blackbirds are joining the herd and me at Mason’s–and they’re very welcome–and more Milk Thistles are germinating–and they’re very unwelcome! Tansy Mustard seedlings are also appearing.

One disaster after another, and I find myself out late, with the day almost gone to its rest. The Galiuros look alone in the gray sky with the way they’re set in the dark shadowed broad landscape–those peaks and sheer faces below them are white, glowing, and across those miles they cast light towards me in beams like a full Moon. They’re colored in gentle brush strokes of sage green, and bay. In a moment all are dusky violet-blue and shady pink, as if a switch were thrown and in the next moment the sky is lit afire overhead, and the land, hills, pastures old and sprouting are for a moment or two all a rose incandescence.