Seventy-five degrees again, bringing Mexican Yellow Butterflies back to the mud at The Stockpond (though they’ll be the last of the Sulphurs until next Spring), dragonflies there too; out on the pastures and over The Cienega they also swoop. The Cottonwoods that still have leaves are at their most scintillating, they shiver and pulse out their colors against the smokey blue of the mountains.
Category Archives: Nature Jottings
December 16, 2013
The herd, well familiar with the land and the route through it, and the people mounted or walking, and the horses, all come together in good ways and while not completely free of flaps and an unwanted excitement or two, the great chore of this cattle drive down Cascabel Road and up onto the mesas is accomplished, and I heave an equally great sigh of relief. A Red-winged Grasshopper flies up from the hooves of the lead cow as she goes for that water at the end of their trail up on range, two weeks after the last of these wonderfully colorful insects put on a show in the Mason bermudagrass. There will be no sight or music of this special grasshopper again until the long Summer of next year starts to thin down and the changing slant of the Sun calls them once again to their dance.
Grateful no cows had peeled off and got into the hopelessly jumbled Tamarisk thickets of the San Pedro’s riverbed, no horse got tangled in the old collapsed rusted barbed wire fences on the ridges, and that the people who help in this do so love to come partake in it, I go back to the bottomland pastures where only a few lonely cow kind have been left behind to increase their frames or to give birth for the first time in their lives in the coming months. Again insects are filling the air, catching the late sun. The peace of a well-finished chore drifts down and there is the feeling for the barest breath of a moment that work has come to be caught up and everything is right in this rural world.
December 14, 2013
Sad sweet notes of White-crowned Sparrows come on the 26 degree morning air. A pudding skin of ice covers The Stockpond and the bermudagrass is a filaree of white crystals of frost with Red-shafted Flickers looking bright against the tall white weeds.
A lot of the herd from the Mason Pastures will be moved downriver on the road over the next couple of days, to be settled then on the upper grazing ranges for the Winter; surely we’ve just brought them down from there only last week in that great heat and dust of June! The first waterer for them must be topped up, there fairly high up above the dry Hot Springs Canyon. Lesser Goldfinches drink eagerly, boldly, at the cracked hose filling that metal stocktank: on the desert, those who delight in having a garden or patio be visited by the variety of birds here that is the marvel of these Sky Islands and bajadas need only fill a pan with water, sit back, sip a bacanora, and enjoy.
Back at Mason’s at the end of day, the tiniest of midges dance on the surface of a now-thawed puddle in the native grass planting, each minute form catching the late sun before the very cold and long night comes down.
December 13, 2013
Mallards, even more beautiful than they are common.
Mesquites are still sprouting from seeds, to become future painful problems to skin, wheel lines, and irrigator’s boots. A Copper Mallow pushes out one brilliant and welcome orange flower; a two or three day Spring has such amazingly rapid effects.
December 12, 2013
Mallards are increasing. Nancy sees a frog jump into The Stockpond, but it is the last until we welcome back another Easy Season next year and warmth returns. Dragonflies have whittled themselves down from their broad variety of Summer to a single species, the bronze one–and only one of those appears today at the water.
December 11, 2013
The news comes from Flagstaff that it’s four degrees below zero there … low 20s here in our mesquite bosque. Who would think of living north of the Gila? Here this far from The Rim at least, it seems there are creatures of interest abroad even if the nights are subfreezing: Sulfur Butterflies are on the wing, and a couple of dragonflies, and even a diehard katydid.
Pat and I saddle up and ride the high ridges of the A-7 Ranch on the West side of the San Pedro, from which we can take in a splendid view of our rangelands, and of neighbors’ homesteads. The afternoon is delightful, and we’re not the only ones who think this: a large rattlesnake is enjoying the friendly Sun of Winter and its balm, and we riders and horses have to step carefully around the snake’s stretched out and lazing body. Rattlesnake is very much awake, and isn’t there when we come on back through the spot now under a late afternoon 3/4 Moon, a pale island like something mythical, floating and Polynesian, just offshore of the canyon rim above us.
December 10, 2013
In the dark of madrugada, scattered snow crystals drop straight down, they are so large that they hit the walkway and the mesquite trunks with loud crackling.
The day lightens to an even gray, all the sky, to every horizon. The color of the bermudagrass is as half-toned as hay, the hoops of the Cottonwood crowns are gray though those yellow swaths of leaves still in them are bright even with no Sun … the mountains and cliffs are gray, and the great rock monoliths, and the snow that wants to shimmer when Sun appear … all is muted, understated, in Winter’s elegance. At Mason Pastures it is well above freezing, but there is a skin of ice on The Stockpond, and the puddles out on those pastures have sheets of ice over them a quarter inch thick. I turn on the irrigation, hoping that no nozzles have become blocked but one is, and I’m forced to feel that Winter elegance deep into cracked fingers while whatever is stopping up the water spout is cleared away by a poke with a wire.
A Snipe, striped like the brown and tan reeds, is near invisible where it stands. Masses of Lark Sparrows arrive or fly out, Red-shafted Flickers hunt something on the ground, and Say’s Phoebes catch the bugs that might be able to escape great cold but not the snapping bill of something consummately agile of wing. The day is cold and cloudy to its end, never getting out of the 50s, but despite that there is a surprising evening show of insects suspended on air.
December 9, 2013
In the shimmering blue morning most of the Cottonwoods are now appearing in their delicate gray winter cloaks, leafless, and some of these look a bit like they’re even in bloom (though they’re not, but who knows how long it will take for that very thing to happen in early December with the way Winter is changing …) New cotyledons of annual weeds are still appearing, and to my dismay I find Milk Thistle in this stage in #2(south) Pasture. Is this a new infestation arrived from afar? Even after these repeated temperatures in the mid-teens of the last few nights, the Caribbean Horseweed is still green–it obviously can adapt to more adverse conditions than its Canadian cousin. The bosque itself also remains green despite the freezes! Only one dragonfly ventures out along The Stockpond edges.
December 6, 2013
18 degrees at first light!
December 5, 2013
The new day brings an utterly different world: 25 degrees on the ridges, and in the valley below sparkling chips of frost fall from mesquite tips. The bermudagrass pasture stretching out from the window of the Cowboy Caravan all the way to the huge saguaros on the far hill are white, icy, the Rincon above us dusted with snow. Yet the air warms enough even in the El Potrero bottomland for Sulphur Butterflies to come to life, and an azure grasshopper.
Still-green and fresh leaves of the big Hackberries at The Stockpond start falling off their twigs by mid-morning–they never had a chance to turn color before the coming on of a night that was surely in the teens. On the water swim a brace of fine Mallards, their wariness telling they are true wildlings. A Wilson’s Snipe is there, too, and a large sandpiper with a long bill, also extremely wary: a Long-billed Dowitcher. It takes off with a pained, “Pitty peet peet!”, showing a white slash of rump as it vanishes across the fields.