Category Archives: Nature Jottings

July 12, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

The stars are dim through the clouds, vanishing for moments in violent lightning, martins are up there flying in their usual places before dawn, calling to each other and earth, their voices vanishing for moments in overwhelming thunder. Spadefoot Toads are stirred by the rumble, and continue sending their melody up from the far bottomlands. The River itself sings all the way to El Potrero.

Summer Tanagers are still singing their full repertoire at the Mason Pastures, where a Spotted Sandpiper pays a rare summer visit for a day at The Stockpond. The sandpiper is still in breeding plumage, spots and all–a wanderer from the confluence of the Gila River and the Bonita, where it is thought to breed sparingly?

July 11, 2013

Nature Jottings

The whole River floodplain below the house is ringing with Spadefoot Toad music at dawn.

After The Stockpond is refreshed with new-pumped water, countless tiny tadpoles of what must be Sonoran Desert Toads swim up to shore, and hang there like a black necklace, all with noses almost touching the bank. They look like kids having their first swimming lessons, holding on to the edge of the pool with bodies stretched out, kicking their legs.

July 10, 2013

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Cuckoo calls, but we seem to have half the number of those birds we did a year ago. We do have lots of young kingbirds colored much like Say’s Phoebes, young Lark Sparrows, many young Vermillion Flycatchers. An adult male of the flycatcher attempts to mate, but he’s rather tawdry; she can do better. Among the still small Palmer amaranths are the peculiar sharply-notched cotyledons of just-sprouted native morning glories, and the large first leaves of the other Devil’s Claw to be found here, Proboscidea parviflora, are also up and on a dash towards blooming. While the Sonoran Desert Toads have abandoned The Stockpond, they’ve taken up their nuptial swims in the still-full dirt tank in #2 Pasture. I can hear the River running again; it will probably come and go this way for the rest of the summer.

July 9, 2013

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It seems I’ve awakened again in Hilo, rain pattering on the window, mists and clouds settled upon the cliffs and hanging valleys above the San Pedro. Pat and I will saddle Nimby and Loompy, go up on the ranges with them and see how nine days of Monsoon rain will have brought change and green and flowers.

I pass under a soaring Swainson’s Hawk on my way north to El Potrero, and once there find Nimby looks surprisingly clean even though he’s black, but Loompy? He looks like a New Guinea [Asaro] Mudman, and it takes a good while to comb him out and get him back to his bright sorrel color. A glorious day to ride, even though humidity hovers around 100% and the temperature hovers near 100 degrees. All is riotous, lush, colorful, fragrant–Loompy chomps off a swatch of Desert Oregano that grows just at the narrow gate that is usually mine to dismount to open. Enveloped in the plant’s delicious spice, I swing into the saddle again, if it can be said that a sixty year old can “swing” at all … […]

Pink Mammilaria cactus in bloom just about everywhere … the vast flats of huisache no longer look furnace-dried and brittle (if not killed outright) by that late freeze and the ensuing drought, but are green with feathery new growth … the sproutlings of yellow Devil’s Claw of a month ago have spread into mounds of shiny green leaves … Three-awn and Muhly grasses are in near complete rebound from the winter grazing of the herd … and the rains have even tempted the Saguaros to push out a couple large and very late flowers.

The rains are coming evenly and are most welcome, but they aren’t giving enough accumulation for the needs of bermuda pasture and so I go to Mason’s to set irrigation for the night. Blue Heron is at The Stockpond, his usual jumpy self. A good number of martins are overhead but don’t give much of a lengthy evening show, male Vermillion Flycatchers are in a rumble of bluff, bravado and defense of the choice real estate–but then come in many more martins, five or six at a time, slicing the water across much of the pond or are more dainty in their approach and drinking, a few others splash onto the water like the Flying Boat landing on a lagoon. Only two nighthawks appear, at 7:30 in the last pink Monsoon light set with thunder from the higher country.

July 6, 2013

Nature Jottings, ,

I know there are several frog and toad species at the Mason Pastures, and see and hear a different one at the ephemeral dirt tank at the north end today, but telling apart this impressive variety of frogs, toads, treefrogs and spadefoots of these Sonoran Desert lands is mostly beyond me or at least is beyond my study time.

All the flycatchers seem to have young ones chasing them around and pestering them for ever more insects. The adults look like exhausted parents do everywhere.The Stockpond Gray Hawk, that most Mexican of our Border birds of prey, comes bombing with great agility through the low branches of the mesquite woods, and the small birds panic and chatter or else they go silent–but I do not read that this hawk eats much other than lizards. The passerine reaction must be born of those birds’ experience of living in this same woods with the Cooper’s Hawk, who comes through terrorizing and picking off its lunch in much the same hunting mode.

July 5, 2013

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What thick air, 81 degrees, 3:45 am, coffee in hand as can so be enjoyed in a treasured Cascabel Clayworks mug. Dark, but there’s the thinnest of Crescent Moon giving the tiny glow of a nightlight behind the clouds. At zenith a few stars but only one house light shows across the canyons, overhead a covering of martins calling down from so great a height that it could be imagined their quarky notes are broadcast from the stars themselves. The birds seem if anything even more numerous than when the nights are bright and clear but perhaps the clouds change the acoustics. This will be the first day of the season I won’t be closing the windows early to keep in the cool, because the house never got cool to begin with, so the windows will be open to let in any tiny movement of air. Bed sheets and pillows toasted to the high 90s are now to be lived with.

When dawn comes, tanagers and grosbeaks are singing at The Stockpond and many nighthawks come for an on-the-wing drink but–no toads! The Sonoran Desert Toads have just … vanished, the water surface left now unruffled, the air above it quiet. The gigantic amphibians have come and gone, like that.

Yellow-headed Blackbirds are decorating a wheel line tractor, as they love to do. Two much younger ones are among them today, which seems to be evidence the species is breeding nearby though I must remember that years ago when I contacted the Audubon Society in Tucson to report a rancher telling me the birds were nesting in the edge of his pond across the River, I was told that was an impossibility. One of the pretty males has a neat white–rather than black–mask.

Pairs of round mesquite cotyledons have popped above their cow poop peat pots, assuring us a future of hard work of tree removal for many years to come. Two Brown-headed Cowbirds are sitting on a cow; I can count the number of times I’ve seen them actually do this, but I imagine it was their habit with their buffalo friends as well.

Sue and a friend come in the evening in hopes the bird show might still have some thrill to it, but only one nighthawk appears. We do see an impressive black tarantula with blond body come past in its measured, giant spider-ly fashion as we sip wine, a male according to what I can read. Suddenly from the gallery forest of willows, cottonwoods, hackberry and of course mesquite along the River bed behind us comes the sounds of large critters crashing through, breaking large branches and sticks in a panic we can’t think what the cause of can be. We never see the animals, but we can tell they’ve topped out over the steep banks where they could at last make a passage and escape something they feared mightily–then comes what sounds like a rush of wind through those cottonwoods. It’s not wind; I realize it’s a flood, and a big one, and that the deer or the javelina or whatever they were, were running madly ahead of a wave coming down that narrow and deep sandy channel that’s been dry for many months. The water arrives in wild fury, stretches immediately bank to bank, and down its course bounces and tumbles and rolls and then flies past me large branches, logs, whole railroad ties that had been H-braces on a pasture edge somewhere between here and Mexico, bobbing styrofoam coolers, a tennis ball … I jump back, fearing that the overhanging bank would collapse under my feet and add me to the number of bodies that have been swept away and gone over the years, some found, some ground up and never found, left buried under quicksand miles downstream.

July 4, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

The Fourth of July, or, Gringo Monsoon.

After turning off the irrigation at 5:00 am and letting the pipes drain, I start the engine on the line, throw the joystick forward and get the whole long train of sprinkler sections wheeling their way north sixty feet so they’ll be in place for the next watering to start at just about sunset. At one whole revolution (it takes four to move to the next spot) I catch a large, dark, out-of-place spot in a corner of my right vision and just in the last moment realize that the broad horizontal axle of the irrigator unit is going to bash a mass of bees hanging delicately from a small mesquite branch, on one of those trees that have sprouted from seeds sewn in bovine Jiffy Plops. A ship’s alarm whoop goes off loudly inside my head and I hear a mental order yelled, “Dead stop! Dead stop! Reverse!” It isn’t too late, though was only a hair-breadth of an escape; I shut down the engine, and back away very carefully, one step at a time. Africanized Honey Bees? It’s best always now to assume so, anyway it is widely believed and told around that there are no “pure” honey bees left in Arizona and all bees in a mass should be feared, a truly twisted case of an alien species being at one time wholly acceptable to people in the landscape, and that alien species being made monstrous with the arrival of yet a different one that interbred with it. I have to find other things to do through the day, and keep coming back to have a look from a safe distance with binoculars to see if that swarm in transit to a new home had gone its way. If I’m really lucky it won’t find the hollow pipe axles of the wheels on the line-tractor an irresistible place to get into and start constructing a comb immediately. The hanging ball of bees is visible from far off and eventually I decide I’ll work on pruning the large “Picnic Mesquite” on the edge of that pasture far enough away that I’d feel safe, which chore would allow the cows to stand comfortably in the tree’s wonderful shade, allow the spray of the irrigators to reach far under its far-spreading boughs and get the bermuda lush and deep, and allow us to make our lunches in that soft green carpet of grass beneath while we enjoy the splendid views of hills and mountains all around the edges of these wide pastures.

While I’m shaping the mesquite tree with aim to please the eye, the cows, the grass, and our skin, a Yellow-billed Cuckoo sings out from the River bosque’s countless many more of the trees. A large, spectacularly beautiful red-and-black Velvet Ant (if such a sized insect can be considered spectacular, at least other than in its sting–and this one reportedly has one of the world’s worst) in a fever searches the ground under the tree, I guess for pupae of another wasp or bee to parasitize, but then it does something I’ve never seen one do: she heads to the base of the trunk of the large mesquite, and races up and up, out onto a mid-level branch and doesn’t stop until she gets to the tips of the outmost leaves. There she makes a tour of every leaflet, going very nimbly around the outside edges of those compound leaves, searching, searching, but for what? She’s uninterested in getting nectar from the blossoms elsewhere–is there a honeydew exuded from such leaflets that she might find a treat? She checks out methodically every last leaf cluster out to the ends of the whole big branch. While I watch her through binoculars (and take glances again to see what the bees in that swarm are up to), I nearly step on another one of the dozens of Arizona species of these always arresting if alarming insects, a Thistle Down Velvet Ant–a large one, too, and very showy, with a furry white head, velvety black middle and wide golden abdomen. These wasps might be worse than “regular” ants to have at one’s picnic, considering the sting, but they mind their own business and are uninterested in burritos.

In late afternoon I finally give up on the big ball of bees leaving today, and I go back to Ridge House for a supper, return in enough time that if the swarm is gone, that line can still be moved in time to get water up soon after seven o’clock. And–they are gone! They’re happy, the bermuda will be happy, I’m happy.

A black Tarantula I can appropriately call spectacular crosses the road in the headlights as I wend my way back home in the dark. Back in the mid 1990s, great armadas of them used to be on the Cascabel Road, going in one direction from one side to the other. These spider parades would about have to be waited out as one waits out a flash flood crossing at an arroyo or canyon unless one wanted to hear the squishes of their fat bodies as tires crushed a path through them. Has drought put an end to this wonder we just don’t see any more but that everyone remembers? Too many vehicles on this now much more used deep country road? Or are we simply not catching them on their grand walk-about nights?

July 3, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , ,

The pink-silver-blue water of The Stockpond at dawn is dotted with Sonoran Desert Toads, across the whole expanse from shore to shore to shore to shore. The air rings with their talking and their Moog Synthesizer whortles and chuckles and notes, their loud splashes and loud ripples of breast strokes through clear water without a speck of algae. They change partners, lock together in threes swimming across in one direction, gather in with their chain of partiers a fourth toad and then do an abrupt about-swim the other way again. I hear the accordion of the Lambada, the entire pond sways and swirls to it, and surely it is playing down the whole valley, every place there is a pond or puddle or a garden fountain in southern Arizona, in the city, in the deepest wilds. It was even part of my job, once, to make toad rounds at the swimming pool of the ranch nearby I’d worked with then, to pull them out of the jacuzzi filter, which we ended up calling, “the toad spa”. Last year, though, there was hardly a square inch of open water during the first toady courtship of “las aguas”, and that scene was even more crazed. Once I found an exceptionally large toad (they were called Colorado River Toads then), who’d died without trauma and had dried into a perfect mummy, then I found a smaller one to match, also mummified, put them as finials atop the entry posts at a gate on that ranch, and called them, “Toadankhamun” and “Nefirtoady”. It doesn’t take long living here before these grand creatures work their way into one’s life.

[…]

It is rare to see a Turkey Vulture standing next to the pond, but one is there this morning–it is more usual for them to come to that cienega out in #1 Pasture to get their drink, where a pool and marsh has formed by a main-leak of a number of years and where the land is wide open all around them. Later on the pasture, a pair of Yellow-headed Blackbirds in natty plumage hang out on the wheel line, their favored perch. For a bird considered so rare in the summer here, I seem to see a lot of them! Overhead of them comes a small flock of Eurasian Collared Doves, which for a few years had a population explosion down this part of the valley from Pomerene but to my observations was now declining, or at least I hardly see any these days.

Many Ash-throated Flycatchers calling, “Ka-brick! ka-brick!” from the bosques.

July 2, 2013

Nature Jottings, ,

4:00 am, coffee with martins innumerable catching their own early breakfast overhead, the birds flying in the dark it sounds from one horizon all the way to the other in a frenzy no doubt born of some big Arizona after-the-rain bughatch. The patio is lit softly by Crescent Moon, and flickers of lightning. Thunder from far off rolls in to me, nudges into the notes of the martins …

[…] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLXcIFLzXWk

No birds again this early morning on the edges of The Stockpond, surely a change come with Monsoon. Quiet, very quiet. Just after sunrise there was no algae apparent on that water, neither red nor green–all was clean. Does it sink? Come back to activity with hot sunshine and rise to float again? Change color with the daylight and its level of photosynthesis? Later in the morning there it all is, the whole pond covered, this time half in red, half in green. A Great Blue Heron stands in water deep enough that its tail tip is under the surface … stock still, the heron waits for a pair of huge Sonoran Desert Toads that he has his eye on to drift unsuspecting within the range of his harpoon. The toads, though, only have googly-eyes for each other (in fact, their eyes popped out above the water is about all I can see of them) and stay humped onto each other and blissed-out mid-pond and away from the big bird. Didn’t take those toads long to be stirred by this new season that makes untold numbers of other lifeforms spring to life and love and song. I haven’t heard the Desert Toads singing yet, though I think I hear these two give out with, “Why don’t we do it in the toad?”

July 1, 2013

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A couple of hours before sunrise, the patio wet … a moonless, vast land can be heard gladly sipping down into itself what that first, early wild storm of a new Monsoon Summer brought it. My lips have no trouble finding the rim of the coffee cup in the utter darkness. The invisible Purple Martins swirl overhead, sing down through the balmy, soft night of a perfect 71 degrees. I wonder what I’ll find at the pastures. I wonder if there is a road left to get to them on. Now comes the season that folds a tropical saturated air into a stiff batter of monsoon heat, when one’s clothes will be drenched through, with patterns of white edges lined out on it where the salt from the body marks a high tide of sweat. Now come days when it will be 100 degrees and raining, likely to reach a peak a couple months from now when hurricanes can hurtle up from the Sea of Cortez, which after all is just beyond our horizon, and mix even more power into the usual storm cells that can materialize right overhead of us.

The washes and arroyos did run large in that single temporal, but I make it through down Cascabel Road as daylight comes on. Close to Mason’s the torrents had ripped across the gravel and dirt, then ripped back to the other side, then burst through a bank in a fulfillment of some endless memory of the land, and filled to the top with water the old earthwork stock pond that in other years had reached such a state only towards the end of a rainy season. I stop, stare in amazement at it for there was no pond there yesterday, take in the lushness, smell the fecundity and odor of the South Seas. At The Stock Pond I hold up the column of the rain gauge in a joyful disbelief: almost one inch of rain, the first rain enough to comment on since February. Imagine … rain. An inch means I can delay the resumption of the irrigation cycle on the bermuda grass, save money, work at something else, save water.

There is not a bird at The Stockpond–not a bird–though there are call notes in the mesquital, and the down-slurred, slightly peevish whistles of a Tyrannulet; the rich songs of our summer residents are all stilled after the violence of the storm. Those friends are going to try to gather again this sunset time on the banks here to take in the evening bird show that’d got cancelled on us last night by the sideways-driven rains and the lightning bolts and the threat of flash floods coming down the arroyos, but there isn’t much promise of spectacle now that today water can be had everywhere and in abundance. Then a White-throated Swift rockets through over the water, water that is noticeably deeper than at this time yesterday. A single large winged termite drops from the air above onto my thumb–they’re emerging already after only one night of rain. Another White-throated Swift swoops through, with a screaming whoosh so fast as hardly to be made out on its approach, but when it is only a couple feet from my head I get a thrilling look at this incredibly beautiful and dapper bird. The swifts don’t much like the look of the water, which is this morning wholly changed from yesterday–mud where any water open at all can be seen–most of it is carpeted with red algae. There are bubbles rising from below that are then held unburst in the thick red covering that stretches from one shore of newly sprouting Barnyard Grass to the other. Suddenly the air is all Purple Martins, but only one or two are willing to poke their bills into so nasty-looking a pool for a drink. The cattle amble in, also wholly changed after the storm in their shimmering, dust-free coats. Surely the Creature from the Black Lagoon is about to jump up through the only open water edge and snag a calf. We’ll see later in the day if the nighthawks and bats will come as they have been in such increasing numbers over the weeks of a Foresummer that now of a sudden have ended. A fiery Summer Tanager comes to a mesquite tip, sings sweetly, slowly as if he’s afraid of shattering the wet enchantment, the notes seeming to come from a bird ventriloquist, his bill moves so imperceptibly.

Chores mostly done, when Saguaro Juniper folk were drifting into the Cafe du Stockponde, I myself drift on up to see if the herd had learned from the lightning strike that scared their little hooves into a high fandango last night, and were still honoring the electric fence in that #2 Pasture. They had learned, to my relief, for if once they get over to that just water-filled old pond there on the other side of the low and flimsy portable fence, it’d be almost impossible to get them out of there again, what with how they have everything a cow could want in there and with how she can hide from a drover and parry with him back and forth on either side of many a mesquite tree. A Killdeer has come to enjoy the pond’s muddy edge, I can hear. I walk back to the truck through the deep summer grass in late day sunglow and am swept over by a vast number of Lesser Nighthawks, high and low, very near and gliding past in their odd flying style, scattered from right where I stand on out to the horizons.

Evening thunderstorms look like they’ll stay on the mountains, and back at The Stockpond the tables are set, cheese sliced and arranged, wine poured from a bottle, olives readied to be plucked from a bowl. The water is open–not a trace of red algae!–though green algae floats instead in scattered swirls. It’s all Lesser Nighthawks tonight and rather than having decreased now there are so many other places for them to drink, they arrive from the lands roundabout, and arrive, and arrive, and the air pulses and whirs with them and then … shoots down from the sky a Cooper’s Hawk, who stretches out its taloned feet and sinks those claws into either side of a nighthawk ten feet in front of our faces, the nighthawk’s wings raise and are jammed up under the wingpits of the bird of prey and both sail as one off into the bosque where hungry baby hawks watch for their next goodies. We’re just stunned and let out gasps, all the nighthawks vanish, no sound, no movement. Sue breaks the spell that’s taken over the air now empty of birds:

“God! Life’s a crap shoot!“