Category Archives: Nature Jottings

May 25, 2013

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Full Moon is lowering itself towards the crest of the Rincon when I leave in the “dark” and thread the ridge above Pool Wash and slowly lower myself towards the canyon bottom and out on the Cascabel Road. The grand, bare cliffs are all in a glowing mist, a world that in this moonlight is there and is not there. Nighthawks are purring loudly and then softly, and from every knoll and canyon bottom rings out Whit-will-do! Whit-will-do! of Brown-crested Flycatchers … the early bird catches the cicada. On the road drive to the pastures the air is sweet and cool on my face. Owl is going home, Poorwills fly up from the gravel or flicker into my headlights, kangaroo rats bounce and jackrabbits try my patience when they decide that safety lies under turning truck wheels and not in the creosote flats they could peel off to instead.

My chest aches in the cold air, but then again it has done since I got knocked face-down flat to the ground yesterday afternoon by the electric fence when after crawling under and to the other side of it, I lost balance while I was getting to my feet and leaned back enough to lay the wire across the nape of my neck … bang! I long to direct the herd grazing these bottomland pastures from horseback alone, abandon the wires and the batteries and the electricity. The temperature and Moon are dropping, and I get the impossible pleasure of seeing four moonsets in succession, over this ridge or that, or when Moon snuggles himself into one gap in the mountains or other while I myself swing around north and south to drop cowboy gates and open hydrants out on the pastures …

[…]

Bright his smile may be, but his night at The Stockpond is far from a silent one. The dark of the mesquite bosque is all sound and singing–Cardinal, Yellow Warbler, Bewick’s Wren, Lucy’s Warbler, chats (lots of chats), tanagers, grosbeaks, Mourning Doves, Bell’s Vireos, kingbirds, House Finches, and a Vermillion Flycatcher that’s dancing mid-air. While singing out, he slowly crosses high over the pond, demanding of the avian world, “Oh, am I a stud, or what? Dig me!!” The fiery red little bird likely had done that through the whole night, dancing in Moon’s follow spot. The pair of Mexican Mallard swim around each other, painting yin-yang symbols with silvery water.

Later in the bright morning sky three Purple Martins, two males and a female, are sewing patterns on the blue, letting out far-carrying notes, twings and plangs in a courtship danse apache among two rivals and their would-be mate. Below in the mesquite edges and the weeds growing ever taller fledgling Lesser Goldfinches are complaining to their parents that not enough bacon has been brought home lately, “you don’t expect us to go out and get it ourselves … do you?” My life as ranch hand with its shocks by electric fences and lightning seems as tenuous as that of the baby bird whom I’d just saved from a pool of irrigation water in which it had wet its feathers thoroughly. I can decide to rescue it if I can as validly decide to leave it to drown, though all I probably did was save it as a fresh meal for a coyote. So be it. I put it way off into the grass, where it will stay hidden at least for a while, could dry out after all and end up changing the entire course of Evolution.

May 24, 2013

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This soft, warm dawn invited the toloache to open its huge white trumpets on the road edge outside the main gate of Mason’s, their perfume drifts out visions of Georgia O’Keefe and other shamans who came before her, of O’Keefe’s revelations to us of a new worldview, of new worldviews revealed to Native Americans through ceremony using the plant, the glowing petals speak too of rites of passage and the passage of spring into summer. I must take all the pleasure I can from the sight of this spectacular plant now, for soon enough the road grader will come along and knife off all the gravel edges and then some, all the way up to our fence, Cochise County having proven the way it has that it will not suffer wildflowers to brighten this road any longer.

Once inside the gates and down to The Stockpond, I find another Spotted Sandpiper is there teetering through the mud, probably for the day. It should be about the last one that passes north. Through the increasing heat (just under 100 degrees again) the first Purple Martins that will fly low enough to skim the pond surface with open bill come along. There are only a few, but soon there will be large numbers of them dropping in for a drink before they return home to their saguaro mansions in which they nest up on the hills and low mountains. The birds must come from a good distance out on the desert; there aren’t very many large saguaros right around here.

After I move each of the wheel lines sixty feet to the north for their next set of waterings early tomorrow, a Swainson’s Hawk lands at the edge of the large puddle left out in the open where the irrigator tractor had been. Only 125 feet away from me the handsome bird of prey drinks at leisure, and acts like he’s not the least bit afraid of me. I come back a while later and find the hawk gone, but other raptors are there aplenty: Turkey Vultures. The ones who have already drunk their fill are standing around on the grass, or are perched on the pipe axles, and at the tractor itself one is sitting in the center atop the engine hood and each of the four wheels are topped off by a single big bird, some staring out at the countryside, some with wings spread in what The Turkey Vulture Society calls “horaltic pose”. (Imagine, a Turkey Vulture society!) The wheel line tractor fitted up as it was with black-feathered vultures looked appropriately like a Victorian hearse …

[…]

May 23, 2013

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Dawn brings with it temperatures in the upper 40s still. Chunks of cobalt, chunks of lapis take wing–many Blue Grosbeaks, and Lazuli Buntings. In the gray light, a Lucy’s Warbler is jumping in and out of the cavity in the railroad tie gate post in which one of those birds was busily putting in a nest a bit less than a month ago; I thought it had been abandoned. There are many chirping babies around and if I remember, Lucy’s fledge with a startling quickness.

While I sit in the pickup sipping coffee after completing irrigation rounds, a Gray Fox comes along to get a drink at the pond. A beautiful animal, it is–red fur on its legs, and a swath of red that runs diagonally from its red ears down the sides of its body. It sits over there for a good long while, black-tipped tail draped elegantly, but acts nervously about something beyond it most of the time though it didn’t seem to care about me. Around him many swallows are flying in for quick on-the-wing dips of their bills into the water, and there’s a real “mess” of tanagers, of both species, coming to drink as well. One of them is a first year male Summer Tanager in that peculiar transition to adult plumage: green, blotched with red all over like either I’m seeing spots before my eyes or he has some dreadful tanager pox.

Sapphire blue damselflies are alighting on the irrigation hoses wherever the units have put out enough water to build little ponds that will of course drain away. The air has heated to just short of 100 degrees, and the grassland birds have discovered quite the way to stay comfortable: with the humidity at 4%, the seventy-foot wide zone of wet soil dwn the center of which the wheel lines sit becomes a giant evaporative cooler, and the upper spokes of the wheels of the units are crowded with birds who get as high as they can up under the wide, flat aluminum “tire” so it can shade them. Close up under one wheel canopy alone there were stuffed a Lark Sparrow, a Cassin’s Kingbird, and two Western Kingbirds, obviously enjoying that shade and “cool”!

May 21, 2013

Nature Jottings

Western Tanagers must now be at the height of their numbers here, and we are fortunate to have them grace our landscape for a few short weeks every spring as their crowd flows north along “lush” Southwestern river valleys. From here at a certain moment they also migrate vertically to the coldest tops of the Rincon and the Catalinas, more than a mile above us. Every time I drive down The Lane the tanagers (often very handsome males) swing out from the branches along the sides and fly off in front of the truck for a ways along the track.

The species is a poster bird for the importance of preserving such valleys as this in the region, because it illustrates well what has been dawning on ecologists and biologists in recent years: the mountains of North America are re-populated every summer with many birds that come north along the ground between those mountain ranges, rather than along invisible routes high overhead. Much more use of places like the San Pedro and Santa Cruz valleys, the Lower Colorado, and the Rio Grande is made by the winged travelers than had been suspected. All along the way once they’ve left their wintering southern zones, the birds need amenities on the ground and each of these valleys has its human supporting and volunteer groups of naturalists and birders determined to see those amenities remain intact and available. It is hard to determine just how important having active agricultural lands like the Mason Pastures is to the continuing health of the West’s avifauna, but it doesn’t take much to imagine what would be the immediate and local effect of turning off the outflow pipe to The Stockpond, or of no longer watering these pastures that are in their way recreated grasslands.

The San Pedro’s “Ribbon of Green” itself certainly in importance is of the first magnitude, but for those other Southwestern watercourses there are claims made about the avifauna and its migration corridor that are indistinguishable from what is said about the San Pedro. It is pronounced for each valley and watershed by their fans, supporters and resident naturalists, This is the most important place! We have more migrants than anywhere! (an example: “Flora and Fauna in the Proposed National Heritage Area […] More than 400 species of birds […] About 200 migrating bird species; the largest number in the United States […] One area is ranked as the most critical area for biological conservation in Arizona […]” This is not the ridge-to-ridge watershed of the San Pedro that is being talked about here: it is the proposed Santa Cruz Valley National Heritage Area (see: http://www.santacruzheritage.org/files/file/chapter_03_smaller.pdf .)

Look long enough through many such papers available online and one can’t help but see the similarities to how one oppressed people or another around the world guarantee their being kept down when among themselves they compete for the title of most exploited or the most meanly treated. It plays right in with the exploiters’ winning game of keeping people from uniting and actually doing something about an insufferable reality. Determining once and for all which one of our Southwestern watersheds should get the title for most biologically important and so most-in-need-of-support is not a harmless academic exercise, for thinking within those frames would likely increase the possibility that the other places in the list be left to disintegrate to a perhaps unsalvageable state. Each corridor should be considered to have an importance of the first magnitude, for after all any number of different stars carry that label and the label still be wholly correct for each. The Colorado, the Santa Cruz, the San Pedro and the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo should be seen as a single, organic entity, and that no one of these is more significant than the others, since it will probably not preserve the wildness of any one of these “flyways” (or by extension, the faunal zones between here and the Arctic re-occupied every summer by these sojourners) if there is done anything less than protecting all four of them together.

May 20, 2013

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Was The Stockpond ever “ducky” this morning: besides the pair of Mexican Mallards, there were three Gadwall and a Green-winged Teal working over the mud furiously and upending themselves to dabble on the bottom and in the bases of water weeds and rushes. So much, I’ll guess, for nymphs and eggs of dragonflies, damselflies and darners!

A jewel of a male Broad-billed Hummingbird came to sit at my shoulder for a little while on the top strand of a barbed wire fence, allowing me to take in every detail of the exquisite little thing. He dropped, chipping away happily, to a spray of Copper Globemallow where he worked on every flower before vanishing in a buzz. (The House Finches also come to the Globemallow: they love to munch on the freshly opened petals, the same way they will go after the flowers of winter annuals, especially pansies and petunias, and wipe out displays in the gardens of the Southwest’s desert oasis cities.)

A mixed group of Lucy’s Warblers and Western Tanagers come at lunchtime to splash and fluff and bath at the base of the hydrant riser at The Stockpond.

May 18, 2013

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Birds of gold, glittering on the edges of every little muddy bay of The Stockpond. Common Yellowthroats, several Western Tanagers, Yellow and Wilson’s warblers. The Yellow Warblers are given the bum’s rush by several Lucy’s; they’re chased off. That done, the Lucy’s “high tail” it to the other side of the pond to perch instead around the hydrant where the cleanest water is to be enjoyed. Beyond all these birds occupied with slacking their thirst, Silver-leafed Nightshade makes a bank of purple flowers. The Wilson’s Warblers should be near the end of their time here, and these will indeed turn out to be the last seen this migration. Their numbers were noticeably down over those of past years, and the timespan of their passage (less than a month) also seemed much shortened.

Later at lunch, a (the same?) Spotted Sandpiper returns to spend the day, and many more Western Tanagers are hanging out at this their favorite waterhole for now. Cliff Swallows zoom in and zoom out, dipping to the water surface in their low swing of flight. A female Summer Tanager gathers nesting material along the flat shore at the west side, and there come along a last pair of White-crowned Sparrows to have a drink before they set off northward and soon out of Arizona for the summer.

May 17, 2013

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The plaintive cries of a Poorwill came up from the banks of Pool Wash in the earliest dawn, as I was packing the truck to get down to the pastures. They’ve hardly been heard since those evenings more than two months ago when the birds seemed everywhere from Mason’s to here, on the road, in the air, or calling.

After I’d got the water going, I drove to the west end of the fenceline between #1 and #2 pastures, which affords a good view of sprinkler head problems in the line across to the south. I was distracted from work, though, by a bobcat running from the middle of that pasture to the protection of the bosque along The River. Actually it was trying to escape from a raven that was harassing it likely just in devilish fun, as ravens seem wont to have. Then just as the bobcat disappeared into the mesquital: another cat, much larger than a house cat but not as big as the bobcat, and of black color, came scampering along in the same direction and also from the middle of the field but in a line further away from me. It was gone too quickly to get the binoculars laid on it and focussed. I’m thinking this was yet one more (of the many talked about when people here are feeling safe) sightings of our ever-elusive-but-never-to-be-documented Jaguarundi.

If such an animal were to be proven resident in this valley, the entire history and game of keeping “The River” the marvel that it remains would be changed in an instant. Myself I have full confidence that I have seen the critter here and more than once, sometimes close enough to study it well and at leisure, sometimes just a flash of body and incredibly long tail crossing Cascabel Road or a ranch road at dusk or dawn especially when the road was in such bad shape that I couldn’t go faster than five mph in the old Ford 100 pickup. The Jaguarundi hereabouts fills the same place in after-dinner conversations, when people are feeling expansive and out of earshot of hostile sceptics, as that held by the Onza in campfire talk in the remote monte of Sonora, or by the dreaded Escorpion that “is” an iguana-like reptile with poison-dripping fangs high in the rainforest trees in Costa Rica, or by the Chupacabras that stalks the corrals out on the Mexican deserts. Erudite biologists and people like Nathan Sayre whose research is always impeccable state that Jaguarundi being seen here is an impossibility, end of conversation! … yet we are tantalized by write-ups like that of the naturalist Stan Tekiela, in his book, “Mammals of Arizona Field Guide”:

Rare […] Very secretive, with a range from South and Central America into southern Arizona […] occasionally one jaguarundi is seen […] It is possible that some of these are the offspring of feral house cats. There are also reports of captive jaguarundi escaping and living in the wild.

I drive off soon as I can manage and find a phone, and call our naturalist Ralph W. who has been setting out cameras for years trying to nail down for us once this Holy Grail of our conservation. Later in the morning he and Kathleen and I hunt for tracks and try to determine if there’s enough evidence to warrant doing another camera project, but we don’t find much in the way of exciting clues. We do come on Badger sign, and an interwoven set of curving lines in the flour-like dust that tell where two rattlesnakes became more than strangers in the Sonoran Desert night–as I followed their movement through the powder and imagined the grace of what went on, in my mind’s ear there played the Ravel “Bolero”.

A Spotted Sandpiper is visiting the mud shore of The Stockpond again.

May 16, 2013

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Seventeen days after the last one was sighted, a Meadowlark is by itself out on the pastures! A lingering Western, or an odd summering Eastern?

Lark Sparrows are in court-n-spark mode, a male and female are singing together like two leads in an opera. He lets out with the sweetness of a canary, and jumps from the ground onto the spokes of an irrigator wheel, climbing them one by one, jumping from one side of the wheel across to the other while spreading his tail, sometimes the feathers wide into a complete fan, and as he reaches the top of the wheel, stretches upwards as far as his neck can extend while he’s singing. She stays below, twittering, joyful.

Ellison and I have our lunchtime at The Stockpond. The 96 degree afternoon brings in a female hummingbird to sip from the open water–she’s desperate enough to forgo whatever security her gender almost always seeks in sticking to the riser hydrant and avoiding the open water area. Instead of being dive-bombed and driven off by a male of her species, however, she is threatened by of all things, a dragonfly! One of those gaudy “saddle shoe” dragonflies (a Desert White-tail like yesterday’s, and maybe it’s the same individual) comes gliding innocently along below her, then rises quickly with obvious intent and attacks her again and again, but she escapes. If we hadn’t seen this with our own eyes … surely it couldn’t have been trying to prey on her, could it? (Much later I would do an Internet subject search on this, and found a number of just such incidents talked about, including one on an Audubon Society bulletin board webpage in which there was a reference to a film documenting a large dragonfly grabbing and carrying off a full-grown Rufous Hummingbird! Who knew?)

May 15, 2013

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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

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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.