Category Archives: Nature Jottings

April 9, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

I arrive at the Stockpond and scare off a put-out, cranky Green Heron, have a glimpse of it for only a few seconds–well I’m grumbling too over a temperature that hovers at freezing. This, too, is Sonoran spring. A front came over us in the night, blue sky gone, but not exactly cloudy either: all is silver and glowing, the light, the air itself, it is stunning, like being in the Waiting Room for Eternity. The birds trickle north in ones and rarely twos, their kinds arriving today for the first time, and maybe regretting their haste as a little drift of sleet begins to pelt the brim of my Stetson … a lone Barn Swallow (“about time, friend Swallow!” I send thought to it on what wings I have, the species is so late this year); a lone Swainson’s Hawk has arrived and with a flourish of masterful flying, dips, parries, folded wings and mournful whistle, he escapes the harassment of a Redtail and is then gone into that silver air above me. A lone Cassin’s Kingbird, gorgeous in this strangest of light around me, whurp-whurpping from a fencepost where he might stay for the rest of the summer once he stops regretting leaving Old Mexico. The sleet sets in, the mid-seventies of yesterday too long gone and it will be a mercy if I forget them. The ice balls bounce off my shoulders as I open an irrigation hydrant and have water shoot up through the frigid air and into my face out of the tottering equipment. Oh my yes! … the vida vaquero loco, romantica, libre.

[…]

As the irrigation water rolls from my face after hitting me squarely in both eyes, I hear my father telling that poem of an April bedtime more than fifty years ago, hear him quivering out the “poor thing” part to add just that extra fear, pathos and doubt, and hear myself crying back, “No Daddy–no! … will he make it to spring??” I wonder if I will. I hope that Cassin’s Kingbird sticks it out.

April 8, 2013

Nature Jottings

Pat and I rode looking for cattle on the higher mesas that earlier in the year had fair moisture. Prickly pear in their diverse species were coming already to be encrusted with small buds, which promises a real flower show not long from now. Down Mason’s way, there seems none of this and rather, the plants are shriveling. Cactus, even cactus, need water but we, however, are enjoying exceedingly this cloudless warm and beautiful day of Sonoran spring.

[…]

April 6, 2013

Nature Jottings

Wrens … those wrens are becoming my psychosis. At least fifteen take up here or there with my walking flush, as I go out to the tractor of the wheel line irrigator. I just get the glasses on them when they drop like a stone and are gone. No attention is paid to my best Dudley Do-Right impersonation, “Come out of there … youuu!”, which I give while standing at the place where one disappears. A chitter back from the deep grass twenty feet from there is all I get. The wheel line, which runs the length of the entire field, is fired up and the joystick thrust forward to run it all north across most of the pasture to where the new watering cycle is to begin, and as it rolls it scares up one after another wren who bounces off before it. That pasture is just full of the birds! They flee in an edged line before the advancing aluminum monster, it seems by the time I’m near to finishing the move the birds are as thick as grasshoppers pushed off before a prairie fire–and still I can make out nothing in the way of markings that would without doubt tell which is its species.

[…]

April 5, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , ,

Song Sparrows, and Lark Sparrows, in increasing numbers come to drink or are seen in the pastures. The Song Sparrows are furtive and slip through the grass though also the wide-open edge of the Stockpond is much to their liking. The Lark Sparrows are bold and chatty, loud, with canary song to delight; they rise from the dirt tracks in a swirling cloud with the dust.

Almost a week on from when they’d started coming to the hummer feeders at El Potrero, a Black-chinned came this morning to hover over the middle of the Stockpond, drop to its surface, and take a long draught and then whir off. Yellow-rumped Warblers in elegant courting plumage came to the muddy edges to sip, too, and while Chris E. and I were lounging on the bank eating lunch, a completely unbothered Cooper’s Hawk also landed, and drank its fill, while a first spring large red dragonfly sailed out over the middle.

Not nearly so many Meadowlark as before, but still they’re here giving out their fluting notes and working over the grassland in shifts. A single Western Kingbird tells it’s about time for those meadowlarks to move away north. The wrens, meanwhile, are paying no attention to Kingbird’s hint that the bell’s rung and it’s time to change classes: the wrens are still well at home, and their species remains as mysterious in both pastures of green winter grass.

A species of White (butterfly) has emerged; they are few in number yet.

April 4, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

A Crissal Thrasher singing discreetly in the mesquites along The Lane. In the fields and on the barbed wire, a full summer complement now of Vermillion Flycatchers. Lucky, we are.

Although we graze it and water it no differently than the other bottomland pastures, #3 increases in native plant species coming in and making themselves once again at home. The grasses are exceptional in this, though they’re not to be seen much of yet this spring and if there are any wildflowers at all in the whole area of south Cascabel (less than 2″ of rain have fallen since September at Mason’s) they are where our irrigation reaches. Some made no appearance this year, others, like a sky blue flax (a Linum sp., likely a L. lewisii variety) are the first I’ve ever seen in Cascabel.

[…]

Lady Bugs … everywhere.

April 3, 2013

Nature Jottings, ,

While I was setting up the day’s first irrigation some odd noises drew my attention to the deepest grasses over at the north edge, to where a young javelina’s thoughts were turning to, um, love, in the Rio San Pedro spring. There were a bunch of the critters come to sip from a riser’s overflow pool, one of them an obviously attractive female, not very large, but every time he professed his love she spun 180 degrees, growled, and snapped onto his lip. He of course chuckled and crooned, made another pass, and then got whacked in the face by a handbag as she hissed at him, “Masher!” I called them Tyrone and Gladys, after the “old” couple on Laugh In. This went on for a while, even after I called out, “Madre de Dios! Go get a room!” and eventually they bowled off into the tall dried grass and tumbleweed, he still grumbling lowly, she still with an offended, “Well I never!” Their children will be lovely.

Delicately-hued, a Blue-gray Gnatcatcher along The Lane, in those still small mesquite leaves.

Four weeks after I first heard the Sonoran lullaby beloved of every desert rat–the cooing of the White-winged Dove, at El Potrero eight miles to the north–a single one now is calling from the bosque at Mason’s. They winter (sparingly) as close as Pomerene, 25 miles or so to the south, but the birds are behaving like so many others this oddly-patterned year: going north and passing Mason’s, then turning south and coming to the pastures, or, maybe the ones now appearing are newly arrived directly from points far beyond Pomerene.

April 2, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , ,

The Lucy’s Warblers and Bell’s Vireos are still way too thin in the mesquite branches, but a few were singing this morning, lightening the heart. Those mesquite they love are now barely sprouted out, but soon the air above the lanes of the pastures will be suffused in a pale green light, when the sun slants through the half-unfurled and still tiny leaflets there is then a holy and shimmering space, one lit by old stained glass windows.

In the uppermost grazing pasture, a plant native to all the sweep of our Great Southwest from Chihuahua and Sonora and Baja, north to the Trans Pecos and across to the Mojave–Desert Evening Primrose (Oenothera primiveris)–have a flower or two above their beautifully scalloped leaves spotted with deep purple. Another native though considerably more weedy, Horse Nettle (Silver-leaf Nightshade) is germinating, the plants still tiny. They won’t stay that way long.

For the last couple of weeks the swallows have been appearing sporadically, in numbers barely increasing, but suddenly today the air was alive with Rough-wingeds over the southmost pasture we call “#1”. In that same lush and deep winter grass of barley, oats, wheat and rye, a visitor, Katy, today caught a glimpse of one of the mystery wrens that pop up and give a tantalizing seconds-long view and then drop into the dense blades. This time one of the pretty little birds stayed for a moment in the open at the edge, only about ten feet away from Katy, and she saw without binoculars that its upper parts were spotted with white. I walked through the area widely late in the afternoon, but my footfalls didn’t make a single wren rise, flit, drop out of sight–did they all leave for the north suddenly?

March 31, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , ,

Black-chinned Hummingbirds are in their spectacular mating aerial dances at El Potrero. As they swing up and down on the wing they purr and putt, the quavering sounds grow louder and dimmer with the swing of the bird on its pendulum course, closer and then away and back again. Did the animation folks who created the Jetsons in the 1960s use this for the sound effect of the futuristic personal flying cars? No sightings or sounds of these hummers at Mason’s, either.

There is appearing a pattern here, of something that may have been happening with every spring, perhaps in reverse every autumn: the returning birds come north in their waves, and eddy and flow around (or over) places that take a little waiting for them to become more comfortable for them. El Potrero is warmer, more temperate than the Mason Pastures–certainly the thermometer readings show this and so singing and courting and avian housekeeping appear to start earlier those miles north at El Potrero. Do more birds come along from their wintering grounds at the right moment to occupy Mason’s areas directly, or are they already present somewhere east, west, north and they swirl on around back to Mason’s when conditions please? The number of species that are showing evidence of this keeps growing–something at least interesting is going on, but … what?

Winter seems about gone though of course we could (and probably will) have a couple snows yet on the higher country above us, and mornings that’ll make us grumble, “Oh this never happens!”, but yes, it always does happen. A lot of wintering birds appeared at Mason’s sparingly or not at all and now their season is winding down–they didn’t come far enough south because of global warming? Winter of 2011-2012 brought great and beautiful flocks of Lark Buntings to us; this year they appeared on only a couple of occasions and in much smaller numbers. Winter before last, often Western Bluebirds would alight all along the wheel line pipes and spokes around me, truly a glittering show and I’d hear their musical “phew! phheww!” overhead, and there were the many Mountain Bluebirds visiting and landing mostly on the open ground, but not a single of the latter species came along this winter. Both bluebird species can be pretty irregular, but the more to be expected flocks of American Pipit didn’t come this year to the irrigated grass, either, though I saw and heard a very few individuals–and no longspurs at all. Long before this time last year Tree Swallow and Violet-green Swallow were passing over our planted grass, but neither of these species has come through yet in 2013. With climate shifting northwards, what might the summer hold for birds on the place? What “Mexican” species might appear?

March 30, 2013

Nature Jottings,

Gray Hawks have moved into the Mason Pastures–swooping in from behind along The Lane, low through the branches at the stockpond, whistling mournfully from the gallery forest along The River. Willows are in fresh, but small, leaf and most of the cottonwood look to be in their full summer emerald already.

Hooded Orioles are chattering at El Potrero, but not a sign or sound of them at Mason’s yet. They seem also late of arrival this year, like so many other birds.