Category Archives: Nature Jottings

February 10, 2014

Nature Jottings, , , , , , ,

Red dawn, the kind I think will be coming through my old window in Alamos right now at the other reach of this far-flung Sonoran Desert in Mexico. Before sunrise over Mason Pastures it is 38 degrees, by noon, 75.

The whiffling of bluebirds: so high are they that they are invisible, only their notes pass overhead, and fall all around me. Gnatcatchers wheeze in the dense mesquite twigs.

Large saffron ants, in mounds and islands three or four bodies deep, are going in and out of their cavern but not carrying anything. Do they wait along the procession route of Persephone hoping for a glimpse–surely she is returned? They’re late, the goddess is already abroad: Bob tells that he’s heard a Poorwill calling in the evening already … Cardinals are singing of Spring joyously at El Potrero, dragonflies fly there as well, the Malta Starthistle is becoming too obviously still present and their mumbled threat can be heard, “I’m gonna get you, and your little pasture too!”, and the first bat comes out in the evening over the Cowboy Caravan.

February 7, 2014

Nature Jottings, ,

A sudden rain awakens me in the Cowboy Caravan, is brief, gone, Venus rises and is a spectacle. The deep dust outside isn’t much ruffled by the big drops.

Before sliding into chaps, buckling on spurs and saddling horses with Pat to ride for cows on range, I speed down to the winter green fields to set the day’s watering. A Gray Fox with orange-red legs and a red head is out on one pasture, staring and staring, or sneaking up to the burrows of one critter or another … mice? gophers? jackrabbits?

On range we find the wildflowers much progressed, so much so that it seems we’re promised a colorful Spring. It’s often prematurely announced that there will be! but–the Bladderpod are fat, healthy, and are even showing flower scapes already, and this gives hope.

February 6, 2014

Nature Jottings, , , ,

Five Green-winged Teal dabble in our shallow pond, while on the “dirt tank” of our fence neighbor ranch to the south, a Redhead makes a startling appearance but that pond is deep enough to attract such diving ducks.

A fearless Ruby-crowned Kinglet comes to work over the mesquite tips where I’m still rather frantically trying to reset T-posts and raise wire along Cascabel Road so our cows don’t go on a walkabout this summer to vacuum the sweet, tasty trillion of mesquite beans that will fall on the gravel roadway. For the first time I ever heard one here, a Cactus Wren’s raspy chortling comes from the dry slopes and Saguaros rising from the opposite side of the roadway. It makes me think the mystery bird in there is not some species of wren after all; I don’t know if I’ll ever hear it again to be able to seek it out at last and identify it.

The Cottonwoods oh the Cottonwoods on The River oh how can it be that no, I haven’t been imagining those tiniest of changes coming over them already before midwinter has come? Glances in passing for the past few days have left me wondering, “Are they still bare?” and neighbors are asking, “My gosh, can the Cottonwoods be leafing out??” I wanted to believe they were still bare and would stay that way a while, for one can hardly get enough of the sleeping beauty of the translucent, filigreed crowns and the galleries of white trunks and limbs. But now it’s undeniable: the trees are indeed pale green, the long forests of them are bands of the soft color, the land above them and the shrubby edges below them a gray even softer, with snow high over them white on wilderness slopes.

February 5, 2014

Nature Jottings,

Tansy Mustard, in bloom already at the pastures’ edges. There is much marveling in Cascabel over the many plants coming into flower weeks earlier than anyone remembers. And now a “Polka Dot Beetle” with twelve spots … which should I suppose be well and truly called Cucumber Beetle, whatever the identity of the earlier, fewer-spotted ones. Will it be a thirteen-spotted one tomorrow?

True evening Winter splendor tonight … the Galiuro ramparts are dark, all the ridges that rim, protect and tell us what is our “Cascabel” are dark, and alone out of the middle of this vast shadow-world rises Sierra Blanca from Saguaro-Juniper’s high ranges to the northeast, dazzling for some moments in the last full rays of Sun, as white as a sand dune and shaped like one, the shadows on its peak milky-green. I turn away from this grand mural hung before, over and around me, and see that Bobcat has come to join me in the pasture. It lounges, serenely, like an odalisque behind the bar in an old cow town saloon. As if a switch were thrown darkness comes, and the hovering mirage of Sierra Blanca vanishes in an instant.

February 4, 2014

Nature Jottings, ,

Twenty-four degrees this clear blue morning, a cold to assure that Winter, though much threatened, is not yet an extinct species. The new snow dust gives The Rincon a pale shimmer in the first sunrays.

Not much going on at the edge of the cold Stockpond, just a Rock Squirrel stretched out almost flat trying to reach the water, and a few nondescript sparrows I decide are not Brewer’s on the strength of their having gray rumps, but think instead they must be “Pale 1st winter” (as Sibley puts it) Chipping Sparrows. The book says they don’t weigh much … imagine, at less than half an ounce they are yet creatures complete.

Haven’t seen the beautiful Polka Dot Beetles for more than a couple weeks, the cold of the nights must have set them groggy, but in the late light during as much warmth as is going to be mustered by the day (50s) one of them appears–it carries not six black spots, but eleven! (One entomologist has sent word that what has been seen over most of the winter with those six spots were just a form of the common and universally-resented garden Cucumber Beetle, and this new one today certainly looks a lot more like any illustration one might find of that pest. Yet another entomologist, whose specialty is beetles of southern Arizona, tells that he doesn’t believe Cucumber Beetles would have one race with a very different number of spots active the first half of their season, and change over to one with almost double the number during the second. He thinks it’s a different, maybe even undescribed, species. I wonder which I’ll be seeing from here on, and for how long into spring …)

February 3, 2014

Nature Jottings,

A wet-in-wet watercolor sunrise, above very cold fields frosted white, but all is beautifully warm by 1:00 in the afternoon for long enough that a new, glossy green and bronze beetle appears on the wheel line hoses where it can soak up warmth it must find so welcome.

Not long later, though … storms and blackness, coming in from each quarter and I cannot get warm no matter the physical work, then snow curtains billow along the lower slopes of The Rincon though they don’t spill over the lip of the high canyon wall and onto us. The highest peaks are veiled from sight by the drifting and sidling white squalls, the mountains are gone, in the gray.

Sue reports that above her house poppies are blooming on the mesa skirting Hot Springs Canyon: earliest February, when Winter spars with Spring, and Spring will spar with Winter …

February 1, 2014

Nature Jottings

… and see what this morrow brings: passing showers, a little bit more “accumulation” than yesterday’s trace of rain (well, call today’s not quite a double-trace, then) and strangely for Winter, a tall and thick Dust Devil whirling a moment of Foresummer into our priceless cold weeks, as if Global Warming wants to toss this season about and plant me firmly head down into the irrigation mud.

January 31, 2014

Nature Jottings

After a night that may not have even dipped below 50, the morning is warm, rich, brings random drops of rain that patter into and scatter the deep dust in puffs, tick on the brim of my Stetson, set silvery rings off across The Stockpond. It doesn’t amount to anything measurable, and the prognostications for the coming month don’t give hope there will be. We’re not the first in Arizona who have ever wondered about the range that is in their care, “Will it all last long enough to keep the cattle on up there through May?” Should it not, that will have to be taken in stride and with that certain, time-tested expansive and philosophical outlook for which the ranching world is famous, a “that was then, this is now” roll-with-it flexibility. For this morning, then, I’ll celebrate this air that honors my inner Resurrection Fern, and see what tomorrow brings or takes away.

January 30, 2014

Nature Jottings, , , ,

Bob comes to help dig mesquite, and reports there are Mexican Mallards on The Stockpond and while we are working, he finds the first Filaree in bloom with its flowers of an odd hue of magenta washed with blue. A brown and russet young Harrier patrols around us on tilting wings.

The day warms … and warms … … 78 degrees … … and out come more Bronze Dragonflies and even Sulphur Butterflies. Well so much for Winter, which I’ll declare has lasted all of six weeks and two days, and began the day after I marked the end of “Fall” when the last of the Sulphurs were a-wing in mid-December on the last day of that month that had reached 75. My shirt is soon darkened by sweat as I dig out those T-posts of the fence long ago so buried in silt and gravel of sheet flooding that Mycha can lightly step over it and get loose on the Cascabel Road if the top wire isn’t raised by another two feet to that optimum 48 inches. Already chores like this one are nagging me, that I’m afraid won’t get done before Summer but better well be. There’s not much I hate more to hear than a voice on the phone telling, just as I’ve put feet up, “Um … your cows are out.”