Tag Archives: Arthropods (Other)

September 5, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , ,

“No, no, it’s Summer!”, chatter and sass the Bell’s Vireos in the River bosque and in The Lane, as they will do every day for the rest of September.

Predatory Stink Bugs (now there’s a righteous name for an insect!), midnight blue and marked with bright red diamond-shapes, are on the bermudagrass doing what they do best, stalking. Red-winged Grasshoppers are in mating dance again …

Where this year’s winter pasture is to be sown, Bob E. and I clear mesquite in the morning of a day that will reach 98 degrees, and is sultry still from the rain of a couple days ago. We are getting all as ready for the Marsh Wrens as we are for our cattle.

Families of Chihuahuan Raven are joining up, and of a sudden are forming large flocks.

 

August 14, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , , , ,

A Great Blue Heron that’s supposed to be uncommon in the summer here is at the northern dirt tank catchment pond, the water is clean and clear now there’s been no storm or wild muddy runoff from the canyons for a few days. The bird is beautifully reflected. Off across all the pastures to the south is the buzz and murmur of crickets, grasshoppers, katydids. Moisture is enough that with the decaying plant matter come very showy mushrooms popping up: stems of pure white, jet black caps speckled white. There is a little similarly colored and patterned butterfly, black, with a crescent of white stars on its forewings, the delightfully named Funereal Duskywing. It has taken up life in that area where we’re coaxing the native grasses to sprout from seeds.

I notice that suddenly the Brown-crested Flycatchers aren’t flying and hawking around in the pastures and desert edge any more. I was just thinking it must be time to take stock of the birds here, now has come the Ides of Summer when the breeding birds are all still showing themselves and none have left but may be about to, and fall transients and winter residents are still far off. Sure enough, a look in the bird calendar for Southeastern Arizona reveals that the “neotropical” Brown-crested would be the first to leave, and precipitously: once the first of August has come the species goes from common to uncommon, and by the end of the first week, to be rare though a few may hang on til mid-September.

I make the mistake of leaving on the ground and out in the sun the nails for a fence repair I’d like to get done before the storm approaching from the horizon gets here. It’s 102 degrees, and the nails are too hot to pick up with bare fingers, and have to be splashed with canteen water as if they’ve just come out of a forge! When the mesquite pods start falling and stir into the air the sound of a kalimba as they hit the ground and bounce off each other, plainly it’s time to get out of here and through all the washes and outflows of canyons and besides, all the windows and doors are open back at the house! I just arrive there and don’t get them all closed before It hits, the Mother of all Monsoon Storms this Summer. It’s been on its way up from the South, and from the East, and from this high spot I watch each valley and ridge and washbottom vanishing from sight in its oncoming, go completely gray in a wall of wild rain from the ground up as high as can be seen, and it’s not slowing down or thinning. I get to the door on the south side of the house a moment after the house is slammed by the front, the door is hard to close and click against it and the space that narrows as I push funnels the air and wet into the room the harder, increasing the blast that sweeps everything off the kitchen table, and for at least the third time this rainy season, the refrigerator is cleared of most of the pictures and mementos held there by magnets. The sun still shines for a little while through the pounding sheets of rain, the landscape 360 degrees around the house glows as if it sits inside an incandescent bulb. Suddenly, all becomes much darkened. The Creosote Bush outside is bent in the wind to the point of almost being flattened to the ground, though I can’t see beyond a few feet from the windows so much like a blizzard has this come to be look. I can’t believe the eaves are able to stay attached to the house … and then, it’s all gone as quickly as it came, moving along in a way that the windows on each side are battered and draining water and when the storm cell reaches the bottomlands to the West, all that land fills like a newly laid out lake, one that later reflects the glow of the sunset for weeks.

Over the course of the storm the temperature has dropped to 74–almost thirty degrees cooler than an hour before and in that hour, 1.35 inches of rain has fallen. Doubtless no one will be able to get in or out of here for a while … when it’s done and the rumbling is drifting off to the northwest, I can hear and see that this long ridge has become an island: Pool Wash and Sierra Blanca wash are white and rushing and their murmur comes up to me from below, water boring wildly past me on either side. I can see trucks and a stocktrailer for now stranded down there but hoping to be able to cross when the grader comes or more people with shovels in their vehicles do (most carry one for this kind of affair)–but there’s more trouble this time than usual, because the electric company left a bunch of line poles in the bed of the arroyo last week, up stream from the crossing. All of those creosoted poles are now gone and swept west down and to the San Pedro, except for one, which is left a anchored lengthwise crossing the road. That’s gotta be fun! Cascabel folk will talk about this great storm for days, about the mess and the damage and the glorious refill of rain which everyone will take any time and any how it will be offered even if it comes with ripped off porch ceiling fans and lawn chairs lifted, taken, and dropped off in the desert. Bob E. reports that his house was saved by his anemometer: lightning hit it, and followed the metal pole it was attached to down to the ground. He couldn’t tell what the blasts of wind ever ended up registering in speed because the bolt shattered everything into pieces. The wind couldn’t have been less than 60 mph …[…]

August 13, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

The Devil’s Claws continue to grow and spread their branches, there are even more flowers now than a couple weeks ago. As I noticed before, only some individuals have the Paulownia-like fragrance and that only slight–one plant’s flowers are nearly raspberry red in color, look like Pansy (Miltonia) Orchids. Wild Tomatillo are at the height of bloom, rather a weedy plant but rather showy, too. After a night of 80% humidity, the dew is drenching everything and as I walk I am wet through from the top of the so-called knee boots to well above the knees. (Knee boots only come now up to about half way between the calf and the knee, which is reminiscent of what happened with two-by-four lumber. They seem no longer to be built to fit well, too, and are too floppy and open to keep out raspy grass seeds, sharp and impaling foxtail awns that can find their way all the way to the toes before becoming a splinter in your hide, or the marbles of White Horsenettle fruits. The “rubber” lasts all of about two months before its seams fracture. What do I want for $30? something that lasts??) More and more grasshoppers are flushed on such a walk through the deep pasture, today there’s a new straw-colored one with a black stripe, and large emerald katydids with a white stripe, trailing legs far behind them when they take off and buzz on ahead of me. A small black wasp is now very active, has a brightly contrasting red abdomen, connected to its forward parts by a thorax as thin as a hair.

I get back to the truck after closing down the riser valves just after lunch, slip off the rubber boots and shake them upside down before putting on regular cowboy boots, and out of them onto the ground falls a spider of astonishing color and shape: apple green, striped with a lighter fluorescent green, and the legs are feathered and ornate like those of deep sea crabs. How this Green Lynx Spider didn’t get crushed as it was jostled around in my boot is a question–it must be very nimble. I read that they can give a venomous bite, but that they have to be harassed into doing that. I should think that a ride with my foot far from home would constitute harassment. I do empty other critters out of those boots from time to time after I have finished crossing those pastures, and have always been happy not to know what alarming thing I was carrying around with me at the time.

Clear sky, temperature 104 degrees in the afternoon … the convection oven of the land bouncing back great heat into the air is setting up all for a big blow, it feels–but not today.

August 11, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , , , , ,

A return walk to that blown out irrigation main in #4 Pasture to see if it’s holding pressure gives an impression that all the world is being devoured by those White-lined Sphinx worms. There are at least four or five to the square foot of Boerhavia that they are quickly decimating, but they leave alone the related Annual Windmills (Allionia choisyi) that are growing among them and showing their pretty, tiny lavendar-pink blooms on widely sprawling plants. The worms are fabulously beautiful: lime and yellow, with black stripes and red bars. I imagine them in their not millions, but probably billions, this year when every flat is massed with their host plants from here up to the canyonlands and over to the far-off Pecos. If any Elf Owls waited out the dry spring with its lack of flowers and thus lack of insects for them, they will be feasting on hornworms this year no doubt. (I once had a pair come down to visit a number of evenings in a row years ago, when one of them brought its own dinner, a huge Tomato Hornworm that it held in one foot while it balanced on the branch with the other. I watched the last of the sunset while only a few feet away from me the little toy owl bit off the head of the hornworm and working from the bottom up squeezed out the liquid green contents and slurped them–a sort of slimesicle–while I toasted the sweet little creature on its hunting prowess, raised my glass of wine to it with a “Bon appetit, frere!”) Also no doubt, there will be a bumper crop of hornworms of various species and the Screech Owls will be seen aplenty around the spotlights on garages and house walls, flying out of the dark of a sudden to snatch a large hawkmoth adult and vanishing back out of sight where it will munch away leisurely on a branch.

One of the few butterflies that are common this year, the Orange Sulphur, flits over all the pastures, sipping at almost any kind of flower they can find open. Grasshopper numbers are still growing, and don’t seem about to decline. In fact I wonder if this year they aren’t going at some point to reach a critical mass and then mow off all the bermuda we have spent our time and our wealth growing. At least for now, there appears to be not a single leaf chewed off, and I wonder what they’re doing. They’re certainly leaving behind a real mass of grasshopper excrement, which must be as good a fertilizer as any cricket poop that is a product of growing popularity among the organic set lately … […]

The mesquites are hung (already!) with whitening beans, they look as pretty as any cultivated flowering tree, as tinselled as any fir at Christmas. On one of these, bright Lark Sparrows perch on each branch tip to complete the look, as if someone had attached to the mesquitebaum the finest of Austrian ornaments, ones that wind themselves up and sing. The second week of August, our Sonoran Summer, perfected. All that has come before from those first days when the mercury shot over a line into the 90s, the wicked Foresummer, the first wild storm and haboob wall of dust, the first flood of The River, have built to this. A pleasant, 96 degrees late afternoon, the Saguaros on the hilltop are stark against giant white Monsoon clouds, the clouds themselves hard against an impossibly blue sky. All things looked at, in every direction, are as if viewed through a stereoscope. The White-winged Doves do yet call and coo, as if spring has not gone to high summer of Los Temporales. Their notes wonderfully blend with far away thunder.

August 9, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

Some Saguaro Juniper members and supporters are setting up a new native Arizona grass pasture project at the south end of the fields, a couple of risers’ worth of fallow land has been seeded with a wonderful variety–sixteen species–and now, to water it. Then … we blow an entire riser out of the ground right from its base at the irrigation main in #4 Pasture in the far north of Mason’s: well that pipe, metal cap hydrant-fixture and all, must’ve shot high into the sky as if from a missile silo–at least the hole left behind looks like one, filled and overflowing with water welling out and up from the 4″ opening in the pipe three feet down. This forms a very attractive and natural-looking ojo de agua. Today we try fixing this again (second attempt) but the fun is interrupted by something of an anguished yelp from Jimmy M., who with a high kick flips away from his bare shin something snake-like that then goes flying end over end into the Boerhavia being munched by uncountable hornworms of White-lined Sphinx Moths all around us. We’re aghast to see that this is one of those offputting Giant Desert Centipedes. Well, at least the centipedes here aren’t in the perpetually bad and aggressive mood that the Hawaiian species seem to be, and Jimmy doesn’t get sliced by the pair of venomous fangs of this one.

August 1, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , ,

Grasshoppers … pistachio green grasshoppers, vanilla striped. It is a month of insects, and we see new ones every year no matter how many years are spent on The River, some we only ever see once, some are greeted like old friends when they return, some of course bring an “Eww! not them again … forgot how much I can’t stand those things. When is it they leave?” On the Sphaeralcea mallows have appeared in their annual clockwork way pillbug-sized and -shaped larvae of something, in masses on the stems and leaf nodes–black or dark brown in body, covered in what look like should be nasty stinging hairs. They’ll be around for some weeks, grow a lot larger and be everywhere and then suddenly disappear. Tom O. finds out that they are the young stage of that very beautiful golden bug I’d last seen a couple weeks ago, whose intricate patterns gave me to dub it the Tao Bug. Their scientific name has a beauty equaling their colors and patterns, and is a very apt one: Calligrapha serpentina.

A Gray Hawk comes bursting out of the mesquite branches and woods edge, with many tail feathers missing and the rest of the bird looking pretty ragged, too. Earlier that was its sad, pained wail I heard, as if it were pleading, “Can no one stop this??” … two insanely angry kingbirds burst from those branches now behind him, dive on him, shriek out in this hawk drive of theirs, delighting in their work and the opportunity this presents for them to show off their aeronautics

July 17, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

Enough rain has fallen to have pleased the ants into hatching from underground chambers, and they rise in their winged millions into swirling black devils that the pickup smashes through every few yards. More mating hordes are scattered across the pastures, and along the unpaved Lane, rising, rising it seems, but only a few individuals at a time get to the top, clasp each other, and drop hard and fast down to the ground through the middle of the others who continue on the rise at the outer edges of the whirling column. Square dance moves, for insects.

On the leaves and stems of the desert mallows are a few of some of the most exquisite bugs I’ve ever seen, about the size of a Potato Bug, as beautiful as any piece of scarab jewelry. They are golden, and engraved with black lines in a design like a Yin Yang and until I can find more about them, I’ll call them not sow bugs, but Tao bugs.

Splayed out as if on a collector’s pin, a “Carolina Sphinx” moth is impaled on a barb on the top wire of the fence by the ephemeral stock tank. It is handsome, large, plain brown but with richly mottled hind wings, and six pairs of yellow spots run the length of its abdomen. How did it come to be there? Did that last blast of Monsoon wind that came before its rain hit nail that moth onto the fencewire? Shrikes are absent from here in the summer, but it sure looks like the work of one.

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 1, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , , , , ,

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!“

June 6, 2013

Nature Jottings, ,

It is 45 degrees at dawn when I check the herd at the Mason Pastures. Later in the day it’s 103 degrees where we check that herd up on the mesas and arroyos on range, in preparation for bringing those bulls, heifers, cows and calves down for the two-day overland drive south to their summer home on the Mason fields. Is it hot? I don’t know. Dry? oh yes: humidity, 6%. A month after the first “Cactus Dodger” cicada was heard up here, the hot air shakes and whines and quivers with their high metallic and wiry song. I love them; Loompy does not. As we ride along, one goes off with no warning of course on the tip of a creosote bush right next to his muzzle, and he freaks. I don’t think he can tell the difference between this and the sound that rattlesnake that bit him on the face must’ve made as it injected the venom that caused Loompy’s lower lip to droop permanently. Maybe I do wish the cicada opera season were done, though that will come of its own within three or four weeks. It seems right that I’ve come to be partners with a horse who made it through the bite of a rattlesnake: I have, too, though I’d had only one fang while he got a complete pair. (After we get back to El Potrero and have unsaddled and turned out the horses, I go to climb up into the big pickup and go home when a wild rattle comes from the pocket of the door, todos los santos! a rattlesnake there?? no–a Cactus Dodger cicada that found its way into the hole and set off a buzzing loudly funneled by the shape of that pocket. Took a while for my heart rate to slow.

And a month after their first ivory and white huge blossoms opened, some Saguaro are still studded with blooms, while many others never had any this year. In general, the ones on the ridge tops were flower-less, the ones almost at the bottoms of slopes at the arroyos and canyons might have plenty, a reflection of water regime I’d guess. There were bald exceptions to this, though. As a very good wine is to the palette, so the Saguaro flowers please the eye no matter how many times seen. We admire each one as we ride by, just as we did last year. I’m grateful Loompy no longer pushes my now-always-chap-covered thigh into all the spiky thorns with which are upholstered the trunks of the really big, old cactus we mosey along under. I keep in mind my gratitude for being able to come to this kind of place and see those pretty Saguaro flowers when later a tall dust devil draws its tail through a cobble of dried cowpies, the vortex changes color almost imperceptibly and drops on us and our horses a fine coating of fecal dust: a new flavor of Shake-and-Bake, yay! “And I helped!” said God.