Tag Archives: Dragonflies & damselflies

September 19, 2013

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As I drive away from the house I look up to the Rincon, where Full Moon sports with the highest peak, is shining out from a mother-of-pearl sky; thrashers scold, sparrows tsip and cheep. The season is on the other shoulder, in the bottomland it is 57 degrees, while it was 95 degrees when I left The Stockpond at 5:15 last night.

A Great Blue Heron this morning at that pond, and at least four Summer Tanagers call around it, some are adult males in bright red plumage. A large “finch”, white below, gray above, and with conspicuous large white eye ring is there too, who knows what it is, leaves before a better look and a determination can be had. Many things will remain unidentified in this pretty good group of birds–Little Brown Jobs, Little Green Jobs, Little Yellow Jobs. There is too much ranch work needing tending to, to give time to sorting out even a few. The aquamarine-colored Damselflies still swarm around the mud edges, and bottle green ones hover there, too. A folded-wing Skipper Butterfly skips from mud to mud, it has dusky brown wings, the lower ones with white trailing edge.

In one mesquite edge or another seen as I make work rounds are Green-tailed Towhee, McGillivray’s Warbler, another Dusky-capped Flycatcher … and along the Cascabel Road at the Mason Pastures’ north end is a fine adult Gray Hawk, the final one I’ll see in the Season of Plenty now winding down. Bug kind flies on, clicks, chirps, as if les bon temps will forever roule: small grasshoppers with turquoise hind wings, gorgeous nearly-hovering Lubbers in 1957 Studebaker color combinations of pistachio and melon-pink, black and yellow, the still-sweet Sweet Clover racemes of blossoms flickering with many Sulfur Butterflies.

Other residents are out that I’d rather see with more distance between … as I barge through the tall grass to get a wheel line moved, I nearly step on top a skunk, who takes the surprise good naturedly though the canopy of entwined grass stems might be what keeps it from being able to raise a tail well enough to add even more interest to the afternoon. Then something else moves itself, parting that grass in a long line as it comes towards me. Must be a snake, I think, and then its diamond pattern can be seen through openings in the blades, and the head, and the rattle-ended tail of a fella who’s all business and thoroughly p.o.’d. I tear off. It keeps up, just behind and for longer than I want. A Mojave Rattlesnake would be the first conclusion out here that would be come to, though Wikipedia says, “Although they have a reputation for being aggressive towards people, such behavior is not described in the scientific literature,” meaning, I suppose, that not enough scientists have moved wheel line irrigators.

The afternoon brings 100 degrees, the humidity builds and builds to a swelter. Monsoon is fixing to let loose on us one last blow.

September 6, 2013

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An odd bobbing and fluttering of a bird, like that of a Spotted Sandpiper and on the bank where one of those might be expected, caught my eye at The Stockpond but no, it is not a sandpiper. It’s a Northern Waterthrush! Immediately after, there arrived another Solitary Sandpiper in butterfly flight, pretty tail spread.

I’m joined at lunch at The Stockpond by a single Barn Swallow come to dip its bill in the water, and I realize that I’ve hardly seen one of them here since May. Not that they aren’t present nearby–indeed they nest abundantly (and some say, make themselves a nuisance) in patio eaves and barns all around us. With so much water flowing in The River, it’s there out of my sight where they’ve probably spent the summer coming to drink. The Waterthrush that arrived this morning is jumpy, flies off into the bosque whenever I move, but the hunger of the trip it must have been on to get here overcomes its fears. Dragonflies docked in pairs are dropping eggs just off the muddy edges, and a young Great Blue Heron comes to spend the afternoon.

August 15, 2013

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The Ides of August, the Ides of Summer for birds and the wildings, but the appearance of those Red-winged Grasshoppers tell that the nagging of winter pasture preparation and seeding and irrigating will soon be more shout than whisper. We’ve got at least as far as confining the Mason Pasture herd to one 350 ft. X 850 ft. swath (about seven acres) of bermudagrass, between two lines of electric fence with an exit to the pond, so cow folk can eat off the crop almost to the ground and make that ready for tilling six weeks or two months from now, clean out around the mesquites that must be pulled or dug out so that the rattlesnakes coiled below them will be more visible.

There are many baby birds cheeping away in the mesquite branches, probably second broods all. I want to spend two or three days right now, though, making a bird list, during these last moments when the summer still feels long and sweet …

Yellow Warbler (singing)

Yellow-breasted Chat (singing)

White-winged Dove

Lesser Goldfinch

Vermillion Flycatcher

Bell’s Vireo

Blue Grosbeak

Purple Martin

Summer Tanager (singing, and call notes)

Mourning Dove

Bewick’s Wren

Verdin

Abert’s Towhee

Lark Sparrow

Gray Hawk

Cardinal

Red-tailed Hawk

Gambel’s Quail

Crissal Thrasher

Black Phoebe

Western Kingbird

Savannah Sparrow (rare–but not unknown to be arriving now for winter)

The River is running, madly … many large blue dragonflies on The Stockpond, and “Whitetails”, or as I call them, Saddle Shoe Dragonflies. Bugs that like to harass humans are doing that, aplenty, worst of them are the tiny loudly singing gnats that fly into the cavern of an ear opening, get louder and louder but then their whine is suddenly cut off when they ditch into the pool of sweat that’s collected just inside the earlobe’s tinaja. This unpleasantness is made up for when the air is thick with the incomparable sweetness of huisache acacia blooms.

One of the cows, Molly, has had a bull calf and I’m worrying over both of them–the baby doesn’t know how to suckle, or maybe even that it’s supposed to. Mamma’s not looking all that good either, uh oh, a big chore coming on. I think she had it Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. … Save the life of my child/cried the desperate mother …

July 22, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

Many species of dragonflies and damselflies–all of them beautiful–have gathered around The Stockpond, out on that permanent main leak we call “The Cienega”, and over the ephemeral dirt tank. There are, however, no tadpoles to be seen in the main pond! The algae sheets have reappeared of a sudden, and maybe they’re hiding under them.

Bell’s Vireos are chattering from every bosque edge. Caltrops are in bloom out on the pastures, small-flowered species and large, and a single Yellow-headed Blackbird stops by.

A profound end of day calm comes upon these pastures and mesquitales and in the pink afterglow The Stockpond is silent and empty. A single tanager’s “pik-tuck-tuck” from the mesquites off to the West, one nighthawk drinks and is gone, a single new mother cow is mooing impatiently far off.

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 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 16, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

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

Nature Jottings, ,

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.