Tag Archives: Ducks & teals

September 9, 2013

Nature Jottings

A lone duck on The Stockpond, another Teal … with bill broad and black, edged with yellow … rather tame, it seems unbothered by me and stretches a wing out lazily to show a large blue wing patch and green speculum, beautiful. I’ll take this for a first year Cinnamon Teal, that hasn’t yet learned there is benefit in wariness.

Wild Clematis drapes lacy white veils of seed plumes high in the roadside bosque and down to the ground, in places so thickly the cows on the pasture beyond can’t be seen from the truck through them.

September 3, 2013

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A lemon slice Moon, shining through clear, cool air that’s richly moist and that, yes, tastes of Autumn. Poorwill, Owl, Coyote sing their Sonoran bolero.

Six Teal fly up from The Stockpond, I’d better make more careful approach from now on: another of the little hints of Fall being on the way. The ducks circle and circle, but do land again and stay nervous while I’m there. How to tell which these are, Blue-winged or Cinnamon? The head of one is reddish, and I think I can safely call that one, at least, a Cinnamon, but the others …?

It’s still Summer, the Monsoon tells with a drenching storm in the afternoon.

August 29, 2013

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A little before sunrise at The Stocktank, the first Teal take wing. I’ve been lulled so long into endless San Pedro summer I didn’t expect the return of waterfowl so soon (it’s later than I think), and did not approach the water carefully enough to be able to see which species of these famously jumpy duck they were. Too large for Green-winged, they’re either Cinnamons or Blue-winged. A set of owls is gossipping still, probably saying about the human with no stalking skill, “Now there’s a lubber!” A lone Summer Tanager calls out its pik-tuk-tukk, but doesn’t sing. Was that a Wilson’s Warbler already? Something yellow, small, bright.

Masses of swallows are over the pastures, probably on that ethereal path heading south. A large flock of large blackbirds shoots past on high, too high to figure out what they are but I’m guessing they’re the first Brewer’s returning or passing, could be going to winter anywhere from here to Tehuantepec, truly a “North American” species. So many of the birds of this place are restive … coming, passing, or thinking of leaving. Overhead are silhouettes of many I’m certain are on the move, with bills pointing south.

The Sonoran Desert Toads smug in the knowledge of how they’ve arrived uptown there in the much-watered native grass seedling field have grown to silver dollar size.

May 30, 2013

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Now at last, the dawn comes in at the ridge above Pool Wash with a temperature of 71 degrees, though in the Mason Pastures it’s “only” just above 60 degrees. The humidity has gone up, too, to 50%, and the air is lush and soft, and rich smells well up from watered areas. The one Mexican Mallard is soon joined by his mate, whom he right off chases across the water, and they zoom around and around until she hits the bank running–literally. They leg it off at a running waddle into the bosque, and disappear. The pond edges flicker with sparrows, Summer Tanagers, orioles, warblers, flycatchers, kingbirds, hummingbirds, a Cooper’s Hawk, doves …

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 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 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.

May 10, 2013

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An oriole is piping in the bosque despite the cold before sunrise–and cold it is, the upper 30s again! Yet by mid-afternoon the air will reach the mid-80s. Myself I’m grousing, not piping, over having to get wet in setting up the early sprinkler irrigation. The pair of Mexican Mallards that are on The Stockpond these mornings are swimming and foraging when I arrive, but are gone when I get back to the pump to check pressure and oil drip. I’m sure they take off when the water comes shooting out of the pond outlet with the noise of Old Faithful. This becomes their habit during this period of irrigation, and they often don’t return before I leave at day’s end. The gush of water doesn’t bother the Spotted Sandpiper cutting a rumba along the shore, it must be grateful to find this mud no matter how cold it is, or how noisy the riser’s spray or ominously moans the sniffer that lets air pressure out ahead of the nose of the water rushing down the main. All the Yellow-rumped Warblers seem gone, or at least their absence is conspicuous. I expect they’ve found streams and conifers more to their liking now high in those mountains above us, in the Rincon and the Santa Catalina and the Pinalenos.

Not a male, but a female, Redwing sits on a wheel today. She shows orange before the eye, and a little red shoulder herself and both make her sure-enough pretty as the male is handsome. It’s a monsoon sky overhead full of beautiful clouds that long ago had became rare, and late in the day there is thunder from afar. Is this all we’re going to be getting out of Mini Monsoon this year?

May 9, 2013

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The Lucy’s Warblers continue the symphony, broadcasting from the Concertgebosque at those same northern double gates at first light, though this day it’s all drowned out for a moment by a Stiffwing Hawk carrying passangers high overhead towards Tucson.

The Northern Mallards are gone, but Mexican Mallards have come back to The Stockpond. (This pair will be on the water most every day for the rest of the month.) White-crowned Sparrows have become rare enough that any lingering here are notable, this morning a pair of them drink at the pond’s edge; Lark Sparrows have by and large replaced the many wintering related species that’ve now left for the Plains or the Tundra or summer life Above the Rim.

Blue Grosbeaks, my … oh … my. There was a single one here for a day a week ago, but this morning the pastures are from out of the “blue” filled with them, they sit all along the wheel line axles taking in the luxury of this their Summer Place though the records have it that this shouldn’t have come about for a few more weeks. With them are many Lazuli Bunting (Nancy F. pointed out that the two birds, grosbeak and bunting, are in the same genus) no less beautiful or calling of one’s attention, and these should soon become more uncommon as they also leave for lands north of the Mogollon Rim but for now, they still seem to be everywhere I look.

In an afternoon Monet light, the gross of grosbeaks works over the heads of barley and oats going now to gold and going to grain, and that grass is alive with the birds who flutter while climbing the stalks from the ground to reach the fruiting spike, there pick out the goodies and are slowly lowered back to the ground as that stalk bends with the weight. A lone and very handsome male Redwing sits atop a wheel and watches all that going on below him.

May 4, 2013

Nature Jottings,

A pair of (Northern) Mallard are on The Stockpond; it’s been a couple weeks since any were here and I thought they’d left. These could be semi-wild ones, I suppose.

Many turkey tracks, in the mud around a riser mid-field. Wanderers from the restocking program on the Sky Islands roundabout, or wanderers coming down the San Pedro north out of Mexico?