Tag Archives: Ducks & teals

May 3, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , , , , ,

A pair of Mexican Mallard at The Stockpond, but the Solitary Sandpiper has indeed gone as has the Kingfisher. The Cooper’s Hawk gives those kookaburra calls from the bosque offstage to the south. It’s cold again, no hint of Foresummer … the temperature hovering at 40 degrees! Windy, oh so windy, and the single Green-tailed Towhee who’s now getting to be on the late side of hanging out here likely feels still quite in his element, so why would he leave for the North? The hummingbirds are hardly in a cold stupor, three or four male Black-chinned come to cavort in the little waterfalls sluicing from one green algae ring to another floating on the surface, as the riser tall above them splashes water down. We would love to do this if we were their size … hummers are so human sometimes, and we, so hummer. No females play in the algae this way, but one comes flying in and onto the side of that vertical riser and lands in the manner of a Swift, upright and flat on the pipe, her body pressed hard to its side below the opening and in that position she bathes in the dribbles running down from the hydrant joint. I have no idea how she holds on.

Meanwhile, the pickup I’d been sitting in had a rear tire losing air while I was watching the pond. So much for tending to the wheel lines getting them watering again: this was the third flat since yesterday and the usable spares had finally run out. Gggrrrrr, I grumbled and stomped up the lane through mesquites with canopies of leaves still wrecked by the deep freeze of two weeks ago. Eeehhhehhheh I didn’t want to be hitchhiking on this early cold morning on which not many folk would be stirring. Out on the wide open gravel road to Cascabel outside the green ranch gate it was windier still, and dust devils came along down the road edge one after another to take aim at me squarely, one or two forcing open my tightly closed eyelids …[…]

I take a childhood comfort in the sound of Redwing Blackbird calls, between gusts of wind the notes of the bird come to my ears from that sadly wilted canopy of mesquites now getting burned off even more by the wind. The dust is risen to a heaven that has become the mauve color of those grasshoppers’ wings of yesterday, and the details of the mountain ridges and canyons are blurred-out all around. At last a large yellow tool-van appears around the far south bend of the road, coming towards me but by this time I’m wind-blown and shaggy … he slows way down, not to avoid coating me in road dust (that’s already an accomplished fact) but to have a look, and in the end he must decide my shabby ranch clothes make me too iffy and scurvy character in an Old West comic book. He picks up speed and adds more dust to the mauve sky and to my shoulders then all goes quiet again but for the wind as he disappears. The cold does not let up. Strangely, in the moment that I grasp the perfection of this lesson in The Suchness of Things–cold, wind, flat tires, dust, uncompassionate and fearful motorist, lust for hot cowboy coffee, regret that I’d had no more to eat than that one banana–perfection drifts down to me from somewhere impossibly high in the dusty air overhead. “Curlee! Curleeeeee!! Curlleeeeeeeeeww!” … the cry of the ghost of a whole wild continent lost, and the hair on my neck rises. I know what it is, but it can’t be what it is, it just can’t, but then for a few moments the speck appears in a pocket of air somewhat clear of dust, the binoculars find it and I see the splendid long bill and cinnamon wings of a lone Long-billed Curlew, the bird nearly suspended in the headwind …[…]

My experience of The West is somewhat more sober than what was described in this pleasant boosterism that over decades to 1910 evolved into the anthem, “Home, Home on the Range”. The Suchness of Things: had the morning gone as planned and I not been visited by the usual troubles familiar to Dave Stamey if not to Dr. Higley, I’d’ve been long gone from these pastures and on to other chores … without that flat tire I’d have missed that curlew as it was trying to find The River or an irrigated field. It didn’t land in ours though it flew lower for a look. In New Mexico some years back, while I was working in the alfalfa fields of dear friends outside Roswell, I and an ol’ boy neighbor rancher were standing together when a spectacular large flock of Long-billed Curlew swept in and landed at the edge of the irrigation flood. As the birds set about snapping up insects the advancing water forced into the air ahead of it, I asked the man if the curlews had a local name. “We call ’em, ‘Mile-or-more-birds’.” “Mile-or-more-birds?”, I said. “Yessir.” “So why d’ya call ’em that?” “Wellsir, when one o’ those birds shoves that bill up the @## of the one standing next to it, ya can hear that scream a mile-or-more.”

The musing was barely out of my head when [Bob Rogers and a colleague from] The Nature Conservancy appeared around that same bend to the south that the yellow van had, oh was I thankful that another vehicle had come along at last and in it were friendly faces! […]

True to the spirit of Dave Stamey’s song, the temperature had risen by 45 degrees by afternoon when I went back to continue the day’s work in those pastures. The wind, though, was no longer wild enough to be blowing grit into my teeth, and the sky had turned back to Arizona blue over the first pretty flowers of the rather ugly-named but reputedly tasty Hog Potato. Swallows everywhere over Pasture #3: Violet-green Swallows, Barn Swallows, the season’s first Cliff Swallows, Tree Swallows, and of course many Rough-winged Swallows, all swirled together in a massive flock, gyrating and hunting the insects that have come back to life after the morning’s deep chill … […]

April 30, 2013

Nature Jottings,

The glory of Arizona April ends with one last Meadowlark, who looks forlorn: surely he’s thinking of other climes and the bubbling companionship of his vanished mates. The pair of Mexican Mallards there on the Stockpond again today will probably stay on with us, this being their own Far North.

April 28, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , ,

There are no wrens taking wing before wheel line irrigators as I move them across the pasture–they are gone! No Western Meadowlarks–have they gone too? In their place a dazzling and minute Azure butterfly has scattered itself, searching out small flowers that are struggling back from the cold.

The “regular” Mallards are gone, too, their place taken by a “Mexican” Mallard pair–appropriate to a day that will reach well above 90 degrees, and appropriate to that romantic Sonoran AM-radio station that I tune in again this Sunday after the early irrigation chores are taken care of. A pair of Yellow-breasted Chats come down to the Stockpond shore and drink; we have I think the most brilliantly colored of any subspecies of this bird that ranges over most of the country. The usual many hummingbirds are sipping or sparring for king-of-the-pond, the White-winged Doves cooing and calling in even greater numbers than before, in the bosque all around and the mesquites overhanging the water. Although I’ve read that it has spread through the South, the White-wing is still to me the embodiment of Sonora and these Spanish Borderlands we it must seem beyond reason love so passionately. The sound of them as winter ends immediately puts me at ease, assures me the valley of the Rio San Pedro is still a wondrous and different place. One hears their voice in the background of Tom Sheridan’s delightful book of the Sonoran village of Cucurpe, that place “Where the Dove Calls”, and I expect their sound inspired the huapango, “Cucurrucucu Paloma”. Joan Baez does a more than fair imitation:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xl84wjM8z8

Songs about Mexico, and Mexican music, avian and human, are whether or not Manifest Destiny wishes to face it a part of this very landscape stretching out beyond the Stockpond through monte and matorral to the Rincon and the Catalina and the Galiuro, and south to the Sierra Madre … […]

Me he de comer esa tuna, aunque me espine la mano … No matter the hand be pierced by spines, I can’t other than eat of that prickly pear. This is always sung with the exquisite pain of romance in mind, but it well sums up cowboy life as at least I have known it and still know it here, sums up the relationship those who make their living by ranching have with what is just another painful romance, one that in the end leaves you stove-up if not physically broken, likely penniless–but satisfied …[…]

April 21, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , ,

The Mallard is out there, alone on the cold pond; in the 30s again. I sit in the pickup bird blind, the early Sunday “Domingo Romantico” out of Sonora bringing into the cab that finest 1930s and ’40s music of Mexico, while I watch Black-chinned Hummingbirds who seem utterly unperturbed by winter returning here right after they did. The males stream in and out from the bosque, land for the briefest moment in a bed of algae and pull single green strands from the floating mess, up into the air for a ways but then let go … or they try picking up a strand of it in the tip of the beak, as if they were pulling a thread to knot, but that gets dropped, too, though the bird can be high above the water before it lets go. Maybe the most surprising was the hummer who flew to the base of the tall riser that comes up out of the water near the pond edge, that is opened to let water flow in an arc from the top to maintain the Stockpond’s water level. As this stream hits the surface, a sort of ojo de agua is formed: a ring of water that rises with the impact of that stream. That hummingbird loved to hover just above this ring of flowing and bouncing water, then lower himself ever so slowly onto it with wings still a-whir above his back, and in this way he’d ride up and over and then slide into more open water beyond, then he’d take off. Humans are hardly the only animals that do things for the sheer enjoyment of them! I remember one Black-chinned last summer who’d come to the leaf tip of a millet plant that had sprouted from bird seed, if I had a sprinkler going and the leaves were wet and holding water in a bit of a cup at their base. That little bird played in the water, lowering himself onto the leaf tip when a stream would be running towards the base, and he’d “slide” all the way, then go back and do it again.

A first Wilson’s Warbler, a beautiful male, flies in, and numbers of White-winged Doves now coo from the bosque and from the wondrously large hackberries around the Stockpond … a probably long dead Mexican in gorgeous tenor croons with them, “Tell her … tell her I think of her, even though she doesn’t think of me … tell her that I die for her”–how different is that from what the doves are getting at? A just arrived Yellow-breasted Chat fusses and hoots, hidden deeply in a graythorn bramble.

I return throughout the day to change wheel lines and waters, and scare up a wren or two–today one showed the black stripes on its back as it flew off across the tips of the barley and oats, so I’m sure these are Marsh Wrens still.

The day ends with a Great Horned Owl silhouetted among the upmost snags of a dead mesquite, a black cut-out against the almost gone red light of evening, looking rather spooky.

 

April 19, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , ,

Early light. The air is frigid, in these lowest of flats to which the cold of every mountain range east and west drains and pools. Mallard is unbothered with his feet wet in his pond, but I know what it will be like to open the hydrants for the wheel lines and get soaked by the wide fountains of water that’ll shoot up the sleeves of my workshirt and into the tops of my rubber boots. The silence is near unearthly, no migrants from the tropics stir or warble or scold. What was greening mesquite is collapsed everywhere and melting in dribbles, from their tree tops down to every last small one sprouted out across the pastures; their growth they’d put on so far this spring won’t make it through to turn dark green now, or expand. It will all have to be pushed out again from nothing. So much for the oft-heard truism that mesquites know when to leave out, for none of these apparently did! I wonder how many times I’ve seen this happen with them of an April, and though I didn’t plant by them as some do, I regret that this year will not be one of that sweet green, stained-glass light in the bosque for a few days while the leaflets are still small and pale and the canopy shimmers and glows. We can’t depend on a yearly show of wildflowers, and we can’t depend on having this pleasure every spring, either.

Holding the freezing metal handles of the irrigation risers while turning them to open the water is itself trial enough, but my wetted hands then go to aching deeply, and then go to numbness seconds after the water comes flying out the more explosively as the valve is opened wider. The sprinklers came up to full pressure, shooting out in arcs of about 50 ft. and turning their big circles, and already within three revolutions the weeds, grass, and now-wrecked mesquites are encrusted with filigrees and lace of shining white frost and ice crystals that appeared so quickly that it seemed some spell of the Sierra Madre had been chanted out by an hechicero offstage and unseen. It is surely lower than 20 degrees F., but I don’t need to know. I just want the sun to rise.

Come up it does, and as the day warms by fifty degrees or more, a vast array of plants begins to turn odd colors and twist up, then fall to the ground and flatten themselves. Oats … sow thistle … conaigre … melilotus … desert mallow … bindweed … tansy mustard … Wright’s saltweed … conyza … bull thistle and star thistle … the bermuda grass that was coming along so robustly to give cows a wider buffet soon–all collapsed and will not recover. But spring cannot be stopped and the afternoon warmth brought out a huge native black bee, and the first deep amythyst flowers of Silver-leaf Nightshade on a plant that wasn’t affected in the least by the sub-freezing night. Winter finches were in their comfort zone–Vesper Sparrows on every barbed wire fence and in the grassy edges, and the Savannah Sparrows weren’t shy at all today. I scared up a few Marsh Wrens, even though they all should have been on the 3:10 to Yuma four days ago.

A fine Cassin’s Kingbird perched atop a close-by wheel of the irrigators as all was being closed down in the pleasantly warm afternoon, its belly bright, lemon dot-candy yellow.

April 18, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

Our male Mallard flies in quacking on the Stockpond–what has happened to his mate? He swims around, calling for her, but she hasn’t been here for a week and is not to be seen again. He’s alone in the cold, and oh is it cold, below freezing. He doesn’t mind the water of course, but it’s no fun to me to be getting the usual drenching out of the hydrant getting up the first set of irrigation … both M’llard and I should be on the Sea of Cortez, or I in Alamos. Painting. Writing. The duck, though, if he is a truly wild one, will likely be heading north or finding a cooler spot in the New Mexico high country within a few weeks. Right now this one is plenty cool enough.

A few Marsh Wrens in that newly grazed pasture of last evening’s herd, and not a few Savannah Sparrows, which are less secretive in the cold air. A Gray Flycatcher lets me approach almost to it on the barbed wire fence at the edge.

April 17, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

The male Mallard still alone at the Stockpond, and in the outmost mesquital beyond and nearer the River, a fine Bullock’s Oriole, a much later than usual arrival of this “neotropical”. Many Yellow-rumped Warblers in splendid and bright marriage garb, coming down to the pond edge for a drink, or hunting through the pasture grass pipit-like. This is too beautiful a bird to be tossed off with an, “Oh, just Butter-butts”, by the Life List Set that comes to Arizona to seek out our famous avian rarities. Normally that warbler’s numbers are larger earlier, and smaller by now, but this is turned on its head; they are everywhere.

Out in the deep winter pastures, another warbler: Yellowthroats are rising, flying off, and dropping into the grass, much like the Marsh Wrens who are not to be seen today.

Our little mixed herd of a couple dear old cows, steers and heifers for grassfed beef, and heifers we’ll keep, race out and kick up their heels in joy over coming into new grass that will be grazed for the first time, in this late afternoon of air that whispers change. The temperature twenty degrees lower than yesterday’s, the day cool but lively, and this beautiful sunset all is very quiet, so quiet the contented munching of the herd carries far and I bask in an all-is-well bucolic sweetness. The air all around and over them is electric, beryl-green, shot through with gold, Barn Swallows swirl and chitter through that air, and snap at the insects the cows as they move stir into flight. A moment of great contentment for those golondrinas, the cows, and me.

April 13, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , ,

A honeyed and calling fragrance in the air, sweet, drifting to the Stockpond from the direction of the San Pedro, which river wanders by close to the west. I presume it is from the clouds and sprays of pink tamarisk blossoms in the reaches of the bottomlands, where there is now a show of color that can be seen from Cascabel Road from enough of a rise.

The lone male Mallard still floats on the pond, he’d been kept company by an adult Black-crowned Night Heron until I drove up. Night Herons being a jumpy sort, it vanished quickly not to reappear. Was this the one that spent a few days here last June when in immature plumage but by now should have matured into an elegant adult bird? Northern Beardless-Tyrannulets (the name is longer than the tiny bird itself–is that true of the Southern Beardless-Tyrannulet, too??) gave their wheezy, sneezy whistles from the bosque and later as I made rounds I could hear them all along the River; I guess they’d arrived together in the night. They can be called down from the trees if one wants to get a close look; I must’ve hit on their territorial call. This is another creature that in late years could be come across in every month of winter, but this season’s frigid air must’ve driven them far to the south, maybe completely out of Arizona. Their arrival in numbers should also in a “normal” year have come about two weeks ago but they were loathe to leave wherever they were.

The wrens began their usual flying up from my footfalls as I walked along the wheel line to open a hydrant, but this day they didn’t fly off quickly nor drop out of sight maddeningly. Several of them flitted off only a few feet, then landed on the spokes of the irrigators so close to me it was hard to focus in with the glasses, jumped around, looked for spiders and such in the corners of the aluminum. There were the white spots I’d been told about, but most amazingly, there were on each of their backs lines of pretty black stripes. I could hardly grasp this, because it identified these little mystery birds that are everywhere in the deep winter grasses we’d planted in October and December as the Marsh Wren!

We have in our way recreated long-vanished cienegas with these winter leafy pastures for the cattle, by bringing water up from 25 ft. under ground and spreading it over these acres. It may be that rather with the grazing schedule, the wrens move from one area of these winter cereals to another with the waterings, which make of them a marsh about a hundred feet wide that stays wet in the shade of the plants for a few days at a time, this cycling accomplished through all the acres over a week’s period. By now the wrens have become used to my tromping through and didn’t go so far off before slipping back beneath the grass canopy. I’d hope Iris Dement would approve of “allowing” the birds to show themselves in their own time like that. Letting their “mystery be” was a pleasure.

After a winter that had the Lark Buntings abandon us, they are passing back north through the pastures. Many females, many males in an eclipse plumage but not a few in their startling and sharp black-and-white courting outfits. I watched one of those fine males for a while, who was moving along the ground looking for insects and seeds in remarkably plover-like actions. Then he and several others flew up and arranged themselves artfully in a round young mesquite tree, and these immediately joined by other birds each competing in beauty: Lazuli Buntings as bright as blue reef fish, numbers of sorrel and white and black-pointed Chipping Sparrows in their full fresh spring plumage, a single Vermillion Flycatcher for a tabasco splash, unfurling pastel mesquite leaflets a foil for all these colors of a Mexican tin Tree-of-Life come brightly to life.

April 12, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , , , ,

One Mallard, the male, on the water today. A pair of Yellow Warblers are in chase with each other, around and around the Stockpond, and around … and around …

Another kingbird, I think a Western by its voice, arrived. Rough-winged Swallows have been increasing, but none over the pastures this whole day. There are a few Meadowlarks, though. Many Vesper Sparrows in the weedy edges and on the barbed wire crossfences, surely they are about to become more scarce; this was the most abundant of the wintering sparrows this year. The wrens, ah yes, the wrens, still tease in the pasture of lush winter graze, to which they’ve all moved over from a couple risers to the south. Seems they prefer yet-to-be-eaten-off, above-the-knee-deep bluegreen oats and barley, the cattle having gone into the wrens’ old area and taken it down to about one foot tall with all the efficiency of a tractor mower, leaving the stumpy culms from the tips of which will sprout a new shoot and then sets of leaves.

A fearless and friendly Gray Flycatcher pops up here and there as I do one chore or another, on a fenceline or in the mesquite tangled edges, pumping its tail as the species so distinctly does. They must be on the move, I hadn’t seen one the whole of winter here. Another species, an insect, came along today, one that in all other years I have seen in every month: the Tarantula Hawk. Those January days of a cold that froze over the Stockpond must’ve had an effect on their movements, if not their survival. It’s the first I’ve seen since Christmas.

Field Bindweed coming into bloom in the pastures–a noxious plant, but pretty as any hanging basket flower in a garden center and cattle are mad for it. Pat often wishes there were enough of it to bale, and use later.

A Red-tailed Hawk is acting like no other in my acquaintance, though the behavior is reported in mountainous territory with knife-edge ridges and strong updrafts. It was back again today, facing into the wind with all the moves of a Kestrel–barely flapping, suspended in one place with tail fanned out widely and using it brilliantly as rudder, hangs high up there for a long time, then drops like a stone from that place stationary in the strong spring gusts and onto some witless creature on the ground.