Tag Archives: Flycatchers

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 18, 2013

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One or two individuals of a broad array of birds decorate The Stockpond, all nicely plumaged: Wilson’s Warbler; Black-headed Grosbeak; Bell’s Vireo; Brown-headed Cowbird; McGillivray’s Warbler; Vermillion Flycatcher; young Western Kingbird; Blue Grosbeak; a female Lazuli Bunting (though plain, still pretty with that blue tail of hers); and Gray Flycatcher–the first returning individual that I’ve seen, pumping its tail down in that distinctive way of theirs that is a godsend of a diagnostic “mark” for this species in a crazy-making genus. The more-greenish-than-grayish little flycatcher jumps off a branch time and again, drops and splashes in miniature belly flops into the pond, and is up then on the wing quickly enough to avoid sinking.

Blue Grosbeaks out in the pastures, who seem still to be unaware their endless Summer will indeed have an end, cavort on the wheel lines, bathe at the tops of the wheels in water that stays collected in the grooves with the constant passing around of the arcs of spray. The shining, sapphire birds stand and let themselves be hit by the waterdrops thrown over them, shake themselves off, then slide down the incline of the wheel to land in another puddle when they want even more fun!

Atop one of the plastic (insulated) electric line posts a large Apache Jumping Spider hangs out, waiting for some bug to land haplessly. It jumps inside the hollows of the post where the wires pass through when I come close for a better look at this most beautiful of Southwestern spiders, and then it comes back out and stares at me through all those eyes as if trying to remember where it knows me from. It is all black velvet and red velvet, most elegantly patterned.

Harvester Ants are cranky after the irrigation leaves their big, bare circle drenched, they swarm all over the place and I know they’d find me trying if I came any closer, but there is a very large, pale brown Swallowtail butterfly who keeps flitting around them. It’s a female Pipevine Swallowtail, the only one I’ve seen this year–and usually males are everywhere through Summer but they were scarce this year. She has cream spots striped between with blue on her underwings, and flashes amythyst on her upper surfaces–a very different color than that indescribably tropical blue of the males. She lands all over that circle, throws out a proboscis to the mud but is only relaxed for a second or two before she has to hot-foot it as ants try to latch on to her tiny feet. She seems to know just how much she can get away with before she’s got to take wing and try another spot.

September 13, 2013

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A Poorwill-sung dawn, with a warmth that has Chris E., James C. and I on the early side saddling up the horses we’ll ride today on range–Chris on my Loompy, James on his Clu, and I on Pat’s Nimby. It will be in the 90s before we turn back on the trail home to El Potrero, the Barrel Cactus are still in their center-crown, late summer orange-petalled splendor, and of all the astonishing things that give one to know that Summer doesn’t let go, we find a Saguaro still in bloom. We pick our way carefully down a long rocky slope from a saddle between ridges, and come down into a broad, white sand bottom and when I nudge Nimby up that canyon to continue our ride just a bit further in the direction away from home, that horse I’m sitting decides to go into a run–backwards, towards home where he thought it was more reasonable to be going. Angry he didn’t get his way with a rider with whom he had almost no experience? Did he see a Jackrabbit, which can make him jump so that I’ve come to call them “Jack(theRipper)rabbits” or “Death Bunnies” as Pat calls them? A couple of hard bucks quickly following one on the other and my left foot is lost from the stirrup as the scenery and time fly past me only now in reverse … I’m still somehow upright in the saddle when his croup knows a sudden and violent comeuppance as we hit a deep wall of Catclaw trees and the sharp bank of the canyon bottom they’re growing against. He rears, tumbles, all is dust and billows of shaken-loose acacia leaflets, then I re-materialize out of that bronc-made haboob among splintering thorny branches and more rising dust, sitting in the arroyo sand with my legs spread out as wide as they were on either side of his flanks only a few calm, but very long-ago moments before. I’ve come to a standstill; Nimby has not. His is a body tending to stay in motion … his be-hind thud-lands between my far spread legs as he, continuing backwards, trips over a low horizontal branch but somehow even though it is Friday the 13th the horse hasn’t crushed me yet. Up he rises again, and up and up, towering into the sky or so it looks from my vantage point where I’m still trapped at his rear and flattened out on the ground. I concentrate on getting my right foot from the off-side stirrup, don’t know why it’s still stuck in there, but then every shred of my being comes welded to the vision of a black horse with head straight up, pawing into the empty air as if swimming for his life, he balancing there like that for a slowed-down second or two. The hands on my pocket watch stand still while he does. I stare up the line of his backbone–it’s not a question of whether he’ll topple, but which way will he topple. Something keeps me from getting out from behind him, maybe I’m frozen there in acceptance of my fate: if he comes back all the way it will split me right up through my middle, from stem-to-sternum, lengthwise, with saddle horn sunk into my chest as if I were a vampire. When for half a second that backbone of his begins tottering my way my thought is simple and resigned: “I’m about to be in the dark.” I’m still unhurt I think, but also still stuck, I scream out a long death wail, I know the last noise I might ever make and it’s from a place deeper in my soul than any where I’d ever brought anything up from or that I’d ever known was there to plumb. I guess there will be no more entries made in the nature journal. The scream startles him and he sways forward a bit, just enough that when he does come backwards it is now to the side, and all that wild horseflesh with its four flailing limbs plows into the sweet soft sand a little ways off my left shoulder. I don’t know how he misses me, he rolls away from me, jumps up, and is gone from my sight behind, down the canyon and I presume, home the way he wanted to go the whole time. My regular horse, Loompy, who together with Chris on his back has been watching, must have thought, “God, what a display. Tsk, tsk, tsk.” I wonder what rule of riding, or knowledge of horses I’m still ignorant of, has played a part in bringing about this wreck.

I live. No broken bones that I can feel, and my organs seem to be left whole, too. My spurs are shoved deeply in the sand, but I totter upwards myself and turn to see the horse not far off at all. He’s running in circles trying to get away from a wide Catclaw branch that’s deeply tangled in his tail and whose thorny twigs are poking the insides of both his legs … I give silent thanks when I see his reins didn’t break off, so I grab them but he keeps spinning away from me as I try to reach back for the branch that appears to be hopelessly knotted into his long tail. Finally I can grab the thick, woody end of that branch and yank hard, and the moment Nimby knows it’s gone he comes to a standstill. Nothing appears wrong with him, though myself I’m already feeling like I’ve been rear-ended at a stoplight with my head having popped out a back windshield; I turn him up-canyon and away from home, and with a laughably painful challenge I mount, and then as if not much happened we continue on our way, go to check whether the watergap fence at Saguaro Juniper’s border has remained intact through the flash floods of this Monsoon. “Do you compete in the rodeo?”, a woman once asked me. “No Ma’am, not if I can help it. That’s the kind of thing we pray at dawn Monday morning won’t happen this week, and on Saturday night following give thanks hadn’t …” […]

The morning excitement worn off, I go back to Mason’s to dig mesquite in the to-be winter pasture, and in the golden light of late Summer. There’s a pair of Mexican Mallard on The Stockpond and four Teal, and then I spot a huge turtle–probably ten inches across its shell–sitting on top a rock a bit off the mud bank out in the water. Trying to sneak up on it for a better look is useless, what with those ducks taking wing in an explosion and I am distracted by the splendor of those Teal spinning over me, turning to show blue shoulders, turning then to show their white underwings with black fore-edge. The turtle, which I’m never able to identify as anything native, is gone. How did it get there? I’m never to see it again, either.

Out where I head to start pulling mesquite, a pair of Chihuahuan Ravens are standing aside a cow manure pile, one bird on watch, the other picking apart the poop chunks and as I approach, the one not at work lets out an obvious warning, “Cheese it! The cops!”, and they both fly off squawling. This would not be the last time I’d find the birds doing this, for as long as the herd vacuums up mesquite pods, and shoot the now-shucked beans out their back ends, Ravens will come to pull out those beans the cattle kind have so nicely prepared, and gobble them down–all the fewer seedlings for us to contend with later! There is a reprise of White-lined Sphinx Moth larvae, now scattered over the grasses and larger than any that’ve come before, but I don’t see Ravens going for them.

A flycatcher I might take for an Ash-throated (which species has been strangely sparse here this year), comes for a few moments into the big mesquite edge, just long enough for me to end up thinking there was something … different about it. A Dusky-capped, down from the mountains and thence south far into Mexico, or migrating down from a bit further north in Arizona?

September 12, 2013

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Poorwill calls his “4:00 am, all’s still well,” and I turn on the coffee.

Young, greenish Summer Tanagers are wheezing in the mesquites at The Stockpond, hoping parents are still willing to give them their hand-outs. It’s been a good long time since any hummers have come there to drink, though there are still a number of them to be seen around the valley.

Seems to be a lull in grasshopper population and activity in general, except for the gigantic Lubbers, which have arrived at Mason Pastures and put on more and more of a show with those pink underwings of theirs flashing in their high, arching flight. Only Queen Butterflies, still no Monarchs–and as it would turn out, no Monarchs that I would ever see will cross these pastures the whole year.

Verdolagas are in bloom, these with extra large yellow flowers, mix beautifully with the magenta of a tiny flowered Four-o’-clock creeping among them. There are almost no toads out and about on the pastures by now, but what’s there have grown larger still and jump into wider-mouthed burrows when my passing shadow alarms them.

Time to see what autumnal winged insects are gathering in #3 Pasture, in its upper end where there are so many native plants and wildflowers and its Burroweed quarter is coming into its first flowering. A fully-plumaged Blue Grosbeak shimmers from the tip of a mesquite on the edge of the Dirt Tank, sings out as if it were the height of Summer. In past years the butterflies have made a real show here, but today they’re sparse (and it will turn out that they’ll remain sparse the rest of the season–there was a real decline in butterflies on The River for the whole year, to my eye.) A few Sulphurs and a Checkerspot come around the tiny, petal-less Burroweed flowers, and there are a number of Queens, one of which is an extra rich dark orange. I watch another Queen that’s not far away and through the binoculars I can make out the smallest and prettiest details, but … as I watch, it suddenly slumps over backwards, folds its wings together, drops from a blossom to the ground. I run the few feet to it, in time to see it give a couple twitches–and then it dies. No predator brought eternity to this little spark of life, I watched that happen of a moment its own. I’d never seen the likes of so Ecclesiastes an event … turn … turn … turn.

Although Burroweed can bring real problems to cattle if a rancher is careless in management, I also don’t want to see this flat of them in #3 Pasture eradicated: it’s a generous pollen and nectar bank that could be an ace in the hole for many Sonoran Desert insects each one of which is seemingly more jewel-like than those on the last bush I pass. The commonest by far is a Blister Beetle (the critter, a Pyrota sp., I dare not touch!), ochre and shining gold, with black spots at the tips of the wing covers, and other black spots on the upper back. It’s one of a number of these justly feared insects we have here, all of them beautiful and interesting (in that way that Poison Dart Frogs are beautiful and interesting), in their various genera and species found from Moosejaw to Mexico.

Mesquite, however, is something I do want to see eliminated there, but it is besting us again on that pasture, and looks like it will win the battle it has with us for land for expanding its forest–land we want for a grass community instead. At least I can get some satisfaction from pulling out a few Cocklebur, and, with exasperation after all our invasive weed eradication work I find about a dozen scattered Bull Thistle that are a foot or less tall, and one of about 18 inches. Those future problems, at least, get literally “nipped in the bud”. Camphorweed is in beautiful bright yellow bloom, and a few are already in seed. A passing Swainson’s Hawk is high high high, drifts off to hang in the sun on the horizon.

At the east end of this pasture the most beautiful wild Buckwheat (Eriogonum) I’ve ever seen has come into bloom, adding yet one more species to the growing list of native forbs that are coming into that area on their own. It holds shell-pink flowers in mounds over blue-gray foliage, each petal striped down its center with a deeper pink color. Livestock duties allow enough time to stop and admire, make a note or two, but not enough to key it out to species even if I had the manual to do so, not enough time to make a specimen for the herbarium, thus its identity will remain an enjoyable mystery, and that allows the experience of it and familiarity with it remain with a directness and immediacy that is a gift for those working directly on The Land. We know these beings mobile and immobile, despite not knowing how they’re named, or by whom.

As I leave, I go over to the ephemeral Dirt Tank in the corner of the next pasture to the south, and find the shore jumping with Yellow Warblers–the last of this species this year, heading south I guess. “See you next Spring … if we’re spared.” A single, half-toned Common Yellowthroat is also jumping through the drowned mesquite saplings, a Gila Woodpecker flies through, and an Empidonax with two broad buffy wingbars perches on those bare dead branches: the famous (or infamous?) Willow Flycatcher. Since they are untellable one from the other in the field, and especially at migration, no way can I say whether the bird is our summer resident “Southwestern Willow Flycatcher”, or one of the migrants coming through from the north where the species itself is considered merely uncommon rather than endangered. The tank remains filled with water, thanks to the continuing generosity of this year’s Monsoon, enough to where I’m thinking of this pond less and less as “ephemeral”.

The day ends as it almost always does, with a swing around the “real” Stockpond, the one I keep constantly water-filled down near The Green Gate. Female Lazuli Buntings are there on its shore, their blue tails making them stand out from the other brown finchy birds. Lesser Goldfinches are pecking off and eating bits of salt from the cattle mineral block!

September 11, 2013

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Swainson’s Hawks, scattered across the agricultural lands through the Summer, now are in numbers noticeably on the increase, and they must be in the swing of their famous migration. Below them the Morning Glory petals are shot through by the sun, as if azure blown glass salvers had been strung along the roadside.

A Kingfisher splashes at The Stockpond, and the Blue Grosbeaks are still around though seem less conspicuous. In the Picnic Tree mesquite, lots of young Vermillion Flycatchers that haven’t realized they’ve grown too large to be cheeping like hatchlings, are still harrying their parents who must’ve just about had it with them by now.

Poorwill calls his “8:00 o’clock, all’s well,” and I turn out the light.

August 30, 2013

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Another three-quarters inch of rain. Every tenth of an inch is recorded, celebrated.

A Gray Hawk glides through the bosque branches, not far above the ground. These birds will only be with us a few more weeks. A gray Diamondback is coiled in one of the truck tracks in #2 Pasture, I almost trample it as I move along in my sunrise bliss but the cascabel appears to be in a cold torpor. Well, the temperature is only 71 degrees. I’m only gone a few minutes to attend to an irrigation hydrant, but already the rattlesnake isn’t there when I return through. There are lots of them in this northern end of that pasture, and we’re also seeing lots of small (two feet long) ones crossing Cascabel Road. … an oriole family group is still acting very clannish in the trees of the alley between this and the pasture to the north, Vermillion Flycatchers seem as bright as they did in the spring when they arrived, many kingbirds are hanging out together and trying every new air-borne trick of the wing they see or that occurs to them.

A for-sure–and handsome–Wilson’s Warbler comes to The Stockpond, I suppose that was indeed what had been there yesterday. I am not going to let go of summer with much grace, but the appearance of this favorite bird is solace.

Poorwills calling at sunset tuck the day into bed.

August 17, 2013

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The night air is about 75 degrees, the casa hotter than that so it feels like the Palm House at Kew. I simmer in bed with coffee and KCBS AM radio news coming across the deserts from that station’s chilly San Francisco home. The skin prickles with heat. Moths flutter all over the rooms, on the lampshades, the insides of screens, on my arms, float on the sink dishwater left over from last night, are in the refrigerator where at least they’re rather sluggish, even drop in through the narrow spout of the glass coffee pot, fall in there, drown, get poured into my cup. It’s the season of towering, lit clouds in the day and at sunset, but outside the night in the hour before dawn the sky is completely clear, a rarity. Flashes of light rise from below the horizon, telling of storms far out of sight over The Rim in a higher, even more lightning-prone country. As the stars fade a very few Purple Martins sweep for bugs overhead; lately their chatter is overwhelmed by the songs of Black-throated Sparrows who live all across these mesas and ridges of Pool Wash and Sierra Blanca. The Martin activity in these hours of madrugada continues to diminish.

No, no way to go back to trying to do a quick and intense documentation of the species at this true height of summer here–I have to be content with what can be noticed and caught sight or ear of during the long hours of attending the cow and calf, which include the lessons necessary to give that bull calf that we hope will get him to find mamma’s milk fountain more attractive to suck on than my knee, her leg, her flank, or the pedal squeeze on the cow chute, which are all things he tries laying his lips to enthusiastically while he ignores Molly’s milk fountains. (I absolutely drew the line on the calf’s “cheekiness” when while I was bending over to fill his bottle the he whipped around behind me and tried to latch on in each their turn to both halves of my, um, back side…) I hope soon it will be possible to go back to the usual chores whose everyday demands do at least expose a hand to what’s coming and going and staying in Nature on the Pastures–the irrigating and the making sure that irrigation stays efficient, the cow moving, digging mesquite, trying to fix cursedly disintegrating fences or fences buried in silt from summer sheet floods, fences pushed over by cattle who’d rather skim that buffet than this one, unloading and stacking hay, putting gates that cattle have torn to pieces back together, keeping horses in rein and in practice, rounding up and returning bovine escapees, ingratiating one’s self to newborn calves, filling the pond with water, controllng alien weed species, checking on cows in our other “units” scattered over miles of Cascabel Road, filling holes in the roadway of The Lane, moving wheel lines, oiling drive chains, raising, lowering, building portable electric fences, rebuilding blown out water mains, hauling steers to the packing house … … …

Young Summer Tanagers are wheezing, hidden away in the thick bosque canopy, giving out those sounds that for years tricked me into thinking there were an awful lot of Tyrannulets around. A Western Tanager flies down The Lane, a common enough sight there in the migration of spring but it’s been a few weeks since the last was here and in my notice; more should be coming down from the mountains, though. Every one of the five pastures has its own Western Kingbird family, soaring, parrying, ducking, flashing and twisting in flight, playing–I don’t hold a doubt about the Tyrant Flycatchers having a sense of fun and even mirth!

August 16, 2013

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Although all feels normal (that is, the temperature’s gone above 102 degrees), the air has changed. A finger can’t be put on this exactly, nor can it be described but, we are headed towards Equinox.

There are odd moments to listen for and watch for birds away from tending to the crisis of Molly the Cow and the difficult birth calf that will starve if we don’t continue milking mamma and getting more of her into him, while we hope the little lightbulb goes on over the dimwit’s head and he realizes that he’s the one got to nurse on her. Among a number of complications of the blessed event, the afterbirth isn’t ejected and it’s obviously not about to disattach–it falls from her tail to the ground in dreadful bloody ribbons into which are tucked sails of white tissue. People gasp in horror when they see Molly. I don’t know when this will be over, the manuals say could be eleven days, but a number of folks are in on seeing it through, and this allows me to slip away now and then so a few more birds can be added to the Ides of Summer list. I’m sure I will miss many species, nonetheless, as preoccupied as I am with the latest stock problem that isn’t going to allow me to continue with the idea of actually going out and putting together the mid-season equivalent of a Christmas Count for the Mason Pastures that I’d wanted. At least these are added, most of them through song or sound:

Ladder-backed Woodpecker

Common Ground Dove

Song Sparrow

Yellow-headed Blackbird

Northern Beardless Tyrannulet

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 …

August 14, 2013

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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 …[…]