Tag Archives: Grasshoppers

December 5, 2013

The new day brings an utterly different world: 25 degrees on the ridges, and in the valley below sparkling chips of frost fall from mesquite tips.  The bermudagrass pasture stretching out from the window of the Cowboy Caravan all the way to the huge saguaros on the far hill are white, icy, the Rincon above us dusted with snow.  Yet the air warms enough even in the El Potrero bottomland for Sulphur Butterflies to come to life, and an azure grasshopper.

Still-green and fresh leaves of the big Hackberries at The Stockpond start falling off their twigs by mid-morning–they never had a chance to turn color before the coming on of a night that was surely in the teens.  On the water swim a brace of fine Mallards, their wariness telling they are true wildlings.  A Wilson’s Snipe is there, too, and a large sandpiper with a long bill, also extremely wary: a Long-billed Dowitcher.  It takes off with a pained, “Pitty peet peet!”, showing a white slash of rump as it vanishes across the fields.

December 2, 2013

Ah … Diciembre, nuestra Arizona linda! … month of kaleidoscope sunsets and mornings beautifully crisp like this one.  A concerto plays on the radio as I drive up the River’s edge, glittering piano woven with glittering Cottonwood leaves, gold on the ear, gold on the air of early morning.

Red-winged Grasshoppers are everywhere in the pastures on this brilliant sunny morning of 60 degrees, dragonflies yet glide and shimmer over The Stockpond now long after the last damselflies have been among them.  A spare butterfly or two are there, too–the more common Sulphurs, and Mexican Yellows.

November 30, 2013

Just as I had when the season of the Red-winged Grasshopper started almost four months ago, I find a blazing scarlet wing lying on a path, then see a single live grasshopper on this another sweetly warm afternoon in the mid 70s.  Polka Dot Beetles are also out, massing again in great numbers everywhere; they are hovering up to ten feet over the grass.

A Mountain Bluebird drifts down out of the sky, lights atop an irrigator wheel.  A chip of blue ice, Prince of the High Country, color of a glacial rivulet.

Sun is gone behind leaden clouds long before its moment to set.  In an astounding silence on the pastures, a pair of Great Blue Heron hunt–I’d bet they’re angling not for frogs but for gophers!  They’re colored the very grays and blacks of the sky above them.  The Tamarisk trees drift orange, and yellow, long avenues and rows and single Cottonwoods are nearly wholly green or green-and-yellow or gold, some are become empty gray crowns of twigs with their edges hoops of rich butter, others are artists’ wide brushes dipped in all these colors and stood upright in a jar.  The River is a palette of Thanksgiving hues.  The gallery forest’s colors are delicate, on this last day of November muted, like Christmas lights already placed but waiting to be lit with great fanfare by December Sun tomorrow.

November 29, 2013

A sweetly warm day, with insects coming back around to be more lively.  A docked pair of dragonflies suspend themselves over a puddle in #2 Pasture.  Polka Dot Beetles also continue appreciating the nice weather.  Days pass during which I don’t see the Red-winged Grasshoppers and I’m sure they’ve all died, but then their clicking will be everywhere and they will be putting on a colorful show out ahead of me as I walk the miles of a day doing rounds.  Today that distinctive snapping sound of theirs drew me to the only one out on the wing, and I wonder again how much longer they’ll be part of the scene.

November 26, 2013

Lots of ducks whistling in, and fast–Mexican Mallards and Northern Mallards and everything on the “hybrid” continuum between the two.  A few small Bronze Dragonflies are about, and the giant Great Blue Heron who might want to snatch them out of the air.

Over the pastures: a Kestrel, yellow-green grasshoppers, a single pale yellow small butterfly, a single war-torn Pipevine Swallowtail, and Polka Dot Beetles seemingly well adapted to nights below freezing.  Large flocks of Winter plumaged Red-winged Blackbirds that hide in the silver-and-gold bermudagrass take off and do aerial moves wondrous to see, “pit-tickkk! pit-tickk!” they chatter.  They may not be as colorful as they are in Summer, but they’re just as elegant in their seasonally appropriate tweeds that set off so beautifully their black, much fanned.  They move around constantly, all fly out of sight, all fly back–but they’re less frantic to go to another pasture if the cows are with them.  The flocks come along horizontally, in a flat, broad bunches, then every bird drops suddenly like a stone and vanishes in the tall grass.

November 8, 2013

Ravens playfully chase after a Red-tailed Hawk, they’re too smart, too agile, or too revolting in taste for the hawk to bother itself with them I suppose.  In the warm morning after a night without a freeze, the little black spiders of Summer are out on their usual perches on the surface of the irrigation hoses, and among them are dark grasshoppers (or crickets?) apparently just hatched and impossibly minute in size.

Autumnal slanting sunrays are caught in everything, light up everything … the broad, high and long avenues of watersprays of the wheel line irrigators made incandescent by them … a large pink dragonfly … the wings of the Pipits … some insect so fast of wing that they look like tiny hovering balls of light, the air over the whole broad pasture is full of them.  The ridges piled high toward that lowering Sun are dark mounds, each sharply defined by crests white, shining.

November 6, 2013

Low 20s at the early pastures–what a seesaw!  The “Layered Look” is an invention of Arizona ranch hands.  The expected rise of 60 degrees by afternoon comes along, fills out the grasslands with Red-winged Grasshoppers again; a Gray Fox lopes across the native grass plots.  Frogs are still leaping from The Stockpond’s edge, splashing in and swimming away well under water.

November 4, 2013

Time of gold, not of green, the season’s colors over the wilds around us are truly changed.  The day is stuck in a Summer time warp, however, and is another one hot and stuffy and so the race across the pastures to get irrigating done is uncomfortable.  Good for the new crop of Winter pasture, though, and only five days after the watering on them was started the pastures are noticeably sprouting single wonderfully-green blades of oats or barley.  Insects have come again to add bright dashes of color: cobalt blue dragonflies with silvery wings, and a few blue damsels (though these damselflies will be the last of that kind to be seen …), Red-winged Grasshoppers are as abundant as the wintering sparrows I flush out with them.

Poorwills are all along the road on the much further drive home I now have, they fly up into the headlight beams with a flash of white glowing in their tails and then hunker down in the deep dust that still holds the day’s 85 degree warmth.  The sky flashing in lightning as a thunderstorm sweeps in from the North promises that the first deep cold will arrive soon as the front clears out towards the East.

 

November 2, 2013

Hallowmas, Dias de los Muertos.  No matter the Winter trickling over this waning year, new flowers are come into bloom, vivid in color, huge in size: abundant plastic, freshly cleaned flowers suddenly burst from the roadside, where the families of the two lost vaqueros of this querencia have come to freshen and brighten the memorial to the deaths of their loved ones.  A tall crucifix marks where their men were swept from a hay-hauling rig after they made a move that couldn’t be retracted, of entering the Hot Springs Canyon, on that day a Crossing Too Far, when Monsoon growled a warning unheeded. The vaqueros didn’t make the other bank and safety and home and senoras.  They crossed to Eternity, instead.

Many many tracks that look like ancient pictographs of human hands are in the mud of the roads through Mason’s Pastures this morning.  I follow along where the raccoons must’ve been playing through the night, and scare into flight just as many Red-winged Grasshoppers from the sides of the tire ruts.

The day itself wings gently up to 81 degrees, and in the late light it is so warm that I sweat in my shirt, without vest or jacket on.  Gossamer catches that light and shimmers high over the grass, and a new hatch of bugs fills the air–glowing Sprites, with partners in the dance the Sulphur Butterflies in rich orange, or plain bright yellow.  Meadowlarks must rejoice in this Winter-long abundance of food for them.  Tall Conyza weeds are also glowing, the high, rock-strewn hills behind us lit golden, too, overarched by sky palest blue with half of it cobbled in little round, evenly spaced clouds.