Tag Archives: Grasshoppers

October 30, 2013

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The clouds, round, leaden gray, are in piles across the sky, or scattered touching the crowns of the Rincon. They are clouds of Winter, and if I were up on those granite-spired heights, I’d no doubt be thinking, “Snow!” I can hardly grasp that this is only the day after yesterday; the temperature isn’t going to rise out of the 60s. The great fluctuations between days like Autumn and days like Summer have the insects coming and going in response, though one day soon they’ll go “for good” (that is, for however long our entertainingly short Vernal-winter lasts!) Only one or two dragonflies patrol The Stockpond, and one blue damselfly and one red dragonfly over The Cienega in the freezing morning. In #1 Pasture there are no grasshoppers on the bermudagrass, which remains green, but I listen to an under-concert of crickets; in the flats of dried Saltweed, a couple of dull-colored grasshoppers, and one bright Red-winged.

How can we be so far along towards Winter, if the “ephemeral” dirt tank in #2 Pasture still has water in it? A Tarantula Hawk is there drinking, and one brown-and-bluish dragonfly, and a Painted Lady butterfly. In that pasture stretching out from the tank more grasshoppers are active, including scattered Red-winged before noon, and as the day warms (well, as much as it’s going to) many more of them come out under the sun until their clicking can be heard across all the wide grass. Boy are they back.

October 17, 2013

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The pastures are hushed, cold. Ice stalagmites balance on the ground below the flush valves that had drained and dripped out in the night and I hope their passages and the many small pipe fixtures aren’t blocked with ice chunks when I get to turn on the water. Mexican General Grasshoppers are still to be found motionless and stupefied on mesquite tips while the cold shadow remains thrown across to The River by the ridge to the east. Russett Harrier would find that huge grasshopper more than a morsel–it would be more like lobster tail–if the bird spies it. Many Vesper Sparrows tseep their little notes from the tangles of dried and drying amaranth, saltweed and other forbs, and Brewer’s Blackbirds alight, the females softly and subtly beautiful.

Life perks up, becomes more enthusiastic with the day, which by mid-afternoon registers above 80 degrees. The year’s last Turkey Vulture has apparently found the year’s last rising thermal wind current, and sails overhead, south … there’ll be no more of this, with that favorite avian mascot of ours. It wants to find a soft corpse for a morning meal, not something that needs to thaw. Brindle will be relieved. Adios, amigo Zopilote–saludos a Mexico! Kestrel, though, wants fresh and moving prey. He’s out hunting, and he dive-bombs a Meadowlark I guess just for the devil of it, the Meadowlark lets out panicked whistles, and alights on the tip of an electric line post with consummate grace and complains about the indignity of it all.

A lone Cassin’s Kingbird chatters farewell, the coming night that will be in the mid-20s will be too much for its temperate tastes and so no more will grace these fencelines. Every butterfly will probably be hard won from now, too, what ones the Kingbirds haven’t eaten; a Red Admiral races by, is nervous in that way of theirs.

The wide rings of Three Awn (Aristida) grass that edge the ant circles in #3 Pasture have taken on the rich colors of Autumn: within, the low walls of stems and leaves are rusty and green, and without are the palest of brown-yellow. Gazing into the depths of these wonderful natural circular sculptures is like gazing into the depths of a crystal.

Full Moon, already pendant in opalescent sky, balances within a cup in the mountain skyline when I top out on the ridge, almost “home”. The wild walls of the Galiuro, the Muleshoe, Sierra Blanca, the Mae West Peaks–all of them the color of the merlot I’m looking forward to pouring …

[…]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqgNagMVydU

Although about to lose this home, still I am comfortable for some nights more, holding a glass of wine the color of those mountains, windows to shut and make cozy the room, but out there? Out there it is different, out across those bajadas marching endlessly to each horizon, on arroyo floors and in washes, the cold air will be flowing in the Sonoran Desert nights down mercilessly over beacon-drawn migrants paying a price for the starry tales they hold on to, migrants praying for a home, praying for roses to grow in a patio their own …

[…]

October 16, 2013

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A False Dawn, in wintry silence on The Ridge.

One can forget that the Mallard, that every-duck, is also one of the most beautiful of waterfowl. This morning an incredibly handsome male is palling around with a little Teal on The Stockpond water; I wonder if that one in eclipse plumage of four days ago is this one, now come into its own with a brand new, very natty courting outfit.

Joel gives a go at rototilling a stretch of mesquite-cleared pasture, to see if it’s moist enough to receive the tines deeply enough, but it’s not and more watering will have to be done. I watch the days go on, and the optimum window for winter graze planting slowly being closed. Fifty or more Chihuahuan Ravens materialize from nowhere, descend on that plot, and look it over hoping to find our oats and barley, only they don’t realize we haven’t planted any yet. The Ravens know we do this every year and can read the sign that will be hung out for the easy feast … they will have their pound of seed, and that must be worked into our sowing rate!

Cooper’s Hawks are terrorizing both ponds, thrilled with the constant arrival of more thirsty birds out of the North. Migrant “traps”, all right! I know not to bother trying to find anything around them if those Cooper’s are about.

Vermillion Flycatcher numbers are up again, all immatures, but no Kingbirds to be seen now for a couple of days. Tail-pumping Gray Flycatchers are looking green and not their namesake color, in their fresh Fall plumage.

Checkerspot Butterflies are on that #3 Pasture Burroweed, even though the crowns of the plants are offering mostly fluffy seed heads to the wind, and hardly any nectar to insects. There is much coupling of grasshoppers … scandal!

The pressure on the irrigation pump seems a bit low, and I wonder if the fix we did on the deep underground main in #4 has maintained its seal. The shaft down to the break was left unfilled so that it all could be easily watched for a while, but instead of water down there (and I’m happy about that) what I do find to my alarm is a hole-bottom filled with Box Turtles that had fallen in and couldn’t get back out. They are all very much alive and don’t seem worse for their ordeal, and they scurry smartly off in every direction when they’re got out of there. That shaft will be filled in but pronto!

Lots of Devil’s Claw in that overgrown field that we don’t irrigate, the plants luxuriated in the wonderful, now gone Monsoon. Their fruits are everywhere, dangling and green still (and looking like some exotic vegetable only to be found in the trendiest of farmer’s markets) or brown and dried, and scattered about …

[…]

Dusk comes on, a pair of Peregrine Falcons tussle with each other in the air over the roof of the truck while I wait at the pump at The Stockpond for it to use up the last of the lower electric rate minutes of the day. I turn it off, and make the rounds of emptying waterlines, a chore of real winter: it is going to freeze tonight, though I can’t tell how deeply and can’t chance swelling ice breaking the fabric of the hoses. It is almost dark when the last of that work is done, and the Mourning Doves are sailing in from all sides to drink at The Cienega. In the Bottomlands moves a cold like the breathed presence of a malevolant spirit by whom Summer has been overpowered, is helpless–taken–but such brutality will never keep Summer down, not in these Spanish Borderlands.

October 9, 2013

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The truck slips from the warm ridgecrest into the riverbottom, under some line of inversion and into temperatures in the upper 30s. I’m afraid there will be ice to be dumped from the irrigation hoses, not just because it would be another hard letting go of Summer, but because I don’t feel much like having to clear spraying water nozzles and getting a face full of wet even if the sun will just have arisen. Dark in the shadows of the eastern ridge, the pasture will take a while to feel warm; grasshoppers are there, asleep in the cold including the Mexican Generals in their habitual mesquite tips. I don’t know where the Red-winged Grasshoppers hide for such a night. A Swainson’s Hawk looks cold himself, hunched in a tree top where the sun will strike first. Last night will be the last he can stand, and he will head towards Sonora today and no more of his kind will grace our sky until Spring returns. Yet–the Devil’s Claw in that pasture still hangs out a blossom or two.

The afternoon, nevertheless, heads up almost to the 90 degree mark, the infamous wind of this season of the Southwest comes up and lasts all day, takes my light palm-leaf Summer cowboy hat in its abrazo and flings it far, time after time Wind plays fetch and I know she’s telling me I ought to change over to the heavier beaver Stetson. The first Western storm approaches but probably won’t bless us, the wind its harbinger. The storm swirls down from the North instead of up from the tropics nearer by us: for Flagstaff it will be snow, but mildness reigns here in our own Land Beneath the Rim, our own Tierra Caliente. It’s probably pushed along to us the lone Cassin’s Kingbird that I spy up in #4 Pasture. The hot afternoon brings out many Western Pygmy Blue Butterflies to the pond’s rim–haven’t seen one of those since Spring. Grasshoppers also love the day’s heat, tiny-sized pale blue ones fly abundantly ahead of my step through their pastures. A Great Blue Heron flies back and forth between The Stockpond and open water of The Cienega in #1 Pasture, where over the course of the summer native Willows have established themselves and grown upwards with surprising quickness. Snipe is less jumpy than the heron, and has grown so used to me that I’m able to walk past within ten feet, and it still sits there.

October 5, 2013

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Snipes are a good way out on The Stockpond, silhouettes with perfect reflections probing the mud, one freezes in a camouflage crouch even in such obvious view as I walk from one truck to the other past them, and I drive out to the herd.

Air is cool if not cold, the dust I kick up hangs in deep layers over green grass sparkling with dew. While my attention has fully to be on such things as a snaky steer that doubtless is fixing to escape the weaning enclosure, I catch sight of a lowering flock of birds whose flight has a familiar and peculiar gait to it, giving me to think that Western Meadowlarks have arrived to decorate our pastures for the Winter with their flash of yellow, flash of white, their fluting and their whistling. There is not time to drift over the pastures with them.

In the afternoon cooler even than yesterday’s, once that snaky steer gets religion and he comes to be resigned to a new order, “Sweet sweet! Sweet sweet!” notes fall to Earth from that highest, wholly blue sky, and settle like feathers in pendulum-drift down to the cattle’s ears and mine: American Pipits, invisible they are so high, but announcing their own return from some alpine meadow.

A drive around the edge of a pasture deep in grass on my way to see if that 1,000 pound steer had settled in with the two heifers and younger steer also being fenced weaned, the truck scares into the air in front of it whirling and clicking Red-winged Grasshoppers–the largest number yet of this brilliant insect that is the long and lingering Summer itself. But no, Summer is indeed ending: the Blue Grosbeak in its immature browns I see today is to be the last, as will be that Western Kingbird.

October 4, 2013

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Poorwill Dawn, in air that beyond just quality of the sound it carries through it, is the first with an autumnal tang–ineffable, a mix of dryness, dust, cooling desert.

Kingbirds do flips and somersaults in the delight of an afternoon that only reaches the mid 80s. Immature Vermillion Flycatchers are still around aplenty on the fencepost tops, but red adults haven’t been seen for a while … I suspect they depart earlier, or many reach the natural end of their lives about now.

At least one Snipe is getting accustomed to us so much that it seems to have lost its wildness, in among the Ground Doves who come to drink at The Stockpond.

Grasshopper numbers have been declining slowly and evenly, the biggest have all but disappeared though here and there one will be found perched at a mesquite sapling’s tip, unmoving, stupefied by I don’t know what … cooler nights? the day’s taking longer to warm them? old age? (should we start looking at time in “grasshopper years”, the way we do, “dog years”?)

October 3, 2013

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The Snipes are finding The Stockpond very much to their liking this Fall, and are there when I drive up to its edge in the pickup. A Mexican General Grasshopper staggers through the dust on the bank, it surely doesn’t like the temperature of lower 40s at least until the sun gets stronger. Bright orange or red House Finches are in the mesquite tops around the banks. Later, when the thermometer goes past 90, richly colored Sulphur Butterflies come to sip at their own lunch of minerals in the mud while I doze in and out. A color riot there–White-tail Dragonflies and bronze dragonflies and large cobalt blue dragonflies, young Western Tanagers with heads just showing the orange blush of their coming adulthood (these would be the last hangers-on of that lovely species), Blue Grosbeaks, immature Vermillion Flycatchers … pink beryl … sapphires … citrines …

Full-sized, outrageously ornamented and bizarre Mesquite Bugs are on the wing up in #3 Pasture; they amaze unendingly, fly through air redolent with the Victorian aftershave aroma of the well-named Camphor Weed that I’ve tromped through as I pursue those big bugs. Sulphur Butterflies rule the patches of what Burroweed are still in bloom.

September 26, 2013

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A bird of prey roars past me, I’m sun blinded by looking towards where it disappears but I could only make out for sure that Miss Otis is going to be able to lunch today–on dove. The first Peregrine, in the first few days of Fall, pitching ducks into horror on ranch ponds everywhere?

Still the ephemeral stockpond in #2(north) Pasture has water in it, well, it’s been hard to call it “ephemeral” this year. A red-brown bat comes to drink there at midday. The presence of that water can lull one into thinking that Monsoon has yet to leave us, but the ever growing number of Red-winged Grasshoppers giving their rattling display flights nags otherwise.

A few Barn Swallows are at the big Stockpond, bright blue Damselflies are there, too, and in such numbers that it seems the banks have sprouted an edge of light, gauzy flowers that might melt with the sun. In the mesquites, a Tennessee Warbler (a rarity in these parts) and a Warbling Vireo.

It is still hot, in the 90s at least (with days sometimes trying to reach 100) and it seems there ought to be afternoon storms. I miss the head-rush terror and thrill of approaching lightning, miss so the thunder, miss her calling from far up the valley, “I come.”

September 23, 2013

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Wind blowing through the night had me closing windows and shivering, the thermometer at 52 … news out of Phoenix just before sunrise announces it has dropped below 70 there (69 degrees! they must be celebrating), and that Flagstaff sits at 32, with a “freeze warning” in effect. Our pearly dawn sounds with the notes of Phoebes, the whispering of Vesper Sparrows, Raven chortles.

I walk through the weedy parts of the pastures, through patches of dried lanterns of Husk Tomatoes, my nose running now not from pollen but from cold, or at least what we can come to think of as that. The big ants scattered over their circles stand there in suspended animation. Mexican General grasshoppers clasp hard to the tips of amaranths, they are so cold and in their own suspended animation that they give no reaction if poinked with a finger. Summer birds, of which there are still a number around, are lying low til the warmth comes in and the temperature is raised almost another forty degrees in midafternoon. House Wrens are out, though, and a pair call from their own amaranth tops.

Sparrows are arriving, still more birds that need time to identify than can’t be spared by a work day. I check the Burroweed in #3 Pasture for things more easily nailed down, and there I find that fluttering jewel, a Great Purple Hairstreak butterfly. Scattered through that pasture now are the blooms of a pretty Composite, its flowers tiny, bright blue. A Western Wood Peewee is on the fence, the same bird of the day before yesterday at The Stockpond, or another one passing on south–way, way south–and another flycatcher relative, the Ash-throated, flashes out of the larger mesquites. That bird should’ve been long gone by now, maybe it is the last?