Tag Archives: Kingbirds

September 28, 2017 – Chant of the Wanderers

The air freshened at last (even became shockingly brisk when a couple recent nights dropped down into the 30s!) and birds are leaving, birds are arriving, and maybe most interesting of all, birds are wandering.

The avian life on The River this September has been thrilling, starting with that friendly Eastern Kingbird that kept me company awhile on the 3rd of the month, for one day perched mostly on the low electric cattle fence wire when the plague of grasshoppers the likes of which I haven’t seen was in its first few days upon us.  I’ve come now to expect an Eastern Kingbird to wander through during this season: they’ve been late Summer/early Autumn visitors on one side of the San Pedro or the other over the years.  They’re always alone, usually here for a brief moment, always very beautiful and always much harassed by the (Wild Wild) Western Kingbirds who seem to think this most dapper of their fellows is “a greenhorn, just escaped from town” and they’ll get some kicks screaming out at him, “Dance, ya varmint!”

Early in the second week of the month, on a day when I was getting the workings of the Winter pasture planting underway in earnest and heading to climb into the Silverado here on Firesky Ridge before the shine of the first rays of Sun, from the North was coming toward Ridge House a broad dark line of large birds.  It seemed a huge, floating arrow pointing South that told, “This way, if you’re sane!”  Ibis?  I’d seen ibis flocks passing in other years, but far higher overhead than is this ridgetop … and I could hear these as they got closer making strange little sounds.  (The only ibis I’d ever heard being vocal were the Hadada Ibis that often flew over the farm in Kenya, loud, raucously calling out and sounding just like that old time comedian, Steve Allen, “Schmock!  Schmock!  Schmock!”)  They were geese, Greater White-fronted Geese heading this way and slightly off towards the River–fifty of them!  They passed the backdrop of the high mountain that was painted in that glorious pink glow that comes to it in the seconds before sunrise, the big flock a telephone pole’s height above me and just off the point of Firesky Ridge, little white faces plainly visible, with little sweet and chirpy honks from the face of this one or that scattered up and down their long line.  I know my jaw was dropped wide open while I stared at those faces and wings, while they all passed by so close and low it seemed in slow motion.

“Our family” of Mexican Mallards has returned to The Stockpond, five to eight of them there most every day and over the last two weeks they’ve been kept company by a young and almost fearless Great Blue Heron.  Just before Heron arrived, the Pond had become so full of Bullfrogs that the outward circle of its water would be a complete froth of them jumping wildly from the banks and skipping four or five times across its surface before they’d plunge out of sight, all with attendant screeches and yurps.  I expect by now Heron has about cleared them off and is going to have to search out a newly laid sideboard of frogs’ legs elsewhere.  It’s the end of the Purple Martins for this year–none have been in the air since a good many passed over The Pond a few days ago, but there are still swallows aplenty in mixed species flocks that suddenly surround me, swirl around and around scooping up the awfully plentiful bugs (and I do mean, awful) of this Autumn, then they swirl in their circles on South and gone.  There’s a chance a cuckoo or two still lurk but they’ve probably flown; I saw two different ones just before the middle of the month, both gliding gracefully across Cascabel Road and into mesquites far from the River bank, but it’s been a long time since any have called.

Just after the middle of the month a single, very handsomely-plumaged Wilson’s Warbler hopped in and out of the branches at the Pond’s edge when I was having lunch there; it is the only one I have seen in the whole of 2017, there were none in the Spring where in recent past it had been one of our major migrants and its beauty a major enjoyment, and it makes me nervous that this could well be the only one of the Autumn.  Our Tom Talbott did report in mid-April that he saw one of these warblers at Sweetwater’s El Potrero Farm. Cornell tells that this bird’s numbers have declined by by more than 60% in the last 50 years.  That same day as I was setting irrigation at dawn what was unmistakably a shorebird’s call began drifting down to pasture from high above, from another lone bird.  Though about Whimbrel-sized it wasn’t one of those, not with that voice–and the bill was nowhere near the size of a Long-billed Curlew’s.  I could only look away from what I was doing and up at it for a second at a time, having to keep close watch as I did on the wheel lines powering up, well, unless I was willing to chance the explosion of a water main deep under me there was no way I could follow this bird’s every move.  This sort of thing happens so often as to make me think those spirits on the mountains roundabout have found something good to tease me with.  Maddening, but a rare bird identified has to take second place behind keeping the herd in graze  … I knew this one was something unfamiliar to me and my brief moments stolen away from the risky work of the moment to see it as it passed South added to its mystery.  Recordings of Marbled Godwit I listened to later in the evening online sounded close to what I heard but that many weary hours later my memory could make it what it was I wanted the bird to have sounded like.  So–it shouldn’t be writ down as anything other than a possible sighting.  (Chris tells me he’s seen a “Garbled Modwit” and that I might have too!)

As the month has worn down, the daily temperatures have soared skyward again (“unseasonably high” as the radio tells–what does that mean any more?), to the point now where my workshirts already by 9 am show dark drenched patches and the day’s first of many lines of salt-rhyme as the breezes that come and go evaporate the wet and evaporative cool me.  The Cassin’s and Western kingbirds aren’t getting a single hint it’s time to leave–unless they’re aware of the days becoming shorter as rapidly as they appear to be.  Those lively and engaging birds are everywhere, maybe they’ll stay on so long as the grasshoppers remain in their unsettling cloud-like masses and I’d say that will be a while what with all the small instars still appearing.  The first Harrier tilted in on the day five of us were planting seed for Winter pastures, Sept. 26th, and the next day out on the rolling grass along the wheel lines I was greeted by eight Western Meadowlarks that must’ve arrived that morning, the first of this “Winter” … um, it’s going to be in the upper 90s the coming week in October, fellas!  (I’ve never seen more than one or two of that species when they first come to these pastures and usually all of them disappear shortly after that and no more seen for two or three weeks, I’ve presumed they get replaced and added to by new arrivals.)  The handsome Brewer’s Blackbirds, too, have come of a sudden, and as with the meadowlarks the flock of them and I played back and forth around each other as I set the nozzles straight or rolled the lines level and meanwhile, our little Pond was a sight for a couple days in this last week of the month: a Great Blue Heron, eight Mexican Mallards, a fine bunch of Cinnamon Teal coming out of eclipse with some looking strangely like Redheads, and a White-faced Ibis (dark-faced at this season) hung out together amiably, and they all grew to have so little fear of me that if they took wing at all any time I’d draw near, it was only to cross to the other bank to continue their foraging and probing and frog-gigging.  The ibis ignored me, and just wandered along until he eventually caught up with the rest of the party once he’d relaxedly circled The Stockpond.

When the teal come to us in these Autumns on The River, for a few days they’re jumpy as those grasshoppers, take off the moment a vehicle comes even remotely in their sight.  (They almost always leave the Mexican Mallards behind, who might wonder about the need for all the commotion.)  The teal would circle a time or two and then go looking elsewhere–but this year there doesn’t seem to be an “elsewhere” for them with other ponds being dry and soon they come back and plow down into the water, and soon they, too, get used to me and the trucks.  I’ve never seen ducks enjoy their bathtub like these Cinnamons!  They wildly, feverishly hunt for food and dabble and tip constantly, then all at once the whole lot just wants to bathe and preen and tease each other in peeping mock battles.  At some point it all looks like a pool party, one teal and another taking quick turns at jumping straight up off the water, curve in a low arc a couple feet above the surface, tuck their head and drop like a bomb straight down, with such force that they disappear for a moment as if they were Diving and not Dabbling Ducks.  They cross each other in mid-air ballet, splash into the center of the flock or some go to the outside, sometimes barely miss each other–there’s one female that loves doing this so much that I swear I hear her yell out, “Cannonball!” in her native Tealish.  They all splash, stretch, scoot about flapping and flopping and throwing water at themselves, stand and shake and love trying to nip their neighbors, who always draw back enough to stay barely out of reach.  One gets so worked up in the fun that she time and again curves her head down in front of her, keeps stretching and pushing her head under her breast and backwards underneath her until at one point the rest of her body can’t help but come along behind her and she does a very neat underwater tumble roll, her body flipping upside down above the water and then spinning sideways until she suddenly finds herself rolled back upright.  “Didja see that?”  Her mates get irritated by these performances.

By the third week of September our Ash-throated Flycatchers and Brown-crested Flycatchers  of Summer are supposed to have vacated these ranges and gone off South–supposed to, but I’m not sure how to sort out what flycatchers of the genus Myiarchus I see most every year later than that in Autumn, during a time after none of the other species have been present for weeks. These late Myiarchus in question I’ve written up as Dusky-capped in transit to the deep Neotropics, that spend a few days with us after having left their high country to the West.  They have just looked different somehow from the Ash-throateds I’d got chummy with all through the Summer.  Talk about birdy “dastardly duos” … I’d have to have both in the hand and even then, can Ash-throated that are still on the young side at this time of year be in the size range of the Dusky-capped?  These autumnal mystery Myiarchus are always silent, well they have been at least until this season when outside the Ridge House and from just down over the lip of the canyon a set of calls was reaching my ears on a morning a few days before the end of the month.  There was something shorebird-like in those notes (it’s amazing how many shorebirds can turn up here) so they had to be looked into, expecting as I did that yet something else weird was in passage like the other many surprises September can bring.  But, here in the mesquite that is so dwarfed and gnarled on these uplands was a pair of bright Myiarchus flycatchers, chattering back and forth and they sure looked like those small and slim Dusky-cappeds.  A run back into the house to the computer (yeeks, and I was on my way to work …) to Xeno-canto’s bird song website allowed quick elimination of that as the species but instead what they did sound unmistakably like were some of the recordings of Brown-cresteds.  (One can listen to 1,068 different listings of those alone, on this “citizen scientist” site, Xeno-canto: http://www.xeno-canto.org/species/Myiarchus-tyrannulus ; more might have been added while I was typing this.)  Published bird calendars be damned, the Tyrant Flycatcher is The Wanderer incarnate: Ash-throateds turn up on the Eastern Seaboard much later than this, Dusky-cappeds can end up in Colorado in the Winter, our Western Kingbirds sometimes reach the Maritimes apparently stopped only by the North Atlantic Ocean, Tropical Kingbirds of Mexico can set out for British Columbia in the Autumn, this list likely tells of birds fledged this year who are the ones get that bug to wander.  What it for sure doesn’t tell is if what I’ve seen is Dusky-capped or not but I still think at least a few of those late season mystery flycatchers have been, if my ability to read the whole aura of a bird is anything to trust.

Tyrant Flycatchers leaving and going every direction of the compass is one of the markers of those change-of-seasons here that people unfamiliar with life on the ground claim we don’t have.  On the human side among us who tramp endlessly across these lands in everyday work either on foot or on horseback for Saguaro-Juniper, the planting of the Winter forage acres for our herd at Mason Pasture is one of these thought-inspiring, soul-inquiring markers of Summer into Autumn.  How does it come around so fast, the picking up of this massive chore, the seeing get done this thing that so much depends on?  By the 27th of September this year those pastures had been mowed, ripped, disced, planted and the soil dragged like a comforter over those billions of wheat, rye, oats and barley seeds laid down–a full two week process, not counting the pulling of mesquite that was labored over starting much earlier in the Summer.  One last chore remained after all the helpful crews had gone, and that was to get the wheel line irrigators into their first places for watering to begin the next dawn.  It seemed miles were to go before I’d sleep, when the last loose ends of the wheel lines will have been humped and curved and bullied into their places.  Only this one in #3 Pasture remained yet to get arranged, and it sat deeply tangled in tall grass and native forbs. The work of getting that very long sideroll free-moving flushed many little dark Lincoln’s Sparrow’s, one after the other after the other: there haven’t been this many of those sparrows around for a number of years though if their recent habits hold true, they’ll stay awhile then slowly their numbers will dribble down as, I presume, most keep heading on into Mexico.  There was a Savannah or two as well, and Vespers.  A number of Marsh Wrens also flew up from my feet, each moving some yards ahead and then dropping down and out of sight.  Will they stick around this year through the Winter, like they used to?

The day was growing older, and with no luxury of time allowing a going off for bird observation I heard to the North yet one more mystery call daring me to guess who might be making it.  Three syllables, over and over, high against the puff-cloud sky Monsoon can leave behind, then it would be beyond the bermudagrass half of that pasture, where the bosque was growing taller with every year.  The calls were moving from East to West, its author unfindable against the brightness.  There was in the sounds the quality of those bold notes of the Abert’s Towhee, the loneliness of the shorebird, and something of a puppy’s squeeze toy … Bub-uhh-WHEET! Bub-uhh-WHEET! … and then of course everything went all quiet just when I couldn’t stand it any more and had begrudgingly dropped my chore to check out what was going on.  Then it came from behind me, above but now much closer.  I turned from the wheel line (which anyway had pulled itself into gigantic pretzels hooking around drifts of Camphorweed and I wasn’t much wanting to tackle the mess), and saw a large, extra-regal looking kingbird.  It was swooping out from a long perch in a big mesquite tree top catching one insect quickly after another but still staying a good ways off from me … I lifted the binoculars finally and saw that what I’d thought was a large black beetle in its bill was no beetle, but the bill itself.  The dark mask, the coloring, the unique call, the stance, the size (larger than any other kingbird usually around), its solitariness with none of our regular kingbird crew daring to divebomb or chase it, all those things said, “Thick-billed Kingbird”, the sight of which would make for the reddest of red-letter days in a birder’s journal.  How could I possibly take time away from a crucial project that there’s no choice about getting finished or not, and get over to that hedgerow of large mesquite and not have the bird fly off and take the last of its diagnostic marks with it?  I had to get close enough for a look at its tail for white edges or pale end-band or a white tip, took a few steps towards it slowly and unaggressively but the bird spread wing and was lifted into the wind that all kingbirds own.  But it banked, turned 180 degrees and sailed right for me, lowering as it came, until it hovered for moments not twenty feet over my head, catching bugs and giving a grand aerial performance that left me open-jawed.  There were no white outer lines on that tail used as rudder and with such accomplishment, no buff, nor any appearance of its being a wide brush just barely dipped into white paint.  A Thick-billed Kingbird, a stray, come North from the Borderline canyons and destined for the Colorado River beyond Arizona’s Great Western Desert?  South from one of the nesting spots they sometimes choose along the San Pedro?  It stayed in sight and within hearing there the rest of the day, and revisiting it a few times was something I couldn’t resist doing.  It kept calling me back.  The next day it was gone, maybe turned around right here and made way for the Mexican Riviera.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKCmmig79mM

August 31, 2016

People on the desert long enough
on a certain day about this time
in August feel
and taste
and see
a shift in the afternoon light and
shadows and breeze, and the
oppression of heavy air
lifts off and away
from each

and they let out a sigh
and breathe back in
a new Season
under another
desert Sun

Day after day the temperature tries to reach 100 degrees, and I take it for granted that as a diamond is said to be, the Sonoran Desert Summer is forever. But then–there is a morning like this one come, when coffee in hand I slip into the patio in the dark and wonder what is wrong, what is different. It sinks in, the world has gone silent, no notes from Purple Martins echoing down from stars, all is still and empty, not even a cricket though as the Autumn will, when it comes to its own winding down, have nights again in cricket song. We can get pretty gladly through every afternoon now that still sizzles, every still mid-morning with its drenching humidity, for we know we’re on our way to one of those months whose weather the World must envy, months that bookend that hot time the snowbirds famously flee in panic. This year there have been few storms violent enough to alarm much, nor did the house get hit by lightning and neither did the power pole and lines so no blackouts of more than a few minutes, the WiFi box never got fried once much less its usual several times, no tornado-like microbursts to upend and throw the patio furniture around.

The wide drifts on every flat and mesa-top of brilliant yellow flowers of Hierba de San Nicolas (Thymophylla acerosa) aren’t making a grand show this year, though there are scattered plants low underfoot on Firesky Ridge and they are still in bud, seemingly staying in an arrested state. Neither have I noticed any vines of the naturalized, exquisitely blue Morning-glory, begin their climb through the branches of Creosote Bush along the roadside. In this area of Cascabel the rain accumulation is about an inch and a half less than last year’s Monsoon’s, could that be why we haven’t had this flower display that is one of the delights of late Summer? Or is it that the rains have come at the “wrong” moments? (Mason Pastures, only a few miles away, received much more rain as storm cells passed over them than has come to Ridge House, and their Native Grass Planting has come back to life and greenery spectacularly. It turned out all right to have taken that chance and not watered them from the irrigation well.) The crop of mesquite beans everywhere is no more than half its usual plenty, and many trees have no beans on them at all–another case of rain falling at the wrong time? Many local folk tell that a rain coming at the height of bloom will abort the work of those sweetly scented blossoms, or mold the anthers and pollen but also this year the cattle herd hasn’t gone after the pods on the ground in the manic and addictive way they always do. Perhaps the cows with their oh-so-discriminating palettes have warned the community we shouldn’t expect the flavor of this Fall’s ground flour to be any better than so-so!

At those Mason Pastures the brood of Ash-throated Flycatchers in the post have long ago hatched and fledged, and by tomorrow–September–they’ll have left for the Pacific Coast of Mexico. I’m filled with a longing to go with these birds when they leave for where Summer itself will be migrating too, let go all this Romance of Western Life …

After the Sun is up and I’m watering the flowers on the patio, what is unmistakably some vireo begins singing out on the Creosote Bush flats, and it’s one I haven’t heard before. Bob had listened to a differently-voiced vireo at his place a couple of ridges away and in much the same sort of upland desert country during Spring migration this year; he identified it as a Gray Vireo, one of the “uncommon and local” species sought out by naturalists who travel a long way to visit southern Arizona. The bird here stays close to the house a good while, long enough for me to find recordings of Gray Vireo songs on the Internet and play them right along with what was coming from a Palo Verde. The real and the recording matched note for note, and so a “Lifer” bird is delivered right to the house before I even get on all my work clothes!

Too many kingbirds on the wires with obviously notched tails, birds that haven’t read the field guides (as Ralph says)–that tail shape is supposed to be the mark of the Tropical Kingbird. They’re silent though, not like that bird at El Potrero that gave itself away with its chattering. In the study of natural history there must be art, intuition, science. Making of friends with the notion that there will be birds, butterflies and bugs, that will not be identified even if you hold them in your hand, also helps. To strive for a life solved of all mysteries is hubris.

A “bug” lands noisily on a shrub next to me, oh it’s large, frightening enough that no one would think of holding it in the hand to identify, or get too close to its mysteries. It is more than intriguing enough to demand being wondered over. Looks can be deceiving and that was what this insect unmistakably mimicking the Tarantula Hawk must be all about! I first take it for one of those Tarantula Hawks that are visiting the Graythorns but then see how its strong black legs bow out to the sides, then come back together and are held in a tight row where it clasps the stem (picture a scissors jack) and the head was that of a fly, not a wasp, with large and bulbous eyes sticking out at the sides. The colors perfectly match the wasp it must imitate–the same orange-red and black–and the pattern fools the eye of the human and I’d guess this insect’s prey. Much of the body is black, but it’s the very long, fat abdomen that is orange, rather than the wings. What the insect does on landing is fold those wings long and straight over the abdomen, the wings are clear with tiny black veins and see-through enough that it appears suddenly indeed that they are what’s orange like those of the big wasp! Have I been fooled myself all this time, or is this something appearing on this desert only lately? (Later I mention it to Kathleen, who tells she has been seeing this very monster insect the last couple of years at 3-Links and was also sure it is a Tarantula Hawk mimic. As it turns out we are not alone in seeing it, and it is indeed a newly arrived and spreading species come north from South of the Border. This “Mexican Robber Fly”, Archilestris magnificus, was first recorded north of The Border here only about 2007 and that first published photograph from Arizona then caused a sensation in the world of entomology. Lately it has suddenly crossed over from rarity to “oh, there’s another one” from Arivaca through Cochise County. It does not sip nectar or nip pollen like the Pepsis wasps, but is a voracious carnivore on the wing snagging bugs and insects who presume it is looking for either a flower or a Tarantula, not for them.

Nine teal drop out of the sky, skittering, falling, completely out of control but completely in control, land like cannonballs with such a splash that they cause a mini-tsunami against the bank of hard-grazed Barnyard Grass. One swims warily, quickly away from the truck, shows fully a wing speculum of cobalt blue … she reaches the far shore of Barnyard Grass, turns forty-five degrees and the gem of that speculum lights wildly into an emerald that would raise the avarice of a jewel thief eyeing the Topkapi. A Great Blue Heron is unmoving in this wild splash-down of Green-winged Teal though perhaps he’s grinding his mandibles over the fright it will have set off among what’s left of the huge Bullfrogs he hasn’t yet dispatched. Heron remains implacable, inscrutable. He has an image to maintain.

September, tomorrow, the month larger numbers of Great Blue Herons begin to arrive, northern birds that will stay for the Winter.

August 16, 2016

At El Potrero, I hear a call so unfamiliar to me that I don’t even have an idea what family of birds to think singer fits into. It’s loud, yet grasshopper like and chattering and then I see it–a kingbird and not just any kingbird, but a Tropical Kingbird. The thing displays and displays until I’m sure of what I’m looking at and then flies into a large mesquite shading my winter quarters there and promptly a Western Kingbird comes screaming through the air and dive-bombs the exotic visitor, chases it off, and there’s no time to pursue. Is it in post-breeding dispersal wanderlust, as it and many of its relatives take up? or has it been there all Summer, outside my awareness?

June 2, 2016

The ryegrass of the Winter Pasture (a quaint term! it’s 102 degrees …) is producing its countless flower spikes, and green grain too, and those pastures are alive with Lesser Goldfinches giving out their lemon twist chitterings, and bright House Finches feasting on the plants of the small grains.

A Chihuahuan Raven flies down The Lane, low and just in front of the windshield of the slowly moving Silverado: what a great view of prowess airborne! but the bird is up to no good at least from the point of view of other species now frantically planning for the families that will come in with the time of plenty that they and I hope is on its way. Pow, a Kingbird bonks Raven on its crown, the blow having no effect on the grace and intention of its flight, Raven without loss of the rowing of its wings can still forward navigate the air of The Lane with its head straight up in the air at right angle to its body, jabbing those big black mandibles at the Kingbird. Pow, a Mockingbird bonks Raven on its crown, Raven looks up in defiance again and glares menacingly at Mockingbird, while it still rows its wings and doesn’t in the least wobble … it stabs the weapon of its bill into the air but misses this second and also most agile bird who “ain’t nothin’ but business”. All three crash through the wall of mesquite leaves and out of sight while other birds throw themselves into a fray now invisible inside the tree … seconds later Raven shoots out of the large and very dense mesquite, a nestling dangling from its bill, the Mockingbird in lightning, angry pursuit, the two birds and the doomed baby disappear over a far pasture with it seems the whole bird neighborhood in uproar behind them.

A single Vesper Sparrow is still here! Bob helps me determine that there are no records of the bird in the first week of June in southern Arizona. “Global Weirding”, I suppose.

May 2, 2016

Among chores and the cow-critters of Mason Pastures, there are lately passing through birds that even for here, are remarkable. Thought I’d share some “jottings” (more like scribbles) from the pocket notebook of the recent weeks …

Two Gray Hawks
Tristan, Isolde,
in love song duet
out of the lush wood it drifts
through budge budge of swallows
and to my ears–
and grumble of thunder that thrills
and welcomes me home
to Summer.

A male Wood Duck on The Stockpond, for one day.

Kingfisher thought he might get hold of tender squablets of Vermillion Flycatchers in their nest out on the branch over the water of The Stockpond, and so spent some minutes giving the alarmed and harried parent birds their annual Spring heart attack …

A great swirl of Rough-winged Swallows curves and descends to the pond in midday heat, to opera playing on public radio while I eat lunch.

I don’t open the middle wheel line irrigator hydrant until I’m sure that the first line has come up to full pressure after its last flush valve closes and stops hemorrhaging water. I put the binoculars there, on its east end, but my sight instead landed right on a low-flying creature I thought by its flight was a bat still out and now caught by the first sun rays, but–it was a very leisurely and solitary Vaux’s Swift! I could have watched and watched, the way I could have that Wood Duck, so rare is such an opportunity of seeing that swift at all, much less in a situation with the light perfect, against good background (vegetation and not glaring sky behind it), its closeness, and how it hung around so temptingly, but,     with that valve having closed, I had to tend to another riser and hydrant that must be opened.

A warbler morning at The Pond … Wilson’s, Yellow-rumped, Orange-crowned, more Wilson’s, a dapper-dan Black-throated Gray (good, understated taste in suits, that bird–I don’t think I’d recorded any before at the place …)

Another great swirl of birds who spend much of their lives on the air–a flock of White-throated Swifts. I’d never be able to count them, they screech and zoom right past my head and seemingly right through me, to drink for the smallest of moments from The Stockpond where I stood.

A splendidly flaming Bullock’s Oriole above a treetop, out on a long wand of a mesquite branch.

A Mockingbird is immitating a Yellow-billed Cuckoo.

and now a large flock of Violet-green Swallows; they spend the day over the pastures swinging low, swinging high, the next day are gone.

Kingbirds already in goodly numbers, and already on the fight.

I’ve got to get that riser closed down, the pump has turned itself off, and as I buzz across the pasture with the chore blinders on, I glance up to see a finch of an obvious strangeness that demands a lifting of the binoculars and, oh my … what has Alex’s devotion to turning that sprouting mesquite bosque back to grassland rewarded us with? A beautiful, and oh-so-rare Dickcissel. It’s not far away, I can see every detail that confirms the bird that looks so like a Meadowlark in miniature. Even if Botteri’s Sparrows don’t come again this summer, the appearance of the Dickcissel (apparently none have ever been recorded in the month of April in southern Arizona!) confirms the rightness of having taken on so awful, painful, and tiring a chore of keeping our little world safe for those sparrows by removing those mesquites. It seems as comfortable there as it is on its native, vast, waving grass of The Plains.

Through all the glory and rarity of these birds of our April, the flycatcher still stands out, and it can take your breath …

Vermillion Flycatcher,
bird aflame
never consumed,
from your ashes
no need to arise
for the one consumed
by your fire, is I.

October 17, 2013

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 11, 2013

Forty degrees, even on the ridgetop, the house had been closed up but the windows are opened before I leave, to let in while I’m gone the warmth of what promises to be a pleasant day. Click, click, click, down go the night temperatures further into the 30s at Mason’s, and there is ice on the irrigation hoses–at last. No Snipe, no birds drinking at The Stockpond, no song, no call notes, there is only utter silence. Later, though, more Cassin’s Kingbirds, Blue Damselflies and other dragonflies return.

October 10, 2013

I looked out on a downright wintry sunrise when the blinds were raised and the curtains drawn back for the first time since May: today I’ll want the house to collect as much warmth it can, and keep it.

The day is hard-put to get past 70 degrees, the Wilson’s Snipe staying with us will feel the more comfortably at home. The front brings another wave of birds south, the first Chipping Sparrows, and more Cassin’s Kingbirds from the Four Corners I guess, and the Mogollon. A day of wild skies and scudding but impotent, cold rain clouds, a flock of Violet-green Swallows and zipping in among them, a rare Vaux’s Swift to delight Bob E. and me. (I’d seen one other in my life, on a birding trip through the Pacific Northwest 40 years ago.) They are to be the last of that Swallow to snap up the bugs stirred by our Mason Pasture herd.

Lunch at The Stockpond, with a beautiful pair of Lazuli Buntings, an elegant Lord and Lady. A Flame Skimmer Dragonfly of the usual incredible, garish hue rests on a water plant in front of us the whole while we ate, but we don’t see any of the Blue Damselflies that were common only a couple of days ago.

October 9, 2013

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.