Tag Archives: Kingbirds

June 3, 2013

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[…]

Butterfly numbers and variety are increasing in their slow way this season, but it still seems they’ve been decimated by that most bitter of cold spells last winter or by the drought of the last year, or both. A Checkerspot is here or there, or a Metalmark here or there–someday I’ll apply my mind to studying the tricky differences among the species but then by the time such leisure comes my way there’ll be no mind left to apply to anything much. Hairstreaks … Blues … Azures … Tailed-blues … doubtless I’m seeing a few of all of these, maybe a single specimen of a species in a whole springtime, or masses of one or two others teasing the eye like a box of ping-pong balls upended and bouncing crazily all over the place so that the eye can alight on no detail. They’re all silvery to blue, or blue to silvery, some with copper sheen, some with exquisite, complex tails so tiny they can hardly be seen. A species that in goodly numbers rises in eddies and swirls from the mud of The Stockpond’s edge is finely striped below (but no tails), and has a pair of round eyes on the edge of each hindwing. One is being tame enough that it doesn’t take flight and allows a very close approach … isn’t that nice of it? As I enjoy this rare chance to see these beautiful markings, it sinks in on me that something is sunk in on the butterfly: stabbed into its tiny abdomen are the fangs of a black spider who apparently hangs out here where the buffet will come to it.

A “small” Mexican Tarantula Hawk, bright cobalt, shining, as gloriously beautiful as it is baleful, zooms past us over the water, the first blue Pepsis of the summer. Tarantulas do come to these banks, but this wasp was probably looking more for a drink than for a spider buffet it could leave for its offspring. So many insect and arachnid chisels and straws and harpoons! The first mosquito of the year shoves hers into my earlobe.

From all the branches along The Lane, from the lone and handsome large mesquite in #1 Pasture, from the bosque, from the River bank, from the mesquites growing scattered in the old alley running down to The River, come to my ears nestlings cheeping and peeping, some softly, some wildly and demandingly, and the frantic coming and going of tireless parent birds catches my eye. Flycatchers and warblers, kingbirds–the close approach of an ever-hopeful raven doesn’t amuse the kingbirds, and I more than once see a huge black silhouette flying off grouchily with Daddy Kingbird in hot “basta ya!” pursuit, trying to bean ol’ Raven on the head with a sharp bill … who is to decide which most deserves to be nourished, which will be nourishment? […]

May 30, 2013

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Now at last, the dawn comes in at the ridge above Pool Wash with a temperature of 71 degrees, though in the Mason Pastures it’s “only” just above 60 degrees. The humidity has gone up, too, to 50%, and the air is lush and soft, and rich smells well up from watered areas. The one Mexican Mallard is soon joined by his mate, whom he right off chases across the water, and they zoom around and around until she hits the bank running–literally. They leg it off at a running waddle into the bosque, and disappear. The pond edges flicker with sparrows, Summer Tanagers, orioles, warblers, flycatchers, kingbirds, hummingbirds, a Cooper’s Hawk, doves …

May 25, 2013

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Full Moon is lowering itself towards the crest of the Rincon when I leave in the “dark” and thread the ridge above Pool Wash and slowly lower myself towards the canyon bottom and out on the Cascabel Road. The grand, bare cliffs are all in a glowing mist, a world that in this moonlight is there and is not there. Nighthawks are purring loudly and then softly, and from every knoll and canyon bottom rings out Whit-will-do! Whit-will-do! of Brown-crested Flycatchers … the early bird catches the cicada. On the road drive to the pastures the air is sweet and cool on my face. Owl is going home, Poorwills fly up from the gravel or flicker into my headlights, kangaroo rats bounce and jackrabbits try my patience when they decide that safety lies under turning truck wheels and not in the creosote flats they could peel off to instead.

My chest aches in the cold air, but then again it has done since I got knocked face-down flat to the ground yesterday afternoon by the electric fence when after crawling under and to the other side of it, I lost balance while I was getting to my feet and leaned back enough to lay the wire across the nape of my neck … bang! I long to direct the herd grazing these bottomland pastures from horseback alone, abandon the wires and the batteries and the electricity. The temperature and Moon are dropping, and I get the impossible pleasure of seeing four moonsets in succession, over this ridge or that, or when Moon snuggles himself into one gap in the mountains or other while I myself swing around north and south to drop cowboy gates and open hydrants out on the pastures …

[…]

Bright his smile may be, but his night at The Stockpond is far from a silent one. The dark of the mesquite bosque is all sound and singing–Cardinal, Yellow Warbler, Bewick’s Wren, Lucy’s Warbler, chats (lots of chats), tanagers, grosbeaks, Mourning Doves, Bell’s Vireos, kingbirds, House Finches, and a Vermillion Flycatcher that’s dancing mid-air. While singing out, he slowly crosses high over the pond, demanding of the avian world, “Oh, am I a stud, or what? Dig me!!” The fiery red little bird likely had done that through the whole night, dancing in Moon’s follow spot. The pair of Mexican Mallard swim around each other, painting yin-yang symbols with silvery water.

Later in the bright morning sky three Purple Martins, two males and a female, are sewing patterns on the blue, letting out far-carrying notes, twings and plangs in a courtship danse apache among two rivals and their would-be mate. Below in the mesquite edges and the weeds growing ever taller fledgling Lesser Goldfinches are complaining to their parents that not enough bacon has been brought home lately, “you don’t expect us to go out and get it ourselves … do you?” My life as ranch hand with its shocks by electric fences and lightning seems as tenuous as that of the baby bird whom I’d just saved from a pool of irrigation water in which it had wet its feathers thoroughly. I can decide to rescue it if I can as validly decide to leave it to drown, though all I probably did was save it as a fresh meal for a coyote. So be it. I put it way off into the grass, where it will stay hidden at least for a while, could dry out after all and end up changing the entire course of Evolution.

May 23, 2013

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Dawn brings with it temperatures in the upper 40s still. Chunks of cobalt, chunks of lapis take wing–many Blue Grosbeaks, and Lazuli Buntings. In the gray light, a Lucy’s Warbler is jumping in and out of the cavity in the railroad tie gate post in which one of those birds was busily putting in a nest a bit less than a month ago; I thought it had been abandoned. There are many chirping babies around and if I remember, Lucy’s fledge with a startling quickness.

While I sit in the pickup sipping coffee after completing irrigation rounds, a Gray Fox comes along to get a drink at the pond. A beautiful animal, it is–red fur on its legs, and a swath of red that runs diagonally from its red ears down the sides of its body. It sits over there for a good long while, black-tipped tail draped elegantly, but acts nervously about something beyond it most of the time though it didn’t seem to care about me. Around him many swallows are flying in for quick on-the-wing dips of their bills into the water, and there’s a real “mess” of tanagers, of both species, coming to drink as well. One of them is a first year male Summer Tanager in that peculiar transition to adult plumage: green, blotched with red all over like either I’m seeing spots before my eyes or he has some dreadful tanager pox.

Sapphire blue damselflies are alighting on the irrigation hoses wherever the units have put out enough water to build little ponds that will of course drain away. The air has heated to just short of 100 degrees, and the grassland birds have discovered quite the way to stay comfortable: with the humidity at 4%, the seventy-foot wide zone of wet soil dwn the center of which the wheel lines sit becomes a giant evaporative cooler, and the upper spokes of the wheels of the units are crowded with birds who get as high as they can up under the wide, flat aluminum “tire” so it can shade them. Close up under one wheel canopy alone there were stuffed a Lark Sparrow, a Cassin’s Kingbird, and two Western Kingbirds, obviously enjoying that shade and “cool”!

April 29, 2013

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Queen butterflies and a very large Blue (what species? and we think sandpipers are a challenge to tell apart …) are seen here and there, not much yet. Too early for Monarchs. What there are a lot of are Kingbirds, I have never seen so many in one place yet it’s reported to me there aren’t many elsewhere on The River. Here on the fencelines of Pasture #3 was a Konvocation of Kingbirds, a dozen or more, the acrobatics of their flight a thrill to watch as always–each one more beautifully plumaged than the last, grays, olives, blacks, clean white, shimmering yellow. Almost all were Western Kingbirds, among them a single Cassin’s, which is growing to be one of my favorite birds. Still a few White-crowned Sparrows in the brushy alley that borders the pasture, and overhead, recently arrived for the summer, a flock of burbling and bubbling Brown-headed Cowbirds, their notes dropping to the ground with the sound of water splashing into the Stockpond. I’ve read that it’s a mystery how the birds learn these sounds and songs, given that other species with other things to teach their actual young are who raise the cowbird from egghood. More mystery here, to let be.

Heading back to the Stockpond, I opened a “cowboy gate” to get out of that pasture, and noted a Lucy’s Warbler very near in the mesquite branches and unruffled by my presence. It had dried grasses in its bill, and was obviously heading towards a nest being built somewhere, then right in front of me it dropped down to the massive old railroad tie post onto which the gate was hung. It vanished for a few moments on the other side of the tie, then popped back up into sight, looked at me again and flitted off for more building material I presumed. Once I got the gate looped-up and closed, I went around to the other side of the post and sure enough, there seen easily within the rotting out heart of the railroad tie was a nest appropriate to the size of this sprite of a bird. It wasn’t very enclosed by walls of wood, in fact it was in more of a ledge that had formed about a third of the way into the body of the tie, with a wide crack above for entry–one would be able to see very easily the eggs that would come, and the nestlings. It still was no place one might imagine a cowbird getting into and in there wedging its outlaw egg, but it’s reported that this is just what happens. The nest I found today is at least the fourth I have come on in exactly this sort of place–a railroad tie gate post with some degree of decay–over the years of being a ranch hand, and invariably the birds have raised their broods despite my constant coming and going on one chore or another that demanded opening and closing their gate, and the babies and parents have been completely at ease with my getting glimpses of their progress. I don’t see any mention of such a thing, such a nesting site, in the professional literature, and Cornell states flatly that the species does not use nesting boxes. I would sure describe these railroad ties as such! or at least they could inspire the design of one that the Lucy’s Warbler would be willing to accept.

Back at the irrigation riser that’s filling the pond, the temperature is climbing well past 90, towards 100 degrees. A female Broad-billed Hummingbird drinks from the hydrant leaks at the top, and what turns out to be the last Vesper Sparrows come desperately to the pools as well–another of those species that leave of a sudden as May’s heat comes in ferociously, to head for the Mogollon Rim a mile higher, and points north from there. The usual Black-chinned hummer males describe geometrics on the air, zipping around in almost impossible moves over the whole pond and in the noonday shimmer, a Common Yellowthroat and very red Song Sparrows come for sips, too. Most dainty of all are the gigantic (many would say, frightening!) Tarantula Hawks that land some distance from the edge on muddy footing, and carefully tread to where they may press their lips to the water. They take long draughts. Everyone leaves alone these extras from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, for they’re packing heat like no other creature. A Summer Tanager that’s even more red than the wings of the Tarantula Hawk comes down, but perches on a rock out in the middle, and before he lowers himself to the edge of that rock to reach the water, has his perfect double reflected in the surface.

April 19, 2013

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

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

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

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

April 12, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

April 9, 2013

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I arrive at the Stockpond and scare off a put-out, cranky Green Heron, have a glimpse of it for only a few seconds–well I’m grumbling too over a temperature that hovers at freezing. This, too, is Sonoran spring. A front came over us in the night, blue sky gone, but not exactly cloudy either: all is silver and glowing, the light, the air itself, it is stunning, like being in the Waiting Room for Eternity. The birds trickle north in ones and rarely twos, their kinds arriving today for the first time, and maybe regretting their haste as a little drift of sleet begins to pelt the brim of my Stetson … a lone Barn Swallow (“about time, friend Swallow!” I send thought to it on what wings I have, the species is so late this year); a lone Swainson’s Hawk has arrived and with a flourish of masterful flying, dips, parries, folded wings and mournful whistle, he escapes the harassment of a Redtail and is then gone into that silver air above me. A lone Cassin’s Kingbird, gorgeous in this strangest of light around me, whurp-whurpping from a fencepost where he might stay for the rest of the summer once he stops regretting leaving Old Mexico. The sleet sets in, the mid-seventies of yesterday too long gone and it will be a mercy if I forget them. The ice balls bounce off my shoulders as I open an irrigation hydrant and have water shoot up through the frigid air and into my face out of the tottering equipment. Oh my yes! … the vida vaquero loco, romantica, libre.

[…]

As the irrigation water rolls from my face after hitting me squarely in both eyes, I hear my father telling that poem of an April bedtime more than fifty years ago, hear him quivering out the “poor thing” part to add just that extra fear, pathos and doubt, and hear myself crying back, “No Daddy–no! … will he make it to spring??” I wonder if I will. I hope that Cassin’s Kingbird sticks it out.

April 5, 2013

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Song Sparrows, and Lark Sparrows, in increasing numbers come to drink or are seen in the pastures. The Song Sparrows are furtive and slip through the grass though also the wide-open edge of the Stockpond is much to their liking. The Lark Sparrows are bold and chatty, loud, with canary song to delight; they rise from the dirt tracks in a swirling cloud with the dust.

Almost a week on from when they’d started coming to the hummer feeders at El Potrero, a Black-chinned came this morning to hover over the middle of the Stockpond, drop to its surface, and take a long draught and then whir off. Yellow-rumped Warblers in elegant courting plumage came to the muddy edges to sip, too, and while Chris E. and I were lounging on the bank eating lunch, a completely unbothered Cooper’s Hawk also landed, and drank its fill, while a first spring large red dragonfly sailed out over the middle.

Not nearly so many Meadowlark as before, but still they’re here giving out their fluting notes and working over the grassland in shifts. A single Western Kingbird tells it’s about time for those meadowlarks to move away north. The wrens, meanwhile, are paying no attention to Kingbird’s hint that the bell’s rung and it’s time to change classes: the wrens are still well at home, and their species remains as mysterious in both pastures of green winter grass.

A species of White (butterfly) has emerged; they are few in number yet.