Tag Archives: Mesquite

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 …[…]

August 11, 2013

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A return walk to that blown out irrigation main in #4 Pasture to see if it’s holding pressure gives an impression that all the world is being devoured by those White-lined Sphinx worms. There are at least four or five to the square foot of Boerhavia that they are quickly decimating, but they leave alone the related Annual Windmills (Allionia choisyi) that are growing among them and showing their pretty, tiny lavendar-pink blooms on widely sprawling plants. The worms are fabulously beautiful: lime and yellow, with black stripes and red bars. I imagine them in their not millions, but probably billions, this year when every flat is massed with their host plants from here up to the canyonlands and over to the far-off Pecos. If any Elf Owls waited out the dry spring with its lack of flowers and thus lack of insects for them, they will be feasting on hornworms this year no doubt. (I once had a pair come down to visit a number of evenings in a row years ago, when one of them brought its own dinner, a huge Tomato Hornworm that it held in one foot while it balanced on the branch with the other. I watched the last of the sunset while only a few feet away from me the little toy owl bit off the head of the hornworm and working from the bottom up squeezed out the liquid green contents and slurped them–a sort of slimesicle–while I toasted the sweet little creature on its hunting prowess, raised my glass of wine to it with a “Bon appetit, frere!”) Also no doubt, there will be a bumper crop of hornworms of various species and the Screech Owls will be seen aplenty around the spotlights on garages and house walls, flying out of the dark of a sudden to snatch a large hawkmoth adult and vanishing back out of sight where it will munch away leisurely on a branch.

One of the few butterflies that are common this year, the Orange Sulphur, flits over all the pastures, sipping at almost any kind of flower they can find open. Grasshopper numbers are still growing, and don’t seem about to decline. In fact I wonder if this year they aren’t going at some point to reach a critical mass and then mow off all the bermuda we have spent our time and our wealth growing. At least for now, there appears to be not a single leaf chewed off, and I wonder what they’re doing. They’re certainly leaving behind a real mass of grasshopper excrement, which must be as good a fertilizer as any cricket poop that is a product of growing popularity among the organic set lately … […]

The mesquites are hung (already!) with whitening beans, they look as pretty as any cultivated flowering tree, as tinselled as any fir at Christmas. On one of these, bright Lark Sparrows perch on each branch tip to complete the look, as if someone had attached to the mesquitebaum the finest of Austrian ornaments, ones that wind themselves up and sing. The second week of August, our Sonoran Summer, perfected. All that has come before from those first days when the mercury shot over a line into the 90s, the wicked Foresummer, the first wild storm and haboob wall of dust, the first flood of The River, have built to this. A pleasant, 96 degrees late afternoon, the Saguaros on the hilltop are stark against giant white Monsoon clouds, the clouds themselves hard against an impossibly blue sky. All things looked at, in every direction, are as if viewed through a stereoscope. The White-winged Doves do yet call and coo, as if spring has not gone to high summer of Los Temporales. Their notes wonderfully blend with far away thunder.

August 3, 2013

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Never have I seen such a beautiful alignment of The Heavens as arranges itself on the low horizon of the East at 4 am, a while before first light … Jupiter … Crescent Moon … Orion … above them all, the Pleiades. The martins do not add their own vocal sparkle until 4:30 or so; something changes with them, they fill the air later, closer to sunrise which is itself coming later but not so markedly as to explain the change in the birds’ schedule.

The morning air is thick, thick with humidity, thick with Mourning Doves, thick with the whistling of dove wings. I find a single Kochia scoparia–“Poor Man’s Alfalfa”–a Eurasian amaranth brought in long ago in hopes of improving cattle grazing but now widely invasive on The River not far from Mason’s. It hasn’t been noticed right here before, and we may not welcome it particularly given the reports of its toxicity if not given tedious management. Oh goody, another weed problem. “Oh well, at least we’ve got the flowering stage Bull Thistle in here taken care of,” I gloat to myself of course just before finding one of those. Hubris, and payback.

As this humid day winds down, but long before sunset, I sit in the truck at the edge of The Stockpond and listen to the mellow whistles of a Blue Grosbeak still singing out his mating song and territorial declarations. Then, out from the grove of mesquite and hackberry to the right comes floating–for it seems barely to move, and is more suspended in the air with how it can fly with hardly a wingbeat–a bat larger than any I’ve yet seen in Arizona. Oh it is superb, of a strange color and pattern, flashing pale brown and darker brown and I suppose it is a trick of the light that makes its wings looked striped as it comes back and forth across the pond. In this flight it is slow and graceful, its wings whose whole span must measure at least a foot across are hardly pumped; it barely dips in its slow and level movement to the water for a dainty, quick sip. All this would be incredible enough, but the ears–the ears look impossibly large. They are very long, and stick out in front of the head nearly horizontally or at not much of a raised angle, with ends flipped out and up like a pair of antlers! After good long looks at it with binoculars, I see it alight in one of the little mesquites on the bank and swing there for a while, lick and groom its wings and body happily, with an uncannily friendly look on its face. It drops out into air and swings low back over the water for another drink, and does this repeatedly until thirst is quenched. [This habit before the light was gone will not match anything I can find on large Arizona bats with huge ears, but Nancy F. helps with the identification by contacting her bat biologist friend Ronnie S., who kindly gave advice and thinks it likely is the Townsend’s Big-eared Bat. Everything I read about the species does confirm this; I never see another, it is amazing luck to have been there for this one’s visit.]

July 5, 2013

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What thick air, 81 degrees, 3:45 am, coffee in hand as can so be enjoyed in a treasured Cascabel Clayworks mug. Dark, but there’s the thinnest of Crescent Moon giving the tiny glow of a nightlight behind the clouds. At zenith a few stars but only one house light shows across the canyons, overhead a covering of martins calling down from so great a height that it could be imagined their quarky notes are broadcast from the stars themselves. The birds seem if anything even more numerous than when the nights are bright and clear but perhaps the clouds change the acoustics. This will be the first day of the season I won’t be closing the windows early to keep in the cool, because the house never got cool to begin with, so the windows will be open to let in any tiny movement of air. Bed sheets and pillows toasted to the high 90s are now to be lived with.

When dawn comes, tanagers and grosbeaks are singing at The Stockpond and many nighthawks come for an on-the-wing drink but–no toads! The Sonoran Desert Toads have just … vanished, the water surface left now unruffled, the air above it quiet. The gigantic amphibians have come and gone, like that.

Yellow-headed Blackbirds are decorating a wheel line tractor, as they love to do. Two much younger ones are among them today, which seems to be evidence the species is breeding nearby though I must remember that years ago when I contacted the Audubon Society in Tucson to report a rancher telling me the birds were nesting in the edge of his pond across the River, I was told that was an impossibility. One of the pretty males has a neat white–rather than black–mask.

Pairs of round mesquite cotyledons have popped above their cow poop peat pots, assuring us a future of hard work of tree removal for many years to come. Two Brown-headed Cowbirds are sitting on a cow; I can count the number of times I’ve seen them actually do this, but I imagine it was their habit with their buffalo friends as well.

Sue and a friend come in the evening in hopes the bird show might still have some thrill to it, but only one nighthawk appears. We do see an impressive black tarantula with blond body come past in its measured, giant spider-ly fashion as we sip wine, a male according to what I can read. Suddenly from the gallery forest of willows, cottonwoods, hackberry and of course mesquite along the River bed behind us comes the sounds of large critters crashing through, breaking large branches and sticks in a panic we can’t think what the cause of can be. We never see the animals, but we can tell they’ve topped out over the steep banks where they could at last make a passage and escape something they feared mightily–then comes what sounds like a rush of wind through those cottonwoods. It’s not wind; I realize it’s a flood, and a big one, and that the deer or the javelina or whatever they were, were running madly ahead of a wave coming down that narrow and deep sandy channel that’s been dry for many months. The water arrives in wild fury, stretches immediately bank to bank, and down its course bounces and tumbles and rolls and then flies past me large branches, logs, whole railroad ties that had been H-braces on a pasture edge somewhere between here and Mexico, bobbing styrofoam coolers, a tennis ball … I jump back, fearing that the overhanging bank would collapse under my feet and add me to the number of bodies that have been swept away and gone over the years, some found, some ground up and never found, left buried under quicksand miles downstream.

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 29, 2013

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Bats and Nighthawks are taking their final sips as their shift ends, the woods around is dark and the creatures themselves invisible, but the pond surface catches enough dawn to show their reflections and so I can only see them upside down. Nothing is as it seems in the crepuscule.

I go about the usual circles, opening the irrigation, back to the pump to turn it on, out to the pastures to see that all is operating well and efficiently using that priceless water, adjust sprinklers, unscrew nozzles to clear out grit and pebbles the pump has sucked up and that will clog an opening (and so I get the usual soaking which still feels cold with the dawn standing at 50 degrees), then swing on back to The Stockpond to see who has come now the sun is heading towards the cliff bottoms. Just the usual neighbors hangin’ out at the cafe: warblers, sparrows, tanagers. Ernest Tubb undoubtedly in a cowboy hat twangs out from the dashboard and from 1950, “I Love You Because”. I sip coffee, munch a tortilla, munch on the day’s cow chores, munch on all the fences that are also twanging out and popping off their posts. I think back to when a ranch visitor almost twenty years ago asked me one dawn in the cooktent if I thought it was going to rain, and I answered him, “Yessir, eventually.”

No Western Tanagers, they seem to have left en masse.

The dark shade of large and dense mesquites invites me to take lunch up on the rim of an old stocktank that still collects the runoff from the hills across the road if a storm cell dumps water in just the right canyon above. I can look down from that bank top at the wheel lines and can see their watering stop when the pump shuts itself off before the 1 pm peak hour rates begin. The scenes below on the fields and above on the hills and mountains and the cool shade invite a siesta though I must beware the large ants foraging around me. At least I must not roll over on any. An orange from some place far from this foodshed is my desert, the peels are left for a favorite steer who has learned to eat them. A thought comes: we humans are no less (and no less legitimate) recyclers of biomass than are those mahogany-colored ants (or gophers for that matter), the difference being only of scale. We do it on a continental, even planetary, scale. I’ve been at the bottom of those orange skins becoming the humus of a spot very far from where they were brought into being by the natural processes and cycles in their homeland, or bioregion if you will, and I’ve been responsible for their being added to the biomass (and decomposing litter) in this one. Humus is neither created nor destroyed, but transferred from one place to another? Multiply that by the rest of what I eat in a day, and that again by 7 billion of us, and we will know that indeed we are changing more than just the Earth’s climate. Will the result be any less “natural” an outcome than what should have happened here without us?

The mesquites are gravid with pods, though many trees are still in bloom and I take in delicious, deep drafts of the sweetness, allergies be damned. The calves are eating the flower spikes as if they were popsicles, their mammas reaching higher for the even headier and protein-rich catkins of Catclaw Acacia, with blossoms that fill the air with an indescribably rich fragrance one might only come on in perfume shops hidden down tangled alleys of old Mombasa.

Seven almost-grown Mule Deer join me on the pasture as I head out across to turn down the risers to conserve untold thousands of gallons of water that would keep flowing out if I didn’t. It is always a big hassle to do this, but I don’t dare waver from the chore. The deer are unsure of me yet also quite unafraid and they let me approach closely as I tend to my own business at hand. They come to graze on the yellow sweet-clover which in its tall drifts is loudly abuzz with honeybees, and there is the maturing barley, oats, wheat and rye, the globemallow, bermudagrass and saltweed for them and the javelina, Coues’ Deer, jackrabbits and cottontails–and the cattle.

These Mule Deer have the same power to enchant as the Catclaw blooming at the pastures’ edges, are so startling in their near-tameness as to seem visitors from one of the Yaqui ania “dream worlds” (if dream they be) where all is flowery and the streams do run. The Yaquis would understand how all in the crepuscule here is not as it appears, living as they do at the other book-end of this Sonoran Desert where their own rio comes to the sea, or at least used to. As I learned from spending a winter in the extreme south of Sonora, everyday life at the opposite shore of this desert is in many ways like ours, at least here in this wild valley of unpaved roads and people who know that as with the word “cowboy”, “neighbor” is both noun and verb.

The physical surroundings of that far land in Sonora take little adjusting to if once you have become at-home on the San Pedro, and I look up from the Mule Deer to hills and peaks that remind me of that beloved part of Mexico. The colors at this season, above the lush riverbottom flats I and the deer stand on, are the same grays and pale browns of the monte mojino–the “tropical deciduous forest”–of Alamos, only here the trees and shrubs are shorter, with no closed canopy because we are much colder though that is hard to remember just now with the afternoon temperatures always in the 90s and very soon in the 100s. Our grays and browns are even more pronounced than usual, because the last rains of any note fell eight months ago on this range. We end up with no closed canopy here on our hills not only because of the cold, but because of the dryness: it looks like every last Foothills Paloverde up there has gone from green to brown and died outright from the drought. The O’odham believe that saguaros we see had once been individual people, and so I can imagine the few of these cactus trees that we look up at on those heat-shattered hills among the dead paloverdes are longing for the arrival of the temporales. The saguaros struggled to bloom this year, and none of them flowered right around here. Will it rain this summer? Will it ever rain again? Yessir, eventually.