Tag Archives: Nighthawks

June 28, 2013

4 a.m. at the house on Fire Sky Ridge between Sierra Blanca Wash and Pool Wash, the martins are as high as the moon nestled among a few meek clouds overhead. In the light the moon pours down the birds pour down calls and notes. I stand on the patio, coffee cup in hand, under the ramada. Over it and all the dark lands arches a firmament of the martins’ starry whistles. This phenomenon which I’m not sure anyone else is much aware of comes to an end as it always does about fifteen minutes before the dawn light comes. Lesser Nighthawk quaverings and weird chuckles come suddenly and night-jarringly out of the dark from out over the Saguaro slopes that drop into those washes.

Their loud, “check!” calls draw my attention to the five Yellow-headed Blackbirds that again today have arranged themselves artfully on the wheels of the irrigation lines. In another pasture Abert’s Towhees chase each other up and down the wheel line axle pipes. It is time to keep an ear out for Botteri’s and Cassin’s sparrows, and this morning I see a far sparrow singing like a Chipping, but with a wren-like ending to the song. I have a second to catch rufous on its crown before a bleepin’ Lark Sparrow chases it far off (later in listening to recordings of the Rufous-crowned Sparrow I’m encouraged to think that a Rufous-crowned it is …)

Kathleen and Ralph W. must see the evening spectacle of birds at The Stockpond before the days of it trickle down and away when Monsoon arrives, so tonight while I was getting the lines up to their watering for the night our naturalist friends arrive in their pickup and set themselves along the shore. It takes me longer than usual to make sure all is running efficiently out on the pastures, and I just miss the parade of martins coming through and sweeping the water, and I’m glad Ralph and Kathleen have been able to see it. What I do see when I get there is a lowered tailgate spread with delectables and fine food, a bowl of fresh large cherries, homemade cookies, a slab of brie cheese for heaven’s sake, crackers, all to be washed down with cabernet, all as if pulled from some never-exhausted magic bag from The Arabian Nights … and then comes in that vast swirl of Poorwills, bats, and nighthawks of two very different sizes–immatures and adults? Lesser Nighthawks and Common Nighthawks? I had been thinking the Nighthawks that come in and hover to drink for that suspended moment have the manner and grace of storm petrels, and similarly Ralph volunteered on his own that what they reminded him of is Kittiwakes. We talk about these things far into the night, well, “far” where we’re concerned in this life that puts us to bed earlier than town folk. Who’d let any of those rare goodies be left on the tailgate anyway? The conversation is as delectable as what is spread on the sideboard of the tailgate, and that’s not just because I mostly have cows to talk to all day.

May 29, 2013

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.

May 25, 2013

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 7, 2013

The first Purple Martins, considered rare here before mid-May, towards sunset swoop over the patio of David & Pearl’s burrito-wagon-home-home-on-the-range nestled in its arroyo just north of Pool Wash, but none have been seen at Mason’s yet, nor have their metallic calls drifted down to my ears there from birds high unseen.

A few Lesser Nighthawks appear of a sudden at The Stockpond as dark comes on, a bird that always makes one feel happy seeing return from Mexico. Though a bug-hatch is going on, they are not just “hawking” insects–they approach the water surface with great delicacy, appear to land on the water for the briefest moment, and they drink. Many swallows join them, one following after another in orderly file, swiping the water for a few inches with bills dipped and open. Later, almost dark, come the bats, who slow as they approach the pond’s surface now a mirror of the last pink of day set in a darkened bosque. The bats make the slightest of curtsies just above the water after they come almost to a gravity-defying stop and are suspended above the surface, drop their heads, take a sip, then are quickly off over the far bank. The cattle for whom this pond owes its existence have drunk their fill and gone back out to graze. The night comes on warm and soft, and continues full of the rustle of wings avian and mammal (who can tell how many of the 28 species of bat that live in Arizona fly above these pastures and pond?) at this only open water for quite a distance around. The greenery adds its humid fragrance to the tangy odors coming up from the water, dust blowing in from here to Mojave, of algae starting to grow and rushes poking up through the slime, minerals in water brought from 30 feet below ground, and my nose takes in something unchanged since long before humankind ever existed: briny, something untellable, ancient, a broth that sparked life.