Tag Archives: Orioles

July 13, 2016

Sprawling over the ground in #2 Pasture, a spectacular star-leaved melón de coyote gourd is in bloom; the fruits to come may taste beyond horrible but the yellow flowers are gourd-geous, worth a spot in anyone’s garden.

The Tarantula Hawks are still mad for the nectar of that Graythorn at the gate of the Botteri’s Pasture and the whole bush flickers with their wing shimmer–and aha, two adult orioles fly across that grassland, an almost-adult cowbird in aerial tow cheeping petulantly–the three disappear into the mesquite edge, more cheeping, they all come out again with the “parents” trying every move they can to ditch the pesty baby, all of them fade out of sight towards the far gallery forest along the San Pedro.

July 5, 2016

The scolding and hissing of Black-tailed Gnatcatchers comes from the scrubby mesquites and the Graythorns, the bird rather uncommon from my observations on this side of las Rincones Altas.. There are lots of little notes and clicks from other small birds, a pack of Bushtits are fluffing around (they look like dustballs with bills) and many immature Black-throated Sparrows are opening green mesquite pods for the still-tender seeds. They leave the chaff on the ground like peanut hulls on a honky-tonk dance floor.

I look down into the opening at the top of that iron gate post in which the Ash-throated Flycatchers have set up home, to see if that big baby had fledged yet from its solar oven nursery. I’d certainly want to get out of there! What?? … the bird is indeed gone, but I realize what I had been looking at a week ago wasn’t a baby, but the mother–I’d forgotten about Myiarchus moustaches! This time I had a better entry of light into the shaft to see, and thought it was sweet that she hadn’t shot upwards then with bill aimed into the eye of the cyclopean monster. Curiosity could have at least blinded this cat prying into their affairs but the pair of flycatchers have got completely accustomed to our coming and going and working right there, and seem undisturbed by our being near, even this near. What I did see this time charmed to no end: three beautiful small speckled eggs, perhaps just the beginning of a clutch.

Immature Hooded Orioles enliven the mesquites and the tall grass and forbs in the north of #2 Pasture, and among them is a large “baby” cowbird (cue the villain music?) begging and seeming to be communicating with an answering adult oriole but, I don’t witness enough to be sure it was that bird who raised it.

June 27, 2016

Hooded Oriole pairs are showy and colorful out in the tall grass and weeds, far from the bosque edge, and over those pastures are winging many Rough-winged Swallows, mostly juveniles from large families. Monday’s swallow is fair of face … the Rough-wings have also lately taken to perching on the branches of the mesquites overhanging The Pond, giving a rare opportunity to study them leisurely, and do they ever chatter there while they sit! Masses of dragonflies are low over the same pasture, echoing the sight and behavior of the swallows above them.

I peer down through the top of the iron gate post where the Ash-throated Flycatcher has her nest, and as my eyes focus through the dimness I can make out not a mother but a big baby bird alone in there, still fuzzy but well along, its eyes piercing the dark and looking straight up, deeply and resentfully (or is it hopefully?) into mine. I must look to it like Cyclops, with my one eye gazing down from the opening in the roof. Actually I am as startled as this juvenile bird is, especially when it suddenly lets out with the most remarkable sounds, sharp loud clicks like the shorting out of some powerful electronic unit that carry a long way, all the while with its brilliantly colored maw held open wide … How does it make such a noise? The disembodiment of those clicks is so unsettling I draw back involuntarily and determine not to investigate that nest cavity again. I’d heard this a couple days ago from some paces away from that post, though couldn’t imagine what it was that was putting out the sound effect–had some live wire come undone and was sparking-out on the metal posts? The noise may be what greets anything the fledgling thinks is going to be bringing it something, rather than a panic or warning.

Fledglings rule the fencelines, the wheel lines, the mesquite hedgerows, the bosque edge, the thickets, the stalks of maturing oats–and their parents. Vermillion Flycatcher siblings … Lark Sparrow babies everywhere … Bell’s Vireo young’uns with fluttering wings hopping along from one parent to another, begging, all these gray birds and the birdlings poking around and fidgeting madly through a bramble of Graythorn and mesquite just outside the truck; they fill the open window as if it were a broad television screen. And on The Pond, a lively set of eight Mexican Mallard ducklings where none had been seen the day before. They’re not ducklings exactly any more, already half grown the way they are this year upon their appearance though they still can’t fly. The now quite tame Mallard parents will probably acculturate these offspring to our human ways, as they did their last year’s brood. Where could these have hatched? The river has been dry for a while, without the deep grass on its banks where ducklings could hide the way there was a year ago. In 2015 the family arrived out of the riverbed, the very young ducks walking behind their parents much earlier than this, too–that surprise of a dozen ducklings that added so much life to The Pond came then the first week of May, and by the end of the first week of June they’d left, parents and all. Many came back later, at least who survived the King Snakes and the coyotes, fully grown and fully winged: we could always tell which they were among other ducks by how relaxed they’d stay when we’d drive up or I’d scoot around the water’s edge to record and empty the rain gauge.

When will the rain gauge need emptying again? In this most Fearsome Foresummer we’ve almost become numb to, our unconscious is turning over the possibility that it won’t ever again have water in it …

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.

September 27, 2013

The day temperature has plummeted to just above 80 degrees, what’s with that? The coolness does give more of a party feel (well, invigoration at least) to the mesquite removal chore that we must first do before the land is ready for the sowing of winter pasture. In digging up one mesquite root I unearth a good-sized, spectacularly ornate larva like that found in late August by Chris E. and James C. when they were doing this same work, only this creature is in deep repose–paralyzed–and I suppose will transform itself into an adult wasp of whatever species had apparently parasitized it, instead of metamorphosing into the beautiful gray and pink silk moth, Sphingicampa hubbardi, the “Mesquite Moth” (a fitting a name!)

 

Surely it is the zenith of Western Kingbird passage now, they are on every fenceline, most every utility pole, mix it up with the last of the Bullock’s Orioles and with Summer Tanagers and Bell’s Vireos. And … was that a Dusky Flycatcher? More madness and masochism is added to that pastime of trying to sort out autumnal Empidonax, in a place and season where almost any of the ten species recorded in the West could turn up. Birds like this possible Dusky have enough about them to make me believe I am seeing something different, but it’s all mostly too subtle … Audubon Society writes things like, “Status uncertain,” and, “‘Western’-type flycatchers cannot be differentiated in the field” (referring to the recent split of Western Flycatcher into Pacific-slope and Cordilleran Flycatcher) and other works tell that some Empidonax that could be seen at The Stockpond in September are best distinguished by voice, but except for the Gray Flycatcher they seem to be silent in the Fall!

 

The first Violet-green Swallow back down from the mountains swings alone over the pastures, and a Hepatic Tanager flies ahead of me down The Lane–a bird also coming down from the forests and thence to Mesoamerica and beyond. Not one but two pairs of Red-tailed Hawks dance a wind-tango high overhead, the couples coming near each other, then in seconds glide across the sky stage far from the other pair, glide back, swirl up, sideways, like twin dust devils over the hot playas.

 

The cattle herd, newly placed on a pasture where they had kicked up their heels and danced delightedly over the grass, as they graze along now with more leisure stir masses of insects to which three most colorful male Brewer’s Blackbirds fly delightedly, and go to snapping at. Then come many Violet-green Swallows, soaring, swirling, swooping so near to me I can see every white circle of the plumage just above their tails. They drop and drop lower, and continue to swirl, only now right through the cows, around the cows, just over the cows’ heads, or skim the seeding heads of the bermudagrass as they pursue those stirred-up bugs. Poor bugs, they must be the only creatures not experiencing delight just now.

September 24, 2013

Whole lot of kingbirds around, they don’t seem to be planning to leave soon, like surfers loathe to give up waiting on that last wave of Summer. The 96 degrees today tell they are not unreasonable, and even I must start closing the windows again in the morning to keep the house from overheating while I’m gone.

A very green-looking oriole, was it an Orchard Oriole? I don’t get to look at it long enough ever to know, but also don’t know what else it could be.

September 20, 2013

On the edge of #3 Pasture I find a returned Marsh Wren that lets me approach within a couple paces, close enough that I can see the white stripes on its back. I also find the place in the fence on the road (well, one of the places in that fence) where Mycha the Cow took advantage of how the whole line is being buried in the mud and rubble of sheet flood after sheet flood. The top wire is now so low that Mycha just springs over with ease and nonchalant grace, to vacuum up the mesquite beans that those other, mere mortal cows who don’t have the nerve to follow (gracias a Dios!) can only dream about getting to. I haze her up the long road stretch to The Green Gate, she traipses back in, I pull up to The Stockpond and lose Mycha’s grand, teeth-grinding irritation in a water’s edge once again so alive with birds that I don’t know what to look at; I’m still so worked up and shaking over the chase with that cow that I can’t hold the binoculars still for a while anyway. Once I calm down, the birds all set themselves before me beautifully: pairs of Wilson’s Warblers, pairs of Black-headed Grosbeaks, sets of Lazuli Buntings, kingbirds, a bright female Bullock’s Oriole, Bell’s Vireos, an Orange-crowned Warbler, Abert’s Towhees, Blue Grosbeaks, a Nashville Warbler, immature Western Tanager, a Black Phoebe, McGillivray’s Warbler, a Swallow bombs in and bombs out too fast to see what species. A pair of Lucy’s Warblers are the last I’ll see in what seems with them a true farewell-to-Summer (I thought they’d all gone by now, it’s been so long since I’ve seen or heard any.) The flock of Brewer’s Blackbirds passes overhead.

The cows have been set to graze down the bermudagrass in #2(north) Pasture, to make easier its preparation for the planting of winter small cereals, as wheat, oats, barley and rye plants are called when used for grazing. Another Marsh Wren is there, and from the uncultivated other side of the River fence slides along another snake, who crosses bare patches of ground and pops down into a hole in the tufts of bermuda. This Ring-necked Snake is more mellow than yesterday’s Rattler (though it, too, is said to be venomous) and a handsome reptile it is: lead gray, with an orange band around its neck worn like a fine piece of jewelry.

The Monsoon, the Summer, end with a bang literally, as thunderstorm cells sweep in and over the Mason Pastures …

August 30, 2013

Another three-quarters inch of rain. Every tenth of an inch is recorded, celebrated.

A Gray Hawk glides through the bosque branches, not far above the ground. These birds will only be with us a few more weeks. A gray Diamondback is coiled in one of the truck tracks in #2 Pasture, I almost trample it as I move along in my sunrise bliss but the cascabel appears to be in a cold torpor. Well, the temperature is only 71 degrees. I’m only gone a few minutes to attend to an irrigation hydrant, but already the rattlesnake isn’t there when I return through. There are lots of them in this northern end of that pasture, and we’re also seeing lots of small (two feet long) ones crossing Cascabel Road. … an oriole family group is still acting very clannish in the trees of the alley between this and the pasture to the north, Vermillion Flycatchers seem as bright as they did in the spring when they arrived, many kingbirds are hanging out together and trying every new air-borne trick of the wing they see or that occurs to them.

A for-sure–and handsome–Wilson’s Warbler comes to The Stockpond, I suppose that was indeed what had been there yesterday. I am not going to let go of summer with much grace, but the appearance of this favorite bird is solace.

Poorwills calling at sunset tuck the day into bed.

June 14, 2013

Devil’s Claw (Proboscidea parviflora) are germinating and producing their first true leaves in tiny open spots out in the bermuda.

The shores of The Stockpond are massed with jumping, landing, and departing sparrows and warblers, towhees, Canyon Wrens, orioles, grosbeaks, the numbers of all of these increasing as the mudflats widen with the extreme evapotranspiration of Foresummer that sucks the pond into midair.

Thunderheads loom … a few drops of rain … the Mini Monsoon?! In a few minutes the heat drops from 107 to 85 degrees, enough to make one shiver!

May 30, 2013

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 …