Tag Archives: Purple martin

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.

January 8, 2014

Chipping Sparrows, lots of Chipping Sparrows, at The Stockpond, as bright of eye and wing and life as a flock of tropical finches. Gambel’s Quail drift in and out nervously for water, Abert’s Towhees though own it all, arrive, chase each other off, come back, squabble and squeal their notes, bomb back and forth at each other low-profiled and fast like brown-feathered torpedoes.

Javelinas, now with babies, mow and mow the winter pasture, but after all, they must be allowed their pound of greens. I and the cattle are growing impatient, though, for the time when the crop has outgrown this constant porcine pruning and the pastures can also be a bovine buffet.

Still I haven’t found a way to catch a Polka Dot Beetle to have a close look–they know well how to evade a predator, fly off faster if you just stare at them, seem to fold wings and drop to the ground if you make a move to scoop one in the air, then they scramble off quickly in the thatch or scurry along the underside of a leaf and vanish.

Pillbugs are active, I turn up numbers of them in the course of digging out mesquites large and small in front of, behind, and beyond the fence of The Stockpond in anticipation of the return of Purple Martins in a few months. Those charismatic birds need a wide, clear approach and runway as they come to drink, as do the various swallows of summer, swifts, and bats, and if the mesquites are left in place it will be not much time before their crowns have grown across into a wall that would be a menace to the flying creatures’ navigation and swing.

A Gray Flycatcher has been at the water’s edge all day, and is joined after sunset by one Mexican Mallard who comes in for the night.

September 28, 2013

Both windows closed in the bedroom, a sudden dip into the 30s before dawn has driven me not only under a sheet, but under a quilt, to drink coffee in bed instead of out in balmy, star-ceilinged air fast becoming just a pleasant memory.

Snowbirds today, driving or riding in pairs in ATVs, touring on the Cascabel Road and as they stir up the clouds of dust that drift to form a low, inversion air dome that settles over me in the cold of the morning there’s no way to stop that song from coming to mind, that song DJs get in trouble for playing but can’t resist every year about this time … […]

Five Purple Martins fly through the powdered-up air, in a southerly way–there’ve been none for a couple weeks (and now, there will be no more martins after these.) Still, the day warms nicely, rises by about 50 degrees and the dragonflies come out in swarms at The Stockpond. Today Nancy, Tom and I see yet another new one, red and black striped, with clear but bluish wings, with red veins on the forward edge of those wings.

The three of us continue the job of digging mesquite, though a number of the little, nasty-thorned trees are growing out of gopher burrows and are easy to remove from the softened ground and air shafts. One shovel turns up an exquisite, one could even say dear, little toad, brown, with raised patterns that are bright Chinese red, as if it had adorned itself with garnets or rubies: the Red-spotted Toad.

August 27, 2013

Purple Martin ways, they are a-changin’. Though they’re still content as can be, we are given to know that we are to enjoy them while we can. Summer grows long, the year will be growing late, but still it’s 95 degrees this afternoon. Within days the Martin kind scattered over much of the country and Canada should begin passing on their way to another America, America del Sur, and pick up to go along with them our local martin-folk. They are not up there singing any more in the dark before sunrise. In the mid-day they are high in the sky, so high I cannot see them but can hear their chatter. In that richest of late day light, each round separate cloud chimes with bells of Martins unseen, then the birds all drop and swoop and play in the winds low just above my head, then swirl up and around the family saguaro standing on its ridge crest against tall white cumulus that have cried out their Monsoon tears for now.

 

August 17, 2013

The night air is about 75 degrees, the casa hotter than that so it feels like the Palm House at Kew. I simmer in bed with coffee and KCBS AM radio news coming across the deserts from that station’s chilly San Francisco home. The skin prickles with heat. Moths flutter all over the rooms, on the lampshades, the insides of screens, on my arms, float on the sink dishwater left over from last night, are in the refrigerator where at least they’re rather sluggish, even drop in through the narrow spout of the glass coffee pot, fall in there, drown, get poured into my cup. It’s the season of towering, lit clouds in the day and at sunset, but outside the night in the hour before dawn the sky is completely clear, a rarity. Flashes of light rise from below the horizon, telling of storms far out of sight over The Rim in a higher, even more lightning-prone country. As the stars fade a very few Purple Martins sweep for bugs overhead; lately their chatter is overwhelmed by the songs of Black-throated Sparrows who live all across these mesas and ridges of Pool Wash and Sierra Blanca. The Martin activity in these hours of madrugada continues to diminish.

No, no way to go back to trying to do a quick and intense documentation of the species at this true height of summer here–I have to be content with what can be noticed and caught sight or ear of during the long hours of attending the cow and calf, which include the lessons necessary to give that bull calf that we hope will get him to find mamma’s milk fountain more attractive to suck on than my knee, her leg, her flank, or the pedal squeeze on the cow chute, which are all things he tries laying his lips to enthusiastically while he ignores Molly’s milk fountains. (I absolutely drew the line on the calf’s “cheekiness” when while I was bending over to fill his bottle the he whipped around behind me and tried to latch on in each their turn to both halves of my, um, back side…) I hope soon it will be possible to go back to the usual chores whose everyday demands do at least expose a hand to what’s coming and going and staying in Nature on the Pastures–the irrigating and the making sure that irrigation stays efficient, the cow moving, digging mesquite, trying to fix cursedly disintegrating fences or fences buried in silt from summer sheet floods, fences pushed over by cattle who’d rather skim that buffet than this one, unloading and stacking hay, putting gates that cattle have torn to pieces back together, keeping horses in rein and in practice, rounding up and returning bovine escapees, ingratiating one’s self to newborn calves, filling the pond with water, controllng alien weed species, checking on cows in our other “units” scattered over miles of Cascabel Road, filling holes in the roadway of The Lane, moving wheel lines, oiling drive chains, raising, lowering, building portable electric fences, rebuilding blown out water mains, hauling steers to the packing house … … …

Young Summer Tanagers are wheezing, hidden away in the thick bosque canopy, giving out those sounds that for years tricked me into thinking there were an awful lot of Tyrannulets around. A Western Tanager flies down The Lane, a common enough sight there in the migration of spring but it’s been a few weeks since the last was here and in my notice; more should be coming down from the mountains, though. Every one of the five pastures has its own Western Kingbird family, soaring, parrying, ducking, flashing and twisting in flight, playing–I don’t hold a doubt about the Tyrant Flycatchers having a sense of fun and even mirth!

August 15, 2013

The Ides of August, the Ides of Summer for birds and the wildings, but the appearance of those Red-winged Grasshoppers tell that the nagging of winter pasture preparation and seeding and irrigating will soon be more shout than whisper. We’ve got at least as far as confining the Mason Pasture herd to one 350 ft. X 850 ft. swath (about seven acres) of bermudagrass, between two lines of electric fence with an exit to the pond, so cow folk can eat off the crop almost to the ground and make that ready for tilling six weeks or two months from now, clean out around the mesquites that must be pulled or dug out so that the rattlesnakes coiled below them will be more visible.

There are many baby birds cheeping away in the mesquite branches, probably second broods all. I want to spend two or three days right now, though, making a bird list, during these last moments when the summer still feels long and sweet …

Yellow Warbler (singing)

Yellow-breasted Chat (singing)

White-winged Dove

Lesser Goldfinch

Vermillion Flycatcher

Bell’s Vireo

Blue Grosbeak

Purple Martin

Summer Tanager (singing, and call notes)

Mourning Dove

Bewick’s Wren

Verdin

Abert’s Towhee

Lark Sparrow

Gray Hawk

Cardinal

Red-tailed Hawk

Gambel’s Quail

Crissal Thrasher

Black Phoebe

Western Kingbird

Savannah Sparrow (rare–but not unknown to be arriving now for winter)

The River is running, madly … many large blue dragonflies on The Stockpond, and “Whitetails”, or as I call them, Saddle Shoe Dragonflies. Bugs that like to harass humans are doing that, aplenty, worst of them are the tiny loudly singing gnats that fly into the cavern of an ear opening, get louder and louder but then their whine is suddenly cut off when they ditch into the pool of sweat that’s collected just inside the earlobe’s tinaja. This unpleasantness is made up for when the air is thick with the incomparable sweetness of huisache acacia blooms.

One of the cows, Molly, has had a bull calf and I’m worrying over both of them–the baby doesn’t know how to suckle, or maybe even that it’s supposed to. Mamma’s not looking all that good either, uh oh, a big chore coming on. I think she had it Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. … Save the life of my child/cried the desperate mother

August 3, 2013

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 25, 2013

Spadefoots pipe in the murky water of the seasonal dirt stocktank, and at the main pond that Summer Tanager sings away purely in the madrugada as if it is still Spring, one Great Horned Owl hoots as if it is still night. Song Sparrows are also in song, which hasn’t been heard for a while, and the tune and lyrics of the local subspecies gives me to remember that the melodies of the ones that were such a part of the arrival of my childhood’s Springs on the Eastern Seaboard do differ, not by much, but enough to be interesting. They also look different, enough that it took me a while to decide that what I was seeing here was the same species. For those really advanced birders, the many regional forms were outlined in my first field guide’s appendix, but mostly it seemed people in those days were only concerned with the general species–such as “Song Sparrow”–much in the way that nobody in the era would have found a need to know how much the temperature one neighborhood over varied at the moment from their own, as is presented now in all television weather coverage.

Mosquitoes. Mosquitoes.

A young Western Kingbird has grown to become talented enough to catch a hairstreak butterfly, though has some challenges getting it down. There is a flash of red from its bill lining when it opens wide and tries something else … the first returning, rare early Tree Swallows appear in those pastures, and many Lark Sparrows are back in view. Abert’s Towhees are doing a lot of singing, sounding not quite like robins, not quite like sparrows. White-winged Doves are also cooing as if it is still Spring, another cuckoo I haven’t heard much of calls from the riverside bosque towards the old Lancaster Ranch, and the cuckoo at the pond also declares its territory.

Coulter’s Spiderling (Boerhavia coulteri) is the next herb coming up strongly and abundantly, rushing quickly to blooming stage everywhere there had been nearly bare soil; there are acres of it.

It’s been a couple of weeks since The Stockpond was much visited in the evening by the martins, but tonight they buzz in five or six at a time, with many more circling in holding patterns waiting for an open slot to approach the water.

July 12, 2013

The stars are dim through the clouds, vanishing for moments in violent lightning, martins are up there flying in their usual places before dawn, calling to each other and earth, their voices vanishing for moments in overwhelming thunder. Spadefoot Toads are stirred by the rumble, and continue sending their melody up from the far bottomlands. The River itself sings all the way to El Potrero.

Summer Tanagers are still singing their full repertoire at the Mason Pastures, where a Spotted Sandpiper pays a rare summer visit for a day at The Stockpond. The sandpiper is still in breeding plumage, spots and all–a wanderer from the confluence of the Gila River and the Bonita, where it is thought to breed sparingly?