Tag Archives: Purple martin

July 9, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , , , , ,

It seems I’ve awakened again in Hilo, rain pattering on the window, mists and clouds settled upon the cliffs and hanging valleys above the San Pedro. Pat and I will saddle Nimby and Loompy, go up on the ranges with them and see how nine days of Monsoon rain will have brought change and green and flowers.

I pass under a soaring Swainson’s Hawk on my way north to El Potrero, and once there find Nimby looks surprisingly clean even though he’s black, but Loompy? He looks like a New Guinea [Asaro] Mudman, and it takes a good while to comb him out and get him back to his bright sorrel color. A glorious day to ride, even though humidity hovers around 100% and the temperature hovers near 100 degrees. All is riotous, lush, colorful, fragrant–Loompy chomps off a swatch of Desert Oregano that grows just at the narrow gate that is usually mine to dismount to open. Enveloped in the plant’s delicious spice, I swing into the saddle again, if it can be said that a sixty year old can “swing” at all … […]

Pink Mammilaria cactus in bloom just about everywhere … the vast flats of huisache no longer look furnace-dried and brittle (if not killed outright) by that late freeze and the ensuing drought, but are green with feathery new growth … the sproutlings of yellow Devil’s Claw of a month ago have spread into mounds of shiny green leaves … Three-awn and Muhly grasses are in near complete rebound from the winter grazing of the herd … and the rains have even tempted the Saguaros to push out a couple large and very late flowers.

The rains are coming evenly and are most welcome, but they aren’t giving enough accumulation for the needs of bermuda pasture and so I go to Mason’s to set irrigation for the night. Blue Heron is at The Stockpond, his usual jumpy self. A good number of martins are overhead but don’t give much of a lengthy evening show, male Vermillion Flycatchers are in a rumble of bluff, bravado and defense of the choice real estate–but then come in many more martins, five or six at a time, slicing the water across much of the pond or are more dainty in their approach and drinking, a few others splash onto the water like the Flying Boat landing on a lagoon. Only two nighthawks appear, at 7:30 in the last pink Monsoon light set with thunder from the higher country.

July 2, 2013

Nature Jottings, ,

4:00 am, coffee with martins innumerable catching their own early breakfast overhead, the birds flying in the dark it sounds from one horizon all the way to the other in a frenzy no doubt born of some big Arizona after-the-rain bughatch. The patio is lit softly by Crescent Moon, and flickers of lightning. Thunder from far off rolls in to me, nudges into the notes of the martins …

[…] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLXcIFLzXWk

No birds again this early morning on the edges of The Stockpond, surely a change come with Monsoon. Quiet, very quiet. Just after sunrise there was no algae apparent on that water, neither red nor green–all was clean. Does it sink? Come back to activity with hot sunshine and rise to float again? Change color with the daylight and its level of photosynthesis? Later in the morning there it all is, the whole pond covered, this time half in red, half in green. A Great Blue Heron stands in water deep enough that its tail tip is under the surface … stock still, the heron waits for a pair of huge Sonoran Desert Toads that he has his eye on to drift unsuspecting within the range of his harpoon. The toads, though, only have googly-eyes for each other (in fact, their eyes popped out above the water is about all I can see of them) and stay humped onto each other and blissed-out mid-pond and away from the big bird. Didn’t take those toads long to be stirred by this new season that makes untold numbers of other lifeforms spring to life and love and song. I haven’t heard the Desert Toads singing yet, though I think I hear these two give out with, “Why don’t we do it in the toad?”

July 1, 2013

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A couple of hours before sunrise, the patio wet … a moonless, vast land can be heard gladly sipping down into itself what that first, early wild storm of a new Monsoon Summer brought it. My lips have no trouble finding the rim of the coffee cup in the utter darkness. The invisible Purple Martins swirl overhead, sing down through the balmy, soft night of a perfect 71 degrees. I wonder what I’ll find at the pastures. I wonder if there is a road left to get to them on. Now comes the season that folds a tropical saturated air into a stiff batter of monsoon heat, when one’s clothes will be drenched through, with patterns of white edges lined out on it where the salt from the body marks a high tide of sweat. Now come days when it will be 100 degrees and raining, likely to reach a peak a couple months from now when hurricanes can hurtle up from the Sea of Cortez, which after all is just beyond our horizon, and mix even more power into the usual storm cells that can materialize right overhead of us.

The washes and arroyos did run large in that single temporal, but I make it through down Cascabel Road as daylight comes on. Close to Mason’s the torrents had ripped across the gravel and dirt, then ripped back to the other side, then burst through a bank in a fulfillment of some endless memory of the land, and filled to the top with water the old earthwork stock pond that in other years had reached such a state only towards the end of a rainy season. I stop, stare in amazement at it for there was no pond there yesterday, take in the lushness, smell the fecundity and odor of the South Seas. At The Stock Pond I hold up the column of the rain gauge in a joyful disbelief: almost one inch of rain, the first rain enough to comment on since February. Imagine … rain. An inch means I can delay the resumption of the irrigation cycle on the bermuda grass, save money, work at something else, save water.

There is not a bird at The Stockpond–not a bird–though there are call notes in the mesquital, and the down-slurred, slightly peevish whistles of a Tyrannulet; the rich songs of our summer residents are all stilled after the violence of the storm. Those friends are going to try to gather again this sunset time on the banks here to take in the evening bird show that’d got cancelled on us last night by the sideways-driven rains and the lightning bolts and the threat of flash floods coming down the arroyos, but there isn’t much promise of spectacle now that today water can be had everywhere and in abundance. Then a White-throated Swift rockets through over the water, water that is noticeably deeper than at this time yesterday. A single large winged termite drops from the air above onto my thumb–they’re emerging already after only one night of rain. Another White-throated Swift swoops through, with a screaming whoosh so fast as hardly to be made out on its approach, but when it is only a couple feet from my head I get a thrilling look at this incredibly beautiful and dapper bird. The swifts don’t much like the look of the water, which is this morning wholly changed from yesterday–mud where any water open at all can be seen–most of it is carpeted with red algae. There are bubbles rising from below that are then held unburst in the thick red covering that stretches from one shore of newly sprouting Barnyard Grass to the other. Suddenly the air is all Purple Martins, but only one or two are willing to poke their bills into so nasty-looking a pool for a drink. The cattle amble in, also wholly changed after the storm in their shimmering, dust-free coats. Surely the Creature from the Black Lagoon is about to jump up through the only open water edge and snag a calf. We’ll see later in the day if the nighthawks and bats will come as they have been in such increasing numbers over the weeks of a Foresummer that now of a sudden have ended. A fiery Summer Tanager comes to a mesquite tip, sings sweetly, slowly as if he’s afraid of shattering the wet enchantment, the notes seeming to come from a bird ventriloquist, his bill moves so imperceptibly.

Chores mostly done, when Saguaro Juniper folk were drifting into the Cafe du Stockponde, I myself drift on up to see if the herd had learned from the lightning strike that scared their little hooves into a high fandango last night, and were still honoring the electric fence in that #2 Pasture. They had learned, to my relief, for if once they get over to that just water-filled old pond there on the other side of the low and flimsy portable fence, it’d be almost impossible to get them out of there again, what with how they have everything a cow could want in there and with how she can hide from a drover and parry with him back and forth on either side of many a mesquite tree. A Killdeer has come to enjoy the pond’s muddy edge, I can hear. I walk back to the truck through the deep summer grass in late day sunglow and am swept over by a vast number of Lesser Nighthawks, high and low, very near and gliding past in their odd flying style, scattered from right where I stand on out to the horizons.

Evening thunderstorms look like they’ll stay on the mountains, and back at The Stockpond the tables are set, cheese sliced and arranged, wine poured from a bottle, olives readied to be plucked from a bowl. The water is open–not a trace of red algae!–though green algae floats instead in scattered swirls. It’s all Lesser Nighthawks tonight and rather than having decreased now there are so many other places for them to drink, they arrive from the lands roundabout, and arrive, and arrive, and the air pulses and whirs with them and then … shoots down from the sky a Cooper’s Hawk, who stretches out its taloned feet and sinks those claws into either side of a nighthawk ten feet in front of our faces, the nighthawk’s wings raise and are jammed up under the wingpits of the bird of prey and both sail as one off into the bosque where hungry baby hawks watch for their next goodies. We’re just stunned and let out gasps, all the nighthawks vanish, no sound, no movement. Sue breaks the spell that’s taken over the air now empty of birds:

“God! Life’s a crap shoot!“

June 30, 2013

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The morning is hot, smokey, with that odd blue light of a partial eclipse, but what’s being eclipsed is not the sun but the forest in far away New Mexico: my old wilderness haunts there in that high country are again burning. Perhaps some favorite old tree I once talked with in The Gila is now suspended in the air around me on the San Pedro, and I take into my lungs its very elements, absorb it into my body, dissolve it in my blood as it was absorbed already long ago in my mind and memory, woven into the fabric of my psyche. It is strange to see a Nighthawk come in to drink in this dimness at 8:00 a.m.–an unusual addition to the usual morning whirl and gyre of swallows and martins. Something big is up. A little more than a week has passed since Dia de San Juan, the 4th of July a little less than a week from now … one date looked to by Borderers with Hispanic, pre-Gadsden Purchase leanings as the start of Monsoon, the other by Borderers who might think in Manifest Destiny terms. Perhaps the two will fuse at last, when Monsoon comes between the two? That may be what today is.

At lunch a Black Phoebe alights in the six inch layer of dust on the roasting, sunny opposite slope of The Stockpond, flattens itself, spreads out its wings fully, hunkers itself into the dust, droops open a red-lined mouth and simply lies there. I think it must have died in the 110 degree heat, and I walk over in curiosity, but suddenly it wakes and flies off in obvious good health. There are no ants right there, so it wasn’t anointing itself with those insects that some birds work with to discourage feather parasites. I expect it was cooking out the cooties, from above by the sun, from below by heat being released upward by the deep dust.

This Mason Pasture cattle herd has since about that Dia de San Juan been a test of my talents at longsuffering. As our Ellison’s grandmother told him, “A cow will go where she wants to.” Every morning lately I’ve come along to find the portable electric fences pulled into pieces, posts broken in half, clamps neatly taken off battery terminals, beeves and bovinas and becerros scattered across pastures “where they’re not supposed to be” (yeah, I know–as if!) If the recently arrived from range members of the bunch aren’t going to pay attention to this modern method of controlling their grazing, we’re going to have a big challenge in grass management from now on. In the afternoon with the atmosphere pensive and the sky from a distance giving troubled growls, I walk one more time a quarter mile out across the wide flat bottom where I am the tallest thing around, give putting the fence system back together yet one more try, change out the battery, re-braid the fine wires that carry the pulsing electric jolts. Jimmy, Elna, Sue and Bob will arrive soon to watch the sunset-time bird showing at The Stockpond, where I’ve left lawn chairs and little tables for antojitos for us but the day now promises a different kind of show. Lightning bolts come down on the other side of the hills to the East, their thunder grows and it’s all I can do to keep my nerve from unraveling–concentration is put into the quickest re-set of the posts and the repairs as can be done without being shoddy, because the herd must go back into the area or be let into some place else that will demolish the next week’s cycle planned with careful hubris. It is work to stay calm, and keep to the chore; keeping panic from taking over takes a will I can’t be sure will last. If I run for the corner gate and the truck, it will surely catch the eye of the predator lightning and I’ll be toast. The last wires are woven back together to complete the fenceline, and it seems logical to expect lightning then to hit the wire at the other end, while I’m holding it. ((What am I doing out here??)), I think to myself, but it will be finished, has to be done, and there’s an end to it. Meanwhile the the herd has come along and sees me far out on the pasture, and they pile up at a far gate sure I’ll let them in there. They’re always cowvoyant about such things. I let out a Mexican whistle when I’m done, and get back a chorus of excited moos.

All is set, the fenceline and battery test out functioning, the cattle are whistled in and they run, skip and kick by chorttling, and then make a right turn and go directly towards the electric fenceline and the always more attractive side of the pasture with the always greener grass. They come to a sliding stop when they see the line all fixed up again … “curses!”, they whisper. Then … a howling wind of a sudden bowls into us, I have to hold my straw Resistol with both hands or it will blow over the River gallery forest, dust rises thick above the pasture, rises higher in sheets and tails, gets grit up in layers blowing sideways to sting all our eyes and rub out the sharp edges of the figures of the cows. In the moment that many of the herd edge their noses to the wire to check whether it’ll pop them this time, we’re all blinded by a stunning flash of lightning, the bolt hitting the ground between us and the pond, and the near-instant thunder boom scares every cow off their front hooves at the same moment, they’re into the air, on their back legs on which they spin a 180 turn, churn up more and more dust to fly over all our heads in brown curtains. Instead of blowing through the wire and posts as they had planned, they flee in a classic unstoppable stampede from the fence in the direction of the lightning bolt instead. Once I come back into human physical form from the quivering molded jello on a plate I was left in by the lightning and thunder almost on top of us, I myself madly stampede back to the cowboy gate and fiddle with the barbed wire and metal latching with a prayer that it’s got back up before that fenceline could be struck by the next lightning. Pat and Sue both say later, “Well that was a perfect moment–those cattle thought your electric fenceline did it all to them when they got their noses too close! Bet they never go near that again!!”

I flee back to the truck and get to The Stockpond where the folks down there are gamely sitting in the lawn chairs and pouring wine, within a quick jump of their own vehicles of course. Not much in the way of winged creatures ventures along for a drink in front of us what with the gale rising and a lightning-streaked wall of dark cloud towering up and coming towards us from the Sulphur Springs Valley to the East, and I fear that this Summer Stock(pond) Theatre of nightjars, bats and swallows is over for the year, and that these my birder friends will have missed it. We give it a few more minutes, but get religion when a wind blast clears glasses of wine off the tables, knocks over the open Free Range Red Rex Goliath Cabernet Sauvignon $4.97 bottle on the ground, tries to fling the cheese, blows tortilla chips out of the bowls … and lightning sears the air in three of the Six Directions, North, East, and South. When a dust storm obliterates the view beyond the fence on the other side of the pond, and the big drops of rain come to mean real business, Elna and Jimmy mount up in their car and call out from the window, “Outta here before the washes run!” The rest of us get into vehicles with rain hammering on rooves–a sound all of us are in bliss over hearing at last. Bob’s car is closest to hand, and I sit in it watching for a lull in what’s now a deluge and for a break in the near-constant lightning to get across the lot and into my truck without being electrocuted. But–it keeps coming down, and coming down and getting louder, and I realize that maybe this will be the first time I’ll ever have seen washes and arroyos in torrents on a First of Monsoon. “Hey, look at that!”, I call to Bob, and point at an inch deep sheet flood coming out of the bosque and doing more than creeping across the parking area–it is swallowing it–around my truck, and towards Bob’s car. “We better get out of here. I hope Sue makes it to the other side of Hot Springs Canyon!” I cannot wait any longer, there’s another flash and boom as I myself bolt towards the truck and am soaked, but it’s hard then to engage the clutch with legs that have turned again to jello in reaction to such close lightning. But–it all says that now comes (ojala!) a time of green plenty, shimmering meadows of Summer Poppies, grand skies and storms, happy critters, happy people, Nature rejoicing in a special, much celebrated time that belongs to the Borderer and not to the Snow Bird. We drive up The Lane and come to the green metal ranch gate, and to open it and go through I have to steel my nerves and embrace the goodness of getting killed by lightning that could hit that gate or the fence that’s attached to it: this is just a fine way to go. Chaining the gate back in place on its post seems to take forever, but then, the gate is closed–on The Lane, and on Foresummer … […]

June 28, 2013

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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.

June 26, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , ,

A sudden cold morning, so cold I put on a winter canvas rancher’s vest to make the before-the-sun-comes-up rounds of turning off the waterers across all the pastures. The temperature is in the low 50s; by noon it will be in the 100s. It is so cold there are almost no birds at The Stockpond, a great shock now I’ve come to be accustomed to the showing of so many who come in from the greatest of distances to get their water and stay alive. They must all be shivering somewhere!

The evening. I’ve finished turning on all the waterers again and at The Stockpond the scene is a very different one than morning’s, more different than can be imagined at the end of this roasting day. Did that chilly dawn actually happen? In the last rays from high overhead descends a swirling vortex of swallows, martins, bats, nightjars–swinging low, dipping for moments longer and shorter, in sets in an orderly fashion; their numbers can hardly be grasped. Then the sun is gone, the critters of daylight’s last shift drink but are seen only in the reflection of the pond’s surface that picks up a final light coming down from the arc of the sky. Our friendly Jackrabbits sit in front of the dark mesquite wall across the way, I only know they are there because their ears can be seen in upside-down reflection in that pink water. An entire reversed Great Blue Heron is there in the wide mirror, too, its actual body I can hardly make out against the dark trees even though it is so sizable a bird.

June 10, 2013

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I’m buzzed by the summer’s first brown and yellow, large wasp, which I call a “Brown Man”, the Jamaican name for a similar species. They will have to be watched for now every time a covering on the wheel line tractors is lifted: from the ceiling of those covers these wasps love to suspend a nest, and they don’t like it much when the lid is rudely yanked up and banged over on its side when the engine needs to be started. Another smaller, all-yellow wasp lands on an irrigation puddle, and floats on the water’s surface film while taking a drink.

Caribbean Horseweed, as I call it, (Conyza bonariensis, or less flatteringly, Asthmaweed) is coming into bloom; it is not as sought after a graze as is its northern cousin, the Canadian Horseweed (Conyza canadensis) that is also shooting up abundantly but flowers much later atop neck-high stalks. The beautiful deep magenta-maroon tiny carnations of Scarlet Spiderling (Boerhavia coccinea) hover in a mist of the thinnest of stems over bare patches of ground in #3 Pasture. The handsome Malvella (Malvella lepidota), which has the not so handsome common name of Scurfy Mallow, holds hibiscus-like, chaste white cups of flowers on plants sprawling through the low places at the top end of #2 Pasture. It deserves being brought into Arizona gardens, should be in hanging baskets in the Tucson nurseries.

The temperature the narrowest slice off 107 degrees … cowbirds, buntings that for some reason are still here, various flycatchers, warblers, all crowd into the shade of the wheel line wheel rims, sitting out the heat of the day perched on the upper spokes. At The Stockpond, Martins that appear black in the midday glare swing in to skim the green water where it’s open among the drifts of red algae, all this a pattern of colors of jewels and precious stone … jet … peridot … carnelian. Now the female hummers come in numbers to point their bills into that open water, driven so by thirst I guess as to risk the usual male divebombing. Black-throated Sparrows, rarely seen in this spot, also come to the water’s edge, and Cardinals too, and many Yellow Warblers, one of which has a crown and face with a glow of orange.

June 9, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , ,

The double gates swing wide into The Lane, and receive the cow herd we’ve pushed down from the uplands with along the way an overnight stay for them at Elna & Jimmy’s on the bank of Hot Springs Canyon. It is of course fun to participate in such a now-rare thing, and the help offered and given by Saguaro Juniper members is grand–a few people on foot, some in vehicles and stocktrailer rig, three on horseback. In the era of wildly hazing (yee … haw) cows, calves, bulls, heifers and steers sardine-style into trailers, taking off and being done with it, while I rode along I wondered if we aren’t the last holdout in Cochise County of such an “Old West” way. We are in part pushed into it by the cost of fuel, and a poverty of facilities, but equally so by wanting to stay with something that is in direct touch with the animals we raise, the horses we ride, and the landscape we ride–and stride–across.

“The Great Cascabel Cow Move of June 2013” goes smoothly and sweetly on a surprisingly “cool” morning (60 degrees at dawn) and our Foxtrotter, Loompy, performs gorgeously beneath me, but fretful and watchfully, tightly wound I’ll always be in such an affair. The years have gone by since these lands, past which we bring the herd, have been taxed according to their value for growing beef instead of taxed according to their value for growing real estate profits, and the fences along the gravel road reflect this: mostly, they are down, caught by the grader and torn into messes, or gone completely including water gaps where a canyon’s opening would be a natural temptation for a cow to peel off into. Owner’s aren’t so concerned now about keeping livestock in because mostly they don’t have any, or concerned about keeping someone else’s out. It would be easy to have a wayward animal lead a bunch off to the hills to the East, or crash into the River bottom and have them all disappear into a hopeless tangle of saltcedar, mesquite, willow and cottonwood, which would turn a fine day into near endless misery. Cascabel Road isn’t much of a cattle highway any more, but everyone handles the reality superbly. When those Mason gates swing and close behind, I let out a great lungful of air, give thanks for all those people around me, give thanks that we and our fellow livestock are all whole, Molly didn’t have her calf in the road, and the young ones had kept up (sometimes Loompy nudged their butts to keep them motivated.) There is romping and bellowing and running as the herd that’s brought in runs in with the herd that has been at Mason’s through the winter and they work out the points of becoming a single unit.

In the late afternoon I return to check on the state of peace or conflict, and find the Brown-headed Cowbird population already increased proportionately with the “new” herd size! Up in #3 Pasture, our very own distelfinks–Lesser Goldfinches–are massing on the seeding heads of Malta star thistle, feasting, joyously twittering or giving out lazy, satisfied notes. That won’t be enough to get control of the nasty weed, but the birds are most welcome to stay for this dinner.

Lots of Purple Martins are overhead after the sun is gone, their number over the spring being few up til now.

May 25, 2013

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

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

[…]

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

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

May 24, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

This soft, warm dawn invited the toloache to open its huge white trumpets on the road edge outside the main gate of Mason’s, their perfume drifts out visions of Georgia O’Keefe and other shamans who came before her, of O’Keefe’s revelations to us of a new worldview, of new worldviews revealed to Native Americans through ceremony using the plant, the glowing petals speak too of rites of passage and the passage of spring into summer. I must take all the pleasure I can from the sight of this spectacular plant now, for soon enough the road grader will come along and knife off all the gravel edges and then some, all the way up to our fence, Cochise County having proven the way it has that it will not suffer wildflowers to brighten this road any longer.

Once inside the gates and down to The Stockpond, I find another Spotted Sandpiper is there teetering through the mud, probably for the day. It should be about the last one that passes north. Through the increasing heat (just under 100 degrees again) the first Purple Martins that will fly low enough to skim the pond surface with open bill come along. There are only a few, but soon there will be large numbers of them dropping in for a drink before they return home to their saguaro mansions in which they nest up on the hills and low mountains. The birds must come from a good distance out on the desert; there aren’t very many large saguaros right around here.

After I move each of the wheel lines sixty feet to the north for their next set of waterings early tomorrow, a Swainson’s Hawk lands at the edge of the large puddle left out in the open where the irrigator tractor had been. Only 125 feet away from me the handsome bird of prey drinks at leisure, and acts like he’s not the least bit afraid of me. I come back a while later and find the hawk gone, but other raptors are there aplenty: Turkey Vultures. The ones who have already drunk their fill are standing around on the grass, or are perched on the pipe axles, and at the tractor itself one is sitting in the center atop the engine hood and each of the four wheels are topped off by a single big bird, some staring out at the countryside, some with wings spread in what The Turkey Vulture Society calls “horaltic pose”. (Imagine, a Turkey Vulture society!) The wheel line tractor fitted up as it was with black-feathered vultures looked appropriately like a Victorian hearse …

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