Tag Archives: Quails

June 25, 2016

Nature Jottings, , ,

Alex finds a knick-knackly perfect, exquisitely miniature Woodhouse’s Toad with its tiny leopard spots, on the ground next to him while he sits eating lunch on The Pond bank. It would be too easy to crush one with a casual knee or an unknowing step.

Two large family groups of Gambel’s Quail cross in front of me as I come along in the old Silverado, each group of bouncing, fuzzy, gravity-defying Ping-Pong balls leaving out from their different sides of the road (after looking both ways?) and passing each other in file as if in Paris crosswalks, looking like so many school girls shepherded by nuns and of course there is always the one who will be off by itself, in panicked lateness shooting forward to catch up, likely named Madeline.

Mockingbird flies out into the middle of the pasture, scolding the flock of Brown-headed Cowbirds and letting them know they are in the minds of an awful lot of avian citizens the scum of the Earth. The notes of that Mockingbird are unmatched for disdain.

January 17, 2014

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Hiroshige Moon-set
on opposite horizon,
in dawn-pink sky
against bare cottonwoods,
and walnut,
above penumbral shadow
dark blue.

Just within the fence on Cascabel Road I finally have to stop digging out an old T-post and go search out whatever critter is calling from the canyon and mesa to the east a long descending trill and chatter. I presume it’s a bird I’m unfamiliar with, who knows, something newly arrived from Mexico and, ahem, undocumented, now the climate of Sonora heads north inexorably. A wren? I have no idea what the Sinaloa Wren–a species new for the United States found the more frequently not much south of here–could sound like, and this voice certainly has a wren motif, or should that be a wriff? After scrambling through two sets of fences and into the rough hillside of Catclaw and Saguaros, I arrive near the source of the odd notes as best I can figure just when the hoot of a midday owl silences whatever it is, and I don’t hear it again. I ought to resist the drive to find out every last fact about this place.

Gray Flycatcher, pumping its tail …

A White Tiger Moth comes over, slowly, passes on by. Twenty Javelina bring their babies to the cool and green winter #2 Pasture, and tuck into the vast salad bar.

The balmy air of late afternoon is full of bugs dancing, on what elfin mission? They move in the orderly bounces of a pinball, or zigzag back and forth and back and forth … Phoebes chitter on the posts, then dive and sail into the shimmering horde, the birds’ moves telling me they can outwit and out maneuver any of these insects that know so well how to evade me.

The day’s become so warm that it’s a pleasure to go back to work on the fence in the shade of the old and giant mesquite trees, where I’m somewhat camouflaged. I hope to hear the mystery trilling song again, from those slopes rising steeply on the other side of the road. While I dismantle the fence that Mycha the cow makes shortcake out of when she wants to get mesquite beans on the outside, there comes a huge Accipiter swirling and diving into the road but apparently missing its target. Gambel’s Quail in the sunset light behind me scatter, and purl excitedly as they flee the raptor even though they’re a thousand feet away from us. The hawk is big and brown, with the bright slash of a white eyebrow over the most intense of gazes, lands on an electric pole almost overhead of me: a Goshawk! Is it what had taken down the Cooper’s Hawk whose feathered remains were on the pasture a month ago?

January 8, 2014

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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.

October 21, 2013

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Sky is music itself–“Chick chack chick! Chick chack chick! Chick chack chick!”, down from the passing Brewer’s Blackbirds … “Sweet sweet sweet sweet”, from the Pipits … “Chick chack chick!” … “Sweet sweet!”

The largest Tarantula Hawk ever comes thirsty to The Stockpond, where there are lots of dragonflies, damselflies and Snout Butterflies today. A relaxed covey of Gambel’s Quail drink, too, and then from the bank behind them most unwelcomingly comes popping up a Cooper’s Hawk, bringing chaos to replace the innocent peace and I can almost hear the hawk let loose a rakish “Bleuh!” just before it snags one of the quail, as if in vampire cape of approaching Halloween.

An owl hoots, in the warm 75 degrees of last light. Poorwill is friendly, not at all put out by the truck in The Lane, bounces its head up and down then rises and with fine acrobatics catches a moth bright in the headlights. We whistle and chirp, one with the other for a while until I wish it a good night’s day, then make a last stop before utter dark at The Stockpond where swallow-like bats are right at its surface taking drinks and moving across like rocks being skipped. As they fly by in zig-zag fashion they seem to flash on and off; they’re very pale, and there are very many of them.

September 10, 2013

Nature Jottings, ,

Slept under the sheet again but this time with the window closed. 60 degrees!

We saddle the horses, ride up onto the range, and find the last Summer calendar page of Barrel Cactus bloom has precious few days on it before it too must be torn away: only the inmost circle of flowers on them are open to be admired, after a month of their delighting the heart of a rider. Sun is changing, the world turned, a different glow passes through the Ocotillo wands. We scare up a Scaled Quail, whose “cotton top” catches this wonderful (dare I call it this out loud?) autumnal light.

August 23, 2013

Nature Jottings,

Baby Gambel’s Quail spill and tumble and roll out of the border shrubs on The Lane, swept along with and trying to keep up in the panic of their parent flock.

A large Black Swallowtail butterfly with wide yellow bands set in its dark upper wings, teeters over the pasture wildflowers, a large species of White is there too. At The Stockpond, which now has floating in it chunks of malachite-colored algae, the dragonflies are getting more diverse and today there is a miniature gold one, and a bright red damselfly.

August 15, 2013

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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 …

March 11, 2013

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Roadrunner giving out its deep descending cooing, territorial notes. It’s at this time that one can tell the bird is a cuckoo after all, from that tone and cadence of the sounds.

Black Phoebe always at the stock pond, flying out and snatching bugs and swinging back to a low branch over the water’s edge. In January when the pond had frozen deeply enough that one could walk over it, the bird often perched out on the ice, chipping at the surface and I’d guess, with no open water anywhere for days, was swallowing down tiny bits of ice.

Watched a Cooper’s Hawk swoop in on some Gambel’s Quail, picked out one it thought made an attractive lunch. The quail vanished in screaming panic through the thick mesquites, the hawk disappeared in close pursuit and off they went into history.

The immature Bald Eagle Ralph W. and I had a thrilling look at farther south a couple weeks ago came soaring high over the fields, and drifted north over the valley and out of sight.

Now a set of five Rough-winged Swallow in the sunset light of the pastures as I closed down the irrigation for the night … and as dusk came in, numbers of two different bats (Small Bat … Big Bat … who knows the correct spp.?) swooping in to drink from the stockpond. Poorwill everywhere in the headlights as I drove out along The Lane, and then others in the Cascabel Road. (Already abundant it had seemed, but they’ve about vanished again by this date of April 1st–though I am hearing them at night here and there …)