Tag Archives: Rain

June 1, 2016

Nature Jottings, , , , ,

I built me a homestead
way out on a desert
a great sandy desert
and I didn’t know why
and when it was finished
I sat on my doorstep
and stared at my desert
and stared at my sky …
–cowboy song collected by Tucson’s Katie Lee, in her “Ten Thousand Goddam Cattle”

In their timetable precision Yellow-billed Cuckoos–the “Rain Crow” of my father’s long ago Virginia country childhood–have arrived and call out around all the bosque of El Potrero. Rain would indeed be nice and if the birds will bring some well by Heaven, we’ll take it! In the whole of May all of 0.03″ fell on us. I heard my first cuckoo of the year at Mason Pastures yesterday, and Kathleen reports one from the day before that. One has to be careful in this because the Yellow-breasted Chats and even the Mockingbirds have worked the cuckoo chortles into their mimid repertoires. They are one of those birds that are either here or they aren’t, of a sudden on the first of this month that people brace themselves for, the cuckoos seem to drop out of the sky all at once and over the whole of the San Pedro. They complete the cycle of arrival of Summer residents and Spring migrants and tell that the fun and expectations of the avian parade is now brought to fullness for the year already and that yes, Foresummer and its splendid challenges is upon all us animals.

Gorgeous Western Tanagers all around The Pond, in the branches, on the water’s edge. A pair of Great Blue Heron fly off, perch each atop adjacent wheels of the side roll irrigator in the Native Grass Area beyond the barbed wire fence. Balancing on a cinder block jutting from the water, I go to open the fill-valve of the pond but a movement catches my eye, and through the now clear water (The Pond has for a year been mostly left unroiled by the cattle who now water at the refurbished metal tank some distance away) I see a large turtle, somewhat egg shaped in outline, lying flat and comfortable on the mud bottom grazing on a beautiful “new” aquatic weed that colonized The Pond after the herd stopped defecating into it. There are a dozen or more aquatic plants Arizona Game & Fish is on the watch for as invasive, is this yet another? Is the turtle? Taking its size into consideration I think the turtle most likely is. It’s gray with sediment built up on its shell and it would have to be caught and scrubbed if the marks diagnostic for the species were to be seen … I don’t think of trying, it’s hard to believe it’s let me get this close without zooming off out of sight into deeper water. It stays submerged as happily as any submarine, unbothered by my hovering over it.

October 19, 2015

Nature Jottings, , ,

When did we notice we weren’t noticing Monarchs any more?  At last! … yesterday Pat and I were returning to El Potrero over the uplands of our Cascabel Pasture and revelling in the splendor of this year’s range with thunderstorms round about the east and south horizons, when suddenly my attention was focussed away from getting toasted by a bolt of lightning to a single Monarch Buttefly sitting out on the tip of a Palo Verde branch.  Like many of us, I grew up with Monarchs: in mid 20th century they were as ubiquitous as white bread, so much so that a kid butterfly collector couldn’t be bothered with chasing, preparing and mounting one or giving one space in a display frame.  For Monarchs, all you had to do was look outside.  Who’d ever have thought that in our lifetime the taken-for-granted creature would become poster-bug of the environmentalist set?  Yet even I, who test for faddishness every threatened and endangered alarm that “trends”, was stopped in my and Loompy’s tracks by the shimmering and orange and black and leaded-glass window wings of old friend Monarch.  “Where have the decades gone?”, I asked him.  While I’ve watched and watched and watched over the summers and autumns, I was never able to turn any of our common Queen Butterflies into this now-charismatic Monarch.  I had forgotten how startlingly different the two species look one from the other, until yesterday when even from a good distance this butterfly was so obviously neither a Queen nor a Viceroy but yes, a Monarch.  It sailed off, looking for more nectar, which it sure won’t be having any hard time finding, the range is so in bloom and has been straight through from those first wildflowers of February to now even in October and likely on into November.  This seems to be another Spring for a number of those same earlier species!  I don’t see milkweeds in those uplands, however, though there is a boom in climbing Sarcostemma below in the valley bottoms for them.  We’re still riding Nimby and Loompy through gardens and seemingly arranged displays of pink Fairy Duster, purple, yellow, or blue “composites” in near overwhelming array, and even Ocotillo and desert Sumac coming back into flower.  It just fills one with wonder.

February 28, 2014

Nature Jottings, , , , ,

The night was warm enough to have slept without a blanket.  Ruby-crowned Kinglets are in the nearby giant of an Afghan Pine, giving out their oriole-like chatters and beautiful motets scaled down to miniature as befits the size of these friendly green sprites.

The oats and barley of Sam’s yet ungrazed winter pasture is already shooting out sprays of flowers, before February has ended.  This day will come to feel roasting in the 80 degrees of heat, which must signal to the cool season, “small grain” grass crops that they must produce seed before Winter skips right into Summer.  There’s been no rain, neither in this month nor last, none since Christmas, which demands of these grasses they bolt and drop seed before they’re turned into hay by drought and the bake of sun.

As I sit in the pickup and scan The Stockpond, the first fly of the year big enough to buzz annoyingly around my face and ears circles round and round inside the cab.  Venus the heifer sticks her head through the window, drops out a tongue that would alarm the rock band KISS, she thinks I’m her adoring head banger and wants to lick me as much as I’ll allow.  It’s hard to hold binoculars still enough to study a duck’s speculum while a cow’s tongue is wrapped around one’s wrist, and tugging.  Neither Cinnamon Teal is present today, but the pair of Mexican Mallards are, and the female Vermillion Flycatcher who is not wanting much to be in the treetop with the male in what he thinks should be a fetching scarlet hussar’s tunic.  “How can she resist me in this uniform??”  She’ll have none of it.  “I’m not that kind of a girl!”  Or, is she the coquette?  Black Swallowtail Butterflies and Sulphurs are underneath, dancing, having a mud party.

Storm clouds! … high, blue and cream-colored, with layer cake tops reflecting as a circle in the pond late in the day, the Mexican Mallards’ dabbling making ripples go out from this brightly lit center to the edges, the water pale blue though Sun is gone.  Silver sky in the North, with throw-pillows of white clouds darkly, ominously edged on their sides, their bottoms thick, even blacker.

Anticipation and a joy that it is hoped is not misguided rises in Cascabel.  Under the Mae West Peaks, it’s going to rain!

February 7, 2014

Nature Jottings, ,

A sudden rain awakens me in the Cowboy Caravan, is brief, gone, Venus rises and is a spectacle. The deep dust outside isn’t much ruffled by the big drops.

Before sliding into chaps, buckling on spurs and saddling horses with Pat to ride for cows on range, I speed down to the winter green fields to set the day’s watering. A Gray Fox with orange-red legs and a red head is out on one pasture, staring and staring, or sneaking up to the burrows of one critter or another … mice? gophers? jackrabbits?

On range we find the wildflowers much progressed, so much so that it seems we’re promised a colorful Spring. It’s often prematurely announced that there will be! but–the Bladderpod are fat, healthy, and are even showing flower scapes already, and this gives hope.

February 3, 2014

Nature Jottings,

A wet-in-wet watercolor sunrise, above very cold fields frosted white, but all is beautifully warm by 1:00 in the afternoon for long enough that a new, glossy green and bronze beetle appears on the wheel line hoses where it can soak up warmth it must find so welcome.

Not long later, though … storms and blackness, coming in from each quarter and I cannot get warm no matter the physical work, then snow curtains billow along the lower slopes of The Rincon though they don’t spill over the lip of the high canyon wall and onto us. The highest peaks are veiled from sight by the drifting and sidling white squalls, the mountains are gone, in the gray.

Sue reports that above her house poppies are blooming on the mesa skirting Hot Springs Canyon: earliest February, when Winter spars with Spring, and Spring will spar with Winter …

February 1, 2014

Nature Jottings

… and see what this morrow brings: passing showers, a little bit more “accumulation” than yesterday’s trace of rain (well, call today’s not quite a double-trace, then) and strangely for Winter, a tall and thick Dust Devil whirling a moment of Foresummer into our priceless cold weeks, as if Global Warming wants to toss this season about and plant me firmly head down into the irrigation mud.

January 31, 2014

Nature Jottings

After a night that may not have even dipped below 50, the morning is warm, rich, brings random drops of rain that patter into and scatter the deep dust in puffs, tick on the brim of my Stetson, set silvery rings off across The Stockpond. It doesn’t amount to anything measurable, and the prognostications for the coming month don’t give hope there will be. We’re not the first in Arizona who have ever wondered about the range that is in their care, “Will it all last long enough to keep the cattle on up there through May?” Should it not, that will have to be taken in stride and with that certain, time-tested expansive and philosophical outlook for which the ranching world is famous, a “that was then, this is now” roll-with-it flexibility. For this morning, then, I’ll celebrate this air that honors my inner Resurrection Fern, and see what tomorrow brings or takes away.

January 26, 2014

Nature Jottings, , ,

The dust is pocked with rain drops, but it’s only a tease.  It seems the winter rains, which were so “promising”, will fail us this year and meanwhile the daily temperatures are in subtle, upward swing.

Saltweed is three to four inches tall already: green, purple, and gray.  They’re not the only thing that is brightening: first-winter Gray Flycatchers are losing now their olive wash and taking on the much clearer gray plumage for which they’re named.

A Leaf Bug the likes of which I’ve never seen sits on an irrigation hose, its body a perfect brown leaf, curled up around the edges and even presenting a central vein–and what look like formidible retracted fangs!  The tiny dark grasshoppers are back on those hoses after an absence of a few weeks; they’ve been waiting out the cold somewhere.

December 4, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , ,

The peak of the Rincon and its cliffs and boulders are white and dancing on the eye in the sun, making those evergreen forests on their far heights look so much the darker.  A shining white cloud crowns all, itself under a long clean blue sky.  Cottonwoods glow yellow below.  Doubtless a storm comes: the air is warm, yet has some tang to it, is even salty, and there is a strong waft of change.  Caribbean Horseweed on the pastures grows on as if none of this is happening, and even shows fresh flower buds, and on the irrigation hoses are the black spiders of Summer.  Canadian Horseweed, presumably more attuned to North America has already turned into seeds or dormant biennial rosettes and thus is well ready for Winter.

American Pipits drop in again–they’ve been elsewhere lately, probably over on the just-germinated seedling alfalfa pasture of our fence-neighbor ranch.  Midday 70 degrees, I am still eating lunch with dragonflies.

The last bat before the year’s deep freezes come on flies down the Cascabel Road, ahead of the truck in the dusk