Rained in the night, the dawn is colder, the rain continues through morning. The cold increasing as the hours move along tells it is the moment, then, when Autumnal Spring becomes Vernal Winter. The high of 55 in the wet feels downright frigid.
Tag Archives: Rain
November 22, 2013
I wake in the Cowboy Caravan (the RV most everyone else calls, “The Chateau”) in a cozy, humid warmth, with rain pattering down through mesquite, rain that brings in the delirious fragrance of Creosote Bush drifting from far off in the deserts that surrounds us. It is dark all day.
November 18, 2013
It’s not cold, oddly, after the “winter front” passes through. Is it a specter of Global Warming, and what does that portend? Instead, the day soars to 80 degrees and this brings out great numbers of dragonflies around The Stockpond, and massive flights of the little Polka Dot Beetle. Some of those beetles sport brilliant blue abdomens.
The miniature annual “Mediterranean Grass” (a Schismus sp.), most beautifully green, is germinating in every bare spot across the pastures. It is tiny, but the cows will avidly seek it out.
Only two Poorwills in the road dust on my twilight drive home–and they will be the last of these mysterious yet engaging birds that either take a long winter’s nap here, or slip into Mexico in the night while we ourselves sleep.
November 16, 2013
The day’s range of temperatures spans only 15 degrees–neither cold nor hot–and so with this second Pacific front the Sonoran Desert year’s quiet season’s weather pattern is set. A sprinkle comes to us and our ranges, but no more than that; all that’s really to be had from this storm is a high and annoying wind who desiccates the germinating pasture grasses. A few dragonflies manage to hover on through it all.
Mesquites are sprouting from the seeds left behind by cows in piles of manure. London Rocket (mustard), too, showing millions of pairs of cotyledons; Sweet Clover is in lush, sudden renewal low to the ground in #2 Pasture; the handsome flat rosettes of what will be tall Gaura next warm season suddenly are just there, having scattered themselves through the native grass plantings. So are woven together this year and next, on the loom Arizona’s multiple and complex seasons, a marvelously eye-catching quilt that decorates no other land but ours. Just now it is Autumnal Spring–sometimes long lasting, always delightful, sometimes regrettably short.
September 21, 2013
The last storm drizzles down, fades away, and along with it fade the hours of this last day of Summer. We’re left with almost an inch of rain in the final benediction! Bird activity at The Stockpond has dropped off startlingly since yesterday’s wild show of feathers and colors, now there is water puddled everywhere for miles. A Great Blue Heron is there, and the pik-tuk-tukk of Summer Tanagers come to the ears but no bird catches the eye. The mesquite trees around the bank are turning pale early it seems, and suddenly, as if the Monsoon’s farewell soaking was too much for their vegetal emotions to take and the tiny leaflets are dropping into the pond where they collect into little bands on the surface. A Western Wood Peewee looks it all over from side to side on a branch tip above, where it sits sullenly and must be feeling a push towards South America.
Calls out a Poorwill in the evening, “Persephone has left the building.”
September 20, 2013
On the edge of #3 Pasture I find a returned Marsh Wren that lets me approach within a couple paces, close enough that I can see the white stripes on its back. I also find the place in the fence on the road (well, one of the places in that fence) where Mycha the Cow took advantage of how the whole line is being buried in the mud and rubble of sheet flood after sheet flood. The top wire is now so low that Mycha just springs over with ease and nonchalant grace, to vacuum up the mesquite beans that those other, mere mortal cows who don’t have the nerve to follow (gracias a Dios!) can only dream about getting to. I haze her up the long road stretch to The Green Gate, she traipses back in, I pull up to The Stockpond and lose Mycha’s grand, teeth-grinding irritation in a water’s edge once again so alive with birds that I don’t know what to look at; I’m still so worked up and shaking over the chase with that cow that I can’t hold the binoculars still for a while anyway. Once I calm down, the birds all set themselves before me beautifully: pairs of Wilson’s Warblers, pairs of Black-headed Grosbeaks, sets of Lazuli Buntings, kingbirds, a bright female Bullock’s Oriole, Bell’s Vireos, an Orange-crowned Warbler, Abert’s Towhees, Blue Grosbeaks, a Nashville Warbler, immature Western Tanager, a Black Phoebe, McGillivray’s Warbler, a Swallow bombs in and bombs out too fast to see what species. A pair of Lucy’s Warblers are the last I’ll see in what seems with them a true farewell-to-Summer (I thought they’d all gone by now, it’s been so long since I’ve seen or heard any.) The flock of Brewer’s Blackbirds passes overhead.
The cows have been set to graze down the bermudagrass in #2(north) Pasture, to make easier its preparation for the planting of winter small cereals, as wheat, oats, barley and rye plants are called when used for grazing. Another Marsh Wren is there, and from the uncultivated other side of the River fence slides along another snake, who crosses bare patches of ground and pops down into a hole in the tufts of bermuda. This Ring-necked Snake is more mellow than yesterday’s Rattler (though it, too, is said to be venomous) and a handsome reptile it is: lead gray, with an orange band around its neck worn like a fine piece of jewelry.
The Monsoon, the Summer, end with a bang literally, as thunderstorm cells sweep in and over the Mason Pastures …
September 16, 2013
Yet another dawn called forth by the Poorwills, after an evening before also filled with their cheering whistle. The rains drizzle off and then end for now, I guess “for good”.
Kingfisher at The Stockpond, and still vireos, and a Great Blue heron comes gliding in like the Flying Monkeys. Brown-headed Cowbirds are out beyond on the pastures, where suddenly, too, there are lots of Vesper Sparrows where none had been yesterday and even though the days are getting hotter and hotter, and stay just shy of 100 degrees. No nighthawks in the early evening sky overhead, but one does appear at The Stockpond, eminently lonely, reminding me how often one who is leading my kind of life can be, too. There is no opportunity to be maudlin, I am driven from the water’s edge by the sickening drone of mosquitoes thirsting for blood.
If nighthawk numbers are decreasing, the calling of Poorwills is obviously increasing on the evening air up on the mesas around Ridge House. Must be that our resident Poorwill are being joined by others coming south, or being replaced by them–maybe ours have themselves already flown over The Line into Old Mexico.
September 14, 2013
A “false dawn” brightens the eastern sky, long before the real dawn is due–the wide swath of celestial light rises from the horizon against midnight blue and far up into the stars at a 45 degree angle, leaning towards the south; it is much brighter if not looked at directly but noticeable no matter how it is approached by the eye. Stars reach down to the horizon on every point, and no clouds show but the flashes of lightning fortell another Monsoon storm is collecting itself, and which we may hope does arrive. How many more rains can there be? “How many more almost utterly dark nights will there be to enjoy like this?” I wonder as I hear an announcement of the success of solar “ranches” and wind “farms” on regional-grid scale, wonder if those things might end our Southwest, as they come to this desert that once forbid all who couldn’t live with Her as she presented Herself before air conditioning, pinata subdivisions and the opiate of video games.
A first year Gray Hawk in brown immature plumage perches tamely in a low mesquite branch in The Lane, while another Monsoon storm builds but will be smaller than the one last week–both bird and the rains will abandon us soon, move off south, evaporate. Perched on a wheel line is an early arrival of the next shift, a Say’s Phoebe, none of which were to be seen over the hot summer at least on this bottomland, and there is a Loggerhead Shrike returned to Mason’s, too. Above, the September sky: the most beautiful of the year now the world dries out longer between the temporales, and the clouds take a few days to gather and build their individual mass against the blue. I don’t have to be so keen to have three weeks’ supplies in the cupboards if the road going afuera is less likely to be mangled or destroyed on most any afternoon. In the evenings the clouds are piled so high that their bases are steel blue in earth shadow, their crests sun-dazzling in white or rose, patterned this way like tourmaline crystals, or look like some fine old cameo carved from a helmet shell. Below, the Galiuros and the Mae West Peaks are cabernet and rose themselves.
September 3, 2013
A lemon slice Moon, shining through clear, cool air that’s richly moist and that, yes, tastes of Autumn. Poorwill, Owl, Coyote sing their Sonoran bolero.
Six Teal fly up from The Stockpond, I’d better make more careful approach from now on: another of the little hints of Fall being on the way. The ducks circle and circle, but do land again and stay nervous while I’m there. How to tell which these are, Blue-winged or Cinnamon? The head of one is reddish, and I think I can safely call that one, at least, a Cinnamon, but the others …?
It’s still Summer, the Monsoon tells with a drenching storm in the afternoon.
September 2, 2013
Summer temporales look like they’ll bless us still, the whole southern horizon flashes lightning in the dawn, the north horizon flashes over there above Phoenix where even at this still-dark hour the temperature is at 89 degrees, the radio tells. Here on Firesky Ridge, 68 degrees.
It’s a day to ride range out of El Potrero, on my way there I pass two Swainson’s Hawks perched in a mesquite along the Cascabel Road. The calls of Yellow-billed Cuckoo come from the bosque as I saddle up Loompy, and I wonder how much longer I’ll hear them (it turns out this is the last time) and that the bird is telling that summer is over even if I don’t see the truth of it. For the cuckoo, it’s time to leave for South America.