Tag Archives: Raptors & vultures

January 10, 2014

Nature Jottings, ,

The silvered Harrier is just full of fun and mischief today–I watch him do moves I didn’t think his species had a penchant for. He dives and pulls up in steep curves then low over the bermudagrass, making the Meadowlarks wild with panic. He doesn’t catch any.

At sunset when I’m getting the wheel lines drained (as night approaches the smell of a deep freeze down to the teens is in the air) the Bobcat so lusted after by that hunter is with me, keeps moving off lazily as I slowly come along, keeps itself at a hundred yards or so distant, looks back, stops. I say, “Meow!”, and it seems fascinated.

January 1, 2014

Nature Jottings, , , , , , , , , , , ,

We were sittin’ round the ranch house some twenty
hands or more
most of us Americans but a few from Arkansas
one Dutchman from the fatherland one Johnny Bull
from Leeds
a Cornishman from Cornwall all men of different creeds
they were a sittin’ an’ a arguin’ busy as a hill of ants
how they’d get rid of the money they had buried in their
pants
that they’d made by hard cow punching work all
the year around
from sunup until sundown an’ a sleepin’ on the ground
where at night the polecat saunters round the chuckbox
after grub
and in passing by your hot roll gives your head a friend-
ly rub
where the rattlesnake lies dormant his fangs are like
a lance
’twas with them that I attended The Cowboy’s New
Years Dance
–Mark Chisholm, pre 1908, “The Cowboys New Years Dance”

Big Mahogany Ants are in wild and mad, kettle-a-boiling wakefulness at their wide hole–something about which I’m not thinking I needed to have a care (it is Winter, right?) when I open the truck door and drop a foot onto the ground in The Lane where I seek out the first bird of an informal First Day of 2014 bird count, a Brewer’s Sparrow. The ants, which aren’t amused by my presence, are sending out gatherers on this warm, sunny, blue spectacle of a New Year’s morning. I will keep chores to a minimum today, only check over the herd and water these pastures for neither kine nor grass have a horse in my race of trying to relax as best the day allow or quietly reflect on this year beginning and last year seamlessly gone. Saltweed splashes its tiny green and purple seedlings under a fence.

Mesquite rows full of singing Lark Sparrows …
Chipping Sparrows …
Say’s and Black phoebes …

Sparrows uncountable, flying up in masses, I turn the truck around to have the sun positioned so they’ll show better–most are Vespers and Larks, but I may suppose Savannahs and Lincolns and Songs are among them …

Western Meadowlarks …
White-crowned Sparrows, abundant in thicker edges …
Female Ladder-backed Woodpecker …

Sixty or so Red-winged Blackbirds in those splendidly understated winter clothes of theirs, crowning a lone wide-spreading mesquite …

Red-tailed Hawk …
Flicker, red-shafted …
Mourning Dove …

Brightest of red House Finches, knocked off his perch by a male Phainopepla with drama and flourish; I have for a very long time seen precious few of these Silky Flycatchers and their almost impossible elegance …

Gray Flycatcher …
Cardinal …
Chihuahuan Raven …

Until a breeze springs up from the North when Sun brushes down on the ridge of the grand Rincon I am comfortable without a jacket through a day that itself brushes 70 degrees. Bugs are aloft, gleam in the last rays and many meet their end as a Gray Flycatcher stokes its belly with them to make the freezing night pass the more bearably.

December 19, 2013

Nature Jottings,

When I go out across the Bermudagrass Triangle to try to find the pair of pocket binoculars that yesterday had fallen out of, well, my pocket, I stumble on a large Cooper’s Hawk lying dead, its flesh picked about clean but the feathers still beautiful in its wings that are nearly three feet in span. What monster is abroad to have taken down this master bird of prey?

Azure sky, from zenith to horizons all around the same hue, a singular small lenticular cloud on the South but it evaporates like one that dares wander in during Foresummer to be extinguished in a near instant in air almost void of humidity. The 71 degrees today feel as ferociously hot as any dished out by the Foresummer, too: it is too hot to work in anything more than a workshirt alone.

November 27, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , ,

Dia de los Birds of Prey, this must be.  My eyes come to be welded to a Merlin doing a thrilling slow, then rocketing, then suspended-in-air ballet and when I turn my head to the side what I look right into are the eyes of a Harrier sailing in straight for my face, something that’s become a real habit of this bird!  It tilts slightly, glides over my head, as laid back as a stoned hippie.  It obviously doesn’t care what my business may be, and goes about its own chores unperturbed by my presence.  A short while later there comes a Peregrine in a stoop down over the pastures, it races over the Meadowlarks who scream out and bolt blindly off in different directions to be anywhere but there.

The globs of silk webs that have lately been appearing at the tips of small mesquites in the pastures are decorated with the tiny dried mesquite leaflets, much as are the coverings of bagworms.  Inside there is no worm or larva–but spiders, very showy spiders, black with white stripes and spots.  Their silk hiding place must be a tight little shanty for them on these cold nights.

Mesquite seeds are still sprouting fresh green pairs of cotyledons from cow poop, to give us joyous chores of some Christmas Yet to Come when the trees they’ve grown into have to be pulled with incomparably more effort.

Not a grasshopper, not a dragonfly.  These fields can be almost motionless for days, and silent, and then suddenly as happens today a tree will fill with Lark Sparrows and their whistles, cheeps and bright chattering.

November 26, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , , ,

Lots of ducks whistling in, and fast–Mexican Mallards and Northern Mallards and everything on the “hybrid” continuum between the two.  A few small Bronze Dragonflies are about, and the giant Great Blue Heron who might want to snatch them out of the air.

Over the pastures: a Kestrel, yellow-green grasshoppers, a single pale yellow small butterfly, a single war-torn Pipevine Swallowtail, and Polka Dot Beetles seemingly well adapted to nights below freezing.  Large flocks of Winter plumaged Red-winged Blackbirds that hide in the silver-and-gold bermudagrass take off and do aerial moves wondrous to see, “pit-tickkk! pit-tickk!” they chatter.  They may not be as colorful as they are in Summer, but they’re just as elegant in their seasonally appropriate tweeds that set off so beautifully their black, much fanned.  They move around constantly, all fly out of sight, all fly back–but they’re less frantic to go to another pasture if the cows are with them.  The flocks come along horizontally, in a flat, broad bunches, then every bird drops suddenly like a stone and vanishes in the tall grass.

November 11, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , ,

A Great Egret–pure water-reflected magnificence in The Stockpond–hunts delectables in a lively manner for it must have worked up quite an appetite by the time it found this unlikely wet and muddy place.

Rusty Harrier, owl-like in movement, aspect, and silence, from far off comes directly to me.  I stand still, and it veers at almost the last moment it could, but only to correct its course so it doesn’t hit me in the face.

The big, late day bug hatches continue and as I do the last work of the day with all those insects also barely missing my face, the sun goes.  I still have wheel lines to move, but it is not a bad thing to be out with such chores that shouldn’t be left for tomorrow:  the sight of the Galiuros in their evening smoking jackets of mulberry and peach is a rich reward for the overtime.  I am descended on by doves, who come to The Cienega just before complete night.

A few minutes rest at The Stockpond is in order before I tackle the much longer road to where I’m now living.  I drive up to the water and turn off the pickup engine.  The quiet is wondrous.  Crickets murmur around the edges where Egret had spent the daylight hours, a single Coyote woof-barks far off, for all the world like a dog.  Half Moon over all, in the balmy dark and a breeze that is only enough to be called a caress.

November 8, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , ,

Ravens playfully chase after a Red-tailed Hawk, they’re too smart, too agile, or too revolting in taste for the hawk to bother itself with them I suppose.  In the warm morning after a night without a freeze, the little black spiders of Summer are out on their usual perches on the surface of the irrigation hoses, and among them are dark grasshoppers (or crickets?) apparently just hatched and impossibly minute in size.

Autumnal slanting sunrays are caught in everything, light up everything … the broad, high and long avenues of watersprays of the wheel line irrigators made incandescent by them … a large pink dragonfly … the wings of the Pipits … some insect so fast of wing that they look like tiny hovering balls of light, the air over the whole broad pasture is full of them.  The ridges piled high toward that lowering Sun are dark mounds, each sharply defined by crests white, shining.

October 22, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , ,

Dozens of those pipits land around me as I set up the lines to guide for Joel when he soon comes to give another try at cultivating for the winter pasture planting, and a dozen Javelina come to drink at The Cienega there. Russet the Harrier floats by me, with such grace that no one can have helped yelping out like I, “Oh! Oh, oh!” Then all the Meadowlarks fly in, join this wildlife samba rolling down the Pasture around me.

It’s an evening of delightful balminess, a Bahamian 80 degrees at sundown. A Red-tail out there looks like it’s stomping grapes, then flies off with a snake dangling long from its talons, flies low over the pasture and vanishes along with the light into the bosque.

Doves, wave upon wave of them, come flapping loudly and wing-whistling loudly … volleys of 30 or 40 birds at a time, in low over the pasture to the North, come vaulting over the mesquite tree tops. Hundreds–countless–they come, they come, they come, landing among others already rimming the entire pond, two or three at every cow pog full of water. So crowded do they become that some hover and teeter barely above the water out in the middle with bills thrust down to sip like hummers, almost falling in. The air is so full of the loudness of all this, and the whipping around of wings, and the silhouettes of ever more arriving doves, I for a moment can imagine why some people could become unsettled or even feel panic with such a level of wild activity, remember Boris Karloff’s presentation of “Pigeons from Hell” that revisted me in nightmares for most of Third Grade. You know you’re in trouble when they stop cooing.

October 21, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , , , , ,

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.

October 17, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , , ,

The pastures are hushed, cold. Ice stalagmites balance on the ground below the flush valves that had drained and dripped out in the night and I hope their passages and the many small pipe fixtures aren’t blocked with ice chunks when I get to turn on the water. Mexican General Grasshoppers are still to be found motionless and stupefied on mesquite tips while the cold shadow remains thrown across to The River by the ridge to the east. Russett Harrier would find that huge grasshopper more than a morsel–it would be more like lobster tail–if the bird spies it. Many Vesper Sparrows tseep their little notes from the tangles of dried and drying amaranth, saltweed and other forbs, and Brewer’s Blackbirds alight, the females softly and subtly beautiful.

Life perks up, becomes more enthusiastic with the day, which by mid-afternoon registers above 80 degrees. The year’s last Turkey Vulture has apparently found the year’s last rising thermal wind current, and sails overhead, south … there’ll be no more of this, with that favorite avian mascot of ours. It wants to find a soft corpse for a morning meal, not something that needs to thaw. Brindle will be relieved. Adios, amigo Zopilote–saludos a Mexico! Kestrel, though, wants fresh and moving prey. He’s out hunting, and he dive-bombs a Meadowlark I guess just for the devil of it, the Meadowlark lets out panicked whistles, and alights on the tip of an electric line post with consummate grace and complains about the indignity of it all.

A lone Cassin’s Kingbird chatters farewell, the coming night that will be in the mid-20s will be too much for its temperate tastes and so no more will grace these fencelines. Every butterfly will probably be hard won from now, too, what ones the Kingbirds haven’t eaten; a Red Admiral races by, is nervous in that way of theirs.

The wide rings of Three Awn (Aristida) grass that edge the ant circles in #3 Pasture have taken on the rich colors of Autumn: within, the low walls of stems and leaves are rusty and green, and without are the palest of brown-yellow. Gazing into the depths of these wonderful natural circular sculptures is like gazing into the depths of a crystal.

Full Moon, already pendant in opalescent sky, balances within a cup in the mountain skyline when I top out on the ridge, almost “home”. The wild walls of the Galiuro, the Muleshoe, Sierra Blanca, the Mae West Peaks–all of them the color of the merlot I’m looking forward to pouring …

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqgNagMVydU

Although about to lose this home, still I am comfortable for some nights more, holding a glass of wine the color of those mountains, windows to shut and make cozy the room, but out there? Out there it is different, out across those bajadas marching endlessly to each horizon, on arroyo floors and in washes, the cold air will be flowing in the Sonoran Desert nights down mercilessly over beacon-drawn migrants paying a price for the starry tales they hold on to, migrants praying for a home, praying for roses to grow in a patio their own …

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