Tag Archives: Raptors & vultures

May 12, 2013

Nature Jottings,

For a good while I suspected there was a leak in the underground irrigation lines, but where it was didn’t become known until an entire riser finally disattached itself all the way and must’ve blown like a missile from a silo into the air in Pasture #4. Once that was fixed, the increase in leftover psi was enough to have the pond-filling hydrant continue to spray a little shower out over the water through the night even after the system was shut down. A fine male Black-chinned Hummingbird liked this a lot, and was there darting in and out of the little arcs of droplets when I arrived.

Sunlight is just hitting the tops of the cliffs when I return to The Stockpond after I get the irrigation up, and I stop to eat a bowl of oatmeal and watch birds through the truck windshield, too shaky to continue the work I’d been doing on the energy of the one banana eaten before I started at that moment an hour before when there was hardly enough light to see. I come back to find one of the hummingbirds lowering himself into a Sitzbad at the water surface at the base of the riser and though one might think this would be sufficiently satisfying to him, oh no!–he spied a female who’d come along to land on the hydrant base to get a drink, and he flew up without delay and chased her right off the pond. (Females are still to be seen almost exclusively coming to that hydrant, knowing as they do what will happen to them if a male sees them drinking from the pond itself or even approaching its surface …) A half dozen or more male Black-chinned come along to the now much heavier shower spraying out of hydrant ‘s mouth, dance back and forth through the spray mid-air like a team rough-housing it in the shower, no females allowed. It is sheer exhibitionism, Life’s Will to Life, a chittering enthusiasm of Mind. I am reminded that in the tropics few birds come to waterfalls because of how the sound muffles the approach of a predator, but that this doesn’t apply to hummingbirds there, either. What can touch them? Well, I did once see children in Jamaica knocking off the eye-popping endemic ribbon-tailed “Doctor Bird” hummers from the acalypha hedges with slingshots, to take home and make shish-ka-birds. In Costa Rica I came on a lovely high waterfall in a jungled setting just back of a beach and sure enough, the only creatures around that water were hummingbirds, which came tumbling into the void before the cataract out of the air over the stream above, like jewels spilled from a green velvet bag.

A pair of Gray Hawks have been calling back and forth for three days.

May 3, 2013

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A pair of Mexican Mallard at The Stockpond, but the Solitary Sandpiper has indeed gone as has the Kingfisher. The Cooper’s Hawk gives those kookaburra calls from the bosque offstage to the south. It’s cold again, no hint of Foresummer … the temperature hovering at 40 degrees! Windy, oh so windy, and the single Green-tailed Towhee who’s now getting to be on the late side of hanging out here likely feels still quite in his element, so why would he leave for the North? The hummingbirds are hardly in a cold stupor, three or four male Black-chinned come to cavort in the little waterfalls sluicing from one green algae ring to another floating on the surface, as the riser tall above them splashes water down. We would love to do this if we were their size … hummers are so human sometimes, and we, so hummer. No females play in the algae this way, but one comes flying in and onto the side of that vertical riser and lands in the manner of a Swift, upright and flat on the pipe, her body pressed hard to its side below the opening and in that position she bathes in the dribbles running down from the hydrant joint. I have no idea how she holds on.

Meanwhile, the pickup I’d been sitting in had a rear tire losing air while I was watching the pond. So much for tending to the wheel lines getting them watering again: this was the third flat since yesterday and the usable spares had finally run out. Gggrrrrr, I grumbled and stomped up the lane through mesquites with canopies of leaves still wrecked by the deep freeze of two weeks ago. Eeehhhehhheh I didn’t want to be hitchhiking on this early cold morning on which not many folk would be stirring. Out on the wide open gravel road to Cascabel outside the green ranch gate it was windier still, and dust devils came along down the road edge one after another to take aim at me squarely, one or two forcing open my tightly closed eyelids …[…]

I take a childhood comfort in the sound of Redwing Blackbird calls, between gusts of wind the notes of the bird come to my ears from that sadly wilted canopy of mesquites now getting burned off even more by the wind. The dust is risen to a heaven that has become the mauve color of those grasshoppers’ wings of yesterday, and the details of the mountain ridges and canyons are blurred-out all around. At last a large yellow tool-van appears around the far south bend of the road, coming towards me but by this time I’m wind-blown and shaggy … he slows way down, not to avoid coating me in road dust (that’s already an accomplished fact) but to have a look, and in the end he must decide my shabby ranch clothes make me too iffy and scurvy character in an Old West comic book. He picks up speed and adds more dust to the mauve sky and to my shoulders then all goes quiet again but for the wind as he disappears. The cold does not let up. Strangely, in the moment that I grasp the perfection of this lesson in The Suchness of Things–cold, wind, flat tires, dust, uncompassionate and fearful motorist, lust for hot cowboy coffee, regret that I’d had no more to eat than that one banana–perfection drifts down to me from somewhere impossibly high in the dusty air overhead. “Curlee! Curleeeeee!! Curlleeeeeeeeeww!” … the cry of the ghost of a whole wild continent lost, and the hair on my neck rises. I know what it is, but it can’t be what it is, it just can’t, but then for a few moments the speck appears in a pocket of air somewhat clear of dust, the binoculars find it and I see the splendid long bill and cinnamon wings of a lone Long-billed Curlew, the bird nearly suspended in the headwind …[…]

My experience of The West is somewhat more sober than what was described in this pleasant boosterism that over decades to 1910 evolved into the anthem, “Home, Home on the Range”. The Suchness of Things: had the morning gone as planned and I not been visited by the usual troubles familiar to Dave Stamey if not to Dr. Higley, I’d’ve been long gone from these pastures and on to other chores … without that flat tire I’d have missed that curlew as it was trying to find The River or an irrigated field. It didn’t land in ours though it flew lower for a look. In New Mexico some years back, while I was working in the alfalfa fields of dear friends outside Roswell, I and an ol’ boy neighbor rancher were standing together when a spectacular large flock of Long-billed Curlew swept in and landed at the edge of the irrigation flood. As the birds set about snapping up insects the advancing water forced into the air ahead of it, I asked the man if the curlews had a local name. “We call ’em, ‘Mile-or-more-birds’.” “Mile-or-more-birds?”, I said. “Yessir.” “So why d’ya call ’em that?” “Wellsir, when one o’ those birds shoves that bill up the @## of the one standing next to it, ya can hear that scream a mile-or-more.”

The musing was barely out of my head when [Bob Rogers and a colleague from] The Nature Conservancy appeared around that same bend to the south that the yellow van had, oh was I thankful that another vehicle had come along at last and in it were friendly faces! […]

True to the spirit of Dave Stamey’s song, the temperature had risen by 45 degrees by afternoon when I went back to continue the day’s work in those pastures. The wind, though, was no longer wild enough to be blowing grit into my teeth, and the sky had turned back to Arizona blue over the first pretty flowers of the rather ugly-named but reputedly tasty Hog Potato. Swallows everywhere over Pasture #3: Violet-green Swallows, Barn Swallows, the season’s first Cliff Swallows, Tree Swallows, and of course many Rough-winged Swallows, all swirled together in a massive flock, gyrating and hunting the insects that have come back to life after the morning’s deep chill … […]

April 24, 2013

Nature Jottings, ,

A few wrens in the wet pasture grass.

Scattered tanagers sing out from deep in the bosque and from its edge, but I do not see them–at this time they’re likely Summer Tanagers.

I watch for the Osprey that landed last evening on the electric pole while I sipped wine at the house where I’m spending the summer on a ridge high above Pool Wash. Will it come soaring over the River? It arrived complete with a large, obviously freshly caught fish in its talons which it spent the next couple of hours eating at great leisure! This was like a mirage in the sere desert and tall, arid cliffs stretching out in all directions from the patio, but somewhere were living waters and not just living waters, but waters with large fish in them. The bird flew in from the direction of the Muleshoe Ranch escarpment, so I’d guess the fish was from a stream in that area; mostly all it will find in the San Pedro right now is hot sand.

 

April 12, 2013

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One Mallard, the male, on the water today. A pair of Yellow Warblers are in chase with each other, around and around the Stockpond, and around … and around …

Another kingbird, I think a Western by its voice, arrived. Rough-winged Swallows have been increasing, but none over the pastures this whole day. There are a few Meadowlarks, though. Many Vesper Sparrows in the weedy edges and on the barbed wire crossfences, surely they are about to become more scarce; this was the most abundant of the wintering sparrows this year. The wrens, ah yes, the wrens, still tease in the pasture of lush winter graze, to which they’ve all moved over from a couple risers to the south. Seems they prefer yet-to-be-eaten-off, above-the-knee-deep bluegreen oats and barley, the cattle having gone into the wrens’ old area and taken it down to about one foot tall with all the efficiency of a tractor mower, leaving the stumpy culms from the tips of which will sprout a new shoot and then sets of leaves.

A fearless and friendly Gray Flycatcher pops up here and there as I do one chore or another, on a fenceline or in the mesquite tangled edges, pumping its tail as the species so distinctly does. They must be on the move, I hadn’t seen one the whole of winter here. Another species, an insect, came along today, one that in all other years I have seen in every month: the Tarantula Hawk. Those January days of a cold that froze over the Stockpond must’ve had an effect on their movements, if not their survival. It’s the first I’ve seen since Christmas.

Field Bindweed coming into bloom in the pastures–a noxious plant, but pretty as any hanging basket flower in a garden center and cattle are mad for it. Pat often wishes there were enough of it to bale, and use later.

A Red-tailed Hawk is acting like no other in my acquaintance, though the behavior is reported in mountainous territory with knife-edge ridges and strong updrafts. It was back again today, facing into the wind with all the moves of a Kestrel–barely flapping, suspended in one place with tail fanned out widely and using it brilliantly as rudder, hangs high up there for a long time, then drops like a stone from that place stationary in the strong spring gusts and onto some witless creature on the ground.

April 10th

Nature Jottings

Irrigations set, I can break away and wander off across Pasture #1 to see what’s up with those vultures attending something unsavory. Eighteen of them took up as I approached, from the corpse from whose ribcage they were picking the last shreds of flesh, most of its bones were clean but all were red-painted with blood. A perfectly whole racoon’s  face stared up uncannily from the tip of an empty backbone. I shuddered, as much as I would had I come on a ghoul; but … we are the racoon and the racoon, we, this the truth that drifts round the graveyards in Mexico’s Dias de los Muertos. Later in the morning I saw the ravens had come, but I couldn’t imagine what was left for them. These avatars of War who once raised blind fear as much as would distant cannon that signaled them to their meal kept respectful distance in a circle outside the now-smaller vulture ring at the late racoon…

[…]

April 9, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

I arrive at the Stockpond and scare off a put-out, cranky Green Heron, have a glimpse of it for only a few seconds–well I’m grumbling too over a temperature that hovers at freezing. This, too, is Sonoran spring. A front came over us in the night, blue sky gone, but not exactly cloudy either: all is silver and glowing, the light, the air itself, it is stunning, like being in the Waiting Room for Eternity. The birds trickle north in ones and rarely twos, their kinds arriving today for the first time, and maybe regretting their haste as a little drift of sleet begins to pelt the brim of my Stetson … a lone Barn Swallow (“about time, friend Swallow!” I send thought to it on what wings I have, the species is so late this year); a lone Swainson’s Hawk has arrived and with a flourish of masterful flying, dips, parries, folded wings and mournful whistle, he escapes the harassment of a Redtail and is then gone into that silver air above me. A lone Cassin’s Kingbird, gorgeous in this strangest of light around me, whurp-whurpping from a fencepost where he might stay for the rest of the summer once he stops regretting leaving Old Mexico. The sleet sets in, the mid-seventies of yesterday too long gone and it will be a mercy if I forget them. The ice balls bounce off my shoulders as I open an irrigation hydrant and have water shoot up through the frigid air and into my face out of the tottering equipment. Oh my yes! … the vida vaquero loco, romantica, libre.

[…]

As the irrigation water rolls from my face after hitting me squarely in both eyes, I hear my father telling that poem of an April bedtime more than fifty years ago, hear him quivering out the “poor thing” part to add just that extra fear, pathos and doubt, and hear myself crying back, “No Daddy–no! … will he make it to spring??” I wonder if I will. I hope that Cassin’s Kingbird sticks it out.

April 5, 2013

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Song Sparrows, and Lark Sparrows, in increasing numbers come to drink or are seen in the pastures. The Song Sparrows are furtive and slip through the grass though also the wide-open edge of the Stockpond is much to their liking. The Lark Sparrows are bold and chatty, loud, with canary song to delight; they rise from the dirt tracks in a swirling cloud with the dust.

Almost a week on from when they’d started coming to the hummer feeders at El Potrero, a Black-chinned came this morning to hover over the middle of the Stockpond, drop to its surface, and take a long draught and then whir off. Yellow-rumped Warblers in elegant courting plumage came to the muddy edges to sip, too, and while Chris E. and I were lounging on the bank eating lunch, a completely unbothered Cooper’s Hawk also landed, and drank its fill, while a first spring large red dragonfly sailed out over the middle.

Not nearly so many Meadowlark as before, but still they’re here giving out their fluting notes and working over the grassland in shifts. A single Western Kingbird tells it’s about time for those meadowlarks to move away north. The wrens, meanwhile, are paying no attention to Kingbird’s hint that the bell’s rung and it’s time to change classes: the wrens are still well at home, and their species remains as mysterious in both pastures of green winter grass.

A species of White (butterfly) has emerged; they are few in number yet.

March 30, 2013

Nature Jottings,

Gray Hawks have moved into the Mason Pastures–swooping in from behind along The Lane, low through the branches at the stockpond, whistling mournfully from the gallery forest along The River. Willows are in fresh, but small, leaf and most of the cottonwood look to be in their full summer emerald already.

Hooded Orioles are chattering at El Potrero, but not a sign or sound of them at Mason’s yet. They seem also late of arrival this year, like so many other birds.

March 23, 2013

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At El Potrero a Yellow Warbler singing, and the first buzzing chatter of Bell’s Vireo. I’ve heard neither of these birds singing yet at Mason’s […] The first time catching any of their notes, of these two and the Lucy’s Warbler, will always bring one relief that the world is brought back to rightness again.

Ralph W. and I set out for a morning’s survey of our acres of grasslands that are a refuge for wintering birds down from their far off north prairies; I like to think we’re providing for them a habitat that was once much to be seen in southern Arizona but is now largely gone. I’ve noticed far fewer of the sparrows and finches lately, surely many have left but still, the edges are alive and the fences often lined with them. I think the Savannah Sparrows must have moved on already, which might not have been expected until late April (eb’ry’teeng change-up!) but I also suspect that many of the birds we saw today moving like mice through the taller grasses were still this species. In other winters I’ve seen as many as fourteen species of sparrow here (fifteen if you include Chestnut-collared Longspur), but today and this year many fewer, among them Lincoln’s and White-crowned, and we wondered if some of the tinier birds that fluttered up and dropped maddeningly down out of range as we moved through the green of the winter pasture weren’t Grasshopper Sparrow if not that Holy Grail of South Arizona, the Baird’s.

Ralph stopped us dead in our tracks with a call to check out some raptor we could hardly grasp was sitting in the eight inch tall barley and oats not far away at all: a Zone-tailed Hawk that had landed and was, as we found out once it took off, going after a young gopher. In a “normal” year this bird is considered rare in March though now of course all bets seem to be off in this. Beautiful, black, shiny, a golden cere, golden legs, a piercing eye–it lifted off and flew low right over us, circled higher until converting itself stealth-bomber like into a zopilote, or so the late gopher must’ve thought.

In the old lane running down to The River, many sparrows flit in and out of the tall, thick, dried and prickly tumbleweeds. Lark Sparrow are abundant here, and they fill the mesquite edges with their spring, canary-like song.

Later we moved through the most mature of the winter pasture areas, that’d been planted in October and were now about knee-deep and lush; we found it just jumping with little rusty-brown birds. One wren after another took up, made an arch, and dropped back into the deep blades of dark green and of course wouldn’t show themselves again. Some seemed larger than others, and it being the wrong time of year for juveniles to be about, I suspect there are (at least) two species of wrens there enjoying being snowbirds. House Wren? Winter Wren? both? Two species of the same (larger) size and one much smaller? I tried to figure them out this time last year when such wrens were occupying the far north winter pastures instead, but couldn’t do it then, either. Both Ralph and I like the mystery of it, though.

No mystery was attached to the final great sighting of the morning’s birding with Ralph, whom I’d invited on the walk especially to try to “nail down” the confusing and abundant sparrows: when we swung back past the stockpond to see if anything had appeared since earlier in the morning, there in the muddy edge was a Common Snipe and like most such visitors to this rare open water, it seemed not to notice us at all, and we could stare and study Friend Snipe all we wanted at a short distance. While we sat in our bird blind, there came in fast in a silent roar a Great Horned Owl who looked for one frightening moment like he was going to shoot right through the cab of the truck, then zoomed out over the stockpond and was gone. Ralph’s eyes grew wide as this bird that I couldn’t see approached, and both their pairs of eyes must’ve bored into each other as Ralph was thinking uh, oh, there’s about about to be three of us watching that snipe… […]

March 18, 2013

Nature Jottings, ,

Pulling up to the stockpond this morning–usually my first stop at “the office”–to see what might have arrived, I had to rub my eyes: floating on their mirror images was a pair of Bufflehead Duck, male and female in perfect, elegant spring plumage, natty, turned out as if they were going to the opera. Never been so close to any as this, and they let me look all I wanted, so desperate for a patch of water and rest did they seem. They were even diving and when I told Nancy that later, she said, “They must’ve got their bills and heads stuck!”

When I got out of “the blind” (the Ford Ranger) they both took off, but instead of beating away in the opposite direction as any teal always do from that pond, the birds came straight at me, and passed overhead only at about ten feet. I could even see the female’s pink toenail polish! (or was it the male’s?) They did a quick circle and came in like phantom jets and landed right back where they were, unconcerned that I was standing there.

Ralph W. told me later that he’d seen a pair like them on the beaver pond on 3-Links a year and a few days ago, and that that pond blew out in recent surges of the San Pedro. I guess the Buffleheads had nowhere else to go now, luckily for us. Luckily for them the Peregrine Falcon that had spent a lot of the winter clearing the ducks off the stockpond (I’d watched it take down a female Baldpate, e.g., while I was attending the irrigation just offstage) has apparently now moved on. There have been far fewer wintering ducks and shorebirds around the stockpond this winter, I suppose we’d traded them for the pleasure of the company of Lord Peregrine.

Cooper’s Hawk later blasting through the mesquites at the stockpond, picking off poor passerines for his potluck. Talk about being “afraid of the arrow that flieth by day”! Finally determined that it is this bird I’ve been hearing out in the bosque over a long time–a voice that is not quite kookaburra, not quite Gila Woodpecker, not quite Pygmy Owl, not quite Inca Dove, but with a flavor of all those.

A first Yellow Warbler came to sip at the edge of the mud.