Tag Archives: Rattlesnakes

June 5, 2013

The Diamondback that had coiled and struck at me last week–among the largest if not the largest rattlesnake I’ve ever seen–has come to claim pastures #2(north), #3, and the alley between them for his range. Well, nothing much is going to argue with him over that, probably including me. He is comfortable, and I intend to live with him, for a while anyway. We but have to mention him and he appears before us as if conjured up, which can cause me to be molecularly transposed to a spot some feet away. Tom O. has christened him, “Phat Phreddie”–or could that be, “Phat Phrederika”? He was probably lusting after the succulent little Lucy’s Warbler fledglings bouncing from one low mesquite branch to another this sunset as I went about getting irrigations set for the next round. Phat Phreddie sure interrupted that chore! I crossed the first fence of the alley, and headed toward the other side of the alley but got stopped in my track by the motion of a serpentine head suddenly raised far off the ground above a very large coiled snake body, a quick rattle and warning and I backed off … Phreddie lowered his head and went back to the snooze I’d interrupted. I tried to go in a wide arc around him, but up came the head, out rang another almost inaudible rattle, and back I retreated, defeated. At least he rattled a bit this time. The irrigation could wait until he slinked off, but it didn’t look like he would. He’d excavated a manhole cover-sized, frying pan-like depression in the dust, into which his whole coil was sunk into flat and full, and level with the surface of the surrounding ground. I’d’ve stepped squarely on him if I’d been in a greater hurry.

May 31, 2013

One night of warm and tender breezes coming through the windows of the house was a delight, but the second (last night) brought … them. Cone Nose Kissing Bugs. Every year I forget about this when the sweetness of that first truly soft summer night comes along, and then–well even the sound of a toy wind-up helicopter buzzing the bed in the dark, then a sudden silence as whatever big insect it is lands on the wall over there doesn’t jog the memory of the little horrors yet. The sudden sharp pains that come later do, though, and the flicking on of the light that shows six, eight of them scurrying under the sheets or between the mattress and boxspring or disappearing into the open end of a pillowcase, and then there’s that one that still has its assassin bug snout deeply plunged into my big toe. Before night’s end I’m burning under most of my skin, feeling like a turkey in a pot of brine with a flame being turned up slowly below. By dawn a fever sets in, and I start out the day’s labors trembling a bit and worn as if I’d put in a day’s work already. About as limp as a tortilla that’s been patted too much, I wander unenthusiastically among the herd, watching what they’re eating now, looking for jaw problems if they’ve got into too much foxtail grass heads … […]

June is bustin’ out all over, with the welts of Kissing Bugs that is, but I’m hoping not with Chagas’s Disease which pathogen has been increasingly found over the years carried by those hateful insects in southern Arizona. What will global warming bring us next? Vampire Bats, I suppose, which are already only 170 miles south of The Border.

One of the little greeny-yellow flycatchers hops around in the mud on the far side of the pond, too far away to tell whether it be something rare for this week of the year, like a Pacific-slope Flycatcher, or a common transient like a Willow Flycatcher. Neither does it make any sounds that’d help get an identity for it, so I just enjoy it and make no attempt to “nail down” one of that group of birds that the professionals have been having the most fun with splitting and then splitting again into one species and then subspecies and another.

It seems in past years that by the last day of May there were many more butterflies to be seen, and I check around the edges of a large pool of leftover irrigation water for them, in Pasture #2(north). On the mud there is a beautiful hairstreak, species unknown, and Queens sailing around (not a single Monarch yet) and the tiniest butterfly I think I’ve ever seen, or some authorities say, that anyone’s ever seen, a Western Pygmy Blue. I’m stooped over so I can get within an inch of it (with my glasses off I can focus that close in), when there is a short, quick, angry rattle from a snake as huge as that Pygmy Blue butterfly is small, and I catch sight of the Diamondback as it pulls into a coil over where the grass can hide it a little after it had tried to strike me. Although it missed by four feet, I am “rattled” nonetheless. I suspect the rattler hangs out near the edge of the water and waits for plump House Finches to arrive to drink and that are distracted in thirst, House Finches that to a hungry rattlesnake could look appropriately dipped in bright salsa, or rich red chili paste, so brightly colored are they. I bet he’s thinking, “mmmmm … finch! Tastes like chicken!”

Back at The Stockpond, it’s too early to turn off the irrigation so I watch the lots and lots of Barn Swallows sweeping in for drinks. Haven’t been able to figure out what it is that brings the Song Sparrows in such numbers to this deep mud. I don’t see them drinking often, but they do pick tiny things from the open water’s surface and at times they act more like shorebirds than Emberizids what with how they wade out til they’re belly deep. They go for things that look like seeds (but, of what?) and they also sneak up on apparent insects back in the mud flats, pounce on them and chase them first, but again, I can’t make out anything. I wouldn’t think you’d have to sneak up on seeds, so it must be a life form that can escape; the shore is often nearly completely ringed today with these sparrows.

Out in the fields the exhuberance of young sparrow-hood and the primavera has passed for the Lark Sparrows, which are to be seen here and not attending their packed finchy raves. All their “rowdy friends have settled down” and the big flocks that were so entertaining now dispersed, gone off to raise families. Farewell, what’s left of spring, what’s left of youth. […]

May 17, 2013

The plaintive cries of a Poorwill came up from the banks of Pool Wash in the earliest dawn, as I was packing the truck to get down to the pastures. They’ve hardly been heard since those evenings more than two months ago when the birds seemed everywhere from Mason’s to here, on the road, in the air, or calling.

After I’d got the water going, I drove to the west end of the fenceline between #1 and #2 pastures, which affords a good view of sprinkler head problems in the line across to the south. I was distracted from work, though, by a bobcat running from the middle of that pasture to the protection of the bosque along The River. Actually it was trying to escape from a raven that was harassing it likely just in devilish fun, as ravens seem wont to have. Then just as the bobcat disappeared into the mesquital: another cat, much larger than a house cat but not as big as the bobcat, and of black color, came scampering along in the same direction and also from the middle of the field but in a line further away from me. It was gone too quickly to get the binoculars laid on it and focussed. I’m thinking this was yet one more (of the many talked about when people here are feeling safe) sightings of our ever-elusive-but-never-to-be-documented Jaguarundi.

If such an animal were to be proven resident in this valley, the entire history and game of keeping “The River” the marvel that it remains would be changed in an instant. Myself I have full confidence that I have seen the critter here and more than once, sometimes close enough to study it well and at leisure, sometimes just a flash of body and incredibly long tail crossing Cascabel Road or a ranch road at dusk or dawn especially when the road was in such bad shape that I couldn’t go faster than five mph in the old Ford 100 pickup. The Jaguarundi hereabouts fills the same place in after-dinner conversations, when people are feeling expansive and out of earshot of hostile sceptics, as that held by the Onza in campfire talk in the remote monte of Sonora, or by the dreaded Escorpion that “is” an iguana-like reptile with poison-dripping fangs high in the rainforest trees in Costa Rica, or by the Chupacabras that stalks the corrals out on the Mexican deserts. Erudite biologists and people like Nathan Sayre whose research is always impeccable state that Jaguarundi being seen here is an impossibility, end of conversation! … yet we are tantalized by write-ups like that of the naturalist Stan Tekiela, in his book, “Mammals of Arizona Field Guide”:

Rare […] Very secretive, with a range from South and Central America into southern Arizona […] occasionally one jaguarundi is seen […] It is possible that some of these are the offspring of feral house cats. There are also reports of captive jaguarundi escaping and living in the wild.

I drive off soon as I can manage and find a phone, and call our naturalist Ralph W. who has been setting out cameras for years trying to nail down for us once this Holy Grail of our conservation. Later in the morning he and Kathleen and I hunt for tracks and try to determine if there’s enough evidence to warrant doing another camera project, but we don’t find much in the way of exciting clues. We do come on Badger sign, and an interwoven set of curving lines in the flour-like dust that tell where two rattlesnakes became more than strangers in the Sonoran Desert night–as I followed their movement through the powder and imagined the grace of what went on, in my mind’s ear there played the Ravel “Bolero”.

A Spotted Sandpiper is visiting the mud shore of The Stockpond again.