Tag Archives: Snipes

February 26, 2014

Nature Jottings, , , , ,

Snipe on The Cienega, creeping, hiding, like a mammal in green tussocks.

The blue-green Stockpond is lightly ruffled by Spring breezes, on it bob a pair of Mexican Mallards and a pair of Cinnamon Teal. The male teal is a color deep and rich, carnelian and that very rich cinnamon of theirs.  The black bill is set off by a red eye startling as a jewel set into the idol, Matrix, the Mother–Nature–from whence we came, to which we go, in which we are.

In what is called “Winter” here this landscape is as richly toned as the great black-and-white Hollywood romances of the 1930s–but that is gone by this last week of February, the Cottonwoods are already a splash of watercolor green and now they remind me of my mother tinting with Easter egg dye the black-and-white kodak snapshots of the 1950s (who could afford color film then?), green for a dress, red for her lips.  While Arizonans pride ourselves on toughing out some of the wildest heat on Earth, we also resist letting go of the precious cold, but the season is being overpowered before our disbelieving eyes.  It’s sinking in that we are not this year to have the dramatic canvasses to treasure of stark white Cottonwood trunks against a frigid blackening sky as snow flurries sweep in, no, not in this Winter That Never Really Was.  There will be no dawn of surpassing enchantment of Silver Fog this year, when a white cloud is snuggled down over the mesquites and rises in level blanket to just above the treetops, each tiny twig and large limb feathered with frost that picks up and holds within it the sunlight sifting down into the mist from an utterly clear blue sky above the roof of that fog blanket.  I realize sadly that neither are we to see the high double mountain to the south be draped for a day (or even two) in a stunning and surprising blanket of snow: no, Mae West will not be donning her white angora sweater.  It is 77 degrees, on the radio the KXCI deejay tells that orange blossoms are perfuming the air in Tucson, the flower buds of lilacs in Cascabel yards are showing color, violets have been in bloom since December in Pat’s dooryard garden at El Potrero, Bladderpods are in flower in our seldomly used #4 Pasture, and Loggerhead Shrikes are already wandering off and becoming more scarce–been weeks since I’ve seen one–and I expect they’ll move out soon to wherever it is they do go for their own Arizona Summer.  I already miss their sass and chatter and their cheery greeting and know that we’ll probably not hear much more of that until about the time the pastures are to be made ready in September for another Winter’s planting.  Into the ears of even those whose ignorance of the Earth’s climate change is willful are coming these whispers–and shouts–of the possibility we come to be driven out of this already challenging place that ever has been close to the edge of uninhabitability to begin with.  Or … will we find we are going to lose it all through one catastrophic change or another anyway, we who stay on here now and live in the wonder of how this naturalist’s and historian’s and cowboy’s paradise remains what we’ve wanted it to and what we love?  Freeway bypasses … bedroom community subdivisions … drone test range proposals … the road getting completely paved some day … and now: SunZia’s massive sets of high tension electric lines tall as a high-rise, the construction effects collateral that will come with the installation of those lines, the ongoing access needs to service them, with the vehicles to do so, the warning lights that will flash atop them in what was once a desert of darkness inviolate.  I am emotionally unable to watch this happen yet its coming is apparently unstoppable, with likely its first destruction flowing into this valley through the saddle between Mason Pastures and the Mae West Peaks, after the towers make that wildland pass from Willcox over which year after year we carry our grassfed beeves on the last trailer trip of their lives.  SunZia would be a pill deadly to each of us here in personally different ways; for me the gaul in it is that I am expected to surrender with grace and peaceable resignation what is left in my life to love above all things, surrender it to someone else who through power-sucking video games and consoles can only live through a screen’s virtual reality a life as exciting as the one I do in real reality.   My ranching existence as it presents in the Contemporary West will be sacrificed to someone else’s artificial existence as it presents in a fabricated Old West of, e.g., the gunslinging and fabulously popular, fabulously and deeply disturbingly violent game (complete with human gore oft-splattered onto the screen) set in an imagined Southwest borderland, “Red Dead Redemption”, which enthusiastic gaming reviews say “expertly captures the Wild West.”   What it really captures is the market demographic of young males who are the usual rattlesnake bite victims hauled off to the emergency room.  Cascabel and my life under the Mae West Peaks will be sold for a mess of wattage.

Not that I haven’t thought of leaving, or haven’t tried to leave and more than once, but … well, I’ll go, but will this be the year like 2001 when wildflowers bloom spectacularly again, so I ought to wait and see if they do, I mean, that can’t be missed … oh but then the warblers are soon to pass through after that, well, I can stay at least long enough to enjoy migration one more time, and the arrival and singing of our Mexican bird specialties … and calves! who’d want to miss the calves? … and oh yes, scattering the herd on the range, well I want to do that one more year, give one more go at it, I can hang around that long … the sizzling Foresummer, with all the world looking to the sky for the first grand thunderheads to form … the season of delicious and beautiful red Saguaro fruits … no, can’t leave when the Monsoon is about to make every creature human and otherwise happy, and excited, and bring raging washes and flashfloods to liven up the day, or night … wait, the Barrel Cactus are really going to go nuts with flowers this summer, you can see all the buds and it’s so much fun to ride out and compare them all one to the other … ah, no, better not leave now, maybe I’ll go next month, can’t do it with the skies of September about to bless us with their O’keefe cloudscapes and dazzling huge moonrises … oh hell, leaving can wait until after we watch the pastures we’ve seed-planted sprout and thicken and become as emerald as Ireland … got to see the snow return to the high country around us in all directions, then I can go … but look, there are so many millions of wildflower seedlings, this could be the best year yet for The Show though it had better rain damn soon or we’ll lose it …  I’ll leave after that!

[…]

Sunset is fire, and lilac.

December 10, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , ,

In the dark of madrugada, scattered snow crystals drop straight down, they are so large that they hit the walkway and the mesquite trunks with loud crackling.

The day lightens to an even gray, all the sky, to every horizon. The color of the bermudagrass is as half-toned as hay, the hoops of the Cottonwood crowns are gray though those yellow swaths of leaves still in them are bright even with no Sun … the mountains and cliffs are gray, and the great rock monoliths, and the snow that wants to shimmer when Sun appear … all is muted, understated, in Winter’s elegance. At Mason Pastures it is well above freezing, but there is a skin of ice on The Stockpond, and the puddles out on those pastures have sheets of ice over them a quarter inch thick. I turn on the irrigation, hoping that no nozzles have become blocked but one is, and I’m forced to feel that Winter elegance deep into cracked fingers while whatever is stopping up the water spout is cleared away by a poke with a wire.

A Snipe, striped like the brown and tan reeds, is near invisible where it stands. Masses of Lark Sparrows arrive or fly out, Red-shafted Flickers hunt something on the ground, and Say’s Phoebes catch the bugs that might be able to escape great cold but not the snapping bill of something consummately agile of wing. The day is cold and cloudy to its end, never getting out of the 50s, but despite that there is a surprising evening show of insects suspended on air.

December 5, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , ,

The new day brings an utterly different world: 25 degrees on the ridges, and in the valley below sparkling chips of frost fall from mesquite tips.  The bermudagrass pasture stretching out from the window of the Cowboy Caravan all the way to the huge saguaros on the far hill are white, icy, the Rincon above us dusted with snow.  Yet the air warms enough even in the El Potrero bottomland for Sulphur Butterflies to come to life, and an azure grasshopper.

Still-green and fresh leaves of the big Hackberries at The Stockpond start falling off their twigs by mid-morning–they never had a chance to turn color before the coming on of a night that was surely in the teens.  On the water swim a brace of fine Mallards, their wariness telling they are true wildlings.  A Wilson’s Snipe is there, too, and a large sandpiper with a long bill, also extremely wary: a Long-billed Dowitcher.  It takes off with a pained, “Pitty peet peet!”, showing a white slash of rump as it vanishes across the fields.

October 14, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , ,

A great convocation of butterflies at The Stockpond mud, on a day the most full so far of these delicate wings … Sulphurs mostly, including many of the large, lemon and bright green Cloudless Sulphur, and the lemony Mexican Yellow Butterfly in dogface pattern, both probably wandering up from Mexico, and doubtless other species of that group are there but too confusing or too far out in the treacherous mud to identify. Snout Butterfly numbers are also on the increase–they must be migrating, too.

A Cooper’s Hawk snatches an on-the-wing Chipping Sparrow that had come to drink with the butterflies; the Wilson’s Snipe I find later out on the edge of The Cienega in #1 Pasture must’ve figured out The Stockpond is too dangerous for it at the moment, and has taken to crouching among deep grass tussocks scattered in that open water.

One of those maturing Vermillion Flycatcher males with patterns so clean and different from the typical adult spends the day on a fencewire. It brings to mind a Trogon, but in miniature. I have several times found ones colored just like this spend the whole winter in places nearby.

Day’s end I straggle up Firesky Ridge to the house, a bit worn by work but brought full back to life by the joy of Three-Quarter-Moon, hung there on the indigo and below her a streaming, sky-wide fringe of flaming mare’s tails, rising high to Moon from the canyons of the Mae West Peaks shadowed Where the Deep Purple Falls.

October 10, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , ,

I looked out on a downright wintry sunrise when the blinds were raised and the curtains drawn back for the first time since May: today I’ll want the house to collect as much warmth it can, and keep it.

The day is hard-put to get past 70 degrees, the Wilson’s Snipe staying with us will feel the more comfortably at home. The front brings another wave of birds south, the first Chipping Sparrows, and more Cassin’s Kingbirds from the Four Corners I guess, and the Mogollon. A day of wild skies and scudding but impotent, cold rain clouds, a flock of Violet-green Swallows and zipping in among them, a rare Vaux’s Swift to delight Bob E. and me. (I’d seen one other in my life, on a birding trip through the Pacific Northwest 40 years ago.) They are to be the last of that Swallow to snap up the bugs stirred by our Mason Pasture herd.

Lunch at The Stockpond, with a beautiful pair of Lazuli Buntings, an elegant Lord and Lady. A Flame Skimmer Dragonfly of the usual incredible, garish hue rests on a water plant in front of us the whole while we ate, but we don’t see any of the Blue Damselflies that were common only a couple of days ago.

October 9, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , ,

The truck slips from the warm ridgecrest into the riverbottom, under some line of inversion and into temperatures in the upper 30s. I’m afraid there will be ice to be dumped from the irrigation hoses, not just because it would be another hard letting go of Summer, but because I don’t feel much like having to clear spraying water nozzles and getting a face full of wet even if the sun will just have arisen. Dark in the shadows of the eastern ridge, the pasture will take a while to feel warm; grasshoppers are there, asleep in the cold including the Mexican Generals in their habitual mesquite tips. I don’t know where the Red-winged Grasshoppers hide for such a night. A Swainson’s Hawk looks cold himself, hunched in a tree top where the sun will strike first. Last night will be the last he can stand, and he will head towards Sonora today and no more of his kind will grace our sky until Spring returns. Yet–the Devil’s Claw in that pasture still hangs out a blossom or two.

The afternoon, nevertheless, heads up almost to the 90 degree mark, the infamous wind of this season of the Southwest comes up and lasts all day, takes my light palm-leaf Summer cowboy hat in its abrazo and flings it far, time after time Wind plays fetch and I know she’s telling me I ought to change over to the heavier beaver Stetson. The first Western storm approaches but probably won’t bless us, the wind its harbinger. The storm swirls down from the North instead of up from the tropics nearer by us: for Flagstaff it will be snow, but mildness reigns here in our own Land Beneath the Rim, our own Tierra Caliente. It’s probably pushed along to us the lone Cassin’s Kingbird that I spy up in #4 Pasture. The hot afternoon brings out many Western Pygmy Blue Butterflies to the pond’s rim–haven’t seen one of those since Spring. Grasshoppers also love the day’s heat, tiny-sized pale blue ones fly abundantly ahead of my step through their pastures. A Great Blue Heron flies back and forth between The Stockpond and open water of The Cienega in #1 Pasture, where over the course of the summer native Willows have established themselves and grown upwards with surprising quickness. Snipe is less jumpy than the heron, and has grown so used to me that I’m able to walk past within ten feet, and it still sits there.

October 8, 2013

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

The newly established native grass planting is being weaned into dormancy, getting watered only twice a month and in decreasing amounts–it is a showcase of wintering sparrows (Lincoln’s, White-crowned, Vesper, Savannah, and a female Lark Bunting.) Seeding amaranths in there are shoulder high and dropping spiny fruits into my boot tops, irritating my feet but quite the buffet spread for the birds. Native gramas long before established by themselves in there, plus naturalized Stinkgrass and Lovegrass, add to the seed bounty.

Opening one of the growing number of silky chambers appearing in the outside branches of the small mesquites overgrowing the pastures, I find a large-bodied, pearly-gray furry spider, fascinating and also unsettling, with an abdomen fat as if it were storing up supplies for the winter.

A drive to that north dirt tank reveals it still has water in it, going on three weeks after the last rain. It has always been “productive” of little birds, but today a Sharp-shinned Hawk is present and the only sound is crickets. The electric wires and utility poles, t-posts and barbed wire strands, and mesquite crowns are also empty of Cassin’s Kingbirds, and I think ours must have left.

Amigo Snipe is at The Stockpond, and Snout Butterflies, and a plain, nut-brown dragonfly with a blue, soap bubble sheen to the wings. Across the water itself gracefully swims a bright orange, large Water Scorpion–or should it be called better, Water Stick?

A Verdin peeps in the mesquites of The Lane; they are almost absent from these lands I work every day.

October 7, 2013

Nature Jottings

A second False Dawn in a row, about an hour and a half before sunrise, bright because of there being no moon but still more detectable if not looked at directly.

“Hundreds of Tree Swallows swirling over main pool” of Whitewater Draw in the Sulphur Springs Valley just to our east says a posting on the Arizona-New Mexico Birding ListServ. There are none on our pond, it seems this valley is not an important Fall migration corridor for the bird, the way it is for a number of other species. There is a Snipe, though, still at The Stockpond, and it’s become even more tame.

We have another newly arrived weed: Salsify. There could be worse things to see come to us unannounced … I don’t think I’ll be worrying about this one if it really takes off.

October 5, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , ,

Snipes are a good way out on The Stockpond, silhouettes with perfect reflections probing the mud, one freezes in a camouflage crouch even in such obvious view as I walk from one truck to the other past them, and I drive out to the herd.

Air is cool if not cold, the dust I kick up hangs in deep layers over green grass sparkling with dew. While my attention has fully to be on such things as a snaky steer that doubtless is fixing to escape the weaning enclosure, I catch sight of a lowering flock of birds whose flight has a familiar and peculiar gait to it, giving me to think that Western Meadowlarks have arrived to decorate our pastures for the Winter with their flash of yellow, flash of white, their fluting and their whistling. There is not time to drift over the pastures with them.

In the afternoon cooler even than yesterday’s, once that snaky steer gets religion and he comes to be resigned to a new order, “Sweet sweet! Sweet sweet!” notes fall to Earth from that highest, wholly blue sky, and settle like feathers in pendulum-drift down to the cattle’s ears and mine: American Pipits, invisible they are so high, but announcing their own return from some alpine meadow.

A drive around the edge of a pasture deep in grass on my way to see if that 1,000 pound steer had settled in with the two heifers and younger steer also being fenced weaned, the truck scares into the air in front of it whirling and clicking Red-winged Grasshoppers–the largest number yet of this brilliant insect that is the long and lingering Summer itself. But no, Summer is indeed ending: the Blue Grosbeak in its immature browns I see today is to be the last, as will be that Western Kingbird.

October 4, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , ,

Poorwill Dawn, in air that beyond just quality of the sound it carries through it, is the first with an autumnal tang–ineffable, a mix of dryness, dust, cooling desert.

Kingbirds do flips and somersaults in the delight of an afternoon that only reaches the mid 80s. Immature Vermillion Flycatchers are still around aplenty on the fencepost tops, but red adults haven’t been seen for a while … I suspect they depart earlier, or many reach the natural end of their lives about now.

At least one Snipe is getting accustomed to us so much that it seems to have lost its wildness, in among the Ground Doves who come to drink at The Stockpond.

Grasshopper numbers have been declining slowly and evenly, the biggest have all but disappeared though here and there one will be found perched at a mesquite sapling’s tip, unmoving, stupefied by I don’t know what … cooler nights? the day’s taking longer to warm them? old age? (should we start looking at time in “grasshopper years”, the way we do, “dog years”?)