Tag Archives: Sparrows

June 10, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , , , ,

I’m buzzed by the summer’s first brown and yellow, large wasp, which I call a “Brown Man”, the Jamaican name for a similar species. They will have to be watched for now every time a covering on the wheel line tractors is lifted: from the ceiling of those covers these wasps love to suspend a nest, and they don’t like it much when the lid is rudely yanked up and banged over on its side when the engine needs to be started. Another smaller, all-yellow wasp lands on an irrigation puddle, and floats on the water’s surface film while taking a drink.

Caribbean Horseweed, as I call it, (Conyza bonariensis, or less flatteringly, Asthmaweed) is coming into bloom; it is not as sought after a graze as is its northern cousin, the Canadian Horseweed (Conyza canadensis) that is also shooting up abundantly but flowers much later atop neck-high stalks. The beautiful deep magenta-maroon tiny carnations of Scarlet Spiderling (Boerhavia coccinea) hover in a mist of the thinnest of stems over bare patches of ground in #3 Pasture. The handsome Malvella (Malvella lepidota), which has the not so handsome common name of Scurfy Mallow, holds hibiscus-like, chaste white cups of flowers on plants sprawling through the low places at the top end of #2 Pasture. It deserves being brought into Arizona gardens, should be in hanging baskets in the Tucson nurseries.

The temperature the narrowest slice off 107 degrees … cowbirds, buntings that for some reason are still here, various flycatchers, warblers, all crowd into the shade of the wheel line wheel rims, sitting out the heat of the day perched on the upper spokes. At The Stockpond, Martins that appear black in the midday glare swing in to skim the green water where it’s open among the drifts of red algae, all this a pattern of colors of jewels and precious stone … jet … peridot … carnelian. Now the female hummers come in numbers to point their bills into that open water, driven so by thirst I guess as to risk the usual male divebombing. Black-throated Sparrows, rarely seen in this spot, also come to the water’s edge, and Cardinals too, and many Yellow Warblers, one of which has a crown and face with a glow of orange.

May 31, 2013

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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 23, 2013

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Dawn brings with it temperatures in the upper 40s still. Chunks of cobalt, chunks of lapis take wing–many Blue Grosbeaks, and Lazuli Buntings. In the gray light, a Lucy’s Warbler is jumping in and out of the cavity in the railroad tie gate post in which one of those birds was busily putting in a nest a bit less than a month ago; I thought it had been abandoned. There are many chirping babies around and if I remember, Lucy’s fledge with a startling quickness.

While I sit in the pickup sipping coffee after completing irrigation rounds, a Gray Fox comes along to get a drink at the pond. A beautiful animal, it is–red fur on its legs, and a swath of red that runs diagonally from its red ears down the sides of its body. It sits over there for a good long while, black-tipped tail draped elegantly, but acts nervously about something beyond it most of the time though it didn’t seem to care about me. Around him many swallows are flying in for quick on-the-wing dips of their bills into the water, and there’s a real “mess” of tanagers, of both species, coming to drink as well. One of them is a first year male Summer Tanager in that peculiar transition to adult plumage: green, blotched with red all over like either I’m seeing spots before my eyes or he has some dreadful tanager pox.

Sapphire blue damselflies are alighting on the irrigation hoses wherever the units have put out enough water to build little ponds that will of course drain away. The air has heated to just short of 100 degrees, and the grassland birds have discovered quite the way to stay comfortable: with the humidity at 4%, the seventy-foot wide zone of wet soil dwn the center of which the wheel lines sit becomes a giant evaporative cooler, and the upper spokes of the wheels of the units are crowded with birds who get as high as they can up under the wide, flat aluminum “tire” so it can shade them. Close up under one wheel canopy alone there were stuffed a Lark Sparrow, a Cassin’s Kingbird, and two Western Kingbirds, obviously enjoying that shade and “cool”!

May 18, 2013

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Birds of gold, glittering on the edges of every little muddy bay of The Stockpond. Common Yellowthroats, several Western Tanagers, Yellow and Wilson’s warblers. The Yellow Warblers are given the bum’s rush by several Lucy’s; they’re chased off. That done, the Lucy’s “high tail” it to the other side of the pond to perch instead around the hydrant where the cleanest water is to be enjoyed. Beyond all these birds occupied with slacking their thirst, Silver-leafed Nightshade makes a bank of purple flowers. The Wilson’s Warblers should be near the end of their time here, and these will indeed turn out to be the last seen this migration. Their numbers were noticeably down over those of past years, and the timespan of their passage (less than a month) also seemed much shortened.

Later at lunch, a (the same?) Spotted Sandpiper returns to spend the day, and many more Western Tanagers are hanging out at this their favorite waterhole for now. Cliff Swallows zoom in and zoom out, dipping to the water surface in their low swing of flight. A female Summer Tanager gathers nesting material along the flat shore at the west side, and there come along a last pair of White-crowned Sparrows to have a drink before they set off northward and soon out of Arizona for the summer.

May 16, 2013

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Seventeen days after the last one was sighted, a Meadowlark is by itself out on the pastures! A lingering Western, or an odd summering Eastern?

Lark Sparrows are in court-n-spark mode, a male and female are singing together like two leads in an opera. He lets out with the sweetness of a canary, and jumps from the ground onto the spokes of an irrigator wheel, climbing them one by one, jumping from one side of the wheel across to the other while spreading his tail, sometimes the feathers wide into a complete fan, and as he reaches the top of the wheel, stretches upwards as far as his neck can extend while he’s singing. She stays below, twittering, joyful.

Ellison and I have our lunchtime at The Stockpond. The 96 degree afternoon brings in a female hummingbird to sip from the open water–she’s desperate enough to forgo whatever security her gender almost always seeks in sticking to the riser hydrant and avoiding the open water area. Instead of being dive-bombed and driven off by a male of her species, however, she is threatened by of all things, a dragonfly! One of those gaudy “saddle shoe” dragonflies (a Desert White-tail like yesterday’s, and maybe it’s the same individual) comes gliding innocently along below her, then rises quickly with obvious intent and attacks her again and again, but she escapes. If we hadn’t seen this with our own eyes … surely it couldn’t have been trying to prey on her, could it? (Much later I would do an Internet subject search on this, and found a number of just such incidents talked about, including one on an Audubon Society bulletin board webpage in which there was a reference to a film documenting a large dragonfly grabbing and carrying off a full-grown Rufous Hummingbird! Who knew?)

May 13, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , ,

The temperatures begin today to cross into the 90s, pushing the vegetation along into Summer that a calendar claims falsely will not come to us for more than another month. The Stockpond’s surface is covered with a film of pollen. Even the cattle are coughing.

On the pastures yellow sweet-clover (Melilotus) is growing lushly, tall, and blooming abundantly, its fragrance carried on the wind and inviting in the Mule Deer whose favorite graze it seems to be. Our cattle go right after this naturalized plant as soon as they’re rotated into a new pasture with it, too, even though it has coumarin within it that supposedly can affect an overindulging animal badly. I’ve never seen any such outcome with the plant, though, I guess because the toxin cannot become active without enough humidity for a mold to grow on the plants. (Humidity will at least half the time register in the single digits this month and next; so much for mold …) Cowbirds have come along in numbers, and true to their name are attending the cows. A last flock of Chipping Sparrows came down to one of the large puddles around an irrigation riser: the birds will be gone any day to the North, or leave for the oak woodlands at higher elevations here where they spend the summer in spare numbers. In Pasture #3 a pair of Brown-crested Flycatcher are purrrrtling and courting, at least I think they’re Brown-crested going on the strength of that rolling purtle, but I wasn’t able to see those tiny details of how far towards the tip goes a darker banding on the tail feathers. The other calls don’t match exactly those described for either Ash-throated or Brown-crested, though are closer to “whit-will-do” than to “ka-brick”. The field guide isn’t very helpful, either, with,

Ash-throated Flycatcher:
smaller bill than Brown-crested;
very pale gray [breast];
very pale yellow [belly]

and,

Brown-crested Flycatcher:
larger bill than Ash-throated;
pale gray [breast];
pale yellow [belly]

Truly a “dastardly duo”, as Tucson Audubon Society calls such confusing pairs of species. If I accidentally left the big hose out of the port on the wheel line irrigator, those birds would immediately take up housekeeping (or at least house building) inside the pipe-axle’s ready made cavity. Sometimes I find the cows have unhooked that firehose from the port and left it flung out on the grass to the side, which also leaves the inside of the axle/pipe open to the househunting flycatcher pair. Years ago I hooked up a water hose to an open port of one of the units elsewhere across The River, turned on the pump, and in a few seconds had distributed a nest in pieces into a couple dozen sprinkler heads and there was the devil to pay to get them all cleaned out again. You only have to do that once before you flush out a system like that first with the endcaps off, should you have found one of those ends open or that a hose had been off for a few days! As much as these flycatchers are among my favorite birds, I want their attention be focused elsewhere for nest sites such as “natural” holes abandoned by the woodpeckers who had excavated them in the saguaros on the slopes just above us.

May 9, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

The Lucy’s Warblers continue the symphony, broadcasting from the Concertgebosque at those same northern double gates at first light, though this day it’s all drowned out for a moment by a Stiffwing Hawk carrying passangers high overhead towards Tucson.

The Northern Mallards are gone, but Mexican Mallards have come back to The Stockpond. (This pair will be on the water most every day for the rest of the month.) White-crowned Sparrows have become rare enough that any lingering here are notable, this morning a pair of them drink at the pond’s edge; Lark Sparrows have by and large replaced the many wintering related species that’ve now left for the Plains or the Tundra or summer life Above the Rim.

Blue Grosbeaks, my … oh … my. There was a single one here for a day a week ago, but this morning the pastures are from out of the “blue” filled with them, they sit all along the wheel line axles taking in the luxury of this their Summer Place though the records have it that this shouldn’t have come about for a few more weeks. With them are many Lazuli Bunting (Nancy F. pointed out that the two birds, grosbeak and bunting, are in the same genus) no less beautiful or calling of one’s attention, and these should soon become more uncommon as they also leave for lands north of the Mogollon Rim but for now, they still seem to be everywhere I look.

In an afternoon Monet light, the gross of grosbeaks works over the heads of barley and oats going now to gold and going to grain, and that grass is alive with the birds who flutter while climbing the stalks from the ground to reach the fruiting spike, there pick out the goodies and are slowly lowered back to the ground as that stalk bends with the weight. A lone and very handsome male Redwing sits atop a wheel and watches all that going on below him.

May 2, 2013

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The Stockpond is alive with birds, among them a single (shouldn’t it be so?) Solitary Sandpiper hunts the shore, unafraid of me; if past observation holds this will be the one day he is with us, on his way to Canada or Alaska and he’s loading fuel for a trip over vast deserts that lie between this mud and Idaho. Summer Tanager males are increasing in numbers (who’d complain?) and into the middle of them and some oddly olive-tinted Song Sparrows and a whole lot of frantic Yellow-rumped Warblers comes screeching and rattling a male Belted Kingfisher, which after the middle of April is in these parts a great rarity. He is elegantly beautiful, and appears to be coming up with fish in his big and splashy dives into the pool from the overhanging mesquite branches from which he’d knocked the tanagers, but there’s not supposed to be any fish in this pond. I’m unable to get a better look at what he’s preying on before he leaves and it’s doubtful I see him again.

As I make rounds through Pasture #2(south), a large rosette of a Milk Thistle jumps into sight–incredibly prickly and incredibly attractive but out it must come, without remorse. A number of us spent a lot of time a year ago removing every plant of that dangerously invasive species we could find, from tiny seedlings to large ones in beautiful lilac-colored flower. A year ago they were in almost every pasture, but the removal of the one today I hope marks the extirpation of this troublesome Eurasian “weed” from Mason’s. It may be only a matter of time before more appear, since this exotic is coming at us from at least three directions: south towards Cascabel on the road from Pinal County, northwest from roadside thick with it outside Dragoon, northeast from the verge of the freeway from Tucson on the edge of Benson. Vehicle tires may have most to do with this, though I know of the plant being grown in pots for its beauty and for its reported medicinal properties.

April 29, 2013

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Queen butterflies and a very large Blue (what species? and we think sandpipers are a challenge to tell apart …) are seen here and there, not much yet. Too early for Monarchs. What there are a lot of are Kingbirds, I have never seen so many in one place yet it’s reported to me there aren’t many elsewhere on The River. Here on the fencelines of Pasture #3 was a Konvocation of Kingbirds, a dozen or more, the acrobatics of their flight a thrill to watch as always–each one more beautifully plumaged than the last, grays, olives, blacks, clean white, shimmering yellow. Almost all were Western Kingbirds, among them a single Cassin’s, which is growing to be one of my favorite birds. Still a few White-crowned Sparrows in the brushy alley that borders the pasture, and overhead, recently arrived for the summer, a flock of burbling and bubbling Brown-headed Cowbirds, their notes dropping to the ground with the sound of water splashing into the Stockpond. I’ve read that it’s a mystery how the birds learn these sounds and songs, given that other species with other things to teach their actual young are who raise the cowbird from egghood. More mystery here, to let be.

Heading back to the Stockpond, I opened a “cowboy gate” to get out of that pasture, and noted a Lucy’s Warbler very near in the mesquite branches and unruffled by my presence. It had dried grasses in its bill, and was obviously heading towards a nest being built somewhere, then right in front of me it dropped down to the massive old railroad tie post onto which the gate was hung. It vanished for a few moments on the other side of the tie, then popped back up into sight, looked at me again and flitted off for more building material I presumed. Once I got the gate looped-up and closed, I went around to the other side of the post and sure enough, there seen easily within the rotting out heart of the railroad tie was a nest appropriate to the size of this sprite of a bird. It wasn’t very enclosed by walls of wood, in fact it was in more of a ledge that had formed about a third of the way into the body of the tie, with a wide crack above for entry–one would be able to see very easily the eggs that would come, and the nestlings. It still was no place one might imagine a cowbird getting into and in there wedging its outlaw egg, but it’s reported that this is just what happens. The nest I found today is at least the fourth I have come on in exactly this sort of place–a railroad tie gate post with some degree of decay–over the years of being a ranch hand, and invariably the birds have raised their broods despite my constant coming and going on one chore or another that demanded opening and closing their gate, and the babies and parents have been completely at ease with my getting glimpses of their progress. I don’t see any mention of such a thing, such a nesting site, in the professional literature, and Cornell states flatly that the species does not use nesting boxes. I would sure describe these railroad ties as such! or at least they could inspire the design of one that the Lucy’s Warbler would be willing to accept.

Back at the irrigation riser that’s filling the pond, the temperature is climbing well past 90, towards 100 degrees. A female Broad-billed Hummingbird drinks from the hydrant leaks at the top, and what turns out to be the last Vesper Sparrows come desperately to the pools as well–another of those species that leave of a sudden as May’s heat comes in ferociously, to head for the Mogollon Rim a mile higher, and points north from there. The usual Black-chinned hummer males describe geometrics on the air, zipping around in almost impossible moves over the whole pond and in the noonday shimmer, a Common Yellowthroat and very red Song Sparrows come for sips, too. Most dainty of all are the gigantic (many would say, frightening!) Tarantula Hawks that land some distance from the edge on muddy footing, and carefully tread to where they may press their lips to the water. They take long draughts. Everyone leaves alone these extras from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, for they’re packing heat like no other creature. A Summer Tanager that’s even more red than the wings of the Tarantula Hawk comes down, but perches on a rock out in the middle, and before he lowers himself to the edge of that rock to reach the water, has his perfect double reflected in the surface.

April 27, 2013

Nature Jottings, ,

A startlingly beautiful Black-headed Grosbeak comes to the feeder at El Potrero this morning, and now an ear must be kept out for their equally beautiful notes at Mason’s. In a more usual spring these will have appeared a full month earlier than this and again one thinks to one’s self, “what gives?”

A single Marsh Wren, which a little bird told me would be the last. It is 90 degrees today, and those wintry Savannah Sparrows have gone back to sulking and racing mouse-like through the tall green grasses; this, too, will be the last of these snowbirds-defined before they leave for the Mogollon Rim or go on up even to the Arctic.