The lone Mallard, and a lone White-crowned Sparrow, at the Stockpond.
A few Marsh Wrens, with no reason to leave such a comfortable spot as their pasture cienega, I guess.
Tag Archives: Sparrows
April 19, 2013
Early light. The air is frigid, in these lowest of flats to which the cold of every mountain range east and west drains and pools. Mallard is unbothered with his feet wet in his pond, but I know what it will be like to open the hydrants for the wheel lines and get soaked by the wide fountains of water that’ll shoot up the sleeves of my workshirt and into the tops of my rubber boots. The silence is near unearthly, no migrants from the tropics stir or warble or scold. What was greening mesquite is collapsed everywhere and melting in dribbles, from their tree tops down to every last small one sprouted out across the pastures; their growth they’d put on so far this spring won’t make it through to turn dark green now, or expand. It will all have to be pushed out again from nothing. So much for the oft-heard truism that mesquites know when to leave out, for none of these apparently did! I wonder how many times I’ve seen this happen with them of an April, and though I didn’t plant by them as some do, I regret that this year will not be one of that sweet green, stained-glass light in the bosque for a few days while the leaflets are still small and pale and the canopy shimmers and glows. We can’t depend on a yearly show of wildflowers, and we can’t depend on having this pleasure every spring, either.
Holding the freezing metal handles of the irrigation risers while turning them to open the water is itself trial enough, but my wetted hands then go to aching deeply, and then go to numbness seconds after the water comes flying out the more explosively as the valve is opened wider. The sprinklers came up to full pressure, shooting out in arcs of about 50 ft. and turning their big circles, and already within three revolutions the weeds, grass, and now-wrecked mesquites are encrusted with filigrees and lace of shining white frost and ice crystals that appeared so quickly that it seemed some spell of the Sierra Madre had been chanted out by an hechicero offstage and unseen. It is surely lower than 20 degrees F., but I don’t need to know. I just want the sun to rise.
Come up it does, and as the day warms by fifty degrees or more, a vast array of plants begins to turn odd colors and twist up, then fall to the ground and flatten themselves. Oats … sow thistle … conaigre … melilotus … desert mallow … bindweed … tansy mustard … Wright’s saltweed … conyza … bull thistle and star thistle … the bermuda grass that was coming along so robustly to give cows a wider buffet soon–all collapsed and will not recover. But spring cannot be stopped and the afternoon warmth brought out a huge native black bee, and the first deep amythyst flowers of Silver-leaf Nightshade on a plant that wasn’t affected in the least by the sub-freezing night. Winter finches were in their comfort zone–Vesper Sparrows on every barbed wire fence and in the grassy edges, and the Savannah Sparrows weren’t shy at all today. I scared up a few Marsh Wrens, even though they all should have been on the 3:10 to Yuma four days ago.
A fine Cassin’s Kingbird perched atop a close-by wheel of the irrigators as all was being closed down in the pleasantly warm afternoon, its belly bright, lemon dot-candy yellow.
April 18, 2013
Our male Mallard flies in quacking on the Stockpond–what has happened to his mate? He swims around, calling for her, but she hasn’t been here for a week and is not to be seen again. He’s alone in the cold, and oh is it cold, below freezing. He doesn’t mind the water of course, but it’s no fun to me to be getting the usual drenching out of the hydrant getting up the first set of irrigation … both M’llard and I should be on the Sea of Cortez, or I in Alamos. Painting. Writing. The duck, though, if he is a truly wild one, will likely be heading north or finding a cooler spot in the New Mexico high country within a few weeks. Right now this one is plenty cool enough.
A few Marsh Wrens in that newly grazed pasture of last evening’s herd, and not a few Savannah Sparrows, which are less secretive in the cold air. A Gray Flycatcher lets me approach almost to it on the barbed wire fence at the edge.
April 14, 2013
[E]arly at the Stockpond, in the mobile bird blind of the pickup, on the radio the gorgeous music of Mexico’s “Age of Gold” coming out of Sonora and so well set to this grandscapes that were once not fenced off from that fair land. Hopelessly sad music, hopeless love for la Malaguena Salerosa, the cheesiest of organ arrangements that scream novella, and of course the tragically romantic, boleros in harmonies that drift over saloon doors of a cantina and into the street, Eydie Gorme singing that it is my inescapable fate to love her, corridos from The Revolution. White fluff from willows drifts past and lands on the water outside the truck windows. The track of a Turkey clearly marked in the dust makes the line from where the bird left the protection of the mesquital to cross the parking opening and down to the water’s edge; I haven’t yet seen one of these birds on the Mason place, but once in a while used to see them in the bed of the River to the south at Heaven Sent Ranch in the years I was a hand there. From the looks of those birds, I had thought then that they were Gould’s Turkey that had simply wandered north out of Sonora down the San Pedro. I wonder about this one.
Large flocks of Lark Sparrows, taking to the air in swirls as I wade through the grasses to open hydrants and set wheels for the day’s watering. I listened to a handsome one high in a mesquite top, by himself giving a concert like no other of his kind I’ve heard–I couldn’t tell it from the Summer Tanagers that were due to arrive from the south tomorrow. A Brewer’s Sparrow was also singing pretty notes in the mesquite saplings that are a constant battle to keep from taking over the grazing fields; right now is the end of that sparrow’s winter residence here and they usually disappear of a sudden. That summer song had me thinking they were restless now. That most exquisite bird of tropical hue and amazing grace arrived in massive number, hawking low over all the pastures: the Violet-green Swallow.
After having got three pastures’ irrigation up, I waited back at the Stockpond for the Great 2013 Wren Drive to start once the other Cascabel Wren Wranglers came along this morning–our eminent naturalists Ralph W. and Kathleen, and avid birder pard Bob E. Kathleen had suggested we play gamekeepers and walk in a line across the grasses, sort of beat the bush and see what flies up so more can be learned about this wren phenomenon that becomes by the day more astonishing. One of us might circle out and around to push a bird back towards the others … here at the water, though, I had merely to watch.
Lots of male Black-chinned Hummingbirds came zooming in to the water, hanging suspended and making acrobatic moves of incredible agility, each trying to chase off the other four or five so he could have the pond alone else he might not have enough water to drink! Sometimes this is out in the middle where the birds will drop and hover, drop again, hover, reach the water in this stair-step fashion and daintily break the surface of the pond with a fine bill-tip. At the edges where the water is only inches deep, the hummers drop themselves at hover right down onto the water, and slide themselves back and forth forcing the water to clean their keels, even landing for moments with wings whirring so they don’t sink; they look like tiny airboats. Some land in little pockets of shallow water that are cupped in the floating green algae, while keeping only the slightest of wing movement going so’s not to lose their balance. None of these things would go on for very long, not with their wing mates coming in at a divebomb to knock them out of the way with a chatter and whizz, “Hummbres, it’s goin’ on High Noon and this pond ain’t big enough for the five of us!”
On the strength of the experience of last week’s flushing of the Marsh Wrens by the moving wheel line, and the ease with which I saw those wrens a couple days ago, I’d promised the Wren Wranglers a good show but the little we saw turned out to be hard won. None of the birds showed themselves but for brief flashes of russet and brown and we were left with the frustration rather than the mystery now lost once I’d got that identity on them. Well, didn’t really matter to us, who all know that naturalists the country over dream of this place, and dream of being out in it of a morning just like this one. Not ones to give up, though, we moved on to other winter pastures to the north where there turned out to be few of the wrens but rather many more frustrating sparrows of who knew what species. How much time remains before all these LBBs (“Little Brown Birds”) give the place over to summer flycatchers, when the oats, barley, rye and wheat give the place over to bermudagrass and the main cattle herd comes back down to its lushness from higher, wild ranges? We used Kathleen’s roundup brushbeating until we got one of those elusive sparrows to light in a bare mesquite sprout, and we could get finally one i.d, Savannah Sparrow, which in past winters were much more numerous and might well have been so this whole winter but hidden themselves much more, too. Then too, wintering White-crowned Sparrow have been much less seen at least at Mason’s than in other years; we did come on a few of them today.
A Summer Tanager glows in a bare tree, when we return to the Stockpond and bid farewell to each other after a most enjoyable morning. The bird is a day early! That Lark Sparrow that was singing like one of that tanager kind must’ve heard him.
April 13, 2013
A honeyed and calling fragrance in the air, sweet, drifting to the Stockpond from the direction of the San Pedro, which river wanders by close to the west. I presume it is from the clouds and sprays of pink tamarisk blossoms in the reaches of the bottomlands, where there is now a show of color that can be seen from Cascabel Road from enough of a rise.
The lone male Mallard still floats on the pond, he’d been kept company by an adult Black-crowned Night Heron until I drove up. Night Herons being a jumpy sort, it vanished quickly not to reappear. Was this the one that spent a few days here last June when in immature plumage but by now should have matured into an elegant adult bird? Northern Beardless-Tyrannulets (the name is longer than the tiny bird itself–is that true of the Southern Beardless-Tyrannulet, too??) gave their wheezy, sneezy whistles from the bosque and later as I made rounds I could hear them all along the River; I guess they’d arrived together in the night. They can be called down from the trees if one wants to get a close look; I must’ve hit on their territorial call. This is another creature that in late years could be come across in every month of winter, but this season’s frigid air must’ve driven them far to the south, maybe completely out of Arizona. Their arrival in numbers should also in a “normal” year have come about two weeks ago but they were loathe to leave wherever they were.
The wrens began their usual flying up from my footfalls as I walked along the wheel line to open a hydrant, but this day they didn’t fly off quickly nor drop out of sight maddeningly. Several of them flitted off only a few feet, then landed on the spokes of the irrigators so close to me it was hard to focus in with the glasses, jumped around, looked for spiders and such in the corners of the aluminum. There were the white spots I’d been told about, but most amazingly, there were on each of their backs lines of pretty black stripes. I could hardly grasp this, because it identified these little mystery birds that are everywhere in the deep winter grasses we’d planted in October and December as the Marsh Wren!
We have in our way recreated long-vanished cienegas with these winter leafy pastures for the cattle, by bringing water up from 25 ft. under ground and spreading it over these acres. It may be that rather with the grazing schedule, the wrens move from one area of these winter cereals to another with the waterings, which make of them a marsh about a hundred feet wide that stays wet in the shade of the plants for a few days at a time, this cycling accomplished through all the acres over a week’s period. By now the wrens have become used to my tromping through and didn’t go so far off before slipping back beneath the grass canopy. I’d hope Iris Dement would approve of “allowing” the birds to show themselves in their own time like that. Letting their “mystery be” was a pleasure.
After a winter that had the Lark Buntings abandon us, they are passing back north through the pastures. Many females, many males in an eclipse plumage but not a few in their startling and sharp black-and-white courting outfits. I watched one of those fine males for a while, who was moving along the ground looking for insects and seeds in remarkably plover-like actions. Then he and several others flew up and arranged themselves artfully in a round young mesquite tree, and these immediately joined by other birds each competing in beauty: Lazuli Buntings as bright as blue reef fish, numbers of sorrel and white and black-pointed Chipping Sparrows in their full fresh spring plumage, a single Vermillion Flycatcher for a tabasco splash, unfurling pastel mesquite leaflets a foil for all these colors of a Mexican tin Tree-of-Life come brightly to life.
April 12, 2013
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 5, 2013
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 31, 2013
Black-chinned Hummingbirds are in their spectacular mating aerial dances at El Potrero. As they swing up and down on the wing they purr and putt, the quavering sounds grow louder and dimmer with the swing of the bird on its pendulum course, closer and then away and back again. Did the animation folks who created the Jetsons in the 1960s use this for the sound effect of the futuristic personal flying cars? No sightings or sounds of these hummers at Mason’s, either.
There is appearing a pattern here, of something that may have been happening with every spring, perhaps in reverse every autumn: the returning birds come north in their waves, and eddy and flow around (or over) places that take a little waiting for them to become more comfortable for them. El Potrero is warmer, more temperate than the Mason Pastures–certainly the thermometer readings show this and so singing and courting and avian housekeeping appear to start earlier those miles north at El Potrero. Do more birds come along from their wintering grounds at the right moment to occupy Mason’s areas directly, or are they already present somewhere east, west, north and they swirl on around back to Mason’s when conditions please? The number of species that are showing evidence of this keeps growing–something at least interesting is going on, but … what?
Winter seems about gone though of course we could (and probably will) have a couple snows yet on the higher country above us, and mornings that’ll make us grumble, “Oh this never happens!”, but yes, it always does happen. A lot of wintering birds appeared at Mason’s sparingly or not at all and now their season is winding down–they didn’t come far enough south because of global warming? Winter of 2011-2012 brought great and beautiful flocks of Lark Buntings to us; this year they appeared on only a couple of occasions and in much smaller numbers. Winter before last, often Western Bluebirds would alight all along the wheel line pipes and spokes around me, truly a glittering show and I’d hear their musical “phew! phheww!” overhead, and there were the many Mountain Bluebirds visiting and landing mostly on the open ground, but not a single of the latter species came along this winter. Both bluebird species can be pretty irregular, but the more to be expected flocks of American Pipit didn’t come this year to the irrigated grass, either, though I saw and heard a very few individuals–and no longspurs at all. Long before this time last year Tree Swallow and Violet-green Swallow were passing over our planted grass, but neither of these species has come through yet in 2013. With climate shifting northwards, what might the summer hold for birds on the place? What “Mexican” species might appear?
March 23, 2013
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 12, 2013
Watched a splendid male Vermillion Flycatcher using the stockpond for his giant birdbath–he repeatedly dropped from a high branch into the water a few (safe) feet out from the bank, hitting the water face first and going completely under, the process looked like a tern’s dive in miniature but in red and not white. I could watch his back bob to the surface and he’d be out and airborne in such a flash that there was no saturation of feathers to bog him down.
Wandered through the far north “pasture” (#4) to see what might be in this area of vegetation more typical of the arid slopes around us, and found Black-throated Sparrow in abundance; I don’t think I’ve ever seen this species where I usually carry out my work in the lush grasses across the other fields. A Ladder-backed Woodpecker worked over the mesquite there, too.
Bewick’s Wren singing in The Lane.