Another summer morning of Summer Tanager in full song at The Stockpond. A giant blue Pepsis grossa Tarantula Hawk wasp clings to a low dirt cliff, head down, sucking in water.
Tag Archives: Toads & frogs
July 12, 2013
The stars are dim through the clouds, vanishing for moments in violent lightning, martins are up there flying in their usual places before dawn, calling to each other and earth, their voices vanishing for moments in overwhelming thunder. Spadefoot Toads are stirred by the rumble, and continue sending their melody up from the far bottomlands. The River itself sings all the way to El Potrero.
Summer Tanagers are still singing their full repertoire at the Mason Pastures, where a Spotted Sandpiper pays a rare summer visit for a day at The Stockpond. The sandpiper is still in breeding plumage, spots and all–a wanderer from the confluence of the Gila River and the Bonita, where it is thought to breed sparingly?
July 11, 2013
The whole River floodplain below the house is ringing with Spadefoot Toad music at dawn.
After The Stockpond is refreshed with new-pumped water, countless tiny tadpoles of what must be Sonoran Desert Toads swim up to shore, and hang there like a black necklace, all with noses almost touching the bank. They look like kids having their first swimming lessons, holding on to the edge of the pool with bodies stretched out, kicking their legs.
July 10, 2013
Cuckoo calls, but we seem to have half the number of those birds we did a year ago. We do have lots of young kingbirds colored much like Say’s Phoebes, young Lark Sparrows, many young Vermillion Flycatchers. An adult male of the flycatcher attempts to mate, but he’s rather tawdry; she can do better. Among the still small Palmer amaranths are the peculiar sharply-notched cotyledons of just-sprouted native morning glories, and the large first leaves of the other Devil’s Claw to be found here, Proboscidea parviflora, are also up and on a dash towards blooming. While the Sonoran Desert Toads have abandoned The Stockpond, they’ve taken up their nuptial swims in the still-full dirt tank in #2 Pasture. I can hear the River running again; it will probably come and go this way for the rest of the summer.
July 6, 2013
I know there are several frog and toad species at the Mason Pastures, and see and hear a different one at the ephemeral dirt tank at the north end today, but telling apart this impressive variety of frogs, toads, treefrogs and spadefoots of these Sonoran Desert lands is mostly beyond me or at least is beyond my study time.
All the flycatchers seem to have young ones chasing them around and pestering them for ever more insects. The adults look like exhausted parents do everywhere.The Stockpond Gray Hawk, that most Mexican of our Border birds of prey, comes bombing with great agility through the low branches of the mesquite woods, and the small birds panic and chatter or else they go silent–but I do not read that this hawk eats much other than lizards. The passerine reaction must be born of those birds’ experience of living in this same woods with the Cooper’s Hawk, who comes through terrorizing and picking off its lunch in much the same hunting mode.
July 5, 2013
What thick air, 81 degrees, 3:45 am, coffee in hand as can so be enjoyed in a treasured Cascabel Clayworks mug. Dark, but there’s the thinnest of Crescent Moon giving the tiny glow of a nightlight behind the clouds. At zenith a few stars but only one house light shows across the canyons, overhead a covering of martins calling down from so great a height that it could be imagined their quarky notes are broadcast from the stars themselves. The birds seem if anything even more numerous than when the nights are bright and clear but perhaps the clouds change the acoustics. This will be the first day of the season I won’t be closing the windows early to keep in the cool, because the house never got cool to begin with, so the windows will be open to let in any tiny movement of air. Bed sheets and pillows toasted to the high 90s are now to be lived with.
When dawn comes, tanagers and grosbeaks are singing at The Stockpond and many nighthawks come for an on-the-wing drink but–no toads! The Sonoran Desert Toads have just … vanished, the water surface left now unruffled, the air above it quiet. The gigantic amphibians have come and gone, like that.
Yellow-headed Blackbirds are decorating a wheel line tractor, as they love to do. Two much younger ones are among them today, which seems to be evidence the species is breeding nearby though I must remember that years ago when I contacted the Audubon Society in Tucson to report a rancher telling me the birds were nesting in the edge of his pond across the River, I was told that was an impossibility. One of the pretty males has a neat white–rather than black–mask.
Pairs of round mesquite cotyledons have popped above their cow poop peat pots, assuring us a future of hard work of tree removal for many years to come. Two Brown-headed Cowbirds are sitting on a cow; I can count the number of times I’ve seen them actually do this, but I imagine it was their habit with their buffalo friends as well.
Sue and a friend come in the evening in hopes the bird show might still have some thrill to it, but only one nighthawk appears. We do see an impressive black tarantula with blond body come past in its measured, giant spider-ly fashion as we sip wine, a male according to what I can read. Suddenly from the gallery forest of willows, cottonwoods, hackberry and of course mesquite along the River bed behind us comes the sounds of large critters crashing through, breaking large branches and sticks in a panic we can’t think what the cause of can be. We never see the animals, but we can tell they’ve topped out over the steep banks where they could at last make a passage and escape something they feared mightily–then comes what sounds like a rush of wind through those cottonwoods. It’s not wind; I realize it’s a flood, and a big one, and that the deer or the javelina or whatever they were, were running madly ahead of a wave coming down that narrow and deep sandy channel that’s been dry for many months. The water arrives in wild fury, stretches immediately bank to bank, and down its course bounces and tumbles and rolls and then flies past me large branches, logs, whole railroad ties that had been H-braces on a pasture edge somewhere between here and Mexico, bobbing styrofoam coolers, a tennis ball … I jump back, fearing that the overhanging bank would collapse under my feet and add me to the number of bodies that have been swept away and gone over the years, some found, some ground up and never found, left buried under quicksand miles downstream.
July 3, 2013
The pink-silver-blue water of The Stockpond at dawn is dotted with Sonoran Desert Toads, across the whole expanse from shore to shore to shore to shore. The air rings with their talking and their Moog Synthesizer whortles and chuckles and notes, their loud splashes and loud ripples of breast strokes through clear water without a speck of algae. They change partners, lock together in threes swimming across in one direction, gather in with their chain of partiers a fourth toad and then do an abrupt about-swim the other way again. I hear the accordion of the Lambada, the entire pond sways and swirls to it, and surely it is playing down the whole valley, every place there is a pond or puddle or a garden fountain in southern Arizona, in the city, in the deepest wilds. It was even part of my job, once, to make toad rounds at the swimming pool of the ranch nearby I’d worked with then, to pull them out of the jacuzzi filter, which we ended up calling, “the toad spa”. Last year, though, there was hardly a square inch of open water during the first toady courtship of “las aguas”, and that scene was even more crazed. Once I found an exceptionally large toad (they were called Colorado River Toads then), who’d died without trauma and had dried into a perfect mummy, then I found a smaller one to match, also mummified, put them as finials atop the entry posts at a gate on that ranch, and called them, “Toadankhamun” and “Nefirtoady”. It doesn’t take long living here before these grand creatures work their way into one’s life.
[…]
It is rare to see a Turkey Vulture standing next to the pond, but one is there this morning–it is more usual for them to come to that cienega out in #1 Pasture to get their drink, where a pool and marsh has formed by a main-leak of a number of years and where the land is wide open all around them. Later on the pasture, a pair of Yellow-headed Blackbirds in natty plumage hang out on the wheel line, their favored perch. For a bird considered so rare in the summer here, I seem to see a lot of them! Overhead of them comes a small flock of Eurasian Collared Doves, which for a few years had a population explosion down this part of the valley from Pomerene but to my observations was now declining, or at least I hardly see any these days.
Many Ash-throated Flycatchers calling, “Ka-brick! ka-brick!” from the bosques.
July 2, 2013
4:00 am, coffee with martins innumerable catching their own early breakfast overhead, the birds flying in the dark it sounds from one horizon all the way to the other in a frenzy no doubt born of some big Arizona after-the-rain bughatch. The patio is lit softly by Crescent Moon, and flickers of lightning. Thunder from far off rolls in to me, nudges into the notes of the martins …
[…] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLXcIFLzXWk
No birds again this early morning on the edges of The Stockpond, surely a change come with Monsoon. Quiet, very quiet. Just after sunrise there was no algae apparent on that water, neither red nor green–all was clean. Does it sink? Come back to activity with hot sunshine and rise to float again? Change color with the daylight and its level of photosynthesis? Later in the morning there it all is, the whole pond covered, this time half in red, half in green. A Great Blue Heron stands in water deep enough that its tail tip is under the surface … stock still, the heron waits for a pair of huge Sonoran Desert Toads that he has his eye on to drift unsuspecting within the range of his harpoon. The toads, though, only have googly-eyes for each other (in fact, their eyes popped out above the water is about all I can see of them) and stay humped onto each other and blissed-out mid-pond and away from the big bird. Didn’t take those toads long to be stirred by this new season that makes untold numbers of other lifeforms spring to life and love and song. I haven’t heard the Desert Toads singing yet, though I think I hear these two give out with, “Why don’t we do it in the toad?”
June 18, 2013
Lizardtail (Gaura mollis), a common but distinctive tall wildflower of irrigated pastures hereabouts, is coming into bloom with delicate small pink flowers. In Spanish its name is much the more poetic, less grating in both sound and meaning than in English: Linda Tarde.
Five Mule Deer of the herd of seven come to eat, in the pasture where they bed down in the Sweetclover. They’re a bit bigger than they were a few weeks ago, and more shy though they do continue grazing with me nearby. What has happened to the two missing ones? Some have fine sets of antlers, others with antlers only beginning to show.
Today The Stockpond is ringed not with yellow birds (chats) but by a great number of blue ones (grosbeaks). Hummers galore zip down to the water surface, even more of them than I’d seen doing this before if that be possible. For the next two weeks–or until the sweeping in of the first couple of monsoon storms–The Stockpond will be The Place for birds. A couple of pairs of eyes pop up from below the pond’s surface, jut above and out into the air, and they seem to be taking a knowing look at the world. They are of frogs or toads coming up for air, and their monstrous size says that this must be the first appearance of the Sonoran Toad. Once the toads start splashing around in ponds and puddles, garden fountains and jacuzzis, it means the temporales are on their way and that, we hope, nothing will stop. As with the first showing of Gila Monsters, local people celebrate this moment of The Arrival of the Toads but also worry about it if they have pets that will worry this very toxic toad and mouth it.
March 20, 2013
At last the return of those endearing winged friends, Lucy’s Warblers, at the stockpond. Should’ve been long before this that the mesquites be alive with their songs, but the branches have remained silent. Maybe they’d finally realized if they just waited that they wouldn’t have to suffer through deeply freezing mornings, especially in the bottomlands? “How could those neotropicals stand those cold spells that come in for a while after the birds usually do?”, I often wonder, and it looks like they won’t have to this year. It isn’t a species that I’ve seen straggle in a few at a time, no, either the edges and bosques are empty and quiet, or all around the bush is alive with the birds flitting or “warbling”, as if the whole lot of them arrived on the same wind in the night and were completely unpacked and at home by sunrise. Global warming at the bottom of this change, both the lateness of the arrivals and the difference in the patterns once they’ve got here? It’s happening with other species that are part of our lives on the River. I’m reminded of how Jamaicans lamented and accepted their island’s world in the 1970s when I was there: “Eb’ry’teeng change-up!”
A Sulphur butterfly alone in the wide sweep of the fields, and it’s warm enough to have a single frog push off from the mud into the open pond … the last paperthin ice of three weeks ago seems as gone as the Ice Age.
The male Vermillion Flycatcher that has been the cock of this rock for a little while found he had a rival this morning, how disappointing for him. The two of them had a showdown in a tree top above the edge of the pond almost overhead of where I sat in the truck … went at each other in a spiral of claws and bursts of red feathers and slowly dropped to the ground, where they corkscrewed deep into the dust and almost disappeared in the brown cloud. A “dust up”, defined!