Tag Archives: Wrens

April 6, 2013

Nature Jottings

Wrens … those wrens are becoming my psychosis. At least fifteen take up here or there with my walking flush, as I go out to the tractor of the wheel line irrigator. I just get the glasses on them when they drop like a stone and are gone. No attention is paid to my best Dudley Do-Right impersonation, “Come out of there … youuu!”, which I give while standing at the place where one disappears. A chitter back from the deep grass twenty feet from there is all I get. The wheel line, which runs the length of the entire field, is fired up and the joystick thrust forward to run it all north across most of the pasture to where the new watering cycle is to begin, and as it rolls it scares up one after another wren who bounces off before it. That pasture is just full of the birds! They flee in an edged line before the advancing aluminum monster, it seems by the time I’m near to finishing the move the birds are as thick as grasshoppers pushed off before a prairie fire–and still I can make out nothing in the way of markings that would without doubt tell which is its species.

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April 5, 2013

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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.

April 2, 2013

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The Lucy’s Warblers and Bell’s Vireos are still way too thin in the mesquite branches, but a few were singing this morning, lightening the heart. Those mesquite they love are now barely sprouted out, but soon the air above the lanes of the pastures will be suffused in a pale green light, when the sun slants through the half-unfurled and still tiny leaflets there is then a holy and shimmering space, one lit by old stained glass windows.

In the uppermost grazing pasture, a plant native to all the sweep of our Great Southwest from Chihuahua and Sonora and Baja, north to the Trans Pecos and across to the Mojave–Desert Evening Primrose (Oenothera primiveris)–have a flower or two above their beautifully scalloped leaves spotted with deep purple. Another native though considerably more weedy, Horse Nettle (Silver-leaf Nightshade) is germinating, the plants still tiny. They won’t stay that way long.

For the last couple of weeks the swallows have been appearing sporadically, in numbers barely increasing, but suddenly today the air was alive with Rough-wingeds over the southmost pasture we call “#1”. In that same lush and deep winter grass of barley, oats, wheat and rye, a visitor, Katy, today caught a glimpse of one of the mystery wrens that pop up and give a tantalizing seconds-long view and then drop into the dense blades. This time one of the pretty little birds stayed for a moment in the open at the edge, only about ten feet away from Katy, and she saw without binoculars that its upper parts were spotted with white. I walked through the area widely late in the afternoon, but my footfalls didn’t make a single wren rise, flit, drop out of sight–did they all leave for the north suddenly?

March 25, 2013

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One of the mystery wrens flew up from the winter pasture edge and into the low branches of the mesquite that stands alone in field #1: longish barred tail, wide but pale eye stripe, white throat, buffy belly–none of the illustrations in Sibley matched it well enough to say exactly what at least this individual was.

A small black Papilio(?) appeared, with powder blue sheen on its hind wings, also the first Checkerspot butterfly.

A handsome male Common Yellowthroat (whose beauty is anything but “common”, our Southwestern race of this bird seems the most brightly colored of the species on the continent) ducked in and out of those banks of dried tumbleweeds in the old River lane between #2 and #3 pastures, and a little later, I saw a female in a field border closer to the stockpond, off to the south. Will they find each other, and find love? Stay tuned.

March 23, 2013

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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

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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.