Quail Tales

We are now in the heart of dry summer, the time of year when it is blisteringly hot with no clouds anywhere, and the time when the entire desert seems alive with young Gambel’s quail, ranging in age from newly-hatched champagne corks to sparrow-sized teenagers.

I love watching these little guys, and each family group I see adds to my store of information on quail behavior. Several large family groups have visited my backyard bird pond in the last week. The largest group had at least fifteen chicks, but counting them exactly was like trying to count the individual particles in a microscopic view of Brownian motion.

                            Adult male Gambel’s quail

Quail Tale 1: Yesterday a family with six or seven very young chicks came tumbling into the garden through the chain-link fence. The parents easily crossed the pond, stepping on rocks that stick up out of the water. Most of the chicks easily followed, except for two who, reaching the largest rock in the pond, did a sudden double-take and looked at the vast expanse (maybe three inches)  of water they must cross. They both stood on the rock like little kids on a diving board, clearly getting up their courage to jump. Finally one tried—and fell into the water. It clambered back on the rock, shook itself off, and this time used its wings to assist. Its brother or sister followed soon after.

Quail Tale 2: The other afternoon I saw a group of five teenage quails (about the size of the ones in the video below) in the front yard. There were no adults with them as they pecked at something under the pyracantha bush. A pair of white-winged doves approached, interested in whatever the quails were eating. All of the quails immediately attacked the much-larger doves with their beaks, running at them and eventually driving them off. They acted like a gang of teenage bullies, but I think maybe they are on their own and have to hang tough to survive.

Quail in Sundial Plaza at Tohono Chul Park

Quail Tale 3: This is a video from Tohono Chul Park yesterday morning. These youngsters are what I consider high-school age. They were gathered beneath a seed feeder in the Sundial Plaza. The biggest one, with the comma-shaped topknot, is the father.

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Snake Over Troubled Waters

Yesterday in the Park I saw two things I’ve never seen before. The first occurred while I was still in the parking lot. I was just getting out of the car when I saw two white-winged doves very close together on the ground. On closer look, I saw they were a parent dove and a baby dove. The parent was feeding the fledgling, very much the way a female hummingbird feeds her offspring: repeatedly thrusting its beak into the baby’s open mouth, and presumably into its crop. I suppose the parent was feeding its offspring “pigeon’s milk,” which is a nutritious liquid doves and pigeons produce in the crop. (For more information on bird milk, see this fascinating article.) This observation answered a major question for me: do doves care for their babies once they have fledged? I always suspected they did, and now I have seen it with my own eyes!

The second thing I had never seen before occurred in the riparian area of the Park. I had finished with my bird walk and was on the way to Reptile Ramble when a fellow docent pointed out a large gopher snake in the thick undergrowth behind our recirculating stream.

As we watched, the snake approached a small waterfall, then elevated the front part of its body and formed a bridge to the other side. The rest of his body followed, serpentining and staying dry. I wish I had thought to take a picture, but I was so startled and fascinated I could only watch in amazement.

Finally, this is something I have seen many times, but I’m sure a lot of the people reading this blog have not. Our reptile show usually ends with a discussion and demonstration of a Gila monster. These huge, lumbering lizards are one of only three species of venomous lizards in the world (the others are the Mexican beaded lizard and the Komodo dragon). Gila monsters are interesting in so many ways, and I will do a post on them soon. But for today, I just want to post the short video I took of the demonstration animal walking around the inside of the safety fence, trying to find a way out.

Gila monster, Reptile Ramble at Tohono Chul Park

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Early Morning Beauty at Tohono Chul Park

Yesterday morning I went to the Park early for a bird walk scheduled for 8:30. When I got there I was the only person around. I stood for a while in the central part of the Park, what we call the Sundial Plaza, and just looked, breathing the fresh scents, listening to many birds calling (cardinal, Gambel’s quail, Bell’s vireo, lesser goldfinch, house finch, white-winged dove, cactus wren), feeling the faint breeze on my skin. It was so beautiful, so lush, that tears filled my eyes and I wished that everyone I know could have been there. 

Here are some of the things I saw. I only wish my photos could really capture the incredible beauty.

                                 

This is an overview of the Sundial Plaza, showing the circle with its beautiful flowers, including giant hesperaloe (red yucca), ageratum, and tecoma stans (yellow bells). There were small gray birds on the hesperaloe, probably young verdins.

Here is another shot from deeper inside the sundial plaza, with a shot of one of the two male cardinals who spent a good bit of time chasing each other away; I don’t know who ultimately won.

                                                                                        

On a nearby desert trail, you can see why some early visitors to the desert thought the saguaro had a red flower; these fruits can be seen all over the Park, often with a white-winged dove in attendance.

             

Finally, on another trail, here is one of my favorite mourning dove nests. The mother, who built her nest on TOP of an old cactus wren nest, is raising her second brood of two babies (you can just see the beak of the second baby behind the first). They were totally motionless as I watched, no doubt certain that made them invisible.

                                                        

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Is Anthropomorphism Really a Bad Thing?

I sometimes say that “anthropomorphism is the last refuge of vivisectionists.” Many people--not just scientists--use the term anthropomorphism (attributing human qualities to nonhumans) pejoratively,  as an excuse to ridicule and thus minimize the concerns of those of us who have empathy for other creatures. Many also use it to suppress their own natural empathy; to distance themselves from things they do that cause suffering to laboratory or food animals.

I believe that feelings of anthropomorphism are innate and natural.  Even small children recognize that animals have feelings. This belief is often called unscientific, yet if you believe in evolution, how can you maintain that emotions appeared full-blown in humans without first evolving from other animals? It may be sentimental to care about the feelings of animals, but I refuse to view sentiment as a bad thing.

Even the most hardened “rationalist” would agree that animals demonstrably experience fear and pain; but I believe they possess a much broader spectrum of feelings as well. I believe that the higher animals, mammals and birds, experience, in their own way, love,  joy, and wonder. It would not surprise me to learn someday that primitive versions of these feelings exist also in reptiles and fish.

All of this is by way of explaining why I will continue to write about critters in this journal from an anthropomorphic point of view, sometimes putting words in their mouths or beaks. Of course I do not believe these creatures see the world exactly as I do, and in these dialogues I’m often joking. But my joking is based on close observation of what I see the animals doing.

                                                                 

Take baby Gambel’s quail. They are among my favorites of the desert’s warm-weather creatures. They emerge from the egg ready to roll, and they follow their parents with what can only be described as enthusiasm.These little puffballs rush into new adventures evincing curiosity and excitement about everything they encounter.

Baby quail  hatch in the hottest, driest part of the summer. All the other birds move slowly in the heat, fluttering their throats (gular flutter) and holding their wings out from their bodies to cool down. No matter how hot it gets the baby quails are undaunted, cheerfully following their parents over blisteringly hot rocks in search of food. I imagine an internal dialogue something like this: “It’s so hot here I think I have been born into hell! And it is wonderful! Oh, how lucky I am to be here!”

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Roving in Tohono Chul Park

One of the regular things I do as a docent is “rove” on Monday mornings. In the cool weather, I rove from 8 to 11, and once it gets hot, from 8 to 10. My job is to interact with visitors and be aware of what is going on in the Park. It is a wonderful “job” to have, a way to be out in the beauty of nature and spend time with like-minded people. I thought I’d give you a look at yesterday’s rove, which was fairly typical for this time of year.

I started by walking from the front of the Park to the North Trail, a 1/2 mile trail that meanders through natural Sonoran desert. Along the way I checked out the birds, including a family of Gambel’s quail: parents plus four fairly young chicks. They would not pose for a photograph.

It was already in the eighties as I approached the large sentinel saguaro about halfway down the path:

This saguaro has a window through which you can see its ribs and vascular tissue.

While on the trail I also took a look at the night-blooming cereus buds. This picture shows two very ripe buds that will probably open before Bloom Night,  when all the cereus in the Park bloom together (see my post on this amazing event from a couple of years ago).                                                              Night-blooming cereus with buds

Leaving the trail, I walked through the behind-the-scenes propagation area, where volunteers prepare plants for sale in our greenhouse, then on to the Desert Living Courtyard, where we have a pond containing Desert Pupfish, an endangered species that we breed in cooperation with AZ Game and Fish. These little fish can reputedly live in water up to 115 degrees Fahrenheit! The males turn fluorescent blue when they are ready to breed.

                                                                      Desert pupfish

I stopped by the hawk nest, but was unable to photograph the baby hawks. I also stopped at the Bell’s vireo nest, but the female was not there and hadn’t been seen all morning. I hope she is all right.

I continued to wander around the Park, talking to my fellow docents and our dozen or so visitors, and enjoying the beautiful, beautiful desert and its critters. The next thing I knew it was ten o’clock, ninety degrees, and time to go home.

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Hot bird walk in the Park

This morning it was so hot so early (around ninety at 8:30), that I didn’t really expect anyone to show up for my bird walk. But four people did: a young woman and her fourth-grade son, who adores birds and has practically memorized his bird guide, and a middle-aged couple who decided to join us on the spur of the moment.

The Park was so beautiful today, even in the heat. There were lots of desert spiny lizards, and exotic pipevine flowers, and local birds. Cicadas were buzzing, and I said that if someone would catch a cicada I would show them how it makes the noise. Sure enough, the boy caught one. It was furious! Buzzing and making other strange sounds that might have been cicada cursing. I had trouble getting it to hold still long enough to grasp it and turn it over to show the orange tympanum that it vibrates for that distinctive summery sound. Male cicada from Bing Images

There were two high points to the bird walk: the little Cooper’s hawklets are out of the egg and standing up in the nest. They are too far up to photograph yet, but I could clearly see round fuzzy white heads and big black eyes. And in the fig tree in the ethno garden, we saw  a BEAUTIFUL Bell’s vireo nest with the mother sitting in it. What an intricate, beautifully-woven and decorated structure!

Bell’s vireo nest, Tohono Chul Park

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My beloved white-winged doves

The beautiful white-winged dove (Zenaida asiatica) is one of my favorite migrant birds. They spend the cool months—from October on-- in Mexico and Central America, then come up here just ahead of the saguaro bloom (late March to early April). One of the great iconic sights of the Sonoran desert is a white-winged dove atop a blooming or fruiting saguaro.

White-winged dove on saguaro at dawn

A lot of folks I know, including fellow docents at Tohono Chul Park don’t like white-wingeds because they are noisy (“Who Cooks For YOUUUUUUUUU!”), ubiquitous, and messy. To me, the sound of their calls is a comfort, a harbinger and and a musical accompaniment of summer in the desert. They are frequent breeders, so there are a lot of them, and they’re big birds with big scats. I find them sweet and endearing.

White-wingeds are wonderfully devoted parents. In a post last year I described in detail the arduous and ultimately heartbreaking nesting adventures of a pair at the Park.

More recently, a pair successfully fledged a pair of dovelets in our carport.

They are at it again, using the same nest. When the babies fledged, one apparently wasn’t quite ready, and the two spent their first night of freedom huddled motionless on a wall outside our bedroom patio. I was afraid a predator would get them, but found them in the morning atop the water-heater closet:

I haven’t seen them since, but I recently read that white-wingeds are known for staying together with nestmates and other family members, sometimes for life, so perhaps they are taking care of each other, wherever they are.

This is one of my favorite white-winged pictures. This bird was cooling his feet on a hot July day on a cactus fountain at Tohono Chul Park:

                                                                                 

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Nearly Summer!

We’re two days from May, and summer is nearly here. The days are starting much earlier—it’s light enough to see by 5 AM, light enough to walk by 5:30. The days are hot—we’ve already had two days in the low 100’s—and the mornings are still cool, though that will change in a very few weeks. The palo verdes are still blooming, but most of the spring flowers are on their way out, except for the cactus blossoms, which are just getting underway. I know that summer means stifling heat, swarms of bugs, scorpions and so on, but I LOVE IT. In my opinion, summer is the whole point of Tucson.

I’m slowly resuming my walking schedule of doing a couple of miles around the neighborhood. This morning I saw a ladderback woodpecker and heard a road runner make a call I’ve heard often in the Park but wasn’t able to identify. But now I can. Here is a picture of a beautiful road runner from the Park.

My beautiful bird garden

This spring has been so beautiful. The whole northern part of Tucson and much of the rest of the valley is a sea of yellow, from all the blooming palo verde trees. Right now the main ones in bloom are the more numerous foothills palo verdes, which have a lighter, less yellow aspect (because one petal of each flower is white). We have a storm, with wind, coming, and within a week I expect they will all be gone. Here are two early-morning pictures from my backyard bird garden, showing palo verdes and some other wild plants including the incomparable Mexican Bird of Paradise.

A beautiful April day at Tohono Chul Park

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It’s getting warm, but everything at the Park is so beautiful. Baby birds, nests, young squirrel families, and flowers everywhere you look: wildflowers, flowering trees, cactus flowers…. you can’t help but smile.

                         New hummer mom

Ocotillo blossoms

 Perezia and Passionflower

Raspberry TrichocereusRose-colored prickly pear budStaghorn Cholla blooms

Under the mistletoe

Cactus wrens are known for their large, untidy enclosed nests, often built in chollas or desert trees like Palo Verde or Mesquite. The nests are sometimes decorated with found objects, such as tissue paper, cellophane, or bits of yarn or colored thread, resulting in a rather antic-looking nest that seems to suit these bold, sassy desert birds.                              

The other day at Tohono Chul Park I was amazed to watch a pair of cactus wrens working on a nest INSIDE a huge clump of desert mistletoe that hung from the branches of a flowering sweet acacia tree. When they had finished, you could easily see the bottom of the nest by standing directly under the mistletoe, and I have since watched the birds flying in and out of their hidden aerie.

                    Here’s the mistletoe:                               

                 

And here’s the nest, hidden inside it:

                                                   

I have also since learned that this behavior is common out in the desert, and that many birds besides cactus wrens and phainopeplas build in, under, or on mistletoe.

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Bird stuff

The Park is a’ twitter with birds. Courting birds, fighting birds, nesting birds. On Friday we watched a pair of male phainopeplas compete for a female, who sat calmly at the top of a tree ear the Sin Agua garden, while her suitors performed acrobatics all around her, being sure to show off their sexy white wing bars. I’ve seen several pairs of verdins with nesting materials—including one that was apparently putting the finishing touches on a nest along the Texas trail; Gila woodpeckers apparently already tending young inside their nests in saguaro holes; and cactus wrens and doves searching for just the right twig or branch for their new home.

In addition to all these treasures, I was privileged to be the “helper” at our bimonthly Harris Hawk demonstration, featuring Sueno, a captive hawk who was badly injured as a fledgling and is now an education hawk. Sueno is very smart and knows several words; she is also devoted to her “family,” in this case her trainer. Here’s a very brief video of Sueno doing her thing.

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More flowers!

So many things are blooming in the Park. Some wildflowers, some cultivated, some trees… everything and everywhere. Here are a few more:

This is blackfoot daisy, and it blooms practically all year, but looks best in spring.

  On the left is creosote bush, with its delicate yellow flower.

 

And above is a South African plant, Cape Aloe

             

Gooding’s Verbena and Western Wallflower, a sweet-smelling wild mustard

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Spring has sprung

It is truly spring in the Sonoran Desert.  The Park is lush with flowers of every color.

    

   DESERT BLUEBELLS              FIRECRACKER PENSTEMON     PARRY’S PENSTEMON

Birds are courting, building nests, mating, and in some cases raising young.  One Anna’s hummingbird nest in the parking lot has already produced two fledglings.  Another Anna’s nest has two ready to go.  The mother is running herself ragged providing insects for her babies.  The other day I saw a male Phainopepla  tenderly feeding a mistletoe berry to his beloved.

                               

         This male Costa’s hummingbird flew right into the picture while I was photographing some of the flowers!

Most exciting for me is the new Cooper's hawk nest in the riparian area. It looks like a very large pile of very large twigs—as if, said one of my fellow docents, it had been built by giant mourning doves.

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Sandhill Cranes

Yesterday I went to Whitewater Draw, near Willcox (home of Rex Allen!) on a tour with Tohono Chul Park to see the Sandhill Cranes, literal snowbirds who visit this area each winter. The cranes are so impressive. Around eleven every morning thousands of them come in for an early roost. They fly into the area in wave after wave—most in formations (a “V”), some in small groupings or singly. This goes on for about two hours.

COMING IN!

 

I inserted the video so you can get an idea of the amazing calls the birds make while flying and landing. Their sounds filled the whole vast area. I wonder if they are calling out to their friends below, or just singing for the fun of it. I sat alone and watched them for about half an hour. I was mesmerized. I didn’t want to leave.

They arrange themselves in stripes across the vast semi-dry lakebed. Once they are on the ground they mostly quit calling.

This is out of focus, but shows their beautiful red heads and eyes.

We saw other shore birds—lots of ducks, teals, and wading birds. Here are pictures of a couple of my favorites:

American Coots and the head of a Cinnamon Teal (“Bring me the head of a cinnamon teal!”)

These guys below are called Northern Shovelers. Their bills look exactly like shoehorns. They have beautiful red eyes.