MONSOON!

The monsoon arrived three weeks ago, with humidity but no rain for us. The pincushion (Mammalaria) cactus bloomed a couple of days after the first rains,

and it rained a lot, all around us, but the central part of Tucson was all but dry. Till yesterday, when a pair of storms, about fifteen minutes apart, brought us buckets of rain and impressive lightning and thunder.

The rain gauge read 2.75 inches by the time it was over—the most we’ve ever had at this house.

 

 

 

 

 

The back yard turned into a lake.

 

 

After the rain a beautiful rainbow formed over the houses across the street to the south:

With a saguaro at the end of the rainbow:

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A fallen giant: Saguaro tragedy

On my regular Monday morning rove at Tohono Chul Park, I was shocked to see the huge top half of a mighty saguaro lying on the Desert View Trail. The saguaro itself still stood, its remaining arms pointing skyward, but its main trunk was now a relative stub. This was the saguaro I posted about only a month ago, the large sentinel saguaro with a “window” in its side.

               

I talked with one of the groundskeepers later. He said it might have been a result of too many woodpecker holes in one part of the saguaro. It’s also obvious looking at the photo in the previous post that the top of the saguaro was leaning rather precariously. My groundskeeper buddy joked that they could put out police tape and draw a chalk line around the fallen limb. We could call it CSI-TCP.

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Quail and Mockingbird Notes

Long-time readers of these posts—and anyone who knows me personally—knows that I’m fascinated by bird behavior. I’ve been closely watching backyard birds for more than twenty years, and every day I see something new.

Just now I’ve been watching quail at the quail block in my bird garden. We are at the height of baby-quail season, and there are several families, with chicks of all different ages. Some of the families are quite large: there’s a group with eight or nine kindergarteners (I’m thinking these might be the same guys I videotaped in my previous post). There are several families with high-school age and even older chicks—not much smaller than the parents. The largest such group that I’ve been able to count had seven adolescents, though most older groups have two to five surviving offspring..

I should really install one of those “take-a-number” machines; the families take turns, waiting for the previous family to finish before coming to the quail block. They are sometimes lined up just outside the fence. Whenever a solitary quail or an overeager youngster tries to join the party before the previous group has left, there is a lot of squawking and running at the intruder. It is very fun to watch.

                                  

For another view of bird pecking order and sharing (or not) of resources, check out this discussion of a possessive mockingbird at my previous home.

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Quail Update

I haven’t posted a quail update in quite some time, though I am as obsessed with these beautiful birds as ever. A few weeks ago someone at the Park commented that it was a poor quail year, with very few babies. This person does not spend the summer in Tucson. While some broods appear as early as late April, the majority of chicks are hatched once the weather gets really hot (see my comment on quail babies in an earlier post).

This year is a banner year for quail. Families of all sizes, with babies of all ages, are everywhere—in my yard, in my neighborhood, at Tohono Chul Park. Several broods of chicks are already mature looking, though not as large as their parents. Others are recently out of the egg. One interesting group of six are what I think of as teenagers—and they are on their own with no adults. They always hang together, and I haven’t seen them enough to tell if one of them acts as the leader.

This family group with ten very young chicks (I’m guessing no more than a couple of days old) showed up in my back yard bird garden yesterday afternoon. It was VERY hot, so they tried the shade of the porch.

                                            

Ten Gambel’s quail chicks and their parents.

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Kingsnake heaven

Look who I found on my back porch when I was watering this morning!

                                                        Juvenile Common Kingsnake

This little beauty is about eighteen inches long and has strikingly beautiful markings. He does not, however, like to be watered.

I feel so fortunate—I have Leo, the big kingsnake, in my guest room, and now this little guy hanging out in the backyard, at least for a while. Here’s a video of him trying to escape the photographer. He also sidewinded a little, but I didn’t get it on pixels.

           

Juvenile kingsnake on back porch, June 28, 2012

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The Snake in my Guest Room

On Fridays at Tohono Chul Park, we offer a reptile show, Reptile Ramble, in which two herpetologists talk about and demonstrate a number of local reptiles, assisted by docents. I always feel incredibly fortunate when I get to be one of those docents, because I consider that show one of the most important things we do at the Park. It educates visitors about how to tell one snake from another, and why they shouldn’t fear or harm any snakes, even rattlesnakes.

I also love the show because I have fallen in love with the snake I demonstrate most often, the beautiful, beautiful Common Kingsnake. The snake’s owner is going away for July and August, and this year he asked me if I’d take care of “Leo” (the king) for him while he’s gone. I jumped at the chance, and yesterday Leo moved into our guest room. Here are a couple of pictures of Leo from Reptile Ramble, showing his incredible beauty:

Common Kingsnake and fingers

Leo, performing in the Ramble

And here is Leo’s cage, with just a glimpse of Leo hiding in his little rock cave. I’ve been in to say hello a few times today, and he is no longer retreating the second I show up. Perhaps soon I can get a picture of him more relaxed and stretched out. In a future post I’ll tell you more about this remarkable species.

                                                                     Leo’s glass-sided cage

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Bloom Night 2012

Last night was our famous “Bloom Night,” the one night in the year when the Night-blooming cereus (Peniocereus greggii)  performs her magic and hundreds of flowers open all at once. It doesn’t start till after sunset, and the flowers blossom all night, to be pollinated by hawkmoths. They open at the same time because they cannot self-pollinate. Apparently they communicate with each other across the desert through some sort of chemical signaling.

At Tohono Chul Park, we have a big “block party” for the whole city on Bloom Night, and hundreds of visitors roam our luminaria-lit trails admiring and photographing the beautiful blossoms.

Last night I was stationed at the back end of our longest desert trail.

                                                           Sunset on the Desert View Trail

When I first got there, Emerald, one of the most spectacular and prolific plants, was just barely beginning to open its tight greenish buds:

Emerald, with ten green buds

Its companion plant, “Little Sister,” was already about halfway open, showing its lovely pink petals.

                                         Little Sister, about halfway open

As it got darker, night hawks and bats emerged, chasing insects. By the time it was fully dark, Emerald was more than half open. People lined up twenty and thirty deep for a chance to take its picture.

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Baby Cooper’s Hawk

Yesterday morning I had a bird tour at the Park. Despite the extreme heat (by tour time in the low nineties, with a high dewpoint), four people showed up and we had a wonderful time, sticking to the shade and checking out the local birds that choose to spend their summer with us.

We were on our way to look at the hawk nest in the riparian area

          Cooper’s hawk nest   

when a fellow docent, along on the tour for the fun of it, silently pointed to a bird sitting on a branch above the stream. It was one of the baby hawks!

 

                                   Baby Cooper’s Hawk at Tohono Chul Park

The picture doesn’t really show how relatively small this little guy is. The photo does show the baby fluffy feathers that haven’t finished molting. To me, it looked a little uncertain as it moved about on the branch, possibly trying to get up the nerve to jump—or fly!—to another one. A little searching revealed a parent hawk nearby, watching over the little one.

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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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