Long-nosed Snake Rove

I’m having a very snaky month so far, which is wonderful for someone like me who believes that a day without snakes is like a day without sunshine. This morning I was surprised and delighted to see a beautiful long-nosed snake basking in the hot sun on the main path into the Park. It quickly slithered away before I could quite get it in focus. These gorgeous snakes, Rhinocheilus lecontei,  are smallish constrictors who like to eat lizards.

That was the only snake I saw (can’t get greedy, after last week’s nightsnake), but I also saw the eerily beautiful flowers of Stapelia, a South African succulent we have growing in one of our ramadas,

…and the lovely flowers of Cereus grandicostatus, a cactus of uncertain origin that twines in a palo verde near the center of the Park.

Since I started this post with snakes, I’ll end with a quick update on Leo, the beautiful kingsnake in my guest room. So far, I’ve only taken him out a few times, but it is a privilege to take care of him and observe him. He has shed his skin once in my care and currently looks shiny and healthy. I have to give him back to his owner soon, and I’ll try to post more pictures before I do. 

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Another Rove Filled with Surprises

It rained last night, and this morning the Park was hot and steamy for my rove. A lot of the usual birds were out and about (pyrrhuloxia, cactus wren, Abert’s towhee), and I even saw a roadrunner, not uncommon but not that often seen. About a minute after I saw the roadrunner, a jack rabbit bounded down the path in front of me. Unfortunately I was unable to photograph either of these guys. However….

While climbing a short trail, I encountered two visitors who were watching something. When I approached, they told me a snake was eating a lizard, and could I identify the snake? I took a close look at this rather small, tan, blotched snake, and immediately ruled out rattlesnake. Maybe a baby gopher snake? But there was something strange about the markings, and after a few minutes I realized it was likely a nightsnake (Hypsiglena), which, as its name indicates, is supposed to be a nocturnal animal. This was the first one I’d ever seen in the wild.

Nightsnake eating zebra tail lizard (Callisaurus)

Googling tells me that the nightsnake is mildly venomous, with rear fangs, and has smooth scales (unlike a gophersnake, which has keeled scales). The nightsnake also has vertical pupils (the gophersnake has round pupils). When I enlarged the picture, it clearly showed the vertical pupils. Here is a brief video of the snake eating the lizard. This is a good illustration of the way a snake can open its mouth and stretch its body to accommodate prey larger than its head. 

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Three very special hummingbirds

In a previous post I talked about the many beautiful hummingbirds that visited the house I lived in before I moved to the Tucson foothills. Of the hundreds of hummers who came to my yard, three stood out as special.

“RUFIE”

Rufie was a young female Rufous  who showed up in my yard at Thanksgiving one year, weeks after the last migrants had moved through. She seemed to like my yard—perhaps she thought she had reached Mexico—and she stayed through the winter, even though we had a long freeze that made me fear for her life. I got up before the sun for several days to put out fresh nectar for her.

When she returned the following year and the next, I got in touch with a local ornithologist and bird bander, Bill Calder, who came over to trap and band Rufie. He told me that most likely she was the same one I had seen the previous two years, because it was so unusual for a Rufous to overwinter in Tucson. He said that she might have migrated thousands of miles from wherever she spent the summer. The following year, Rufie returned and Bill confirmed that the band was the one he had placed on her. She came one more year, and then I never saw her again.

“The Ghost”

This hummingbird showed up one day in the spring. When I first saw it I couldn’t believe my eyes. It looked like a hummingbird ghost. I called the Audubon Rare Bird line, and two hours later a man showed up from Phoenix to photograph it. It was not an albino, by the way, but “leucistic,” because it did have pigment in its eyes, beak, and feet. It stayed for about a week, then continued on its migration. It never returned to my yard, but I wasn’t surprised because birds with defects in coloring often have other defects as well.

                                                                       

“Olivier”

My favorite of all the hummingbirds I’ve ever known, Olivier was a bold and beautiful broad-billed male who lived year-round in my yard for three or four years. He showed very little fear of humans, and projected an attitude that caused a friend of mine to name him after the famous actor.

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A mid-Monsoon Rove

I posted about a typical Rove at Tohono Chul park in early June. We are now in the midst of the summer Monsoon season, and it has been very humid—very unlike our usual desert weather. Last night it rained two inches in the Park, and this morning it was like a steamy jungle. A lot of plants appeared  to have grown overnight. There were lots of blooms, and one major change to a familiar landmark.

All the trails were very eroded—when water flows in the desert, it goes where it wants to go.

 Just off the Saguaro Discovery Trail

Two cacti were blooming—one a saguaro way out of season; the other a fishhook barrel, whose season is just beginning:

                          

Desert senna was in bloom along all the paths, and passion flowers were beginning on a vine outside the Sonoran Springs Desert garden:

 

The biggest monsoon change of all was across from the Overlook, where we have a beautiful, huge copper boulder showing oxidation to azurite and malachite.The ground was evidently so saturated that the boulder had settled, and a previous small crack had widened, splitting the boulder nearly in half!

                    Copper Boulder

I asked our resident geologist what could have caused such  a split, expecting a technical geological answer, and she said, “Weathering.”

The little female Desert Spiny Lizard who lives in the small crack in the boulder(on the left of the above photo) didn’t seem to mind that her hiding place had become noticeably wider.

Desert Spiny Lizard in crack in Copper Boulder

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My hummingbirds

When I first moved back to Tucson more than twenty years ago, I knew almost nothing about hummingbirds. I didn’t know, for example, that they spend a great deal of time just perching, in between trips to flowers or the nectar feeder. I didn’t know that they eat a lot of insects (you have probably seen them doing this, even if you didn’t know that’s what it was—they hover in mid-air, making jerky movements as they snag microscopic bugs). I didn’t know that many of them migrate long distances—more than 2,000 miles—and over barriers as formidable as the Gulf of Mexico. And I had no idea that I would have so many species of hummers right in my own backyard.

As I wrote in the previous post on learning Arizona birds, I didn’t know one bird from another when I first arrived here. But hours in the backyard with binoculars and hummingbird books taught me to identify the six or seven species that eventually came to my tiny yard.

Male Costa’s hummingbird 

These included Anna’s, the most common; Broad-billed, the second most; and Costa’s, Rufous, Broad-tailed, and Black-chinned.

Male Anna’s hummingbird

I never did get very good at identifying female hummers, most of whom tend to look a lot alike, but I did get to know all the males. On this page are a few pictures of “my” hummers from those early years. In my next post I’ll introduce the three most memorable hummers to visit my yard.

Male Black-chinned hummingbird; not my photo

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My First Tucson Birds

I moved back to Tucson, where I had grown up, in 1989. After twenty years in NYC, where the only wildlife I saw were squirrels, rats, pigeons and sparrows, I was suddenly in the heart of the beautiful Sonoran desert with its amazing birds.I was lucky to have picked a house near the river (a dry river, but still attractive to wildlife), and my tiny back yard was full of growing things and trees. I quickly added a garden and then a pond.

I sat in the back yard every afternoon for one to two hours with binoculars and bird books. I sat in my office, gazing out at the astonishing birds when I wasn’t busy typing, and sometimes even when I was.

White-winged dove and gila woodpecker

The first unknown bird I remember seeing was a large black-and-white striped bird pecking on the trunk of my tangelo tree. I quickly learned that this was a Gila woodpecker, the owner of the loud, raucous voice that sometimes startled me when the window was open. I also learned that we had two types of doves: white-winged and mourning.

 
My first familiar bird was one I had gotten to know when visiting my parents in the Washingon, DC, area: the mockingbird. Now I could see these amazing, intelligent, and beautiful creatures close-up.

 
The next desert bird I learned to identify was the curve-billed thrasher, a close relative of the mockingbird. Hours of observation showed me that these gorgeous birds had yellow eyes, except when young (juveniles’ eyes are gray). They also invariably have a grumpy, peeved expression on their faces.

Curve-billed thrasher; not my photo

I got to know these and many, many other birds over the first few years I was here. Most wonderful of all were the hummingbirds, and I will write about them in a future post.

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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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