I look out the back door and I can’t believe how much beauty surrounds me. This morning I was struck by the semi-wild bottlebrush tree growing behind my bird garden. Its beautiful red bristles are tipped with gold:
The hummingbirds love it:
In my tiny rose garden, our orange rose blazes. I love spring!
I had a great time roving at Tohono Chul Park yesterday with my buddy Sue. As we walked the trails, Sue noticed something very odd: shredded leaves and twigs lay beneath many creosote bushes. What made this particularly strange is that not many creatures eat creosote, which contains a number of potent and presumably bad-tasting chemicals.
We continued our walk, and at the top of a hill we saw this:
It was a round-tailed ground squirrel, dismantling a creosote branch. We said in unison: “Mystery solved!” We assume that he or she was using the little twigs and leaves to line a nest.
A little farther on, in a different part of the Park, we saw this beautiful example of a wolf-spider parapet.
A wolf spider creates a hole in the ground, usually alongside a trail, and builds a very nicely-constructed parapet all the way around the hole. I have heard different stories about why they do this; some say it is to give them a better vantage of approaching prey, but I have NEVER seen a wolf spider on a parapet.
Finally, in the front of the Park, we saw something I’ve never seen there before: a hummingbird moth (white-lined sphinx moth) busily sipping nectar from a field of penstemons. The below photo is courtesy of Sheri Williamson, of the Southeastern Arizona Bird Observatory (http://www.sabo.org/):
Here’s a video illustrating why these insects are sometimes mistaken for hummingbirds:
A couple of evenings ago I was staring through our front picture window, as I often do, watching the birds and critters, when I saw something I’d never seen before. A cottontail rabbit was lying stretched out on its stomach in a shallow depression the length of its body. It was unmoving, and though it occasionally opened its eyes, its ears were down, and I thought it must be sick or dying.
Another rabbit crouched next to the one that was stretched out. It seemed to be licking the face of the one lying down. It licked the right side of the face, then the nose-end, then the left side. Then it circled to the back, and licked the back part of the seemingly sick rabbit. I wondered if I were witnessing some kind of bunny funeral ritual. But then, something happened—a hawk or other predator must have appeared, because the rabbit that was stretched out suddenly opened its eyes, straightened its ears, and sat up. Suddenly it, the other rabbit, and one I hadn’t seen before took off running for the neighbor’s yard.
I have since done some reading, and believe that the stretched-out rabbit may have been a female, and that she was being groomed by a male interested in sex. But who knows? If anyone reading this has witnessed this behavior and knows what it means, please let us know in the comments.
This morning I looked out at the yard just as the sun was rising, and saw a pair of javelinas crossing the yard. Though they are big and rather awkward looking, it was amazing to see how delicately they walked on their relatively tiny hooves.
Despite their appearance, by the way, javelinas are not closely related to pigs, which come from the Old World. Javelinas, which originated in South America, resemble their European cousins through convergent evolution.
Finally, something else I had never previously seen: a friend and I went birding yesterday at a nearby artificial wetlands. The air was thick with the mating cries of red-winged blackbirds, which could be seen in every bush and tree. While trying to attract a mate, these beautiful males actually erect the red feather patches on their wings!
I have had to be away from Tohono Chul Park for nine days. In my absence, spring arrived. The flowers are flowering, and the birds are nesting. The desert tortoises have emerged from their dens. It is beautiful and thrilling. Best of all, the first white-winged dove of the year arrived today, though I did not get a photo.
Penstemon
Mexican honeysuckle Texas Mountain Laurel
Bluebells and gold poppies in the Cactus Circle
Desert Tortoise Cooper’s Hawk Nest
Mourning dove nest in a yucca, and, below, a verdin building a nest
Curve-billed Thrashers and Northern Mockingbirds are two of my favorite birds. They are actually closely related—both members of the bird family Mimidae. Their bodies are nearly identical, but the slightly-smaller mockingbird is grey, white, and black, while the thrasher is mostly grayish brown. Mockingbirds have yellow eyes and a short straight beak, while the thrasher’s eyes are orange and its bill long and distinctly curved. Both birds eat insects, seeds, and berries, though the thrasher is more of a desert dweller than the mockingbird, which is often found in urban environments.
Mockingbird Curve-billed thrasher (Sue Feyrer)
Both birds excel at singing. Nearly everyone has heard the beautiful, ever-changing trills of a mockingbird in the spring, but not everyone knows that thrashers can sing nearly as well. The thrasher’s ordinary call is a piercing upside-down wolf whistle (whit-WHEET!), but their song is beautiful and very melodious.
This morning at Tohono Chul Park I heard beautiful birdsong on one of the desert trails. As I approached, a mockingbird flew into a tree above me, but it was not singing. I followed its gaze to see this beautiful thrasher singing its heart out.
After snow, ice, severe winds, and very cold temperatures, spring started to reassert itself today in the Sonoran desert. On my rove at Tohono Chul Park this morning, I saw these beautiful early wildflowers: Arizona blue bells with a few Gooding’s verbena mixed in.
I climbed the hill to take a closer look at a very vocal cactus wren that was perched on the saguaro’s crest. While I watched, another cactus wren landed next to the vocalizing bird, and both fanned their tails in what I took to be a very provocative display. I believe they were courting. Here is a brief video of their behavior, up to the point where the second wren flew off.
It snowed here yesterday. I mean major snow, not like that I chronicled in a recent post. Big, soft, wet flakes fell thickly through the air, starting around noon and not ending till sometime in the evening. In parts of the city, including mine, the snow accumulated, creating phantasmagorical shapes and patterns on the desert plants. Here are a few of the photos I took around my house and my neighborhood.
The rising sun illuminates snow-covered peaks and clouds
We’ve had two wet cold fronts pass through lately, leaving rain in the valley, snow on the mountains, and misty fog everywhere. As a companion piece to my posts about blue skies and clouds, here is what it looked like at Tohono Chul Park.
And on a wetter day, this was the view from our house:
Although our skies are often dramatic, it is unusual for a Tucson day to actually be cloudy, especially in the morning. Such a day occurred on my last rove. When I arrived at Tohono Chul Park at 8 AM, the sky was churning with clouds. It had rained over the weekend, and everything smelled damp and delicious. The cold, moist air seemed literally to caress my skin as I walked along the Desert View Trail, watching and listening to birds and looking for jackrabbits.
Evidence of the weekend’s rain could be seen all along the trail.
As I neared the end of the trail the clouds closed in and I could see only a tiny dot of blue sky.
Just after I left the Park, the clouds opened up and it began to pour, a surprise for mid-January.
After record-breaking low temperatures last week (in the high teens), yesterday we broke the record high (low eighties). And today it’s cloudy and mild. The sky has been spectacular. Here are a few sky shots, including one from Sabino Canyon last Sunday:
And from various locations in my yard:
The cacti are still wearing their styrofoam “hats,” and will continue to do so for several days, as winter has made a big comeback. We’re at the beginning of a five-day hard freeze, nearly unprecedented in this area. The last such, though it didn’t last as long, was two years ago. This is possibly the result of global warming.
Tohono Chul Park was very cold but beautiful today. There were plenty of birds, among them: phainopeplas, white-crowned sparrows, mourning doves, goldfinches, Abert’s towhees, Gila woodpeckers, curve-billed thrasher, pyrrhuloxia, house finch, house wren, cardinal and Gambel’s quails. But we saw no hummingbirds; this weather is hard on them. It kills the nectar flowers and small insects they subsist on. I hope that this year at least a few survive, because two years ago very few did. The biggest surprise today was this ice sculpture in the riparian area:
The New Year has brought cold weather to the Sonoran Desert. But because we’ve had some rain and because it was so warm through most of December there are pockets of wildflowers coming up here and there, as well as blooms by some flowers that won’t be stopped by anything but a hard freeze.
Desert Marigolds and Chiltepin fruits Arizona Bluebells
In most of Tohono Chul Park, our plants meet more hospitable conditions than those out in the desert. We irrigate many flower beds, and surround them with wire to keep out rabbits and javelinas. And we cover many non-native plants on nights when freezing conditions are expected.
These Mexican Fence Posts and other columnar cacti grow from the top of the stem, so it’s necessary to protect the delicate growing tip from freezing. We do this with styrofoam drinking cups. The next morning it is always a cheery sight, with the covered cacti looking something like a Shriner’s convention. (I personally think we should put tassels on the cups, but so far nobody has taken my suggestion.)
It’s chilly here in the early morning—in the forties—so I have to bundle up for my rove at Tohono Chul Park. Below two cold, Christmasy sights:
We have neither partridges nor pear trees at the Park, so how about six mourning doves in an agave?
As for snow on the ground, we don’t have that either, but on very cold days frost forms along the trails. Here’s a video of frost on a prickly pear skeleton, sublimating into the air as the sun begins to warm the desert floor.
Happy holidays to all my readers!
