Art in the Park

Tohono Chul Park, where I am a docent, is a small (49 acre) desert preserve that includes cultivated  gardens of native Sonoran and adapted plants, natural desert trails,  and lots of art—much of it related to the culture of the southwest. We have three small art galleries with changing exhibits, and a number of outdoor sculptures that blend with or enhance the gardens.

Here are some of my favorite pieces, because they are not only artistic, they are (or seem) functional:

 This weathered-looking structure is a habitat for solitary bees, of which we have hundreds of species in Arizona. These include mason, leaf-cutter, and resin bees, and many of them have found homes in this specially drilled piece of wood, The bees lay their eggs at the bottoms of the holes, then plug the holes with wax. Please don’t tell anyone, but I often refer to them as “cribbage bees.”

 Here is a close-up of the habitat, showing bees crawling and some holes with plugs.

Below is my favorite piece of art in the Park—an old mesquite tree that was allowed to grow where it fell during a monsoon storm. Our head botanist at the time built the small fountain.

Last year the sculptures of a javelina family were added:

Finally, the cactus fountain, currently standing in front of a ramada,

is used by birds on hot days to cool their feet. Here, the guy cooling off is a beautiful white-winged dove.

Technorati Tags: Tohono Chul Park,outdoor sculpture,art galleries of the southwest

The Thirty-Day Challenge

I have entered this blog in the 2013 WordCount Blogathon. This means that I will post every day for thirty days, until the end of June. I did this last year with my writing blog.

KL’s Sonoran Nature Journal has been around a lot longer than the writing blog. I began writing it in the early nineties, soon after I moved to the beautiful Sonoran Desert. I migrated the blog to the web when Blogger became available, ten years ago, and added photos a few years after that.

A beautiful example of Sonoran vegetation, near Sabino Canyon

(For a look at my early posts, check August of 2003. There’s an amusing look at a coyote and its reaction to water in our usually dry Rillito river (August 16), as well as a piece on bird dominance and the beginning of my obsession with Gambel’s quail families.) .

Flooding on the Rillito in July of 2007

My main focus has been and continues to be the beautiful plants and animals I see daily in my yard and other locations in the Tucson area. I am especially interested in the behavior of birds and other animals. I also love to learn new things, and love to teach them to others as well.

Please join my journey into the natural history of the Sonoran Desert. You can subscribe on this page, if you like. I welcome comments and questions, and will always answer them.

Technorati Tags: Sonoran Desert plants and animals,2013 WordCount Blogathon

Mid-May Anomalies and a Rattlesnake

It's heating up in the desert, but there is still plenty of beauty and interest at Tohono Chul Park. Today I saw the following:

A desert spiny lizard disguised as a tree lizard (these guys are usually found on the ground);

An agave stalk that seems to be part corkscrew;

And a beautiful diamondback on one of our main trails. He (or she) could not at first decide whether to cross the path. Eventually, the snake made the sensible decision to turn back and disappear into the dirt, rocks, and desert plants, where it no doubt lay in wait for its next meal. I am mesmerized when I watch these amazing animals flow along the ground, so graceful and deadly.

In case you're wondering how they manage to move so sinuously, the short answer is that their ventral area is covered with scutes, which are large scales. The edges of the scutes catch on projections on the ground, or rock, or tree, and their very muscular body muscles work with the scutes to move the snake along. Also--how to tell a western diamondback from other rattlesnakes? Look for the black and white striped bands just above the rattle. (The Mojave rattlesnake also has black and white bands, but the white bands are noticeably wider.)

Psychedelic Fish, a Roadrunner Nest, and Baby Quail at Tohono Chul Park

We are in the late Spring/early Summer part of the year now—starting to get really hot, but with cool mornings. The wildflowers are mostly bloomed out, but the cactus blossoms more than make up for them. Here are a beautiful yellow trichocereus and some rosy-red staghorns:

Mrs. Roadrunner, her watchful eye visible here on her secret nest, has reportedly hatched three voracious babies.

The desert pupfish, an endangered species we keep, under the supervision of the Game & Fish Department, are enjoying the weather as their thoughts turn to love. The males become fluroescent-blue when they are ready to mate.

And here are a family of Gambel’s quails, foraging in one of our wildflower beds.

As The Egg Turns: Goose Drama by the Parking Lot

This guest post was written by G.H. Curminion, my Internet buddy in South Carolina, who also took the photos.

This is so cool. My office is on the ground floor, with floor to ceiling windows. I looked up a few minutes ago and a Canada goose was building a nest not 6' from my window! It can't see me, what with the reflection and the mini-blinds. The pair has been hanging out in a small L-shaped area, about 20' on each side, with the sidewalk and parking lot crossing the open part, for about three days now. I thought it was odd, because the geese usually wander around in indiscriminate numbers, but lately it's just been the one pair.

Oh! she just stood up! I saw an egg! Dad has been standing guard faithfully since early this week. Now I feel bad about heckling him every morning when I get out of the car (I'm parked just off the L).
It's getting pretty windy, and the area is well-protected, but the wind swirls back in that spot. I'll have to alert our groundskeepers to stay away. They come through with leaf blowers every few days. The nest is built from the pine needles they use as ground cover.

Mama Goose looks uncomfortable. Maybe she can see me, so I just turned out my office lights. Maybe it's the wind, but she's not really settling fully on the nest. Sort of squatting over it. Maybe she's laying another egg! Last time we had chicks here there were five. Okay, I just stood up to close the mini-blinds some more. There are two eggs. [Mama goose went on to lay two more eggs.]

[Later] Well, before I left on Friday I noticed that Mama Goose had covered up the nest with more pine straw and departed. I was worried because of a storm front due to come through that evening. When I pulled in this morning, the nest was still there, covered with even MORE pine straw, and the couple are hanging out, grazing on the median in the parking lot, watching the nest. When she is on the nest, he stands guard. 

Google says incubation period is 24-28 days, so we’re in for the long haul. Dad was chasing people away from the front door last night, and lunged at my car when I pulled out. My parking space is closest to the nest, and when I pulled up this morning, dad was sitting in MY spot. I had to park a couple spots down. So far he hasn’t lunged at me, but apparently there are several pairs nesting in the complex. The other day one of the dads chased the UPS guy all the way around one of the buildings.

To be continued….

Technorati Tags: Bird behavior,Canada geese,Canada geese nesting

Mysteries and Marvels at two Parks

Yesterday, my buddy Sue and I went birding at Catalina State Park, a nearby mountain Park with a lovely, short birding trail.

We saw (and heard) lots of birds, though couldn’t identify all of them. The biggest mystery was the almost frantic, constant song of either a mockingbird or a curve-billed thrasher. It sounded much like the thrasher I wrote about in an earlier post. We never did see the bird that was singing, though saw a thrasher fairly nearby.

We solved two other mysteries involving birdsong through judicious use of the iBird app, which I intend to write about in the future. It helped us identify a brown-crested flycatcher and helped confirm the song of the yelllow-rumped warbler.

Here are two of the beautiful wildflowers we saw at the state park, desert dandelion and Mariposa lily:

Today Sue and I roved at Tohono Chul Park. It was hot—mid-eighties going up to low nineties, but it was a fabulous day. In addition to the marvels of the year’s first trichocereus blooms:

 

The passionflowers were also beginning to open, and while squiring a bunch of preschoolers through the riparian area we saw a beautiful kingsnake:

(The preschoolers were awed.)

Finally, perhaps the highlight of a wonderful day, we saw another Bell’s Vireo nest, this one in an olive tree near the center of the Park. I believe the bird I photographed is adding some finishing touches to the inside before moving in:

Technorati Tags: Tohono Chul Park,Catalina State Park,wildflowers of the southwest,Bell's vireo,common Kingsnake

Late-spring Rove at Tohono Chul Park

No matter what the time of year, there is always beauty at the Park. This is one of the best times, because in addition to flowers, birds are still courting and nesting. Below is a Bell’s vireo in its nest high up in a Texas ebony tree (photo courtesy of my roving buddy, Sue Feyrer). This wonderful nest is an intricately woven and decorated hanging basket. The other pictures show some of our amazing late-spring blooms.

        The glory of Sonoran spring: a blue palo verde in bloom

Remarkable Penstemon (that’s its name!)

 Blooming yucca

Mexican Bird of Paradise

Red prickly pear blossom

Wish you could smell these chocolate flowers. They smell exactly like chocolate!

Magenta hedgehog blossoms

And beautiful Engelmann’s prickly pear in almost-full bloom!

Technorati Tags: Cactus blooms,Tohono Chul Park,Blue Palo Verde,Bell's vireo nest,Chocolate flowers

Dove Love, Competition, and Flowers

I wish I could invite everyone who reads this to come over to my house and look at the birds and flowers in the yard. Even though some of the flowers are past peak, it’s still amazingly gorgeous.

I’ve been worried about the white-winged dove female who has nested in the carport and raised several broods the last few years. I had seen her in the nesting spot several times, but no sign of a nest. This morning I heard white-winged doves calling, and when I looked up at the pillar where she nests, I saw her and a male dove evidently just completing copulation. She was all fluffed-out and shuddery, as I’ve seen female doves after sex. Anyway, no signs yet of a nest, but I now feel they will build it soon.

White-winged mama and one baby from last year.

Back in the bird garden, a pair of pyrrhuloxias and a pair of cardinals squabbled over the sunflower seed feeder. It was also  visited by a thrasher and a cactus wren who shoveled seeds out as fast as it could for future eating.

Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal, at the seed feeder. The bottlebrush blossoms are so thick they have pulled several stems down to the ground.

Elsewhere, in the back and front yards, everything is blooming and beautiful.

Cleveland Sage in the back yard; this plant has the most heavenly scent in the world.

Hawthorne blossoms. This bush came with the house.

 

Creosote in the front yard and brittlebush at the mailbox

And ocotillo in the driveway.

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Two Amazing Flowers and a Hummingbird

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!

Technorati Tags: Bottle brush tree,orange rose

A Mystery, a Parapet, and an Impostor

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.

MYSTERY: who is attacking the creosote?

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.

Wolf-spider hole with 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:

Hummingbird Moth (White-lined Sphinx Moth) and penstemons at Tohono Chul Park

Technorati Tags: Round-tailed ground squirrel,creosote,hummingbird moth,white-lined sphinx moth,wolf-spider parapet

What were those rabbits doing? And other interesting tidbits from the natural world.

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.

(Photo courtesy of azgfd)

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.

Photo from azgfd

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 don’t know about you, but if I were a female blackbird, I would definitely be interested!

Technorati Tags: cottontail behavior,urban javelinas,red-winged blackbirds