…was patrolling our yard yesterday, an overcast Thursday morning.

I was working in the studio and noticed yard birds scolding harshly.  But my brain was busy with clay, and it only spared enough attention to ID the calls — cactus wren, verdin, curve-billed thrasher — and forgot to be curious about what was setting them off.  If you’re really paying attention, sometimes it’s possible to tell from the calls whether it’s a ground predator or an aerial one — hawk, kestrel — and sometimes even if it’s cat or snake. Snake creates the most fury, or panic, and the longest-lasting, loudest scolding.  But it wasn’t until I noticed E heading outside with his camera that I thought to check out the scene.

In this case, it was the local Gophersnake (Pituophis catenifer affinis, the Sonoran Gophersnake), gliding through the dried leaf litter around the citrus trunks.  Although we can’t be sure, I suspect this is the same individual we see periodically, although it’s much longer than it was the first time we saw it a few years ago, swallowing a very young cottontail practically on our doorstep (E was able to get fabulous pictures of the process from capture through constriction through engulfing, but I’m of two minds about posting them).  Thursday’s snake was close to 5 feet long, and robust, although gophers are not as thick as rattlers.  Gophers are Arizona’s longest snake, and can reach 6 feet in length, so this guy has a way to go yet; I’m hoping he’s finding lots of roof rats to help him get there.  Right now there’s a new batch of rabbits, rock squirrels and quail around, and these along with bird eggs, other snakes and lizards would all be on his menu.

He was moving slowly around the yard, intent on any prey items he might come across, but also moving toward a daytime hiding place, so E was able to get lots of pictures.  At one point, we got a little close for the snake’s comfort, and it gave us its best impression of a defensive rattler: it pulled up into an s-curve, and gaped its pink mouth, hissing and making a mock rattling sound (photo above).

This picture also shows the amazing coloration of the gopher snake: a series of mottled chocolate brown patches and spots on a creme-colored ground, grading into a bold dark brown and yellow striped tail.  This rattler imitation is both a blessing and a curse for the snake.  No doubt it discourages many potential threats like coyotes, but it also causes people to mistake them for actual rattlers, with unfortunate results for the innocent and effective rodent-hunter.  The display was impressive; we gave him a little space, and he quickly resumed his slow perusal of the yard.  Eventually it took cover under a big quartz boulder by a fence, and that was that, until the next time.

For more info, click here to link to the useful Reptiles and Amphibians of Arizona website.

(Photos, E. Shock)

I’m now in heavy production mode for the upcoming Southwest Wings Birding and Nature Festival in southeastern Arizona (see Events for details).  Some of the objects I’m making in small batches are smooth-surfaced mugs for glazing bird portraits on.  Flat-bottomed, hand-built (as opposed to wheel-thrown), and intended for daily use, these mugs have proven popular items at nature festivals and among Three Star Owl‘s birding clientele.  Who wouldn’t want to drink their favorite beverage out of their favorite bird mug?

I recently finished a batch for a client with a home in the Colorado Rockies, and here are a few shots of the process.  One of the reasons I’d like to share these photos is so folks can have an idea of the amount of work that goes into these mugs, which have three images of a species on each cup.

The mugs start out as flat rectangular slabs of clay that I make with a rolling pin and hardwood slats from the “home improvement center” as guides for thickness: very high tech.  (Many potters have slab rollers in their studios, which are fabulous items for making clay flat, but they’re big, and I’m not giving the swamp cooler the boot when a rolling pin and some wood molding will do.)  Then I curl the clay rectangles into a cylinder, seal up the side seam, add a slab base, a rim coil and a coil handle, and dry them very slowly over a period of several days.

After they’re bisqued, I draw the outline sketch of the chosen bird with regular no.2 graphite pencil right on to the clay.  This is convenient because I can erase pencil lines or whole drawings if they don’t go as planned (although nothing eats through erasers like rubbing on bisqued clay!), but I don’t have to remove the lines before the final firing: the temperature in the kiln is sufficiently hot to burn off the pencil completely.  The photo above gives a general idea of the tools used for glazing; the one to the right shows the roughed-in pencil sketch for a Green-tailed towhee.  (Remember to click on any image you’d like a closer look at).

The next step is glazing the interior: that happens before glazing the images on the outside, so the glaze doesn’t drip down a finished bird while pouring out the extra from the mug’s interior.

Next, I brush the glazes on.  This is like painting, without the advantage of being able to see what the image will look like with its proper colors.  This is because most raw glazes have very little in common visually with their finished, fired selves.  They go from chalky, pastel flat patches to shiny, brightly hued areas often with brush strokes visible where the thickness of the glaze varies.  These two photos show the difference between a male Western tanager, before and after:

Each mug has an image of the bird on each side, often the male on one side and the female on the other, and a thumbnail sketch, usually a profile portrait of the bird, on the bottom.  The bottom image must be done with matte slips, so they don’t stick to the kiln shelves during firing.

This batch of birds is spoken for, but if you’d like some of your own, contact me and I’d be happy to make you your own, with your own choice of birds (for details click on Shop).  Or, come visit Three Star Owl in Sierra Vista and see what’s in stock at Southwest Wings this August.

(all photos A.Shock)

Arriving in the spring, they lurk like vultures for weeks on the crowns of blooming saguaros, waiting for the flowers to swell into fat green fruits.  When they do, the White winged doves (Zenaida asiatica) rip them open with their strong fruit-ripping beaks, exposing the sweet red fruit and feasting greedily.  Sometimes several doves will stack, treading clumsily on one anothers’ backs, vying for access to their favorite food.

“White wings” are big doves, and during their breeding season, which are the hottest and driest months of the Sonoran Desert year, they rely heavily on the fruit of the saguaro for food and water.  So heavily in fact that in this habitat biologists consider them “saguaro specialists”.  In other parts of their large range, which includes the Caribbean and parts of Central America, they are agricultural freeloaders, and vast flocks of them take advantage of bountiful farmland for food and roosts.  Here they are considered “tropical doves” by ornithologists and “pests” by farmers. As such, they have been hunted energetically, and their population numbers are subject to wide swings throughout the year and decades.

This pesky mooching aspect of this big dove is not hard to imagine: they are agressive and a bit greedy at the yard seed feeders, and will lower their heads and charge at smaller doves, like their “cousins” the Mourning doves, making a hoarse hoo that’s the columbid equivalent of a growl.

But perched picturesquely on top of a fruiting saguaro against a desert blue sky, their frequent “who cooks for you” call means summer to me, and a welcome sign that the desert cycles are intact and thriving.

(Sketch book drawing, graphite, and photo, A.Shock)

The Eurasian Collared Dove (Streptopelia decaocto) has an agenda well-befitting a Columbid: “Must Colonize New World.”

Actually, it started before that, and a lot farther east: a native of central Asia, the Collared Dove had populated Europe as far west as Great Britain by the 1950s.  By the early ’80s, a population had taken hold in Florida, likely coming from the Bahamas where they also had been introduced (or escaped captivity) in the 1970s. From there, the large doves filled the southeastern US, and have been spreading inexorably west and north.  The first documented report of the species in the state of Arizona was in Eager, AZ, on March 6, 2000, and they were regularly sighted in Maricopa County by the end of the same year.

As mentioned in a previous post, they’re quite similar to the African Collared Dove (which used to be called the Ringed Turtle Dove), but they’re bigger, and a darker beige, and have different vocalizations.  In the Phoenix area and over much of Arizona, Eurasian Collared Doves have become quite numerous — on some days I would ungenerously call them a pest in our yard — and a few theories exist as to why they’ve spread so rapidly.  One is that they fill a niche left empty by the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon  (Perhaps in the Northeast U.S., but I’m not so sure that applies to the desert regions?).

Like the African Collared Doves, they show a disturbing willingness to become tame, and quickly learn  to fly down to empty feeders when they see someone coming out with a bag of birdseed.  I’ve caught them lurking on top of my studio — their toenails clicking on the roof, their pink foot skin glowing hazily through the translucent plexi panels — as if lobbying for the filling of neglected feeders in a kind of inexorable zombie-like way.  They’re hard to miss since their arrival is a dry noisy wing flapping, the thump of a hard landing of a big heavily-wingloaded airship, and the inevitable repetitive hoo-ing and gibbering that follows.

(Images: pencil sketchbook drawing and photo by A.Shock)

The desert suburbs of Phoenix are Columbid-rich, that is, there are many species of doves and pigeons.  Yesterday I was putting out seed in a neighbor’s gravel drive just before sunset.  The area is quite open, and at that time of day it fills with fat, free-loading doves and pigeons who are used to being fed there and then: after only a minute, there were 30 birds chowing down, their heads bobbing up and down rapidly like sewing machine needles, almost all of them Columbids.  I counted six species both native and exotic — all the species regularly seen in our neighborhood and most seen regularly in the Phoenix area at this time of year: Mourning dove, White-winged dove, Inca dove, Eurasian Collared Dove, African Collared dove, and Rock Pigeon.

There was only one African Collared dove (Streptopelia roseogrisea).  This species, like its close relative the now-abundant Eurasian Collared dove, is an exotic.  But unlike the ECDO, which was introduced in one place and then spread itself across the nation, the African Collared dove (or Ringed Turtle dove) was originally released very close to here but hasn’t spread widely, even in the Phoenix area.

The plumage of the two exotic doves are somewhat similar: both are beige and have a black crescent on their neck.  They can be hard to tell apart, until you get the hang of it.  The African is a smaller, paler dove, almost white, with a gentle two-note call that sounds like the chorus from the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil”: “Woo-HOOooo!”  The larger Eurasian is slightly darker in plumage and has a hoarse three-note call with the emphasis on the middle note: “hoo-HOO-hoo” which it utters incessantly.

Our neighborhood hosts a small population of the daintier African Collared dove, and one of them spends most of its time mooching in our yard and our neighbor’s yard.  Because of its habit of snarfing up seed rapidly, packing it into its crop and then flying off to digest at leisure, we’ve named it Hoover, like the vacuum cleaner. (Hoover used to have a mate, Eureka, but she’s not around these days).  These birds are quite “sweet”: by that I mean they are not very afraid of people, unlike the other doves which all have a proper wariness towards humans.  They will fly right down and land on the ground at your feet if they think seed is to be had.  Not surprisingly given these behavior traits, there has been debate among ornithologists as to how domesticated this species (or variety) of dove is, but currently it’s enjoying full species status.

(Images of ACDOs: sketchbook pencil sketch and photo, A.Shock.)

We missed some of Spring in the desert this year, so last weekend we went in search of it under the Mogollon Rim: Sunday found us hiking along the West Fork of Oak Creek in Sedona.  It’s one of the more popular trails in that popular area, and at times it’s mobbed by clusters of sweaty Phoenicians looking for a quick cool-off up in the oak pine red rock country.  But the weather in the desert has been cooler than seasonal, and although we certainly weren’t alone on the path, the trail wasn’t as crowded as we feared.

The day couldn’t have been more beautiful — Oak Creek Canyon at that point is a mile high (literally) so it’s still spring up there, with lots of showy color.  Both Scarlet and Yellow Monkey Flower (Mimulus cardinalis and guttatus), Golden columbine (Aquilegia chrysantha), and Western spiderwort (Tradescantia occidentalis) were at their peak. Columbian monkshood (Aconitum columbianum) and Deers-ears (Frasera speciosa) were just beginning, as were the False Solomon’s seal (Smilacina sp).  Butterflies abounded — both on flowers and on ammonia-rich heron-wash smears on the gravelly banks — and the air was lively with swallowtails, skippers and sulphurs, and others I don’t know.

The local birds were lively and showy too, the males singing and holding territory: Lazuli bunting (Passerina amoena), Black-headed grosbeak (Pheucticus melanocephalus), Western tanagers (Piranga ludoviciana), and Red-faced warblers (Cardenlina rubifrons) were among the colorful singers, while Cordilleran flycatchers (Empidonax occidentalis), House wrens (Troglodytes aedon), Plumbeous vireo (Vireo plumbeus) and the ethereal-voiced Hermit thrush (Catharus guttatus) were vocal but plainer of plumage.

Now, I admire a little brown bird as much as anyone — the House wren is a delight to watch, singing so hard its little barred tail vibrates — but it’s tough to not be swept away by the sight of tiny woodland jewels like Red-faced warblers, who were numerous and singing, or the Painted redstart (Myioborus pictus) who was foraging quietly and intently as if he had nestlings and a mate to feed.

To the right is a page of the day’s birdlist, sketchily illustrated on the fly with really tiny thumbnails of a couple of the brighter species.  (I’ve been honing down a back-packing sized watercolor kit, and it’s coming along well, although I haven’t yet gotten the paints pared down to an Altoids-tin, since Jerry’s Artarama is still out of empty half-pans). The bird-list is small-scale, too — in a Moleskine journal just 3.5×5.5″.

The Broad-tailed hummingbirds (Selasphorus platycercus) were zizzing around fussily, sometimes more easily heard than seen, but we lucked into looking up at just the right time to see this Hen settle onto her nest on a bough directly over the trail.  Check out her clever lichen-camo, and how it blends right down into the lichen-covered Big-toothed maple branch!

The Phoenix-Sedona round trip with an eight-mile hike in the middle makes for one long day, but even so we came back refreshed and renewed, glad to have a cooler option when the desert is too hot to hike.  Graduated seasons are one of the nicest things about living in a state with delightfully drastic topography.

(Photos from top to bottom: red rock overhang, West Fork of Oak Creek, A.Shock; Spiderwort being pollinated by Eurobee, E.Shock; Golden columbine dragon-heads, A.Shock; illustrated bird-list, A.Shock; Broad-tailed hummer hen on nest, E.Shock)

…was a Ruru, or Morepork (Ninox novaeseelandiae).

It’s NZ’s only remaining native owl (the Laughing owl was last recorded in 1914), and is fairly common in many habitats, even parks and gardens, but is especially numerous in tracts of native bush.  We heard them several places, mostly in the Kauri Forest while on a night walk looking for Kiwi.  They whinny and whoo and screek, but their main call is, not surprisingly, “More-pore” repeated frequently.  If you live where there are Inca Doves, you know what a Morepork sounds like.  Inca doves’ call is usually transcribed as “whirl-pool” or “no-hope”, but in pitch, frequency, and tone, it’s very much like the owl’s call.  The Māori name, Ruru, is also onomatopoetic, as is the Australian name, (Southern) Boobook.

Ruru is a relatively small (approx 10″ ht), long-tailed owl that takes a range of prey but specializes in nocturnal insects like weta (large crickets — really large crickets!), huhu beetles and moths.

(Photo by Aviceda from Wikimedia Commons)

In our area, the first Gambel’s quail chicks of the year usually start showing up in early May, clustered around their parents under the mesquite trees in the yard, pecking expertly at the ground like the precocial youngsters they are.  This year, since we weren’t around then, we missed the “nebula phase” of their development — when they’re so small and move so fast that it’s hard to count them: a streaky brown cloud of down orbiting the adults like electrons, running everywhere because their legs are so short.

Now that we’re back, the feeders are full again, and the parents are bringing their broods around.  For the past two days there’s been a family of six cleaning up nyger thistle that the frenzy of fressing finches let fall from the front mesquite feeder: two adult quail and four chicks.  The chicks are still quite young, but no longer downy — adolescent really, and they’re beginning to get little nubs on their foreheads where their topknots will grow in.  They are still cryptically colored buffy-streaky so that they’re nearly invisible against the soil in the dappled sunlight let through by the mesquite’s tiny compound leaflets.  Papa usually stands watch as the family feeds, which they do at a more leisurely pace than when it’s the adults alone.  This may be a clutch incubated in the spiky tangle of our fan-palm, where a hen successfully raised a brood of 9 last year.

Normally I’d snap a photo of the family scene above.  But because I can’t get a decent picture through the reflection-hazed windows looking out onto the feeders (I’ve tried!), and going outside would start the whole shebang to flee, I thought I’d sketch from life (above).  I’m just finding my way around watercolors again after a very long absence, and haven’t managed to loosen up as much as I’d like — at this point, I seem to produce tinted drawings, rather than acheiving a freer painting style.  One reason for that is that it’s such a different process than capturing “birdness” in the broad, unblended swatches of opaque glaze color, which is what I normally do, as in this Three Star Owl male Gambel’s quail wall tile pictured to the right.

Living in Southern California as a kid, I was familiar with the massive, blade-leafed clumping plant widely used in landscaping called Flax, or New Zealand Flax.  So I shouldn’t have been surprised to see it growing everywhere in New Zealand, right?  Still, my first dim thought was, “Oh, they landscape with it here, too, just like in California…”.  But when I say growing everywhere, I mean everywhere.  So, after a bit, I realized that Harakeke (flax) is a native plant, and that Aotearoa is the True Home of Flax.

Not a grass, not a yucca, and NOT related to northern hemisphere flax of the genus Linum, New Zealand flax plants (Phormium spp.) occur naturally in a huge range of colors and sizes — supposedly over 2000 varieties — and grow on headlands, along rivers, at the beach, in the mountains, in beech forests, as single plants or in massive monospecific expanses. In spring, the blossoms on the long flower spikes are used for food by raucous Tuis and lovely olive Korimako, or Bellbirds (photo, right), or a handy perch the rest of the year.

The leaves have long been used by Māori to weave into creative and symbolic kete, bags or kits, and other articles of clothing and rain-wear, as well as amazing woven wall-linings in traditional buildings (photo below).  Very versatile stuff. Raranga, the art of plaiting harakeke, is laden with symbolic importance for Māori people, as an emblem of the survival of traditional culture.

One of my favorite campgrounds was at Curio Bay, where the flax stand on the headland was carved up into very private spaces.  From a distance, all you could see were the lids of the campervans (photo below) — a nice change from some of the parking-lot like “motor camps” you find everywhere.

(Photos A. Shock: flax on a seashore headland, North Island; Bellbird on old flax blossom stem, Tiri Tiri Matangi Island; flax wall-weaving between carved wooden wall panels from Te Puawai o te Arawa, a Māori carved house dating to the 1880s, now in the Auckland Museum; Curio Bay motorcamp, South Island)