This is the very week many Costa’s hummingbirds leave our yard.  I know this because I’m keeping track, not out of obsessiveness, or possessiveness (well, maybe a little…), but because each winter I participate in the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s Project Feeder Watch.  Like Christmas bird counts, it’s a way for science to harness the awesome powers of birdnerds and aviphiles across the nation.

<< male Costa’s hummer in our Little-leaf palo verde tree.  Go ahead and click on it to enlarge — I uploaded a huge image!

So, between November and April, I keep periodic count of birds that come to food sources in our yard: feeders, water features, flowers and plants, and other food sources like bunnies, finches and doves.  I report these winter bird censuses to Cornell Lab, and they compile the data into useful charts graphs and figures, which can be accessed by anyone online.

In previous posts, I’ve mentioned how our post-breeding population of Costa’s hummers balloons, with as many as 6 or 8 individuals, both males and females, coming daily to our feeders.  The males can be easy to tell apart, as some are young of the year, and are just growing in their flamboyant purple moustaches (properly called gorgets, like the piece of armor which protected the throats of knights, or the swath of cloth beneath the wimple some orders of nun wear), and the new feathers grow in distinctively, for a while enabling us to separate individuals by sight.  From July to January, the feeders in our yard are dominated by Costa’s.

But right after the New Year, many of them go away.  For instance, Yoyboy and Macho C, fierce contestants for our front porch feeder for months, have just recently moved on.  Some individuals do stay year round, and for right now, we still have at least one female coming to the feeders in the back, and at least two males — “C-Dude” and another nameless young of the year male — are still defending prime feeders in the back yard as well.  Time will tell if either stays here through summer.

For now, though, the Costa’s numbers are thinning, and the big Anna’s hummers are beginning their courtship cycle.

Anna’s hummer, photo by Will Elder of the National Park Service >>

For the last week, while the rest of the country fogs its glasses in a deep freeze, it’s been warm enough in Phoenix to open up the house, and I can hear the sharp, loud “chip” the Anna’s males accomplish at the bottom of steep, repetitive dives.  The sound has recently been discovered to be made by air rippling tail feathers as they descend, and it takes practice before the birds can make the noise consistently.  Little bullroarers, they swoop down on a female from high in the air, and chip just as they pass over her head in a millisecond, like miniature fighter planes at an airshow buzzing the crowd.  They’re just as fuel consumptive — I have to fill the nectar feeders twice a week or more.

So beginning now, my Feederwatch counts will have more Anna’s than Costa’s, until next year when the proportions are reversed again.  The next hummer change?  Around the first week of March, when the Black-chinned hummers fly in from their wintering grounds, and zip around the yard with their zizzing flight sound, dipping at the nectar sources alongside the Anna’s and resident Costa’s.
(This is Three Star Owl post #200!)

Gila monsters (Heloderma suspectum) are large stumpy lizards with bright handsome markings that are both cryptic and aposematic simultaneously, and whose hands look like neoprene wetsuit gloves with claws.  They are remarkable for being one of only two venomous lizard species in the world.  They live in the Sonoran and southern Great Basin Deserts and love to eat quail eggs, nestling birds and mammals, and other slow-moving prey items. (Below: captive gila monster on a wooden schoolhouse floor, photo A.Shock)

Approximately life-sized clay Gila Monster “bowls” are items I only make one or two of per year or so. They’re quite time-consuming, since they’re textured, slipped, and glazed pretty much beaded scale by beaded scale.  Here’s one now :

1)  I form a blob of clay that looks like a gila monster.  This early stage is the time to get any sinuousness in the tail, neck and belly, so the clay “remembers” it.  Then it’s time to put the wet lump aside to set up, or stiffen slightly, so that it can be shaped further.  Sponges help hold a pose, if desired.  >>

2)  As the water leaves it, the clay becomes more self-supporting.  While waiting for this to happen, I make legs — oddly spindly for such a stout body — with blocked out feet, to stiffen for adding later.  I also hollow out two thick places in the monster body, to aid in drying: the head, and the base of the tail.  This also makes the completed piece lighter and better balanced.  It is important to make a tiny, invisible passage into the hollow part from the outside, to let air escape during firing, or there could be an explosion.  <<

3)   With the clay slightly stiffer, I smooth the shape into its final form, including carving the toes from the blocked-out “hands”, and rounding the belly “bowl” part.  This shape causes herp boys to giggle, because it makes the lizard look like roadkill to those with scavenging permits for heloderm pelts.  From my point of view, it makes the piece functional, if desired: an Effigy Vessel, and not just a representation.

4)  The next step is to attach the legs, and texture the skin.  This must be done at a particular point of dryness, when the clay is still wet enough to accept the stamps I use to make the “nail-heads” in the skin (Heloderma means “nail-skin”), but stiff enough to hold up to the handling and pressure of stamping it.  Then it’s waiting for it to be bone-dry for slipping (right).  >>

The belly-texture, which looks like pink-and-black Indian corn on the cob, is carved into the clay rather than stamped — this is particularly time-consuming, especially for a part that isn’t seen very frequently.  Early on, I searched the web for a reference photo for Gi-Mo belly-scales, and never found one.  Fortunately, I persuaded a handler at a wildlife education event to flip a live one up for photos (she held it vertically, not upside-down), and got this great shot, which tells me all I need to know about what the unders of a monster look like, including vent details (<< left).  You can just see the heavy-duty cowhide welding gloves the handler was wearing; they were covered with black half-moons: venom-marks from previous crabby bites.  <<

5)  Slipping an item bone dry is slightly risky, as adding water to a piece at this point can cause cracking.  But adding slip to a dry surface gives a crisper, less texture-obscuring coating.  I use a combo of commercial under-glazes and slips I make in the studio.  It’s necessary at this point to choose the subspecies: the banded H.s. cinctum from the northern part of its range, or H.s. suspectum from the southern part, which has a more complicated reticulated pattern.  This one is kind of a combo. >>

6) After bisquing, I glaze the piece with dots (another labor and time-intensive step), each dot on the raised nail-head part of the texture, with a combination of black and pinkish-orange glazes.  After it’s fired, this adds depth of color and a glint to the lizard’s skin, similar to the fresh skin of a newly-molted lizard.  Sometimes, I add a leather tongue, if the monster’s mouth has been made slightly opened.  I’m looking into making a fully-open mouth next time, with wire teeth, giving it a really venomous-looking gape.  Here’s a shot of the finished version, a little more bulbous than an authentic lizard, but — after all, it’s a bowl:

Etymology

As mentioned above, Heloderma means “nail-skin”, for the fact that the monster’s skin looks studded or beaded rather than scaled.  suspectum, the species name, comes from the fact that early herpetologists were uncertain if the animal were venomous or not, and only suspected it was because of anecdotal accounts of its potentially lethal bite.  Eventually it was confirmed by laboratory experiments, and dissection, which revealed the large venom glands in the lower jaw.

Check out more info about the natural history of these lizards here.

All photos A.Shock

…will be a great ear.

Happy New Year!

Weeks out of “swim-season”, our pool is a bit dishevelled right now: a recent windstorm, a bit of a chemical imbalance, a bit of neglect, made it time to brush the pool.  It’s a task that in itself isn’t huge fun in cold weather — cold wet aluminum chills the paws fast! — but does get me out of the studio into the outdoors.

It was nice to be out this morning.  Our post-rainstorm air was still clear as blue glass, the temp in the low forties (yes, snow-dwellers, I know this isn’t actually cold!).  The bird feeders, seed-feeders and nectar-feeders both, were crowded with fressing finches and zizzing hummers, and the squee-like contact calls and chatter of the busy Lesser goldfinches filled the yard.

(left: adult Cooper’s hawk.  Photo by Hanna Breetz)

Suddenly, a gray blur shot low over my right shoulder, and streaked over the pool to where the birds filled the creosote bushes, waiting for their turn at nyjer thistle and oilers, or warming in the early sunlight.  The blur pulled up as the finches and sparrows scattered, and manifested as an adult Cooper’s hawk, probably a female to judge by her size (female hawks are generally larger than their males).  A couple of passes through the mesquite tree and she’d emptied the place of smaller birds: Inca doves, goldfinch, house finch, thrashers, Abert’s towhees, cactus wrens, and white-throated sparrows, even the mourning doves and Gambel’s quail, all exploded off the ground, out of the trees and bushes, off the feeders, and disappeared over the yard walls with a burst of wing percussion, jibbering and complaining.  Hummers scolded energetically from their perches safe inside the thorny citrus.

(right: “accipiter kibble”; if you put out seed for the finches, you’re also putting out finches for the raptors. This is a Lesser goldfinch hang-feeding on a thistle-feeder.  Photo A.Shock)

The hawk paused on the top of the wall, searching the creosote below her with a fierce red gaze, glaring a few more birds out from the thin cover.  Then she flew off, empty-taloned, around the corner of the house, possibly headed for the crowded seed feeders in the front yard.

Cooper’s hawks (Accipiter cooperi) are spry-flighted bird specialists, adept at tail-chasing winged prey through foliage or over open terrain due to their short wings and long tails.  These traits show excellently on the photo at the top of the page, a bird perched on a water feature in my friend Hanna’s Phoenix yard last November.  In the photo to the left, take a look at those long yellow toes, and sharp, curved talons: more bird-catching equipment.

(left: the same Cooper’s hawk as above, showing delightfully rusty-barred breast, and intense red iris.  Photo by Hanna Breetz.)

I finished brushing the pool, but in the silence of a yard emptied of small yammering finches and bossy cactus wrens.  Warming my hands on my coffee cup, I hope the Coop’s finds a fat hot pigeon to take off the morning chill.

(Guest photographer Hanna Breetz often has knitting needles as well as a camera in her hands: you can read her green knitting blog, Ever Green Knits, here.)

BTW, just had another bird moment in a humble locale: While in the looney-bin that passes for a local strip mall parking lot, I looked up to see a heavy-bodied, dark falcon laboring aloft with prey, headed for a high rung of an enormous antenna that looms over this block of big box stores deep in east Phoenix.  Seeing a Peregrine in a place like this is not only a bit of happy spotting, but a great reminder to keep your eyes open: spot opportunities anywhere, like a hawk.

…as it basks in the late autumn sun at Boyce Thompson Arboretum.

(Photo A.Shock)

…it’s a coil of tube-slush that blurped out of the hose this morning — yes, ICE!  So, the frost-cloth and styrofoam cups are stratigically positioned, ready to be placed over newly-planted herbs, and on tender cactus-tips late this afternoon: tonight is supposed to be the first frost of winter.  The hummers are hitting the nectar feeders hard.  (Photo A.Shock)

Spotting coatis in Sabino canyon was fortunate in many ways.  Not only is it always amazing to see a coati, but it was artistically inspiring, too.  Before the Tucson visit I had already begun a small coati effigy bowl, so on returning home I was all fired up to finish it and start another bigger one, images of live animals fresh in my head to draw from.

(left: pair of coati effigy bowls in various states of completion; photo A.Shock)

The little one is sculpted, textured, and burnished — bone-dry and awaiting bisque-firing.  The bigger one is still wet, with sponges propping up a tail that wants to slump forward, and a plastic bag over the head to keep the snout workable for a little longer.  (Our cool fall weather is keeping things drying at a snail’s pace, frustrating when you’re trying to get things through the studio rapidly, with the holidays coming up).

Sometimes clay places practical limitations on forms, and there’s no way to make tails as gloriously long and sinuous as real coati tails. But the snouty-shoulderyness of the climbing-digging critters is do-able, as is the higher-in back posture that makes them look like they’re always trundling downhill.  These pieces are destined for sawdust-firing, I think, so the smoky coloration of the twilight-colored desert animals should be suitably earthy, but I’m still thinking about how to get the spectacles and the rings to be visible but not too contrasty.

The little one is apparently a male.  Be sure to click to enlarge.

(All photos A.Shock)

The post-breeding influx of Costa’s hummingbirds in our Phoenix-area yard continues.  This tough little desert hummer is present at the feeders year round, but the population goes up noticeably between about June and December.  Most of the birds we see are males, some in fully developed adult plumage, some with scraggly purple moustaches just growing in.  Gray-green, slightly less pugnacious females are not as flashy, giving the impression of being less numerous, but I’m not certain if this reflects numerical reality or is a figment of observation.

(left: “YOYboy”, young-of-the-year male Costa’s hummer; photo A.Shock)

Since the vacancy of Miss Thang from the front garden, a new battle for the porch feeder is ON.  The combatants are two male Costa’s, who are easy to tell apart by comparing their gorget featheration.  One is “YOYboy” (male Young of the Year), with only sheathed feathers and small purple spangles sticking out from his face like cactus spines (see left).  His favored perch is about 18″ off the ground, the very tips of the leaves of an Agave americana mediapicta in a pot on the front walkway, where a volunteer chuparosa flaunts its red nectar-filled flowers conveniently nearby.

The other is a full adult male, Macho C (nicknamed in remembrance of Arizona’s recently — and tragically — deceased last known resident wild jaguar Macho B), who sports glorious grape Yosemite Sam mustachios.  He perches in low branches of the mesquite tree across the walkway, also near a blooming chuparosa.

(Right: “Macho C”; photo A.Shock)

These habitual perches are sallying points for fierce aerial combat and tail-chases that break out several times each day, accompanied by zoom-buzzy wing-whirr, metallic scolding, and sometimes actual brief mid-air body contact, audible as a quick, dry feathery tap that sounds like someone snapping shut a rice-paper fan.

Much of the action occurs at the feeder, and can go on for minutes — E clocked them at more than three minutes solid the other day, with the winner getting to sip supper from the sticky feeder ports.  The fierceness of the competition has somewhat lessened in recent days, but they’re both still close by, and in between bouts of strife, each roosts and preens on his perch less than 15 feet from the other. Occasionally they join forces to chase other hummers from the front yard.  As far as I can tell, with all but one of the feeders being defended by male Costa’s, the Anna’s hummingbirds have been confined almost entirely to one part of the yard: the airspace and perches in the big Aleppo pine in the backyard, where the Hen nested last spring.

Can’t resist posting this swell picture by E of a Wrentit (Chamaea fasciata), a veritable Dinky Dude not of the Desert, but of West Coast scrub and inland chaparral.

(left, Wrentit, photo E. Shock)

It may have subdued plumage, but how can anyone not like a skulking, big-headed, tiny bird with white eyes, who is the only North American representative of the bird family called Babblers (Timaliidae)?

We had crippling views of several of these dinky dudes on our recent Oregon coast trip.  I saw more Wrentits in a weekend of casual birding in moist coastal forests than during years of birding in California.  This one was dinking around in thick brambles and undergrowth at the top of the headland at the Cape Meares Lighthouse observation platform, in the company of a couple of obliging Winter wrens, another bird I’m not used to seeing so easily (in Arizona, the presence of Winter wrens is practically mythical).

Wrentits are common in their range and habitat, but their skulking habits can make them hard to see.  According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Wrentits…

…may be the most sedentary bird species in north America, with an average dispersal distance from natal nest to breeding spot of about 400 m (1300 ft).

This Dinky Dude is also a homebody.

Listen to its trilling call here.

By the way, please note that the fabulous Ed Bustya figured out the snag in my photo publishing, so please be sure to click on photos posted here to see larger images.  Thanks, Ed!