E and I went uphill today, to see what last week’s winter storms had brought to the higher terrain: a proper Sunday Drive.  We drove up into the Sierra Anchas, a rugged wilderness area east of Phoenix, east of Lake Roosevelt, a place we seem never to explore frequently enough.  In a surprisingly short distance, the road passes through a wide range of landscapes, from the deserty upper Salt River canyon, through yucca-studded chaparral, oak-piñon woodland, and up to thick ponderosa pine forest.  The recent storms had brought the snow level down to about 3800 feet, so much of the area above the desert foothills was still blanketed in heavy, deep snow.

Here are some images from our day. (Photos A.Shock, except Phainopepla, E.Shock)

Above: The snowy Sierra Anchas from the Saguaro-rich foothills below

Above: Spent agave blooms and prickly pear in the snow;  right, a male Phainopepla perched by his favorite food, mistletoe berries.

Below: Ponderosa Pines near Sawmill Flat.

Here are some boffo blue beetles.

I don’t know anything about them. We found them last year just below a cloud forest in southern Veracruz, Mexico, on the side of a road that crossed a re-grown lava flow. There were hundreds of them, congregating for reasons possible to guess at, but known only to themselves, in an astounding density. Each is just over 1/2 inch long, and the color is true.

Anyone know who they are?

Here is an bonus unidentified beetle, big and green, seen at the same location.  It was almost 2 inches long.  The irregular dark shape that looks like backwards Texas in the highlight of its carapace is the reflection of my hand holding the camera.  That’s how reflective its shell was.  Click to enlarge, and look at all its little pores!

(All photos A.Shock)

Update: After looking around the internet, I believe the green beetle on the left is a Fig beetle, Cotinus sp.

I’m also working on the theory that the blue beetles may be cobalt milkweed beetles, Chrysochus cobaltinus, but further investigation is needed.

If these IDs are correct, both beetles are quite common, and also occur in the southern US.  The fig beetle is a favorite prey item of Mississippi kites, and no wonder — it looks like it might have some meat under its hood.

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!

…like saguaros in the snow!

This photo of saguaros dusted with the white stuff near Lake Roosevelt has been trotted out from my photo archives: our current desert skies are clear and cold, at least for now, and all the snow is up above the Rim, apparently in good quantities this year.  The hummers are swarming the feeders, and the lesser goldfinch and quail are chowing down on their seed of choice.  A typical winter scene in these parts.

Wherever you are, in snow or sun, enjoying seed, nectar or vole, Three Star Owl wishes you an excellent holiday season.

(Photo A.Shock)

…and a Phainopepla in a Palo Verde tree.

As around the turn of every new year, Christmas Bird Counts are happening across America.  Under the auspices of the Audubon Society winter bird distribution and population information is compiled, collected by volunteers, most of whom are not ornithologists but people with a non-professional — although sometimes intense — interest in birds.  The vast quantity of info gathered in this time period is used “to assess the health of bird populations – and to help guide conservation action” in the U.S.

What do the volunteers gain from their long, often cold, hours in the field counting both species and individual birds seen?  For some it’s competition, to best a personal record for birds seen in a given area, and of course, there’s the satisfaction of adding to what’s known about North American avifauna.

right: Four Peaks above the Verde Valley

For me, it’s getting out into in the winter landscape, among plants and animals which, sometimes, it’s been too long since I’ve seen.  Of course, the birds are a big draw for me — but it’s not just birds.  We regularly see other critters on our patch of territory: jackrabbits, coyotes and cottontails are common, but one year, we spotted a bobcat.

For the past three years, I’ve  helped with the Salt and Verde Rivers CBC.

left: Yavapai Nation on the Verde River showing the bands of habitats we census.

Our particular area is in the Yavapai Nation along the Verde River east of the Phoenix metro area (special permission to bird the Indian Community is necessary), under the changeable faces of Four Peaks, at about 7600 feet, the highest peaks close to Phoenix.

The immediate censusing area is a mix of riverside riparian (cottonwoods, willows and invasive salt cedars), cattle-trampled mesquite bosques (mesquite and graythorn with little in between but sand and cowpies), desert upland (saguaros, creosote, cholla, palo verde and ironwood), and agricultural land: the tribe maintains many acres in pecan groves, citrus, and alfalfa. There’s also a patch of semi-rural residential area where tribe members and employees live.  Such variable habitats make for a fairly diverse species assortment, ranging from invasive exotics, like Eurasian Collared Doves and starlings, to uncommon natives like Bald Eagles, which nest along the Verde River.

right: Rio Verde

This area distinguishes itself in a few ways: in numbers of sparrows, including white-crowned, savannah, lark, song, vesper (photo below), and lincoln’s, which glean brushy ditches cut through the fields, alongside verdin, bewick’s wrens, and lesser goldfinch.  Other small birds like orange-crowned and yellow-rumped warblers, ruby-crowned kinglets and both expected species of gnatcatchers hang in the cottonwoods — this year we saw bushtits for the first time. Red-winged black birds, meadowlarks, mourning doves, american pipits and house finches fill the fields and line the electrical wires along the road.  The river hosts wintering waterfowl large and small: gadwall, mergansers, wigeon, mallards, bufflehead, canada geese, coots, and this year, even snow geese.  Throw in five or six species of woodpeckers and other Sonoran upland species like thrashers, Abert’s towhees, cardinals, and quail — the area holds a record for most Phainopepla counted on a CBC — and you’ve got quite an assortment.

With such a smorgasbord of small birds — so very tasty! — there are plentiful predators like Peregrine falcons, Cooper’s hawks, Red tailed hawks, American kestrels, and harriers.  One “functional raptor” we encountered was a Loggerhead shrike, working the brushy ditches for reptiles and insects, maybe even a sparrow to eat.

right: Loggerhead shrike

There’s even raptor-on-raptor pursuit: I saw a Peregrine dive at a kestrel.  As the smaller falcon coursed over alfalfa fields searching for an unwary or slow pipit, the peregrine above took a shot at it out of the sun, its dive so steep and sharp that I could hear its feathers buzz like a bullroarer, the avian equivalent of a sonic boom.  But before the strike, it pulled up short, giving the impression of having accomplished a dry run; the kestrel only dipped in the air evasively, and went on its way.

Experiencing the unpredictability of the natural world is what makes getting out to count enjoyable.  And it doesn’t have to be far from the bustle of people and suburbia: sometimes, it’s all within a few miles of the intersection of a major highway, a casino, and the inevitable Denny’s.

(All photos taken by A.Shock during the 2009 Salt/Verde River Christmas Bird Count)

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)