Seriously, dude, the ears are a giveaway.

A scrape in damp soil in the shade of a shrub is desert cottontail air conditioning on a 100 degree afternoon.  A nearby brushpile makes a good escape plan, and there’s viral bermuda grass for grazing just a few feet away.  This is the rabbit equivalent of the dude with beers in his hat tubing down the Salt River.  The only thing missing is the smell of sunscreen, and blaring music. (Photo A.Shock, Canon EOS xti).

Low desert mornings are beautiful in May and June, the air still cool and crisp before the slight sogginess of monsoon season sets in later in the summer.  The real desert is even cooler, but here in our corner of Phoenix there is enough open saguaro-y space in nearby Papago Park and few enough lawns in the ‘hood to maintain a deserty feel in the air.

Sunrise this morning was prime, overseen by a waning gibbous moon still high in the sky, and I wandered into the back garden early to see who was around.  I found a pair of complementary blooms: a passion flower winding up a sunflower — sunrise and moonset together on a garden scale.

While I was admiring them, tiny Lesser goldfinches flew into the sunflowers to fress.  We put out nyjer thistle in feeders for them, but even still they’re always hungry enough to rifle the seedy charms of a sunflower.  So we let the reseedlings take over the herb garden in the summer, and allow the basil plants and mexican hats go to seed for the little yellow dinosaurs, who repay us by spreading the seeds around for next year’s crop.

The Lesser Goldfinch below came within feet of me to feed.  Her boldness can be interpreted as lack of experience — she’s a juvenile, and not as jaunty as the big boys, but she’ll do. (Photos A.Shock: upper, with iPhone4/Camera+app; lower, with Canon EOS xti, 55-250mm zoom)

Our front porch doesn’t get much traffic: the occasional UPS guy, guy leaving door hangers flogging local pizza joints, signature-gatherer, political candidate, stranger, or neighbor will come down our sunbaked, overgrown front walk, all the way from the street to the garage to the front door.  But not very often.  The back door is where most of our domestic foot traffic flows.

I should clarify: by “foot traffic” I’m talking about during the day, and bipedal mammalian feet, unless it’s an occasional Cactus wren gleaning the crevices behind the Mexican metal cat mask or the Talavera wall planter with plastic cactus replicas.

At night it’s a different story.  The front porch is where it’s at.  It’s because of the porch light, and the overhang, and the textured vertical surfaces.  All these features seem to have combined to create an ideal locale for a night time hangout, part snack bar, part thoroughfare, and part pick-up joint.  Moths, beetles, and a host of night-flying insects are drawn to the light, while in turn cellar spiders, lacewings, huntsman spiders (big!), geckos and other predators lurk too, waiting for a slip-up among the herds of prey.

<< Praying mantis on the screen door (photo A.Shock)

Last night, we had a small native desert praying mantis on the screen door, swivelling its big-eye head in the dim light.  In real life these aren’t blue, of course (that’s just photo-artsiness to distract from the low-light graininess in my shot) — or green like the giant asian species people buy online to release for garden pest control. These little ones are grayish brown, and this one is full grown at under two inches.  These are the guys whose breadloaf-like eggcases we find in the yard (or, once, in the house on a plant we took in for the winter; the hatchling mantids are green).

Love the mantis!  Or, if you’re very small, fear the mantis!

Since we aren’t equipped to either observe or photograph solar eclipses directly, E and I took to the yard during Sunday evening’s event to seek indirect eclipse images instead.  The classic pinhole method is simple and adequate — poke a small hole in foil or stiff cardboard, and let the sun shine through the hole onto another card, positioned so that a small image of the sun can be seen on the second surface: the bigger the spy-hole, the farther away the second card needs to be.  This works well enough to see with your eyes, but we found the images of the sun were too vague for the clumsy auto-focus mechanisms of digital cameras to gather adequate images.  Also, the scale of the card operation is tiny, and so, although interesting (and positively better than the alternatives of not seeing the eclipse or blinding yourself trying) it’s not hugely thrilling.

(<< multiple solar eclipses cast onto a house wall through the pine tree canopy)

Fortunately, our yard has an enormous pinhole camera growing in it: the Aleppo pine tree.  Its clumped, criss-crossing needles create a fine mesh that, in addition to delightfully sifting raptors out of the wind, also results in a wonderful indirect eclipse-viewing system.  The tree’s foliage-mass essentially acts as a large card with innumerable pinholes in it: the pine shadows — as well as the shadows of any other trees with sufficiently small spaces between leaves — become patches of eclipse crescents projected onto the back wall of the house, the block fence, and even the ground where the surface is smooth enough to retain detail.  The apertures (the spaces between the trees’ foliage) and the focal plane (the wall, etc) are far enough apart so that the solar crescents are fairly large.

Those solar images can be readily and safely observed and photographed with any camera, and although not as spectacular as a directly photographed astronomical image of the sun, these sun-shaped light leaks make up for their lack of solitary crispness with the sight of multitudes of bright crescents spangling whatever lies in the umbra of the trees, even E’s ASU tee shirt: Sun Devils for real! >>

(By the way, trees do this pin-hole sun-image thing all the time, it’s just that the light-leaks are round like the unobstructed sun, so we call it “dappling” and consider it “normal”.)

(Above photos A.Shock)

In the following series of photos (by E.Shock), beginning at the left, you can see the progression of the moon shadow from upper right to lower left across the disc of the sun.  In Phoenix, we experienced more than 80% occlusion.

Not keen on enacting the Mad Dogs and Englishmen scenario, E and I lounged for a couple of hours during the heat of the day in the shade of a wild palm grove last weekend.

<< Southwest Palm Grove, Tierra Blanca Mountains, Anza-Borrego State Park (photo A.Shock)

This is a well-known oasis, and not terribly remote — but a destination doesn’t have to require too much hiking before you can expect to have the place primarily to yourself, especially if it’s slightly uphill. With only occasional others wandering through, we ate lunch and waited for the heat of the day to subside so we could march back across the desert to our campsite in the low sun.

E doesn’t sit still very well, but he was amenable under the circumstances: just feet from the moist green calm of the grove, the white desert glared through dark trunks, reminding us of the hot, spiny, and hard path home.  He read, and poked around the substantial grove with his camera.  There was plenty to look at: like windmills, palm trees have a quality which readily vacillates between stateliness and creepiness according to wind, light, and the observer’s mood.  At noon on a calm day, these palms seemed merely sleepy and obliging, providing shade and coolth to travelers, both human and animal.  I sat on a rock, choosing this outlier palm to scratch into a small Moleskine sketchbook with an excessively-finepointed pen, fussing over capturing the complicated but orderly rhythm of shadow and light on the pleated, fringed fans, and considering how to show the blackness of the trunk without losing the way the sun picked out its checkered texture. Slatted shadows wheeled around us as the sun rolled across the afternoon sky.

Sitting still is a wonderful way to see birds, especially at a frondy desert oasis with high perches for cawwing ravens and low cover for furtive Lincoln’s sparrows and simultaneously sneaky and showy Common yellowthroats.  Instead of keeping a list in a notebook, I wrote species’ names as they manifested in the palm’s portrait. It was possible to use a cramped scrap of background for this because bird diversity was low — the list was quite short, even with non-avian species like ants and butterflies included, and the few words provided the perfect coarse-textured, mid-range value for the desert beyond the grove.

<< Look closely, this isn’t just a landscape, or a portrait of a stately middle-aged California fan palm (Washingtonia filifera), it’s a bird list (click, twice, to enlarge).

Normally, previous years’ fronds cloak the trunks of Washingtonia palms to the ground, giving them a mammoth-legged look: sturdy, shaggy and brown.  But this grove had burned sometime in the past few decades, leaving the surviving older palms bare-legged and carbony black, smooth and manicured like well-behaved resort palms.  Little palms grew up around them, a decade or two old themselves, and bearing all their previous fans on their trunks naturally, indicating they’d sprouted after the last fire.

>> glowing spines (photo E.Shock)

We timed the return trip well, and eventually hiked back to camp with the low sun behind us.  It back-lit the cholla with a golden haze, and ignited the early Scott’s orioles perched on red ocotillo tips into melodious yellow flames.  But the orioles wouldn’t hold still for a photo, and there was no time for a sketch; darkness falls abruptly in the desert.

It exhibits questionable judgment to leave Phoenix right now when the Sonoran desert is so beautiful, but we did.  In a fit of really-needing-to-get-out-of-town E and I enacted a spur of the moment plan for a busman’s holiday of camping in the Colorado desert*.  We took off down I-8 in the footsteps of Juan Bautista deAnza himself, headed towards a bit of California desert between our desert in Phoenix and the desert under the currently snow-capped Peninsular peaks east of San Diego (see photo below, be sure to click to enlarge).

<< our tent above Bow Willow (all photos A.Shock unless noted)

Between.  We arrived at the south end of Anza-Borrego State Park between weekends (it was spring break at ASU, so E was more or less at liberty mid-week).  The weather was a slice of unseasonable summer between winter and spring, topped by a dry blue sky between pacific storms and a tarry, star-salted night sky between moons.  It was a waiting wing of a moment, a pared-down parcel of between, when all that was in the desert was what was always there, the patient bare granite bones, the sun, cactus, creosote, and cool, rustling palms: the permanent residents.  Ephemerals — the summer-breeding birds and annual wildflowers — hadn’t appeared in any numbers, yet.

>> Overlooking the Carrizo Valley and the snow-dusted Tierra Blanca Mtns from the notch at the end of Smuggler’s Canyon

Arriving in any desert for peak wildflower bloom or migration at an oasis is serendipitous: we’ve managed it occasionally, sometimes by accident and sometimes on purpose — once for a songbird jam at Butterbredt Springs in the Mojave and twice for “jubilee” blooms in Death Valley only a few years apart.  These were times we effortlessly tripped over the attractions and high points, unable to look away from showers of jewel-colored orioles and tanagers and thick carpets of bright petals.  This between season was different: we had to look hard and close for things — the serendipity took more effort.

Ocotillo (Fouquieria splendens) being very splendid indeed; this one was about 10 feet tall  >>

But the desert seldom disappoints and though between, this trip was no exception.  The beavertail prickly pear, studded with fat pink-green buds, were clearly about to burst into glorious magenta bloom only after we were gone.  But the tips of the Ocotillo were in flame, and in the few days we were there their thorny bleached stems scaled over with green leaves.  Little fishhook cactus rocked coronas of creamy blossoms that looked glued onto their heads like fake straw flowers on a hat.  In places, a tide of tiny goldfields washed around the feet of gray wintery shrubs (see photo at bottom of post).  The mesquite and desert willows were still bare, but the Elephant trees (Bursera microphylla) were green with their incense-scented leaflets, and deer vetch, creosote, and desert lavender were all blooming.  Tangles of red-flowered chuparosa scrambled over granite boulders, and in tight crevices fronds of “resurrection plant” or desert mossfern (Selaginella sp) unfurled, instantly green and pliant after recent rains.

<< “Fishhook cactus” Mammillaria (probably) dioica.  They need no more than a fracture in rock for a foot-hold, and seem to require no soil at all.

Birds were also in a between season: Rock wrens and Black-throated sparrows, present year-round on the rocky hillsides, were ubiquitous and vocal, along with Cactus and Canyon wrens, Costa’s hummers, quail, and ravens.  There were only occasional passers-through: a Lincoln’s sparrow in the palm oasis; surprising numbers of Sage thrashers moving through the Bow Willow wash. But the summer visitors were barely starting to trickle in — we found a couple of male Scott’s orioles alternately singing their ringing song and molesting nectar-oozing Ocotillo flowers, a Common Yellowthroat working the dense understory at the palm grove, and an Ash-throated flycatcher k-brkk‘ed near the campsite.

A Black-throated sparrow; who says sparrows are plain?  (photo E.Shock) >>

Surprisingly, we were between when it came to snakes, too — we saw none, but I’m sure they were out.  On the other hand, lizards were plentiful.  Blue-bronze Granite Spiny lizards basked, and we were ignored hard by a harlequin Baja California Collared lizard sunning on a boulder right next to the trail.

<< Baja California Collared lizard (Crotaphytus vestigium) is a species of collared lizard found only in a small range in the US, as its name indicates.

The only disappointment of being between was that our transportation was between, too: we discovered after arriving that the truck’s four wheel drive wouldn’t lock in, leaving us with high-clearance passage but wimpy traction.  This wasn’t an emergency but it ruled out more remote, difficult roads — we could only go where two-wheel drive or our two feet could take us, which turned out to be plenty for the short time we had.  But we missed some interesting habitat like the Carrizo Marsh, and intriguing, fossiliferous geology that E is itching to check out.

We’ll have to get that 4-wheel drive fixed so that instead of between, next time we’ll definitely be smack-dab.

Low carpet of yellow wildflowers I know only as “Goldfields” >>

* The term “Colorado Desert” generally refers to the portion of the Sonoran Desert that lies within the state of California.

Today’s weather has been changeable, to understate the case.  After a week of early warmth, winter has barged back into the low desert in the form of a March Pacific storm, bringing intermittent rain, gusty winds, spotty sunshine, and nippy (for us) temperatures.

Folding clean laundry was the other option, so I chose fiddling on the computer, and this is the result: a highly-edited photo of a Bridled titmouse (Poecile sclateri) snapped up at Montezuma Well last fall, on the exciting fortuitous Tarantula Visit.  Overcome at the time by the thrill of encountering miniature possibly un-named by science marauding arachnids, the comparatively calm pleasure of a small gray bird was passed over until today, when I discovered some “lost” photos on my computer desktop.

<< Bridled titmouse (Photo shot by E and edited by A Shock)

These are the least plain of the titmice, which are known more for their jaunty demeanor than their subtle plumage, which is usually buffy gray and tan.  In fact, before it was split into “Oak” and “Juniper” species, the other western titmouse was officially known as the Plain titmouse.  But the Bridled not only sports a perky peaky head, but has a white face with ornate black “bridle” outlining it.  And look how much that natty head pattern looks like sticks silhouetted against the bright sky — the first and second rules of camouflage: break up your overall body shape, and blend in to the background.

We don’t see Bridled titmice — or any parids (chickadee-related birds) — in the desert very often: they mainly breed in oak-woodland or coniferous forests at higher elevations.  During the colder weather months, however, they can be seen down here, but not usually “in town”.  So spotting one of these guys uphill is always pleasant, and getting a picture of one isn’t easy: like all ‘dees they are dinky, chatty, busy, and speedy.  This was one of a pair foraging in low mesquite trees, gleaning twigs and bark for little joint-legged goodies, staying in touch with one another with continuous contact-calls.  To hear the Bridled titmouse’s punchy vocal efforts, click here.

Anna’s hummers are capable of setting clutches just about year round in warm climate states like Arizona and California.  The little males have been doing their combo territorial and courtship dives — which culminate in a loud, popping “CHEEP” sound — since December, at least in our neighborhood.  This little Hen in Tucson has gotten a bit of an early start to her reproductive year: here’s a digiscoped shot (acceptable if not perfectly sharp) of her on her fresh nest >>

I was visiting Kate‘s house in Tucson on my way back from Wings Over Willcox, when the motion of the tiny busy hen happened to catch my eye as she flew up into her nest with a beakful of some sort of light-colored fibers to add to the construction.  Mature Aleppo pines seem to be a favored nidification tree for Anna’s, where nests are often built on top of the smallish pinecones, as in this case.  I wish her luck, and I hope there’s not too much more winter weather for her to sit tight through!

(Photo A.Shock)

Tens of thousands of Sandhill cranes winter in the fields and wetlands of far southeastern Arizona each year, and they have their own festival: Wings Over Willcox, held in mid-January by the historical community of Willcox, AZ. This year is the 19th Annual WOW Festival, and it’s part of SE Arizona’s celebration of the state centennial.

>> Dawn pinkens sandhill cranes standing in the icy waters of Crane Lake south of Willcox, AZ (Photo A.Shock)

There are tours to the local hotspots, not just for crane-sighting, but for other winter birding specialties in the bird-rich, high-desert grassland in and around the Sulphur Springs Valley: the Chiricahua Mountains, Whitewater Draw, Lake Cochise, and more.  Not all of the outings are bird-related: there are historical, agricultural, gastronomic, and archeological tours, too. Check availability for tickets here. There are also seminars by local experts on anything from photography to astronomy to more birds and birding, which I believe are free.

If your tour of choice is sold out, don’t despair. The cranes can be viewed (and heard!) flying in v-formation overhead often, but you can also visit places like Crane Lake (above) and Whitewater Draw at dawn and dusk to see flights of cranes leaving (morning) or returning (afternoon) to and from foraging in the agricultural fields during daylight hours.  Driving the public farm roads south of town at any time of day, you can luck into hundreds of cranes moving in a group through a field, or a fierce bird of prey like a Ferruginous hawk patrolling the skies or perched on a wire over the field margins.  Loggerhead shrikes are fairly common, as well: check out a previous post of mine for more photos.

<< three Sandhill crane magnets by Three Star Owl will be available at WOW for $16 each

Three Star Owl will be at the Nature Expo portion of the event, held in the Willcox Community Center, which is the headquarters for the festival.  The Nature Expo will be open from Thursday afternoon until Sunday, check my Events page for more specific hours and a link to a map and driving directions.  If you’re in the area, please stop by and say Hello — admission to the Nature Expo is FREE!

A word of advice to those planning on visiting: although sunny winter days in this part of AZ can be comfortable, Willcox is at 4200 feet above sea level, so night-time temps usually dip well below freezing this time of year, and if it’s windy or overcast, daytime temps will be brisk.  So if you plan to get out into the world on your trip here, dress for the weather!