We have not been stuffing our keyhole with magenta tissue paper.

The local leaf-cutter bees have been trimming neat circles out of fresh, hot pink Bougainvillea bracts and carefully layering them with pollen in a tubular nest for their eggs. The eggs will hatch into grubs — females deepest* so that the woodpecker or cactus wren gets the vulnerable males near the opening (the population needs fewer males to successfully reproduce, the theory goes) — which will eat the pollen and leaf material and hatch into another generation of solitary bees.  Solitary bees don’t produce honey, and aren’t at all aggressive, but are vital pollinators in the garden.  If you don’t have handy keyholes in your screen doors, you can buy or make nest-boxes with drill holes or bamboo to encourage them.  A few scalloped leaves on your bougs or roses is worth it!

Collateral observation: I use this worn lever door-handle fifty times a day, and I never see it close up like in the photo — hadn’t appreciated the “greek key” design circling the hole.  Also, I’m pleased to see that its patina is just getting good!

*I couldn’t find out if the gender of the eggs develops as a result of depth, or somehow the female eggs are laid first.  The former sounds more plausible to me, but I’d love any ideas?

(For more info, click here . It’s by a British blogger, but the basic lifestyle info is the same for this type of bee on either side of the Atlantic; be sure to enlarge his photos of the cutaway nesting chambers and the circular cuts the bees make on thin, pliable leaves).

A few weeks ago, we discovered that one of our local Gambel’s quail pairs had nested in an aloe bed at the foot of the back garden wall.

The pale, speckled eggs were tucked deep into a hollow among the spiky aloe leaves — real Spot the Bird material — they’re barely visible inside the red circle on the photo. (click to enlarge) >>

The hen had scraped a shallow depression, lined it with bits of dry vegetation and a few feathers, and settled hennily onto the eggs.  She had hidden her nest well, but unfortunately it was while we were out of town and the garden was quiet.  Once we came home and started watering and raking and making a human kind of tidying fuss, she flushed when we passed near. If she hadn’t flown out of cover each time with a clapping wing burst, we might never have discovered her and her trove.  On the other hand, these skittish, explosive escapes were as much distraction as alarm, designed to draw a predator’s attention towards herself, and away from her helpless, immobile egg cache.  But we kept away as much as possible and did the math, looking forward to seeing the little cloud of downy chicks swarming uncountably behind her before long.

For more than a week we avoided her part of the yard as much as possible in order to keep from disturbing her, but occasionally we had to Pass the Nest.  At those times, when she flew, or if she wasn’t at home, we’d peek briefly into her green hollow to see what was new.  We counted ten eggs, which is about average for Gambel’s quails.  If the clutch had been out in the open, it wouldn’t have looked significantly different from these Cadbury Mini Eggs (photo by William Warby from Wikimedia Commons) — if they’d been a bit rounder, larger, and not delicious candy-coated chocolate.  No pink or yellow ones, either: they all look like the white ones with cinnamon speckles and blotches.

Here’s a slightly better view of the genuine eggs, enlarged from the photo above right >>

For a week nothing changed: hen, aloe, eggs.  Late one afternoon I passed by, and when she didn’t flush I peered down into the hole.  I didn’t see eggs — just some miscellaneous checkering and speckles.  Since quail babies follow mom right out of the nest the minute the last chick has pipped, never to return, my first thought was that the chicks had hatched and I was seeing eggshells. But it didn’t look quite right for that. I bent closer in, peering, and saw bright eyes staring back.

A young gopher snake had found the nest.  All I could see was elegant coils of yellow and brown snakeskin draped over the eggs in the shallow scrape.

>> the gopher snake in the hen’s nest.  It looks like it’s eating an egg, but it’s just the angle of the photo

After managing a few blurry cell phone photos in very low light, I moved away, not wanting to spook the snake.  Since I didn’t know whether the quail hen was going to come back to the nest or not, it would be a shame if the eggs went to waste: the gopher might as well have them.

Would the snake eat all ten eggs?  Would the hen abandon the nest in agitation?  Did she even know she’d been robbed (possibly not if the snake came and went while she was away, because unlike ravens, quail can’t count).  We didn’t know.

What happened was that the young gopher ate five of the eggs, and departed.  The hen came back, and continued to incubate the remainder.

But only for two days.  After that, she didn’t return to the nest and none of the remaining five eggs hatched.  We don’t know if she abandoned the nest because of the snake, or because the eggs weren’t viable, or if she met her own fate (probably not to the egg-robbing adolescent snake, which wasn’t big enough to eat her).  There were five eggs for a while, then four, and now there are two — somebody’s coming back periodically for a snack.

<< today, two remaining eggs

It seems like a terrible loss for the hen, and it made us sad to not have a batch of fresh quailets swarming around the yard (and we still haven’t seen any quail hatchlings this season, which is unusual).  But a moment’s reflection provides reassurance.  The eggs went to a native predator, and weren’t wasted by some other pointless loss like being stepped on, eaten by a well-fed pet dog, or crushed by our neighbor with a dropped branch as he lopped mesquite limbs on our side of the wall.  Even if the eggs had hatched, the odds are that some of the chicks would have been lost to predators anyway, perhaps to the very snake that scored the egg bonanza.  I’m pleased to have gopher snakes and coachwhips (or even the occasional problematic other) working the yard, keeping less appealing scurrying neighbors in check. It means there’s some vestige of a natural system at play here, so I can’t truly begrudge them a baby cottontail or a quail egg, or eight.

With luck, experience, and efficient gene expression, the hen is sitting on another clutch right now under the watchful eye of her baby-daddy rooster, in a nest better hidden from foot traffic, human disruption, and snake-sense.

(All photos and illustration by A.Shock, except where noted)

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.

It’s been a couple of months since the Cooper’s hawk (now long gone to its more northern, mountainous summer home) ate Hoover, the feral African Collared Dove who shared our garden.  I’m not mourning him — in fact I’m thankful that a proper wild hawk absorbed his nutrients and energy instead of a second-storey window or someone’s over-fed, bored housecat — but I do miss him still.  Cleaning up my computer desktop during yesterday’s stormy weather I uncovered one of my favorite photos of Hoover: a shot from below of the soles of his salmon-pink feet visible through the translucent plastic of the studio roof:

When I was working in there, he’d land with a thump and stomp to the edge to peer over to look for seeds, his rapid, trundling dove-steps clicking toenails all across the ridged panels.  I’m glad I wasn’t in there the day the Coop’s took him from this very perch — the view from below would have been grimmer than this cheery reminder of him.

… it just seems like it sometimes.

This Friday Saturday and Sunday, from 10am – 5pm March 9, 10, 11, it’s time for the spring Camelback Studio Tour, and if you visit the Sherwood Heights neighborhood of south Scottsdale, you can find lots of things besides owls, even at Three Star Owl Studio (Studio #3 on this map).  Among the exciting Non-Owlular things available are the metal south-west themed garden sculptures of Tracy Paul of Pentimento Metalwork.  Here’s a tantalizing image of the shadow of one of Tracy’s agave-like creations. >> She’s brought a large selection of delectable items and strewn them artfully around our rambling garden, where you can wander around searching them out.

And, there are three other studios to visit filled with paintings, clay, jewelry, glass, and gourds handmade by local artists Lynn Gustafson, Vickie Morrow, Pam Harrison, Jan Campbell, Chris Demma, Reg McCormick, Bernie Nienebar, Lynn Strolin and Margaret Sullivan.

Of course, Three Star Owl Clay is stocked as usual with a motley assortment of owlishness (that’s motley said with pride), some new like the Boiled Owl Sake Sets (see previous post for photos) and Napping Owl Tumblers — which exude a quaint whiff of Victoriana, pushing Retro all the way back to the Martin Brothers.  But I’ll also have on hand some non-owl favorites like Horned Lizard Bowls, a Gila Monster Effigy bowl, Frog Skeleton Mugs, and also a bit of species-faithful Wazzo-ware for the birders among us, and more.  The photo above is my studio bench tonight, with new items waiting to be photographed and priced — note the Gilded Flicker in the Saguaro vessel: definitely Not An Owl, for a change.  Oh, and a couple of Writhing Rαt Dog planter/bowls.

<< And for the first time ever, I’ll have hand-knit hats for sale by Sylvia Schoenfeld (my mother), like these.  And yes, those are owl cables with button eyes — which makes them most definitely mostly about owls.

(All photos A.Shock)

Hoover, the semi-tame feral African Collared Dove who frequented our yard, is no more.

I’ve been postponing the task of writing an obit for a couple of weeks, hoping that the white dove taken by the wintering Cooper’s hawk wasn’t Hoover.  But I can’t put it off: we no longer hear his soft, two-note cooing, and he doesn’t appear on the back porch to beg for a seed or two, perching on our palms to accept safflower, sunflower hearts, or millet, all the while his dark red eye making sure that we’re not up to something.  His habit of rapidly vacuuming up seeds earned him his nickname.  This habit of coming to the porch for handouts was also likely his demise: I saw the Cooper’s flash past the back door, and heard him strike the studio roof, where Hoover lurked hoping for a handout. Later, I found the sad pale feather pool in the back of the garden near the lemon tree, where the Coop’s had stood on the ground to pluck his prey.  The clear place on the left is where the hawk stood, leaving a “feather shadow”.  >>

In some ways it’s surprising that a non-native and bright-plumaged individual lasted in our predator-rich corner of the Phoenix area as long as he did.  The first photos we have of Hoover date from April 2005.  He’s been a part of our yard experience since then, mooching, alerting us to owls, courting and contributing his exotic genes to the local columbid gene pool. He would occasionally “help” me pack the truck for a sales event, walking into the garage to see what was up, and if there were seeds involved.

He was a cheerful presence, and we miss him.

For more photos, and to read more about Hoover and the small  (now nearly extirpated) population of African Collared doves in our neighborhood, click on the category “Hoover the Dove” in the left-hand sidebar.  (All photos A or E Shock)