Smart is the new mighty.

Here’s a link to the transcript of the Inaugural Address on NPR’s website. Better yet, hear the address as Pres. Obama gave it: there’s a link on the NPR page you can click on to hear him speak it. It’s strong, inclusive, thoughtful, and focused, and meant for all of us on the planet, not just Americans.

Click here to view the new White House website, including the White House blog.  Transparent government manifesting before our eyes.  And it’s not even tomorrow, yet.

Photo from Wikipedia.

Fortunately, I was able to hook up with V on her scouting trip this morning, and this is where we went: the dawn lift-off of Sandhill cranes just south of the town of Willcox, AZ.

Above is a photo of a small fraction of the cranes flying out from the ice-crusted ponds where they spent the night — something like 6 or 8 thousand roost at this place.  Dos Cabezas peak in the Chiricahuas is the twinned topography in the distance.  The sound the cranes make is as much a part of the spectacle as the sight of thousands of birds in wheeling lines overhead.  It’s an amazing noise, which I haven’t found an adequate way of describing.  A croaky sort of rattly trumpeting, continuous and amplified and multiplied by thousands of syrinxes, it’s mixed with the baby-piping calls of immature birds urging their parents to wait up, distinct above the stuttery honks of the adults.  (I’ve got a great video clip with the sound of the lift-off that I’m currently unable to get the editor to accept; I’ll post as soon as that struggle is over…)

An immature Golden eagle momentarily fools us all into thinking it’s intent on a crane on the fly, but it turns out to be adolescent high jinx and it perches on a power tower instead, after creating a fuss in the air, and setting most of the remaining cranes into flight.  Earlier, a handful of Chihuahan ravens hadn’t done as efficient a job of agitating everyone.

The cranes fly out to feed in the stubbly fields of Sulphur Springs Valley during the day: here’s a telephoto shot of a group working in a field with an irrigation pivot looking like a fence behind them.  They move slowly but steadily as a group, pecking the ground and occasionally each other, challenging breast to breast and vocalizing if necessary.  An occasional stick is brandished boldly, and there is some hopping about, with stick.  The immatures have brownish crowns, the adults a bright red heart-shaped “shield” between the base of their bill and their crowns.  Not visible in the picture, a big Ferruginous hawk lurks over the crowd, perhaps waiting for the probing bills to stir up a rodent, and American kestrels follow the foraging flocks as well. The cranes themselves often seem to follow the field equiptment, poking through freshly turned soil for goodies.  Horned larks work the furrows too, a Loggerhead shrike emits a variety of calls from a power line, and Eastern meadowlarks in large numbers stalk purposefully over the clods.  All of these birds, like the farmers, make their living off the soil of the Sulphur Springs Valley, and to some degree their numbers and even presence are due to agriculture.

In Willcox,  Land of the Cranes, they are everywhere: back at the motel, a solitary crane poses obligingly on the commode, but its stately blue silence has little in common with the mobile, gabbling gray thousands we’ve just witnessed.

For those of you within range of southeastern Arizona, consider visiting the annual Wings Over Willcox Nature Festival this weekend.  Held in the historic community of Willcox, this event celebrates the yearly return of tens of thousands of Sandhill cranes to the Sulphur Springs Valley in southeastern Arizona.  The rich Chihuahuan desertscrub and grasslands are slung between the Chiricahua Mountains and the Dragoon Mountains.  Patched with mesquite bosques, farmland, rangeland, and dotted with pools and ponds of semi-permanent and seasonal water, the Sulphur Springs Valley is winter home not only to the cranes, but to extraordinary numbers of birds of prey, sparrows and longspurs, waterfowl, shore birds including upland varieties, and other bird species people may not commonly associate with our region.  Scaled quail, Eastern meadowlarks, Bendire’s thrashers and Mountain plovers lurk in the wintery fields along with more expected Roadrunners and Gambel’s quail.  It’s a land of agricultural heritage — hydroponics and hay, and ranching, too.

This close to the event, many of the fieldtrips are filled, but check at the registration desk in the Community Center for last minute cancellations.  Also, many of the sights, notably the crane lift-off at Whitewater Draw and elsewhere along the farm roads in the Valley, are something you can do on your own.  The WOW organizers can give advice on where and when to go.

This year’s festival is the sixteenth annual WOW, and it’s the second year Three Star Owl has been in Willcox for the event, offering Arizona-specific table wares and sculptural items both funky and sensible.

Come visit “The Owl” at:

Booth 12, Willcox Community Center, 312 West Stewart Street, Willcox, AZ

Friday 16 Jan: 10am -7pm

Saturday 17 Jan: 8am – 5pm

Sunday 18 Jan: 8am – 3.30pm

more info at: wingsoverwillcox.com

Right: Small Turkey Vulture “Bottle” with detachable, posable head.

(3.75″ ht, $52)

Bird photograpy by Ed Bustya, “Sandhill Cranes taking flight”.

One of the most famous saguaro plunge stories there is tells of the death of a man with a gun plugging saguaros in the Arizona desert.  You’ve probably heard the story — a heartless gunman is killed by a saguaro he shoots until it falls on him.

I always suspected this tale was urban legend, but Snopes and other authorities confirm it as fact.  The shooter’s name was David Grundman and he and a room-mate were drinking and plugging saguaros in the desert by Lake Pleasant, northwest of Phoenix, in 1982.  They shot a little one, and then, inspired by how easy it was to get it to fall, Grundman began blasting away at a big one – reportedly 26 feet tall and estimated to be about 125 years old.  Damaged, it dropped a four-foot arm right on its tormentor, who succumbed under the weighty, spine-bearing limb; then, the destabilized main trunk went over too, also landing on Grundman. It’s hard to find much sympathy for someone who would do something so cruel and pointless (and illegal).  In fact, it’s hard not to root for the saguaro, although the loss of life in this story is sobering: two saguaros (or, according to one account, up to six were shot down where they grew) and one man. But, let’s face it, there’s karmic satisfaction in a cactus that not only defends itself, but gets revenge for the death of a smaller relative.

Having seen the carnage in our backyard resulting in a small saguaro falling on potted cactus, this story has new impact, and I have no interest in pursuing visuals, which must exist in some police records or other.

To offset that visual image, I’ve included a more nutritional picture I took in early summer of a White-winged dove poised to feast greedily on saguaro fruit in our neighborhood.  The fruits are green, bud-like pods (the dove is perched on one, and its flower stem).  After being opened by the doves and other frugivores like Gila woodpeckers, the exposed flesh of the ravaged fruits is red and flower-like.  The actual flowers, white and night-opening, are commonly pollinated by bats.  You can see a flower on the right edge of the photo.  They generously stay open during daylight for the convenience of bees, native and European.

On a lighter note (or at least, a musical note), the story of Grundman’s demise is immortalized in the Austin Lounge Lizards‘ competent saga “Saguaro” (which they pronounce suh-GWAH-ro, it must be a Texas thing), listen here: saguaro: “He grabbed his guns, he mounted up, he was off, to say the least…”

There must be something about Lake Pleasant.  That’s also the place where an inebriated man asked a park ranger to help him get a Gila monster, which he had tried to kiss, off his lip.  There’s another visual I could do without.

There’s an extensive account of the Grundman episode by Tom Miller, written as a biography of the victim cactus (Miller calls it Ha:san), in the chapter entitled “Saguaro” in the book Traveler’s Tales, American Southwest, by O’Reilly and O’Reilly.

Updated 22april2016: the photographer Nathan Stodghill, has commented below and said the big cactus fell as a result of a storm! I’ve edited the original text to reflect this new (to me) info!

Looked all over the place for this classic old card, when our saguaro fell over crushing plants and shelves.  Today, I finally tracked it down, still in print, sold in our local Walgreens drugstore.  I don’t know why, but somehow it seems significant that the car’s plate is Oregon.  You know the old “We don’t take kindly to strangers in these parts…” line from a classic western movie.

Dang it, but if you look closely, the base of the saguaro, visible to the left of the car at the very edge of the photo, looks like it might have been chain-sawed.  I suppose this is just an early example of staged traumas such as are now so common on You-Tube and TV shows like America’s Funniest Home Videos… Per photographer, not staged a bit, but knocked over in a storm!

Still, I bet it made a big crunchy thump!

Photo © Nathan C. Stodghill, postcard distributed by Smith-Southwestern Inc.

The last post was about really big mammals that seem on a scale with mammoths, condors, and whales.  That’s the thing about the Western US, you can never be sure when you’re going to run into some immense mammal, left over from the Ice Age:

E does field work in Yellowstone, so I have an acquaintance with relict Pleistocene megafauna. Once when we were at a back-country hot spring taking measurements, someone stood up and said, “What’s that?” Everyone stood up and looked, and saw a Grizzly Bear. I stood up too, but the autumn grass was tall, and all I could see was a brown woolly hump lurching closer.  It could have been anything, a moose, an elk, a ranger. But it was a bear, scavenging old bones where bison had gone to die on a warm thermal hillside. That’s when I realized how effectively height is selected for in humans.

It’s easy to be afraid of a grizzly bear, but it’s smart to be afraid of a Bison. Even if you know how fast and big they are, they’re actually even bigger than that, and much faster. Not long ago I ran into one, not in Yellowstone, but on Catalina Island, on a hike up to Butt Hill (its real name) above Two Harbors.  I was alone, coming down a “social trail” — an informal path made by people’s feet rather than Park Employees’ shovels — and as I came out of a shrubby oak woods (see photo on right) onto the official road from above, a Bison came out in the same place from below. He was headed up hill, up the trail I had just come down, and was Not At All Pleased to see me. He began to snort, and kick clods, and in general act like a Warner Bros. cartoon bull, except not funny a bit. I sidled up to a shrubby little oak with spreading branches figuring I could climb if it came to that. The bison was only about 15 feet away, so I held very still. After more macho display, he moved off a short distance.  But then I moved slightly, and it set him off again, scuffling dirt and huffling snort and hopping around rocking back and forth, wagging his huge bearded head over his fore-hooves, like an owl “toe-dusting”. The problem was that he had moved off down hill, where I needed to go, and I was standing where he wanted to go. All I could do was hold still until he stopped doing Crabby Boss-man Dance, imagining being late for dinner at the conference dining hall, which seemed very very very far away from that scrubby oak woods, trying to not think what a bison horn would feel like hooked under the ribs. Eventually he stopped acting thuggish (I swear it felt like an hour, but it was probably only a couple of minutes), then he moved off behind some trees, uphill, and disappeared. I stuck to the crummy oak for a few more minutes and then picked my way down hill, on the downhill side of the trail, saying intelligent-sounding things like “Ho, bison,” and “Hey, bison,” so it would know I was there and not be surprised. The rest of the hike was treeless, and I kept looking over my shoulder for the big angry animal, but I never saw it again.

Bison aren’t supposed to be on Catalina Island, but like a lot of things living in Southern California, they were left behind by a film crew. In 1924, so the story goes, 14 bison imported to the island for a film version of Zane Grey’s “Vanishing American” were left to fend for themselves. They did, for better or worse. To judge by the number of close-call videos posted on You Tube, I’m not the only one who’s had an adventure with one of them. I didn’t get photos: the last thing on my mind at the time was the camera.  So my only record of the actual encounter is the Fauxtograph and sketches from my journal included here.  (The very telephotic picture just above shows a bison at a distance — probably the same one I ran into later, but I never imagined he’d cover so much terrain so quickly.  He’s the brownish deceptively tiny blob in the brightest green patch of grass, lying down calmly chewing cud.)

Nature is unpredictable: the next day I came down with a horrible cold.  I’d been worried about being gored on the spot, but instead I was laid low by a bacterium or virus, and was miserable for days. I’ll bet the bison never even gave the incident a second thought.

In memoriam: favorite rust-colored bandanna lost at some point during the escape, when it fell out of a pocket.  On the other hand, I ask: is it smart to hike in bison country with a reddish flag wafting at your side?…

Photos: A. Shock.  Yes, it’s a plastic bison.  That’s the fauxtograph.  Left: bumper sticker on the gear box of a Colorado River raft.  I’m sure the Condors would appreciate Pleistocene rewilding, too.  I’m not so positive: Bison are bad enough, but Short-faced bear and Smilodon?  Don’t know about hiking with those guys…

Pleistocene megafauna trivia

It’s a fact that Lewis and Clark were told to look for Mastodon dead or living on their exploratory jaunt out West, because the terrain was little enough known that the cognoscenti back East weren’t absolutely SURE they were extinct.  Besides, Thomas Jefferson (right, B&W) wanted to prove wrong the eminent French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (right, in color) who claimed that the degenerate North American environment couldn’t support a robust fauna (including its humans).  Jefferson was a big fossil enthusiast, and had a relatively new shiny country to defend against Old World criticism of not coming up to snuff.  To refute Buffon’s claim, so the story goes, he dispatched US soldiers into the north woods to shoot a bull moose to ship to France for display, but Jefferson felt it was necessary to substitute a more impressive rack from another individual to bolster his case that the fauna of North America was indeed macho.

To come back full circle to our bison, it has a prominent place in a monograph Jefferson wrote in response to Buffon’s claim that America was a land “best suited for insects, reptiles, and feeble men.”  Jefferson pointed out that quadrupeds occurring only in America not only out-number by four to one quadrupeds unique to Europe, but that one of them by itself, the American Bison, actually outweighs all of the indigenous European quadruped species combined!

Left: Peale’s mastodon, the critter that everyone was talking about in 1803.

After the family Christmas gathering, E the M and I made our way down the California coast towards the M’s house.  Every few years we find ourselves doing this, stopping sometimes in Santa Cruz, sometimes Big Sur or Davenport, but more than once in Cambria.  The twee shops in the village don’t draw us as much as the surrounding coastal landscape, gentler and less remote than the raw edge of the Big Sur coast (that jagged and temporary fringe of an entire continent): it’s less dramatic but more accessible.  Humans are not the only organisms to find this coast attractive: Sea otters, harbor seals, dolphins, and gray whales can readily be seen in season in these waters; also, northern elephant seals.

In our long ago years at Santa Cruz, E and I would visit the elephant seal rookery at the point Año Nuevo, in those days the only place the enormous pinnipeds were known to haul out on the mainland.  The visit involved advance reservations and a naturalist-led slog through seal-festooned dunes to a viewing point looking down on the rookeries and the island lighthouse of Año Nuevo, in which, the story was told, the lighthouse-keeper’s claw-footed bathtub still contained the skeletal remains of an elephant seal that had crawled into it to die.

So, imagine our surprise when we pulled off from Hwy 1 to hike a bluff trail just north of San Simeon — a hundred miles south of Año Nuevo — and looked over to see a heaving heap of snorting, snoring blubber, jostling and making the same distinctive bladdery croaking sound (described as a Harley starting up in a gymnasium, listen here: 02-alpha.mp3) that we remembered from the rookery north of Santa Cruz.  Since 1990, Elephant seals have colonized the narrow strands stretching south of Piedras Blancas lighthouse, and each December, they return to give birth and mate on these beaches.  Viewing them is easy — a couple of  parking areas have been built atop the bluffs along coast Hwy 1, and low-visibility fences are in place to separate scarred, cantankerous males from pesky human voyeurs.  By mid-December, bulls have staked out their section of beach, and cows are lying about in harems.  The real draw, though, is the young of the year: wrinkled black-furred seal pups lying at their mothers’ side, chirping and bawling until she rolls over to expose a teat, or, rather, a slot where the teat lurks.

We’ve never been lucky enough to see an actual birth, but we’ve seen such newly-born pups that gulls and Brewer’s blackbirds were still fighting over afterbirth among the sandy heaps of seaweed. Last year 4000 pups were born just in the Piedras Blancas rookery, and they’re expecting similar numbers this year.  The density of seals is astounding: in addition to hefty 1600 pound cows, massive 4500 pound bulls, and an assortment of bulky young males, there are piles of blond yearlings lying about in the dunes, snuffling and spraying briny snot on one another, occasionally engaging in mock baby-fights, baring their teeth and striking at each other in practice territorial behavior, then falling back into a doze piled together in heaps like bleached drift logs.

For those of us less inclined to gawk at the unnatural concentration of the world’s riches crammed into William Randolph Heart’s folly (the ersatz Moorish castle overlooks the rookeries), the Piedras Blancas elephant seals put on a different type of oversized spectacle.  Check out the website of Friends of the Elephant Seal for more info and images.

A tip to would-be visitors to Piedras Blancas Rookery: Because viewing access is easy here, there are lots of people, and parking can be problematic.  So, go early (before 10am) or late (after 4 pm, and sunsets can be spectacular!).  Or, visit alternate viewing sites along the same coastal bluffs, where you will see fewer seals, but fewer people, too.  For a less drive-up experience of the seals than at Piedras Blancas, take a hiking tour out to the rookery at Año Nuevo, but don’t forget to get advanced reservations for peak breeding months (Dec -Mar).

By the way, if curious architectural follies of eccentrics do appeal, drive by the eclectic Nitwit Ridge in Cambria, in disrepair but surprisingly resonant with Hearst Castle.

…family and clients who enjoy, enhance, and support Three Star Owl.

Especially to two friends who generously shared their time, creativity, and expertise to make Three Star Owl a better artistic enterprise in ways I couldn’t have managed on my own.

Thanks to Jack Follett who made wonderful copper shelving for portable displays at Three Star Owl sales events.  He based the design on original shelving made awhile back by another good friend, Leslie Wood, in St. Louis.  Both the old and new shelving are strong, easy to transport and set up, and are so elegantly conceived and constructed that people come over to the booth to admire them!  Many thanks, Jack!

And thanks also to the inestimable Ed Bustya who created the threestarowl.com website for me, and who generously offers me the benefit of his experience with sales events, and ideas for outlets, ventures, and possibilities for new directions for the flight of Three Star Owl.  Much appreciated, Ed!

Ed and Jack have in common a deep appreciation of birds and the natural world, and each one spends a lot of time outdoors and traveling, Ed photographing, and Jack birding and volunteering for bird and wildlife related organizations.

Hope the coming New Year is a healthy, happy, and hopeful one for everyone!