It’s the Return of the Beastie Pitcher! For those of you familiar with Three Star Owl “Beastie Ware” — functional clayware that looks like it might nip your fingers, or wrestle the napkin holder to the ground — here’s a march of the beastie pitchers: three in-progress, highly textured pitchers in various stages of drying, destined (if they survive their ordeal of fire) for an Open Studio/sale coming up in just over a month. Stay tuned for more details!

A while back, I posted the latest Spot the Bird, a shot of a Mexican wetland that contained hard-to-see birds.  It was a tough one.

Here’s the key.  The hidden birds are three Black-bellied whistling ducks, visible in the sea of green only by looking carefully for their bright coral-red bills, a tag of chestnut plumage, and surprisingly, their gray cheeks which stand out more than you’d think.  Enlarge the B&W version of the photo on the left, and look for the color splashes inside the yellow oval.  Two of the ducks are together on the left, and one, the most diffucult to see, is on the far right.

Well, OK, they’re still hard to see. Here’s a color-heightened, tight close-up to help.  Disregard the bright brown clump of leaves in the middle of the field of view.

(Photos A.Shock)

Last post was the New Year’s first bird — a frosty Costa’s hummingbird — but this one is the Year’s First New Bird, and it’s a hummer, too.

We just returned from Baja California, and in the mission village of San Javier on the dramatic east side of the Sierra de la Giganta in Baja California Sur, Xantus’s hummingbirds (Basilinna or Hylocharis xantusii) were much in evidence. They’re pretty little birds, medium-sized for a hummer (about the size of Anna’s) and colorful, sporting a bright red bill, buffy chest and belly, azure and emerald green upper-parts, black throat, blue-black forehead, a white line behind the eye, and a cinnamon tail.

Behind the Misión San Javier de Viggé-Biaundó, in the three-hundred year old olive grove planted by its founding Jesuit missionaries, Xantus’s hummers zipped back and forth, feeding on chuparosa flowers sprawled over the bulky stone walls (photo right), perched in the thin tips of the olive branches (below), and scolded each other. This is a hummer that lives no where else on earth but central and southern Baja California, and we had tried unsuccessfully to see it once before on an earlier Baja trip, so it was delightful to get so many good views.

(All hummer photos thanks to E.Shock and his magic big little zoom lens, in difficult light conditions with tiny moving targets! Click to enlarge.)

The man whose shares his name with the bird had an interesting history: Xántus János, John Xantus de Vesey (left), was a Hungarian exile who came to the US in the middle of the 19th century, and worked with Hammond and Baird (also names familiar to birders and biologists). He had a short-lived consulship in Mexico — according to Wikipedia he was dismissed for ineptitude — but was there long enough to collect a specimen of this endemic hummer.

In his lifetime, Xantus’s name was also attached to a blenny, a croaker, a gecko, a pelagic crab, a murrelet, a wrasse, a night-lizard, and several plants. In addition, according to an anecdote recounted to me by a Baja historian, during his consulship Xantus left quite a few of his own chromosomes in the local gene pool, along with his Hungarian family name Xántus, which reportedly can still be found as a surname in Baja.

>> A durable little male Costa’s hummingbird, perched two feet off the ground on an aloe-tip, in the gray light of a below-freezing desert dawn, the first morning of the year also the coldest of the season so far. (All photos A.Shock — click to enlarge!)

Moustachios a-flarin’ >>

Above: slurping at the feeder:

It’s surprising how often the shutter captures an extended hummer-tongue:

As I’ve mentioned in other posts, Costa’s hummingbirds are year round birds in our yard, although in the winter months their numbers can be sparse. Currently, I know of one male in the yard, this one, who holds court at the feeder hung in the palo verde shown here, and one female, who hangs out at a feeder at the back of the lot. Gnats must be scarce right now, but the Chuparosa (Justicia californica) — so favored by the little flower-feeders that the bird gives one of its Spanish names to the plant — are in fine bloom, their red tubular flowers full of sweet nectar.