Weasels and stoats are not welcome in New Zealand, although they live there.  But they’re not native, and as opportunistic and energetic predators they’re particularly dangerous for the few remaining species of indigenous birds, many of which are ground-nesters, having evolved on an island on which there are no native species of mammal except bats, and no snakes at all.

So we shouldn’t have enjoyed seeing a fierce European invader and eater of eggs and nestlings, but we watched this little stoat playing “kill the pine cone” around a heap of cut pine boughs at the edge of a pasture.  Its mock-predatory antics were so fast it defied being captured on camera, but when it stopped playing to check us out, E got a shot.

(Photo E. Shock)

Yes, and we did!  Also very large eels that live in very small streams, and giant crickets called Weta.  Moreporks (New Zealand’s only native owl) made themselves heard, although not seen.

The kiwi on the right is carved from Kauri, the huge New Zealand tree which isn’t like any other tree I’ve ever seen. The photo below is a Kauri, and not one of the biggest.  There aren’t many left on North Island — they were too tempting a source of building material for the folks clearing the native bush for homesteads and pastures, and it’s a mixed experience to visit the Kauri Museum, which is as much a glorification of the Kiwi Bushmen (loggers) of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as it is a memorial to the great trees they harvested.

Easter mornings are often spent focused on the ground in an Easter Egg hunt, a ritual seeking delightfully chthonic goodies on a day of rising up.  But our Easter walk in Papago Park was filled with airy trophies instead: birds in trees.  And the birds were obliging. Once seen perched safely on high, they stayed to be photographed, preoccupied with their own activities — singing, like the Ash Throated Flycatcher (“k-brick, k-brrr”) and the Mockingbird, or glaring, like the Loggerhead shrike and the immature Cooper’s hawk.  The young hawk didn’t stir as we passed Its Fierceness fairly close to the trail: it appeared to be waiting on the tip of a palo verde snag for the warming air to create wing-filling thermals, so it could continue its northward journey.

Click on an image to enlarge; the Cooper’s hawk’s glare is better bigger.

(From top to bottom: Ash-throated flycatcher; Northern mockingbird; Loggerhead shrike; immature Cooper’s hawk.  All photos E. Shock)

The past three days I’ve been immersed in clay.  Sounds muddy, but what I mean is, of course, NCECA: demos, tools, galleries, other clay artists, techniques, long-time friends from St. Louis, Metro Light Rail, even a little shopping, and downtown Phoenix: all those things compressed into a fairly short amount of time, in three long but stimulating days.

The Potters as Sculptors, Sculptors as Potters show was fabulous, and folks who made the trip out to Mesa Community College saw a broad yet focused themed show that added a lot to the exhibition experience at NCECA.  The room was light and spacious, and packed full of pairs of pieces showing the range in various artists’ work, and how they deal with the duality of making both vessels and sculpture.  (Here’s a shot looking into the gallery.  My pieces, Stacked Toad Teapot Effigy and Venomosity are the two objects nearest to the camera.)  Saint Louis clay artist James Ibur finessed an adroit and thoughtful piece of curation in organizing this show, as well as doing a lot of hard work.

The bulk of the event was deep in the bowels of the Phoenix Convention Center, and almost all of it was nearly simultaneous.  To make the most of NCECA you have to be good at time management and willing to switch gears mid-stream.  I watched a Korean Onggi potter make really big pots in the traditional style.  He made the coil of beige clay at his foot by stretching 25 pounds of clay all at once on the floor like a giant taffy loop.  He would then rest the coil on his shoulder while feeding it onto the top of the pot.  He said at home each potter made 30 of these in a day!  That’s a lot of kim-che storage — and a lot of clay.

There were also on-site installations constructed during the course of the meeting, like this one of a California gray whale made of clay packed onto slat-armature.  The mini-whale in red clay on the boxes is the artist’s maquette, and you can just see a few slats still un-clayed at the far left edge of the photo.

The NCECA exhibitors’ hall is also a great place to shop for the latest tool, equipment, or silly clay tee-shirt (“Throwing my life away” “Tee-shirt for my clay body”, etc).  But the best tool ideas I picked up were being used by the demonstrators, like this one used by the Korean potter above: it’s a wooden hand-held anvil used on the inside of the pot while the outside is beaten with a wooden paddle.  This thins the clay and compresses it, making the walls of the pot stronger and reinforcing the joins between the coils.  Wood tends to stick to wet clay, so the face of the tool has been textured so it releases more easily.  It also leaves a great texture behind.  But, it wasn’t available for sale in the exhibition hall, so if you want one, you’ll have to make it yourself (I’ve always used a river-cobble as an anvil).

I mentioned shopping, and that’s because much of the art on display was for sale.  Probably the most notorious selling frenzy at the conference is the Cup Benefit sale, where artists donate cups for a sale, the proceeds of which go to art scholarships.  The cups are displayed for two days, then, on the third day, they throw open the doors and let people in a few at a time to shop. The cups are donated by lots of artists, from plain folk to rock-star potters — the most famous names in the business — so the line to get in is long, and people arrive early.  By early I mean 4.30am!  Although I had my eye on a specacular piece with burrowing owls stencilled on it, it was long gone by the time I got in.  So I contented myself with two appealling cups by potters unknown to me — oddly, both named Reilly/Riley.

As I mentioned previously, there are two pieces of mine in the NCECA “Potters as Sculptors; Sculptors as Potters” show currently up at Mesa Community College (see the Three Star Owl Events page for details).  One of them is the long-evolving “Toadstack” (the other is Venomosity which can currently be viewed on the Home page.) As promised, here is the entire Toadstack story in pictures, culminating in the final state of the piece.  They go from L to R and Top to Bottom; don’t forget you can click on an image to enlarge it:

and the finished piece, Stacked Toad Teapot Effigy (Toadlier than Teapotly):

This show is associated with the annual NCECA (National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts) Convention, which opens in town tomorrow (Wed 8 April).  From now until Saturday, Phoenix will be popping with potters, sculptors, and ceramic arts educators.  The downtown Phoenix Convention Center is the main venue, where the discussions, demos, lectures, and exhibitors will be located.  There’s a fee to attend that part of the conference, but there are many many galleries, museums and other display venues which have shows up featuring the work of both nationally known and local clay artists, and these shows are FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

So if you like looking at the broad range of contemporary ceramic artwork and what’s being made in America today in clay, check out the NCECA website for lists of and maps to the concurrent shows and outlying venues which are all over the metro area.  Principal show clusters are located in Tempe, in and around the ASU Campus; Mesa, at both the Community College and the Arts Center; downtown Phoenix in the hotels around the Convention Center; and Scottsdale, in the Old Town Arts District, a fun and stimulating place to visit anyway.  It’s a great time in Phoenix to Get Out and See Art.

One of my favorite places to go in the Phoenix area at any time of year (except perhaps in the heat of summer) is the Boyce Thompson Arboretum.  It’s a botanical garden of native and non-native desert plants up in the desert mountains around Superior Arizona about an hour’s drive east of Phoenix.  It’s spectacularly sited along craggy Queen Creek gorge at the foot of Picketpost Mountain.  And it’s great for plants, birds, walking, picnicking — even shopping, like now when their twice-annual plant sale is going on.  If this sounds like an ad, that’s okay, I’m happy to enthuse about the place.

We made a visit earlier this week: the place is rocking with wildflower color, the penstemons are at their peak, and the aloes are still going; the spring migrant birds are coming in and the residents are singing and nesting like mad.  For some reason, male Costa’s hummingbirds — sturdy little desert hummers with bright purple mustaches (in the right light*) — are particularly in evidence; the hens are probably on their nests now. Here are three images E captured of male Costa’s intently working over various penstemon blooms.

Three upper photos by E. Shock.  Remember to click on each for a slightly larger image.

Hen update: The Stalwart Hen (who you will recall is an Anna’s Hummingbird) is sitting tighter than ever on her tidy nest atop pine cones in the big Aleppo pine.  The breezy air has rearranged the branches around her, and although it’s still easy to see her on the nest, it’s tougher than ever to get photos.  But, she’s there.

Speaking of Costa’s hummingbirds and hummingbirds in the yard, I regret to report that we are currently not seeing Miss Thang, the female Costa’s who’s been so regular in our front garden.  There is one male Costa’s very actively performing display flights on the edge of the property, but he’s currently the one Costa’s individual who we know has stayed the entire season here.  We’re hoping Miss Thang (or a suitable replacement!) will be back sometime around the beginning of June, which is when there seems to be an increase in Costa’s in the yard.

*Here’s a bonus shot of just how purple a Costa’s gorget can look in the right light: it’s a head-on view of a Costa’s at one of our yard feeders (photo A. Shock):

One more post from our desert hike last weekend, because, well — Wow!

Right along the trail we encountered two specimens of individual cactus that seemed taller than most of their kin.  One was a towering, somewhat spindly saguaro. Of course, saguaros are known for their height, but this was one of the tallest I’ve seen personally.  Here’s a shot looking up at its crowns from the base. I’ve also included a picture of the saguaro with E, who is just over 6 feet tall.  If you figure you could stack about 7 of him to the top of the cactus, it’s probably close to 45 feet tall which is about maximum species height.  Maricopa County is the home of one of the state’s champion saguaros which is just over 50 feet in height, but it grows somewhere in Scottsdale.  By the way, although this saguaro has probably survived brush fires, the blackened, tough-looking skin on its lower section is more likely bark, developed with age, in place of the smooth green skin we’re used to seeing on younger individuals.  When the skin becomes calloused and barky, the spines are no longer as needed for protection against gnawing animals, and they gradually become the vestigial, button-like bumps you can see in the photo above.

The other picture also has E for scale, but that’s not a young saguaro he’s standing next to.  It’s a barrel cactus: a compass barrel, Ferocactus cylindraceus, one of the most commonly encountered barrel cactus in this part of the desert.  They’re big barrels, and when you come across an undisturbed cluster of elderly ones, they’re often 4′ to 5′ tall. But this one, with two small ones growing at its base — probably its own seedlings from many seasons past — looks to be more than 8 feet tall, which must approach the maximum height of the species.  The only barrel cactus I’ve seen to compete are the famously tall Diguet’s barrels (Ferocactus diguetii) which can reach 4 meters in height. They grow on just a few islands in the Sea of Cortez off the eastern shore of Baja California.  Below is a photo of one, but it’s only of average height — no more than 7 feet. And check out the tiny tiny bud of a baby barrel coming up at its base: it looks like a tennis ball. How cute is a baby cactus ?

All photos A. Shock (except Diguet’s barrel on Santa Catalina Island, by E. Shock), and with no camera tricks, like standing farther from the camera than the subject: no Hogzilla here!

In an earlier post, there was an oblique mention of seeing “Feral Quadrupeds of Interest”.  These would be the wild burros who live in the desert around Lake Pleasant, Arizona.

On our hike the other day, E and I encountered a small group of them.  They are often described as “more likely to be heard than seen” and in fact, we did hear them first.  A loud braying filled the quiet air of the desert morning, drowning out the breeze in the saguaro spines, the jingling of the Black-throated sparrows, and the chup-chup-chup of the male cardinal.  It was instantly recognizable — after we remembered there were supposed to be feral donkeys out here! — and after looking around for a bit, E spotted a group of about 5 on the top of a ridge.  They were not very close, but we did get some distant images of them, one of which is above.  The adults are gray, and you can see them on the very right-hand edge of the photo, behind a saguaro and a palo verde tree.  There’s a younger, darker animal visible grazing near the left side of the picture.  (Photo by E. Shock.)

These are the naturalized descendants of work-burros brought into the region by miners and others during the 1880s when gold prospecting and other pursuits were a big deal in the area. (I’ve read that Phoenix, on the Salt River, actually started as an ancillary vegetable-growing supply community for the then larger population around Wickenburg, where the local river, the Hassayampa, lives mostly underground.)  There are approximately 200 wild burros living in the desert around Lake Pleasant.  (The photo to the right is of a Burro I met in Veracruz last fall.)

But there’s a sorrowful angle to this tale which we didn’t know when we saw these guys the other day: just a couple weeks ago, an ORV rider found the bodies of 11 wild burros including several jacks, a jenny, and some colts, not far from this trail, on BLM land.  They had been shot by someone, which is a federal offense, and now there are investigations, a $5000 reward, a hotline (call 1-800-637-9152 if you have info about who did this) and a great deal of deserved outrage about the shootings.  Is it my imagination, or does the desert west of Phoenix harbor more gun-totin’, Saguaro-plugging, burro-murdering, gila-monster-kissing ignoramuses than necessary?

The discussion of whether feral animals like these should be in wilderness areas is not one I intend to engage in here — these issues are complex and I have no expertise (although I will say that the Federal Government allows cattle on these lands, and I can’t imagine cattle are gentler on the desert than a relatively small number of dainty-footed burros).  They certainly are part of the human history of the land, like a ghost town or an old stagecoach track, but of course, living.  What I do know is that I’m happy we saw this small family group of wild burros at home in this part of the desert.

Etymology

A bit of a stuffy etymological point unrelated to burros: although always used as a noun nowadays, the word ignoramus is actually a verb: in Latin it means “we do not know”.  So the proper plural really is ignoramuses, not ignorami, which is a “pseudo-learned blunder” (a favorite concept of mine — a common example of which is saying “pro-cess-eez” as if processes is a Latinate plural for process, incorrectly based on the thesis-theses model, which it isn’t: it’s just a plain old -es plural added to a noun that ends in a consonant.  You would never pluralize address by saying “ad-dress-eez”).

E and I managed to break away from work and gardening and the yard long enough to go out into the desert world, on a trail on the edge of Hell’s Canyon Wildernerss west of Phoenix.  It’s a real wilderness, but the trail we took merely skirts the proper wild stuff. It’s right next to the heavily used Lake Pleasant recreation area, so the hike is a combination of feeling like you’re Really Out There mixed with the occasional irritation of ORV engine-blarts or gunshots in the distance — plinking is a traditional pastime in this desert.  But we didn’t see anyone else on the trail all day, and once into the hike a bit, did achieve a sense of being away from others.

We went in search of wildflowers as well as a new hike experience, and although we anticipated the height of the ephemerals and hedgehog cactus bloom, there were plenty of flowers, birds, certain Feral Quadrupeds of Interest, and other things to look at.  And I was finding desert Chimaera combo-clumps everywhere — natural ones the desert plants themselves had arranged.  Here are some chimaeric photos (all photos A or E Shock):

Branching cholla cactus, pink fairy duster, hedgehog cactus

Barrel cactus and Jojoba

This last one is harder to see since it’s a subtle tangle of non-succulent foliage, so be sure to click on it to enlarge:

Wolfberry (bright green foliage); Jojoba (gray-green oval leaves); Fiddleneck (tiny yellow flowers unfurling like a fern frond)