There were plants and birds and rocks and things

[Actually, the horse's name is Dolly. Thanks from all of us, Beth, especially from Ellie!]

The Sonoran Desert in springtime. Photos by Jessa and myself. These were taken over several days at numerous locations around Tucson, including Saguaro National Park, Picacho State Park, and suburban areas of Marana and Oro Valley—not all of them pristine, but still retaining some wildness. (In sharp contrast to, for example, most of Phoenix.)

[Southwestern (greater) earless lizard.]

[Cactus wren in ocotillo.]

 

[Another cactus wren.]

[Abert's towhee.]

[Costa's hummingbird.]

[Curve-billed thrashers: adult on saguaro, young nearly ready to fledge from nest in cholla.]

[Verdin and nest under construction.]

[Pyrrhuloxia: the real Arizona Cardinals.]

[Desert grassland whiptail.]

[Gambel's quail.]

[Gila woodpecker.]

[Gila woodpecker at nest cavity in saguaro.]

[Chuckwalla.]

[Picacho Peak at dusk.]

[This photo, taken entirely by accident, may be my favourite of the whole lot.]

Side-blotched lizard

Complicated taxonomy, even more complicated reproductive ecology. Read about it here, if you're ready for a "five-gender" system with two different types of females employing either K- or r-selection strategy, three types of males whose genetically determined mating strategies resemble a high-stakes game of rock-paper-scissors, and relative abundances of each gender type fluctuating on either a two- or four-year cycle.

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered.

—Charles Darwin

 

Adversaries: stalking the Gambel's quail

...The instinct that finds delight in the sight and pursuit of game is bred into the very fiber of the race. Golf is sophisticated exercise, but the love of hunting is almost a physiological characteristic. A man may not care for golf and still be human, but the man who does not like to see, hunt, photograph, or otherwise outwit birds or animals is hardly normal. He is supercivilized, and I for one do not know how to deal with him.

—Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Four mornings. Four mornings I spent stalking through Sonoran desert brush, sans camouflage, to get these few images, and I'm still not entirely thrilled with the results, but I wanted to be able to post some photographs of Gambel's quail.

At times, they were surprisingly conspicuous. Males could be heard calling for at least two or three hours each morning, often from elevated perches in mesquite or palo verde.

But while they are known to congregate at bird feeders—Jess used to see her beloved "quail with hats", apparently decked out in Sunday best, at her parents' old place in Marana almost every day—Gambel's are not easy birds to photograph under more natural conditions. The home-field advantage is formidable, and these beautiful gamebirds are very alert and very adept at using cover, always keeping on the far side of whatever brush is available.

On occasion, I was able to get off a snap shot at a single quail making a dash up a rocky slope or across a sandy wash—they run much more readily than they fly, even when pressed—but only a tiny fraction of these were even remotely in focus. Autofocus is useless in an arena consisting mainly of twigs, and Gambel's are loath to give much time, so manual focus is a Hail-Mary play even when one can predict their route.

 

One the last morning of my self-assignment, I was able to get fairly close to a small covey and make a few pictures before the quail dispersed.

 

But the best shot I got all week—and, again, I'm still not completely satisfied—was when I emerged from a culvert under a road and turned around to find a cock Gambel's loafing in the shade just above me.

Of course, there's a reason these birds are so wary...

Shining robe

Blog neighbour Chas Clifton, also recently back from southern Arizona, asks: "The Phainopepla has no common name? Really?" Until I refreshed my memory with a glance at Peterson's Western Birds, I was calling Phainopepla nitens by the family name, silky flycatcher, and I doubt I'm alone. Phainopepla's a pretty cool bird name, though: Greek for "shining robe", a reference to the iridescent plumage of the male—and the specific epithet, nitens, also means "shining", this time in Latin.

The female's plumage, a matte grey, is more subdued than the male's glossy black, which serves her well while nesting.

The phainopeplae (that's plural, right?) I observed and photographed were tolerant but not excessively confiding. The nest above, in a mesquite overlooking a dry wash in an Oro Valley neighbourhood, took some finding.

[Phainopepla with Pusch Ridge in background.]

[Phainopepla with chain link fence, somewhat less picturesque.]

Although, as the name silky flycatcher implies, they do eat insects, these birds subsist primarily on berries, and they are the primary propagators of Phoradendron californicum, the hemiparasitic desert mistletoe. At the excellent website of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Kenn Kaufmann notes, "Few other birds in North America have such an intimate relationship with a single plant species." He goes on to say, "At times they congregate by the hundreds when food is abundant, such as when elderberries are ripening along rivers at the edge of the desert. When food is scarce, they virtually disappear. Their numbers vary tremendously from season to season. As long as the mistletoe is in fruit, however, there will be at least a few Phainopeplas around. A classic winter sight in the desert is a lone Phainopepla perched atop a mesquite, its spiky crest raised, trim and alert, ready to chase away any other birds that might approach the clumps of mistletoe in the branches below it."

[Beneficiary: Gila woodpecker (Melanerpes uropygialis) feeding on desert mistletoe in palo verde.]

I never did get a good flight picture showing the phainopepla's rather mockingbird-like wing flashes, but enjoyed the time I did spend in their company. Here's to a good berry crop and nests full of silky flycatchers.

Nocturne

Driving for hours through empty country at night will play tricks of scale on a tired mind. You may know that the reassuring, steady thrum of the engine is really thousands upon thousands of explosions happening mere feet away. You may comprehend that that tiny dot of coloured light, miles away across the silent plains, is a bustling truck stop, noisy and redolent of diesel fumes. You may come to understand that the city of red lights on the horizon is a place where no one lives, just row upon serried row of giant turbines on slow blink, each lazily rotating blade a cleaver capable of slicing through the metal box in which you travel. But you will perceive the whole as peaceful, hypnotic, even hallucinatory.

As a photographer, you may want to capture some of the wildlife along the way: the owls, the kangaroo rats, the jackrabbits, the javelina. Instead, you'll remember the way you perceive their movement from the car: the almost imperceptible fluttering of ear tufts in a breeze too light to sway the twigs of the cottonwood in which a great horned sits watching; the headlong, almost suicidal bounding of k-rats in the headlights, inexplicably always toward the road; the easy lope of hares down the back-road verge—not one of them is as fast as the car, but somehow they are winning as a relay, always another one taking its start from in front of you, mile upon mile upon mile; the surprisingly delicate tiptoe steps of a herd of javelina crossing the road in a Sonoran desert neighbourhood, like a street gang in ballet shoes.

You will, eventually, remove the key from the ignition, open the door, and step from the car into the cool of the darkness. You will stand, and stretch, and shake your head, trying to dispel the exhaustion. And, gazing up at a sky scattershot with uncountable stars, you will remember the drive, the monotony distilling into singular moments to which you alone are privy, which could happen on no other planet in all that vastness, and you will want to strap right back in and do it all again.

Pygmy huthatch

Watch Sitta pygmaea at work, even for five minutes, and then tell me you have trouble with the concept of "a charming little dinosaur".