Here. A quarter-circle of wooded peaks – three miles away on my right, eight on my left, more or less. – Flash: a large hummingbird (a female Rivoli’s) settles on the three-inch fencing surrounding the deck, then zooms off to chase a much smaller Black-chin. – The mountains, less mobile than hummingbirds, are still there. They are wooded mainly in theory. In fact, many of the slopes are in the early stages of the long slog back to forest-hood, following what the foresters call a "stand-replacement" fire 13 years ago. Whether they return to their previous mixed conifer “stand-type” is up for grabs. In my view, it is mainly the fire-intolerant high-country that keeps burning in Arizona; years of accumulated duff on the forest floor will burn hot enough to boil douglas-fir sap and ignite a crown fire. In other words, that stand-type is not designed to burn, so when it does the result is a conflagration. Ponderosa Pine forest is designed to burn, with frequent ground fires removing a couple years’ needle accumulation and the latest crop of grass, as long as the trees are well spaced. Decades of thinning following decades of misguided fire suppression is moving the Ponderosa system back toward that natural equilibrium. With climate change making the upper elevations hotter and drier, it may be that the erstwhile mixed conifer stands should be replaced with widely spaced Ponderosas to prevent additional catastrophic fires.
My immediate habitat is Pinyon-Juniper woodland. It is lower and drier than Ponderosa Pine, with large open spaces between the low-stature but ancient trees. Knee-high grass, product of this summer’s abundant monsoon rains, abounds among the trees this year. If a fire were to come to this spot, this grass would not be expected to burn hot enough to kill the trees, which are fire resistant on account of thick bark. But I can't say the same for a wooden house. I think I will acquire a weed-whacker and cut the grass near the house.
At 08:12 Arizona Standard Time, two hours past sunrise, two dozen Turkey Vultures define the walls of a narrow thermal. They are not “hunting,” they are riding the free escalator of the skies, as cheap for them as the tides are for us, to a point whence they will sail off, downhill, to sniff the flats for carrion. Nary a wing has flapped, nor will it, for quite some time. I wager they will repeat this spectacle many a time while I am here, setting forth from their favored roost in the sycamores just up Turkey Creek Road from the mailboxes. They roosted there 25 years ago, too.
The thermometer is supposed to exceed 110 in Phoenix today. Here in the Chiricahuas it will not be so hot. The question is, will it be hot at all? This house sits on a south-facing slope in full sun. Yet when I arrived late yesterday afternoon, with the doors and windows open for perhaps half an hour thanks to a friend, it was quite pleasant inside. Even if it is hot in the afternoons for a few weeks in September, the southern exposure and the sun’s warmth will be increasingly welcome as the months get into double digits.
After dark last night, it was close to cold, a two-blanket night. And out on the deck, the stars put on a show for free. Portal and Rodeo, down in the San Simón Valley, have become a retirement-mecca for self-funded astronomers. In New Mexico there is Astronomy Village. Outside Portal is Arizona Sky Village. Houses in these developments tend to have domed observatories in the yard. The skies are indeed dark and clear in the San Simón Valley. They are even darker here, with no mercury vapor ranch lights, no auto headlights, and only half a dozen occupied houses. Last night the Milky Way cut a phosphorescent swath across the sky. Scorpius and Sagittarius straddled it, Antares sparkling like a ruby in the navel of the scorpion. A large white planet gleamed overhead.
Here. I am here, in solitude, to complete a labor of love from my youth. But it won’t take all my time. There is time to notice the passing of the hours, days, and months, the cycles of the sun and moon and the changing of the seasons, and the permanence of it all. There are a few houses here and a few people, but it is really a place that belongs to nature. I will notice the living things here too, mostly the birds and plants, but also the spiders in the corners and the mice in the wall, all part of the scene.
On the maps, they call this place Paradise.
As it turned out, it never did get hot. I was in Douglas yesterday afternoon, where the thermometer hit 97, but here today I would guess it might have made 85. Maybe less. The closest it came to making the house uncomfortable was around 1 p.m., local time. I have set up shop on a table in the breakfast nook. It has windows on the north and east sides, and a sliding glass door to the deck on the west. With curtains pulled on north and east, my “desk” was in the shade all morning. But the sliding door has no curtain. As the sun moved toward its zenith I watched as the shade provided by the roof over me receded up the side of the table. “I’m going to have to move if it gets any higher,” I thought. But about that time the sun slid behind the chimney on its westward journey, and I was saved. The ancients, of course, marked movements of sunlight and shadow on surfaces to discern patterns and thereby make predictions. I will do the same as I sit at this table writing. I can already predict, thanks to book learning, that the shade-line will get higher and higher as the sun retreats farther and farther to the south in its inexorable virtual quest for solstice. I say virtual, because, as we all know today, the sun is not moving back and forth. Rather, the earth is inclined on an axis, and the solstice is the day, in the northern hemisphere, when the northern pole of the axis is pointing away from the steadfast, stationary (to us) sun. The virtual sun will reverse itself and head north again on December 21; by late March today’s shade level will be replicated.
Local time, by the way, is Mountain Standard Time. Arizona does not indulge in daylight savings time. New Mexico, which is only seven miles east of Portal, does use daylight time. This results in conspicuous signs in local shops reminding visitors that the shop is on “Arizona Time” or “New Mexico” time. For purists, Arizona is correct. Noon is at the sun’s zenith in standard time, while the zenith is at 1 p.m. in daylight savings time. Arizona time is therefore more “natural,” except of course that “noon” and the rest of the 24-hour clock are human inventions, even though time is not. And right about now, at 5:30 p.m., the sun in Paradise, Arizona is about to slide behind a mountain. The hills between it and me are dark with shadow except for a pencil line of light along their top edges. So easily understood and yet so arresting. I would like to see how a pen-and-ink artist renders that.
At 5:41 the shadow engulfs the house.
At 6:13 the prominence to the north goes dark.
At 6:18 a Rivoli’s Hummingbird male tries to get to the feeder, but the gnatlike blackchins worry the much larger bird away.
At 6:23 Silver Peak’s orangish west front goes from glowing to flat.
At 6:41, eight minutes after official sunset, but a full hour after the sun went behind the mountains, hummingbirds appear to have quit for the day.
At 5:00 a.m. Orion dominates the predawn night sky. I quickly trace the entire winter hexagon, and find Sirius with ease. It is two hands above my eastern horizon, straight down from Rigel, said to be Orion’s knee. “Sirius” is probably best known these days as the given name of Harry Potter’s godfather, but for millennia the celestial body of that name has known fame as a portent. The brightest star in the sky, it demarks the shoulder of a dog, a long-waisted one, perhaps a dachshund, that is sitting on its haunches. It could be begging a scrap from Orion the hunter, as it is said to be one of his hounds. The hound’s name is Canis Major, or top dog, and Sirius is often called the “dog star.”
The dog star is now low in the sky on this September morning, as we are only a little more than a month beyond its annual reappearance on the eastern horizon just before dawn. The days that follow this return, nicknamed “dog days” in honor of Orion’s major hound, are the hottest days of summer. The Greeks viewed them with dread, as did the Romans. As do we, mostly. They certainly are not a good time to rob a bank, especially in the afternoon. On the other hand, here in southeastern Arizona the dog days coincide with the summer monsoon, which turns the desert green with new grass and cools the air. As noted previously, this year’s monsoon was especially effective.
Off to the left of Canis Major is a lesser dog, Canis Minor. Its bright star is Procyon, which means “before the dog,” on account of its rising before Sirius, the dog star. It is indeed a little higher in the sky right now. “Procyon” is also the first scientific name of the raccoon, i.e., its genus, which is then the basis of the name of its taxonomic family, Procyonidae. You might think this is a carry-over from a common name used by the ancient Greeks, as many generic names are, but no, the name was only applied to the raccoon in 1780, by Gottlieb Conrad Christian Storr, a follower of Linnaeus. In fact the Greeks couldn’t have had a name for the raccoon in ancient times, because it is restricted to the Americas. Storr plucked the name from the skies, where it had been established for some time, and gave it to the somewhat doglike raccoon, removing the latter from the bear genus Ursus. Linnaeus had thought the strange American beast somewhat bearlike. Time, and modern genetically-based systematics, have confirmed the wisdom of his move. Raccoons are, at least at the family level of distinction, things unto themselves. Ursus, by the way, is an example of a genus that did get its Linnaean epithet from an ancient usage. Ursa major and minor (our big and little dippers) are the bears of the sky, and they were named by the ancients with the name they applied to earthly bears.
Smack in the middle of this early autumn predawn version of the winter hexagon is a bright planet, revealed by the internet to be Saturn. It is almost straight overhead. I lean against the massive stone chimney on the deck to draw a bead on “straight overhead” and find that Saturn is about an hour short of that high point. But Capella, in the winter hexagon’s Auriga, has just passed its high point. I’ll use the chimney as a pointer to measure the seasonal and nightly progress of the stars as they parade across the sky in the months to come. I may not have a domed telescope like the folks in Arizona Sky Village, but at my level of expertise, and interest, a deck in Paradise is all I need.
Yesterday evening at a party half a mile up Turkey Creek Road I learned that I am the ninth fulltime resident of Paradise. Many of the fifty or so folks who were present, including the hosts, are part-time residents, coming to second homes here for the week-ends or more extended visits. And quite a few were from Portal, five miles down a very rough unpaved road. The latter included the Geezers, a very good three-piece band; two folks operating a very busy food truck; and numerous others. Primary among the fulltime residents are Jackie and Winston Lewis, who run the George Walker House, a bed and breakfast catering to birders. Jackie, whom I met here 25 years ago, made sure I met just about every one of the Paradiseños. They were all friendly and welcoming, despite the gnats that tormented all of us. The prevailing theory was that cutting grass was responsible. My data point was that I haven’t cut the grass where I live, and I don’t have a gnat problem. Maybe I will hold off on weed-whacking for a while; the grass is too green to burn right now anyway.
I learned from Jackie that they are banding hummingbirds today at her place. She jokingly asked us all to take down our feeders so all the hummers would come to her house and get banded. I did just that this morning, putting one feeder up from 5:50 to 6:00 to give them a quick breakfast before they filter down to the open feeders at GWH. She claims they are “trap-liners,” a term of art among students of hummingbird behavior, and know the status of all the feeders in Paradise. I will be able to test that hypothesis beginning this afternoon, simply by checking the legs of the hummers zooming around my feeders. If some are banded I will know she is right about the trap-lining.
I maintained an active banding program as part of my ornithological research for about 25 years, but I never banded a single hummingbird, even though I caught dozens, maybe hundreds, of them. Hummers are so small that they require special bands, and the Bird Banding Lab, the federal agency that supervises a legion of volunteer banders, only issues them to banders who conduct active research on them. Such a bander is Susan Wethington, executive director of Hummingbird Conservation Networks. When I dropped by this morning, she was seated at a table with a hummer in her hand, surrounded by volunteers who were recording data in logbooks. It was one of 80 hummers she handled today, only one of which was a bird that had been caught and banded before.
Like airliners, migrating birds require “fuel tanks” to make their long flights. Hummers convert the energy stored in the carbon-carbon bonds of sugars to different, more efficient, bonds in fats, which they store just under their transparent skin. Banders gently blow from the aft end of the bird, lifting the feathers away from the skin to reveal these subcutaneous fat deposits. The favorite place to look is between the two branches of the furculum, aka wishbone, which is between the neck and the rib cage. Susan was exultant over the fat levels she was seeing, knowing the birds are well prepared for their journeys.
Jackie uses two gallons of sugar water in a morning at the height of migration, which is now. There must have been 200 of them whirring around the several feeders in their shaded yard. Winston endorsed my guess that 95% of them were black-chins. Five percent of 200 is enough to incorporate the nine other species present there: Rivoli’s, Rufous, Broad-tailed, Calliope, Broad-billed, Lucifer, Costa’s, and Anna’s Hummingbirds, plus the grandiosely named Blue-throated Mountain-gem. But I think in retrospect I will reduce my estimate to 80% Black-chin, because there were probably two of each species, and even more Rufous and Calliope.
It is worth noting that hummingbirds prefer ordinary table sugar (sucrose), as I learned from Dan and Barbara Gleason’s useful introduction to ornithology, Birds! From Inside Out. That is the sugar found in natural nectar, so there’s no need to be more esoteric. And mixing the solution is easy, too. Some years ago I read of an experienced provider who mixes sugar with hot tap water, in a 1 to 2 ratio. I’ve been doing it ever since, and am very happy with the ease of preparation as well as the results. Regardless of how it’s mixed, it’s not going to lure the hummers to stay here when they should head south. Jackie leaves her feeders up past the departure of the hummingbirds to feed the nectarivorous bats, and all the hummers leave. When the messy bats leave, she takes the feeders down. A few individuals of the two larger species, Blue-throated and Rivoli’s, do over-winter. Their larger body-size allows them to tolerate temperatures that are too cold for the others. And Anna’s Hummers, recent arrivals in Arizona, can tolerate very cold weather if they have feeders. I’ll keep feeding as long as I have takers, and hope I can boost an Anna’s or two through the winter.
In the town where I live most of the time, Charleson, S.C., “Gadsden” is a very familiar name. Christopher Gadsden was born there in 1724 and became a leading patriot during the American Revolution. The rattlesnake, an indigenous American serpent not found in Europe, was already a popular symbol of colonial resistance to British oppression when, in 1775, Gadsden created a flag with a drawing of a rattlesnake on a field of yellow over the words “Don’t Tread on Me.” This flag is still popular today, with 12 states offering a Gadsden Flag license plate to car owners.
Gadsden’s grandson James Gadsden graduated from Yale University, joined the US Army and rose to the position of Adjutant General, before becoming president of the South Carolina Railroad. As a railroad executive he realized the economic value of a transcontinental railroad, and devoted the rest of his life to promoting a southern route, which would enrich his native South Carolina at the expense of the northern U.S.
Under President Franklin Pierce, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, yes, him, a supporter of a southern route, realized that his goal and Gadsden’s was impractical without the acquisition of more land from Mexico. Although the U.S. had just acquired vast territory from Mexico as a result of the Mexican War, the southern fringe was mountainous and unsuitable for a railroad route. President Pierce sent Gadsden on a mission to Mexico City to purchase the largely flat desert country between El Paso and Yuma. He closed the deal for $15,000,000.
The resulting Gadsden Purchase includes the city of Tucson and the Santa Catalina, Santa Rita, Huachuca, Chiricahua, and Pinaleño Mountains. These isolated “sky island” ranges contain the northern range limits of many species of animals and plants that are primarily Mexican in distribution.
Taxonomists come to the former Gadsden Purchase to collect species not found elsewhere in the U.S. Field naturalists, e.g., birders, come here to see the same species. Ecologists come here to study ecosystems not available elsewhere north of the border. One could do all of this in Mexico, of course, but there is an incongrous non-biological overlay on biological data. Political entities, whose boundaries are arbitrary with respect to natural boundaries, such as the northern extent of the Short-tailed Hawk or Eared Quetzal, have statutory responsibility for care of those “resources.” And so political entities have lists of species residing within their boundaries. And birders, for example, follow suit and only count Eared Quetzals seen in the U.S. on their U.S. life lists, and year lists, etc.
And so, birders by the thousands come each year to the Gadsden Purchase in hopes of seeing an Elegant Trogon, a Broad-billed Hummingbird, a Whiskered Screech-Owl. I have done it a few times myself. A long-time anti-lister, I have completely flip-flopped and now spend valuable time mining old field notes to boost my world and U.S. life lists on the Ebird website.
Here is a partial list of the birds that avid birders come to the Gadsden Purchase to try to see: Short-tailed Hawk, Buff-collared Nightjar, Berylline Hummingbird, Violet-crowned Hummingbird, White-eared Hummingbird, Lucifer Hummingbrid, Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl, Tufted Flycatcher, Tropical Kingbird, Thick-billed Kingbird, Rose-throated Becard, Sinaloa Wren, Black-capped Gnatcatcher, Rufous-backed Robin, Rufous-capped Warbler, Slate-throated Redstart, Five-striped Sparrow, Flame-colored Tanager. I’ve been working at it, but I’ve seen only half of them.
Of course there is a lot more to seeing a Quetzal or Coatimundi than listing it. That’s what this journal is about.
The dog wants to take a walk. For JoJo, twelve pounds of terrier muscle with a straight-ahead attitude, the ideal walk is South Turkey Creek Road, where she can pretend she is the lead husky on an Iditarod team. It’s almost like she prefers the leash so she can strain against it.
I need to confirm my aural identification of the young Red-tail that has been screaming from the sycamores down there since we arrived five nights ago. So, our wishes in line, we set out. In this case I have her on the leash, but I also am carrying a parabolic microphone and digital recorder in case I get a straight shot at the vocalizing bird, binoculars the better to see it, my phone with the Sibley 2.0 app the better to identify it, and my wallet in case I keel over and the person who finds me wants to notify my next of kin. Having thought of everything, even headphones for the recorder, the better to hear anything we encounter, we set off down the path.
Down at the road, JoJo turns right out of recently acquired habit, but the bird is sounding off to the north, so I redirect her to the left. She pulls on the sled in that direction until I stop her to look at a perched bird. Putting one of my feet on the handle of the recoiling leash frees a hand for my binoculars. It is a pewee, presumably a Western Wood-Pewee, but there’s no way to know unless it vocalizes. We pass the cattle guard at the Mile 1 marker. JoJo has already learned that cattle guards are no problem if they are silted in, like this one.
The young hawk has by now stopped squealing. As I turn to go back, I notice a large hawk sitting near the top of a sycamore. It is badly backlit, but seems to be all black, not at all what I was expecting from the screamer. Then the screamer sounds off in the distance and this bird is absolved of responsibility for the racket of the last five days. Or is it? Juvenile Zone-tailed Hawks are black-bodied, as are juveniles of the dark phase of Red-tailed Hawk. Maybe there are two hungry fledglings in this bosque.
I move down the road to get a side view of the bird. Under a nice Alligator Juniper I find a full view at a good angle. I tether JoJo’s leash to a fence post, set the recording gear on a slope and start an unattended recording, and lean in to peering at the bird through binoculars. It looks like a perfect Common Black Hawk, except for one thing. From the front, I cannot see the broad white band on the underside of the tail, which appears all black except for the expected narrow white band at the tip. The solid black tail, by the way, eliminates the various black-bodied juveniles, as they all have narrow bands on their tails. It also eliminates the dark phase adult Red-tail, which has a red tail like all the other Red-tails, and is not expected here until winter anyway. This leaves Zone-tail and Common Black Hawk as the only hawks in this area with solid black tails. But both have a broad white bar midway down the tail. (Zone-tailed Hawk has another narrow bar or two nearer the base of the tail.) Zone-tailed Hawk nests regularly in these mountains; Common Black Hawk does not, it is typically found in gallery forest along flowing streams. Its small U.S. range is mostly along the Gila River and its tributaries in Arizona and New Mexico. So, it is most likely an adult Zone-tailed Hawk with its white bands hidden behind its under-tail coverts.
I try waiting for it to fly off and show its tail, but eventually I have to do something, anything. I can’t stand the waiting. I go over to the recording gear and save the file, starting another recording. When I turn around, the hawk is gone. So now I have two mysteries instead of one. Then I talk to Jackie. She says Common Black Hawks nested along the creek this summer. I say it is not on Ebird. She says nobody birds the creek, and she doesn’t do ebird. So, my impression that it was too big and chunky for a Zone-tail gets new wind. Meanwhile, I check my recordings of the squealing juvenile spectrographically. They are dead ringers for recordings of visually identified Red-tails. But I still need to confirm that visually. And I definitely want to see the black adult again. It looks like we will be taking frequent walks along the road. JoJo will like that.
It’s goldenrod time. While that may signal the onset of unpleasant allergic reactions for some, for all of us it is undeniably a time to enjoy yellow-flowered composites. Goldenrod may be the most recognizable of these, but there are many other kinds flowering along roadsides. I found half a dozen in a short walk. They are all in the sunflower family, now called Asteraceae after the familiar Aster, but the same family was formerly called Compositae, after their unique flower-like structures, which are actually composites of many much smaller flowers.
Right now I’m looking at a small sunflower “infloresecence,” which you might define as the thing (structure) that instantiates the essence of flowering. It has 13 bright orangish-yellow petals, each about a centimeter (cm, = .4 inch) long and half as wide. Their tips are twice indented, producing a three-lobed effect. These “petals” surround a central disk containing dozens of little spikes. The “petals,” however, are not true petals, which in fact (embyologically) are modified leaves. Each composite “petal” is an individual flower! They are imperfect, sterile flowers that perform, for their inflorescence, the function performed by real petals for ordinary flowers. That is, they attract pollinators. They are called “ray flowers” and they, like petals, are flags that make the fertile structures easier to find for pollinators.
In the case of a “real” flower, such as a phlox or a gilia, the petals form a sort of tube, in which are found male organs called stamens and/or female organs called pistils, which produce or receive, respectively, sperm-bearing pollen on the way toward fertilization and the production of offspring (seeds). In composites, the disk is made up of numerous small flowers that typically are “perfect,” like phlox and gilia flowers, i.e., they have both stamens and pistils in the same flower. They are tubular and packed together so tightly that they are reminiscent of the compound eyes of insects. But with a hand lens, which is penny for penny the best buy available for expanding one’s exposure to the wonder of plants, you can see that they are tubular, that they have a fringe of petal-like lobes at the entry to the tube, and that they have both pistils and stamens emerging from the tube.
If the inflorescence has ray flowers you can bet the disk flowers contain nectar, and that you will see insects lighting on them and extending their tubular probosces into the tiny tubes. This complicated arrangement works very, very well. There are more species of Asteraceae than any other plant family, except perhaps the orchids (Orchidaceae), and you know what lengths they go to to attract pollinators.
If a composite, i.e., a member of Asteraceae, has no ray-flowers, you can count on two things. The inflorescence will not be attractive, and the flowers will be wind-pollinated, not insect-pollinated. Most insect pollinators visit all kinds of flowers, so some goldenrod pollen could end up on sunflower disks, where it would go to waste. But that is still a lot more directed and efficient than casting it on the wind.
Which brings us to ragweed. It eschews ray flowers and insect pollinators and produces immense amounts of pollen, more than one billion grains per plant according to one source. This is much more likely to get into the nose of a human than insect-borne goldenrod pollen. And it is ragweed, rather than goldenrod, that is responsible for most of the pollen allergies of autumn. So enjoy the golden composites of autumn, and don’t blame them for your miseries.
I went out just after sun-up to check the air and heard a nice birdsong up the slope. “I better get that,” I thought. The pressure is on constantly to record a song for the day. Under the new ground rules any song will do, but a new one, one not yet added to the Song of the Day catalog, would be better. So it was quickly back into the house to fetch the recording gear.
Up the gentle slope through the grass-choked PJ I rushed, hearing the song faintly in the distance. Something told me to slow down, though, and shortly I was rewarded for this instinctive decision. The bird was not singing loudly in the distance but faintly right in front of me. Had I taken another step I might have scared it off.
The singing of this bird had a run-on quality, like the singing of a thrasher, but acoustically (both band width and modulation), the sounds were just right for Plumbeous Vireo, one of which has been around for the whole week I’ve been here. (This species probably nests in this woodland; the PJ habitat is just right for it). Glimpses of gray and white on a chunky small bird supported that determination. Glimpses of a bright white eye-ring (which actually extends toward the bill as “spectacles”) further supported the i.d. I stood there and recorded the bird ad libitum (meaning “to my heart’s content”) as it moved around in search of insects and revealed itself clearly to be a Plumbeous Vireo. I even stopped recording before it flew off.
Although the sounds were acoustically right for this species -- one could say they just had a Plumbeous Vireo quality -- two things were unusual. One was the aforementioned “run-on” phrasing. This vireo typically utters short phrases that are evenly spaced in time. In fact, the temporal spacing of phrases is an important “field mark” used to identify some vireos to species. Aurally, Red-eyed Vireo is told most easily from Blue-headed Vireo by its faster rate of singing. The other unusual feature of this singing performance was its low amplitude. Plumbeous Vireos can really project sound when they want to. I have to assume this bird didn’t want to.
Both characteristics fit Complex Song, which Pieplow describes as “Reportedly given by males in close courtship, as well as in response to cowbirds or predators near the nest. Rather soft.” Bingo. Except this is September, well past the nesting season, even if this bird nested right here. So, the other possibility is subsong, which young males rehearse in their first autumn as they practice singing appropriately for their first attempt at attracting a mate the next spring. Subsong can be rather freeform, even difficult to identify to species. Intuitively, I favor calling my sample complex song, but maybe it doesn’t matter. It was great to witness, and I’ll be able to enjoy it again and again.
Taxonomic note: Plumbeous Vireo nests in the mountain west, where it is found in semi-arid woodlands rather than moist forests. The closely-related Cassin’s Vireo nests in the Pacific Northwest and in California west of the Sierra-Cascade crest, where it is often found in the moister mixed woods that are found in its range but not in the range of Plumbeous. Their singing is indistinguishable, but Cassin’s plumage has green and yellow pigments where Plumbeous has only gray. They are essentially the same species, except for pigmentation, which fits the environments in which they nest. All other things being equal, populations in moister habitats will have more pigment. That pattern was recognized long ago and enshrined as Gloger’s Rule.
In fact, Plumbeous and Cassin’s, along with Blue-headed Vireo of eastern North America, were once all treated as a single species, Solitary Vireo. They have non-overlapping ranges. Yellow-throated Vireo, although never lumped with Solitary, is also “the same bird,” just with different pigmentation. All four sing the “same song,” and have complimentary ranges. How we treat such situations taxonomically is a matter of preference and sometimes vigorous disputation. I will lay out the alternatives at a later date.
The first time I made a scuba dive, the most memorable image was not the sea cucumbers on the sandy bottom, it was the fish hanging weightless in the world above. Hundreds of feet above me at 7:30 this morning, the gyring Turkey Vultures reminded me of that underwater scene. I used my binoculars for the obligatory inspection of their tails for white bands – looking always for the devious Zone-tailed Hawks that mimic them – but was happy it was only vultures.
JoJo and I were on our early morning constitutional along Turkey Creek Road, me hoping for a repeat sighting of the black hawk, she hoping to get off the leash and find a packrat nest to sniff. I had already heard the squealing juvenile hawk several times, first when we probed up the Portal Road as far as Sycamore Place, then down this road toward the place I made the sighting on the 10th. Now the squealing was near, as always coming from the tall and densely-foliaged sycamores along the creek bed. I inched may way up the road, scanning the sycamores. And there it was, on a very exposed branch, leaning forward as though over a kill. It was black! Not the conventional juvenile Red-tail I was expecting to see.
I started the recording and placed the rig on a bank. I dropped the leash so my hands could be steady, but JoJo dragged it and made noise, so I released her and let her go. I figured I would later rue that decision. The bird was still there. The experience was similar to the one three days before. Although in full view, the bird was back-lighted so detail was scanty. Once it spread its tail and I thought I saw thin dark bands on a dark tail, from above, as expected on any of the melanistic (“black”) juveniles. I definitely did not see any pure white bands. Eventually the bird flew off, and another series of squeals came from along its expected flight path behind the sycamores.
JoJo was nowhere to be seen. JoJo did not respond to vocal commands to appear. Unsurprised but dismayed, I started trudging up the road for home, cajoling and remonstrating as though she were a human. I was at least 50 yards away when she emerged from her roadside hiding place, impenitent. She caught up with me soon enough and reluctantly ascended the driveway at the end of the leash.
“Back at the lab,” I looked up the vocalizations of Zone-tailed Hawk. Unlike those of Common Black Hawk, They are very similar to those of Red-tailed Hawk. I have finally put that sound with a black bird, which, on this evidence seems to be a juvenile Zone-tail. Summarizing, I know there are two hawks, I know that at least one of them is black, and that at least one of the squeals came from a black bird. It is most likely that the recordings I have made on just about every day since arriving on September 4 came from Zone-tails, that there are two juveniles in the sycamores, and, I would add, that they were raised locally. We will continue our walks. I have very little experience with Zone-tails. I’m delighted to get to know them.
Now, what does this discovery, if correct, do to the experience of hearing those young hawks over the past week? Does it change the wonder content of the experience? Do I edit my memory tape and replace "Yeah, Red-tail." with "Wow, Zone-tailed Hawk!"? Can that be done? Should that be done? Answering questions like that is one of the reasons I'm here on the side of a mountain.
Meanwhile, although I'm still getting used to the idea of two Zone-tailed Hawks in the sycamores, I'm liking it a lot so far.
One technical point. I have mentioned the “phase” of hawk plumages here and there. I should have said “morph,” as Bryce Robinson points out. A glance at a field guide will make it clear that most species of hawks in the genus Buteo have dark morphs and light morphs. These are genetic polymorphisms like the polymorphism for eye color in humans. Sibling hawks can be of different morphs, just as sibling humans can have different eye color. For more, follow the link.
It was 7:30 a.m. as JoJo and I crossed the bridge onto the Portal road. The sycamores there were full of roosting Turkey Vultures, a first for this visit to Paradise; they have been hanging out somewhere else this year. As we trudged eastward, the sun in our eyes, I could make out Mexican Jays in the distance moving from the road up into a tree. When we got to the tree I found an Acorn Woodpecker in it. Anticipation. Then I saw the woodpecker awkwardly hanging in a clump of oak foliage. Suspicion. Then yes, it had an acorn in its bill. Confirmation.
Scanning the Arizona White Oak with binoculars I realized it was full of acorns. A few were brown, but most were green. Many acorn caps were empty, meaning their acorns had already dropped to the ground, or had been harvested.
What a relief. I have seen the woodpeckers in flight carrying acorn-sized objects in their bills. Ditto for Mexican Jays. But, around the house I have not seen any acorns on the oak trees. I have worried about an acorn crop failure. Those jays and woodpeckers are dependent on cached acorns for winter survival. I checked the next oak down the road and saw acorns in it, too. Not as many, but still some. The third tree was the same. The fourth tree was an Emory Oak. It too bore acorns. They were narrower, more bullet-like, than the White Oak acorns.
After that, no more acorns were seen along the roadside. A survey of Emory Oaks at the cabin produced no acorns, although the woodlands there are mostly PJ. One nice Arizona White Oak among the conifers did have a very few empty caps. And facing northward on the banks of the “North Draw” were three small oaks with blue gray leaves. They could be Mexican Blue Oaks, or Gray Oaks. One of them bore a few tiny empty caps. Overall, not a good prognosis, but I will check more trees.
Autumn is harvest time. It stands to reason. If a producer has a growing season, and almost all do, its biomass will be most abundant at the end of that season. Autumn by definition is a time of shortening days following the season of maximum sunlight, which ordinarily would be the height of the growing season. If that growing season produces a crop, autumn would be the time to get it in. (Even if you live in the Southern Hemisphere and autumn happens to begin in March and April. Calendars, like clocks, are human inventions; seasons, like time, are not.)
A consumer of biomass, of course, may harvest at any time in and out of the growing season, and many do, often to the detriment of the producer. The harvest of hay does not directly benefit the grass. And hay, by the way, may be harvested repeatedly during the growing season. An autumn harvest, on the other hand, pertains to products that go through developmental stages during the growing season; a boll of cotton for example, or an apple, an ear of corn seeds, or an acorn.
All of those examples are reproductive structures. More specifically, they contain seeds, which are the potential baby plants of the next generation. That makes them offspring, and all parents have some level of interest in the success of their offspring. That is why so many plants (producers) package their seeds in structures, e.g., fruits, amenable to cropping by animals.
Why? Primarily for dispersal. Dispersal is nearly universal in the life cycle of living things. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” is a half-truth. Yes, offspring resemble parents. That is the meaning of the expression. But an apple is an apple precisely so the seeds will be dispersed, rather than starting a new apple tree in the shade of its parent. Why? Because shade is not necessarily a good place for a young tree, most of which need plenty of sunlight. Also, parents don’t want offspring competing with them for resources. The situations in which parents care for their offspring into adulthood are exceptional. Just ask those squealing hawks.
Plants have several alternative ways of dispersing their seeds. Most popular, probably, is wind. Maple keys, the papery samaras around elm seeds, and the parachutes of dandelion seeds are all structures provided by their parents to get the offspring away from home. All the others are “animal-assisted.” Familiar to all of us is “hitch-hiking.” Cockleburrs would not have hooks if there were no animals. Cheat grass was also designed to attach to animal hair, but it works even better in socks. A high-risk-high-reward strategy is fruit, an enlargement of the flower’s ovary walls into a structure that is good to eat, for at least one species of intended seed disperser. The fruit is meant to be swallowed, with its seeds intact. Upon digestion of the nutritious pericarp, as it is called, the animal excretes the seeds, somewhere, anywhere, away from the parent plant. Animals that do not swallow fruit are not the intended dispersal agent. Some eat the flesh of the fruit and leave the seed, others are after the seeds themselves. Neither do any good for the plant; from the plant’s point of view, they are parasites or predators. Finally there is, what shall we call it, “directed seed predation.” The acorn harvesting of the jays and woodpeckers fall into this category.
Remember, the object is dispersal. If the plant produces a lot of seeds and makes them attractive and accessible to seed predators, and if some of the predators carry the seeds away, but lose a few in the process, then you have assisted dispersal. The best pawns in this game are animals that hoard seeds, caching them for later use. If they eat the seeds on the spot, not many will be dispersed. Jays cache seeds in the ground. Each cache is known to only one jay, so if it expires before emptying the cache, or forgets where it is located, the entire cache not only has survived, but also has been planted in a location ideal for germination. This is a great deal for the plant.
Acorn Woodpeckers have one of the most elaborate caching systems in nature. They excavate small holes in the bark of a tree, and place an acorn in each one. They do this cooperatively with family members, and all members of the group defend these “granaries” from Mexican Jays, which try to raid them, and participate in the periodic turning of the acorns to prevent their rotting.
The jays and woodpeckers are the poster birds of southwestern oak woodlands. You might even call them the spirits of southwestern oak woodlands. You might say we naturalists need them as much as they need acorns. And this year acorns appear to be in short supply. I’m worried, but at least the pinyon pines are loaded with green cones.
When the sun first came up over the eastern ridge this morning it illuminated the mountains to the west so nicely that I took out my binoculars and scanned then. To my surprise, a slope covered with yellow wildflowers came into focus. It faces east and is quite steep and treeless. I guess it was part of the burn, although the north-facing ravine next to it is choked with conifers. The flowers are several acres in extant and are carpet-thick. I know I will never make it there to look at them up close, so I fetched my spotting scope. At 20X they appear to be good-size bushes, and they are indeed shoulder-to-shoulder in a continuous stand. But that is all I can make out. Young aspens are a possibility, but it seems a little early for aspens to be turning. I’m going with a composite (Asteraceae) of some kind.
On another front, the Acorn Woodpeckers down below set up an unusually vigorous racket all of a sudden. Their trees are about 150 yards away, and stand right by the road. Yesterday I counted five woodpeckers together on one of the dead branches that emerge from the living canopy. They spend most of their time on these spires, in what looks like dangerous exposure to aerial predators. Binoculars revealed the cause of the ruckus. A young Sharp-shinned Hawk was harassing them. That’s about all it could be called, because without the element of surprise it had little chance of a kill. As if to prove it, the hawk flew at a perched woodpecker, which circled out and tightly back to its perch with the hawk in ineffectual pursuit. After that, the hawk was gone and the woodpeckers returned to sitting on their exposed perches.
One of the great advantages of living in groups is sharing vigilance for predators. With five sets of eyes taking random glances for incoming, a hawk doesn’t have much of chance. The detecting bird gives an alarm call and the whole group then takes evasive action. A researcher in England once flew a trained Goshawk at pigeon flocks of different sizes and found that the larger the flock the sooner they detected the incoming hawk. This poor Sharpie, hatched a few months ago, has a lot to learn.
As a follow-up to yesterday’s comments about the acorn crop, I walked half a mile up Turkey Creek Road this morning, and attempted to assess the acorn crop along that transect. It is not much fun scanning the green leaves of oak trees for glistening green acorns with binoculars. It’s too much like serious data collection. And the results were not encouraging. I found two Arizona White Oaks with multiple acorns, out of twenty or more that I scanned. The prognosis for the crop remains poor.
Yesterday afternoon clouds built up over these mountains, but it did not rain. I thought it would not, as I believed the rainy season is over. Last night, the clouds remained, and when I rose at 5:00 a.m. to view the Winter Hexagon it was not to be seen, only Sirius and Procyon visible through the clouds. Still the persisting clouds this morning did not seem laden with raindrops. But I was wrong. At 11:45 a steady rain began to fall, beating a comforting tattoo on the deck’s new metal roof. Additional showers ensued, and by 3:00 p.m., the vultures had had enough of it, twelve of them sitting out the poor soaring conditions in the sycamore tops to the south.
About that time a young Zone-tail, its squeals missing in the soundscape for a day and a half, sounded off in the usual area down canyon. Barely noticing, I watched two ridges of the high country disappear behind aqueous curtains as another squall advanced from the south with spikes of lightning and explosions of thunder. The hawk squealed at a high rate all through this, and then, as the rain began to fall locally, it took flight, calling in triplets of squeals, as if to say, “Feed me, please!” persistently and forthrightly.
The squeals moved left to right and then I saw it, the spitting image of a Turkey Vulture, all black with long wings and tail, flapping just above the treetops of the gallery woods. For a moment it was a Turkey Vulture, so complete was the deception, the squeals notwithstanding. Then it banked and showed me proof of its real identity. First, from below, zebra-striped flight feathers, where the vulture’s would have been all gray. Second, a yellow mass at its forehead, a typical buteonine cere, but as prominent at distance as though it were a Great Curassow’s yellow knob. And then it perched in a sycamore, in full view.
The deception mentioned above is the great similarity of a flying Zone-tailed Hawk to a flying Turkey Vulture. The Zone-tail is in genus Buteo, most of which have short tails and broad but rather short wings. The Zone-tail uses its long wings and tail to soar just like a T.V., with wings angled up in a “V”. It accompanies the vultures as they soar about, searching for carrion. It is supposed that the hawk is able to closely approach potential ground-dwelling prey by masquerading as the harmless carrion eaters.
What a gambit! I taught Animal Behavior for a while at the College of Charleston. I loved examples like this for explaining mimicry. Everyone knows about the Monarch and Viceroy Butterflies, so it’s great to drive the message home with an unfamiliar example. To work, mimicry has to be rare, and/or the cost to the deceived party has to be low. Otherwise, the suckers will evolve resistance to the false signal; in this case that would mean evolving the ability to tell Zone-tails from Turkey Vultures. The cost of a misidentification to ground squirrels is quite high, so it must be the relative abundance of Turkey Vultures that makes mimicry of them a successful strategy.
Mimicry is a lie. It could work in this case because the prey of Zone-tails have, over a long period of time, “learned” that big, black, long-winged, long-tailed birds tilting back and forth on V-shaped wings are not dangerous to them. Without that inferential link between the prey and the vultures, the lie could not have taken hold. Whether the practice of ignoring vultures is habituation, i.e., learned in each lifetime, socially transmitted, or encoded in the genes of the prey, I don’t know. All are possible. One thing is for sure, though; when mimicry includes lifelong morphological characteristics, as with the Viceroys and Zone-tails, the lie is not learned. It evolved through natural selection and is encoded in the genes.
In 1977, somewhat disillusioned by graduate school in biology, I decided to try my hand at nature-writing. That September I moved down here, to Portal, to give it a go in a mountain range renowned for dramatic canyons and little-known species of plants and animals from Mexico. On the night of the 25th of September, I walked up Cave Creek Canyon and jotted down, on the backs of computer cards, what I saw and felt. This became a chapter, “Night Walks,” of the nascent book Portal: A Sojourn at the Gates of Paradise.
I have come back to the Chiricahuas these 47 years later because that book is still nascent. The writing went well for a while, but after the new year of 1978 the stack of inscribed computer cards and chapters derived from them is skimpy. The approach to life I was advancing in those early chapters became lackluster to me, and I moved on to other things, eventually back to biology, where I belonged. But through those 47 years I have never given up on that book, and so I am back in the Chiricahuas to have a go at finishing it.
By chance, the moon tonight is two days before full, as it was on September 25, 1977. I will walk in the canyon again and see what it stirs up.
Last night the clouds departed and the moon presented the kind of illumination I anticipated for my walk in Cave Creek Canyon. I took copious notes, although I have to admit I dictated them on a handheld device rather than writing in the dark on note cards. I will describe what I saw at a later date. I am planning a repeat of a 1977 predawn walk in two days.
On our morning walk, just up the Portal road from the bridge, I looked above me and saw, circling like a Turkey Vulture, an adult Zone-tailed Hawk. I caught a glimpse of the white medial band on its tail almost immediately, and as it turned circle after circle I saw the other, narrower white bands. It did not vocalize, and soon it was gone.
This species is acquiring near-totemic importance for me. I have long since stopped wishing the squealers had been Common Black Hawks. The appearance of an adult somehow adds significance to their presence. And the whole affair raises the question of how we (I) value rare things in comparison to common things. I haven't confronted that question yet, but it is simmering in the back of my mind.
The hummingbirds visiting my feeders have all had pollen on their bills, so they are out and about contributing their services to the flowers of the area. I'm curious what those flowers are. Although yellow composites are rampant, they are not so constructed as to place pollen on hummingbird bills. I doubt the hummers ever visit them. I have seen none of the red flowers hummingbirds helped create. No scarlet gilias with their long tubular corollas, and no wannabe gilias, the red-flowered penstemons that have abandoned bees for hummers. The ocotillos are coverd with green leaves, now turning yellow, but show no signs of having flowered recently. There is a yellow-flowered annual, likely of the Orobanche family, growing abundantly on limestone in places. Its flowers face upward, like the similar-looking paintbrushes, just right for hummers, but they do not appear to be open. I will be watching them for hummingbird visitation. For now, where the pollen on hummingbird bills comes from is a mystery.
For the first time, I have evidence that three juvenile Zone-tailed Hawks are frequenting the creekside sycamores. This morning I had a squealing bird in flight at the exact location where I saw the adult yesterday. Its tail seemed all black from above, but when fully illuminated the underside showed numerous thin dark gray bands on a gray nearly white background. In indirect light, it merely looked black. These characteristics mark it as a juvenile. It perched in full view up a hillside. Not only was I able to confirm that its head was feathered (i.e., not a vulture), I saw its yellow cere and a few flecks of white on its black breast. Such flecks are depicted in Sibley's illustration of a juvenile.
I realized while watching this bird that I was hearing two others, one back along the creek, and the other very close on my left. I walked up the road toward the nearby sound and as I rounded a bend I saw another black hawk perched in a low tree by the road. I was too close for its comfort and was not able to back out of sight quickly enough. It took off and flew north, squealing as it went.
Back at the cabin, I heard a good bit of vocalizing, but with a twist. I was able to record several single calls that could be classified as screams rather than squeals. Actually, they seemed transitional between squeals and screams. Screams are adult calls, but they develop from squeals, so these calls showed that process in action. Then the vocalizer began squealing. Directly I saw two birds in the air above the sycamores. Series of squeals seemed to be coming from them. I recorded these for a while, confiming that he birds circling in front of me were the likely sources of the calls. Then I dropped the microphone dish and attempted to inspect them visually with binoculars. I saw one well enough to see that its head was that of a hawk and not a vulture as it sailed away to the north, still squealing.
These birds are migratory. I wonder if the young ones squeal all the way to their winter grounds somewhere in Mexico or beyond. I expect that they will be around for a while longer, and that they give up squealing before they leave. We'll see.
A three-note call, familiar but not recognized, suddenly started up just outside my window. After hesitation, I decided I'd better get it, i.e., record it. I grabbed the gear and pressed the on button on the Zoom H4n. By then I had realized it was a Crissal Thrasher, heretofore heard only north of an impassable ravine. I slipped off the deck and waited behind the house for the recorder to load, the insistent sound very near. And, for the sixth time in a week, the sound stopped right before the recorder was ready. I did not find the thrasher. I did playback of a thrasher song and got no response, unlike yesterday with a Curve-billed at Portal.
I have to do something about this technical problem. I keep missing good sounds. And meanwhile, I do not see the bird either as I hold back for the recorder to load. I suppose I should immediately turn on Merlin. It will get an audible record of anything close enough for me to want to record. It just won't be the high fidelity recording I want. I guess I should start Merlin and leave the phone on the rail, then go get my clunky gear. As I mentioned, magnetic tape did not present this problem, but its frequency fidelity (and portability) disqualify it in the digital era.
The hummingbirds who visited the feeders in the early morning had clean bills. I bet they break overnight fasts here, where the sugar water is rich and abundant, before heading out to the flowers. Of course they have to contend with competitors to get to a spigot. Most seem to relish a dispute, although the largest of them, Rivoli's Hummingbird, seems shy and skittish and often retreats without feeding.
I will camp tonight in one of the Forest Service campgrounds in Cave Creek Canyon, then take a predawn walk tomorrow morning under the full moon. After that I will do some more exploring, in the canyons and/or on top.
I camped last night at Sunny Side Campground, an awesome spot surrounded by magnficent red and green (chartreuse, actually) cliffs. I needed to make a phone call, I thought, so I got in the van and drove toward Portal, expecting to go well past that village to pick up a signal from Rodeo, in New Mexico.
As I emerged from the canyon onto the mountains' desert apron, I caught the upper limb of the orangest moon I've ever seen, peeking over the Peloncillos on the eastern horizon. The first pull-off spot was the junction with the Paradise Road. There is a wide spot at that "Y" with room to park briefly, no traffic being expected. The orange moon was still rising. I hooked JoJo's leash to a handy stanchion. I took an abundance of pictures of the orange moon. After that I watched it continue to rise, getting whiter by the minute, while I placed my call, because that very spot had two bars. Need I mention how happy I am I went to make that call?
This morning I took a predawn walk in Cave Creek Canyon, to replicate a walk taken in 1977. The two walks were very similar, as anticipated. The main difference is in the person who took them. I'm less given to ecstatic responses now than then. What do I do with that? Let it be, is my first inclination. But, there's good grist for the mill here, piling up in the corner.
After a nap, JoJo and I drove on up to the high country. The road is very rough, steep, winding, and narrow. The Sprinter van is unperturbed by any of those. I have been relieved by the ease with which it chugs up the driveway in Paradise. It's the same with the Trans-Mountain Road, a name I like because it sounds like something from the Hindu Kush. As we climbed, Paradise came into view. First I saw the green roof of the Zweifel house, but not the cabin where I reside. Higher still, I was able to see over an intervening ridge and spotted the deck where I lift up my eyes to the hills.
I was astonished -- I don't know why, it's perfectly reasonable -- to find myself gaining access to the mysteries I've accumulated from below. After the turn off for Rustler Park at Onion Saddle, the road climbs through stand after stand of yellow sunflowers, the wildflowers I have been ogling from below. They cover the ground among the scattered pines that survived the fire. It also appears true that several higher slopes are blanketed with aspens, as I suspected. But there are other plants that turn bright yellow as well.
At Barfoot Junction, I stopped, unrolled the awning, made some lunch, and let leashed-up JoJo sit in a folding chair. I saw several wildflowers I haven't seen in some time. All brought me delight. The Paintbrushes raised again the question of whether hummers get nectar from those owl-clover-like things. High country penstemons were there, as was a thread-leafed Senecio that stumped me for a while in 1977. There is an attractive, self-possessed plant with flat flower heads that I remember; I fear it is another of those liar-making rayless composites. It has both pink- and white-flowered plants, suggesting a genetic polymorphism. And finally, as I came around a pine tree I blurted out, "Eupatorium," as though I had rounded a corner in Paris and bumped into a longlost friend. I'm not sure that is the right name for this white-flowered, rayless composite, but it certainly is handsome.
17:30. The sun has set on Paradise. Its westward departure has long since retired the thermals that kept the vultures aloft at noon; now they scud by at eye-level, like sailboats on a New England bay. Yes, the wind is blowing. The moving air provides the lift for almost-level fixed-wing flight, thirty yards away off the deck. They seem to be playing, using their expansive airfoils to swoop and pirouette. Certainly they are not searching for food.
These graceful maneuvers are effected with the same aerodynamics used to climb the thermals. Three things are involved: gravity, the curved upper surface of the wings, and on-coming air flow. A heavier-than-air machine must generate two forces to fly forward: lift to counteract gravity and thrust to counteract the drag of the atmosphere as the machine moves forward. Airplane wings and bird wings generate lift in the same way. The curved upper surface of the stationary wing causes oncoming air to travel farther when passing above than below the wing. That requires the air over the wing to travel faster, and that generates negative pressure on the top of the wing that lifts it and everything attached to it.
Lift is useless without thrust, except for a balloon. Thrust is provided to the airplane by its engines, and to the bird by flapping. But we are talking about soaring here, not flapping flight. Whence comes the thrust? Perhaps you have seen movies of an albatross facing into the wind on a seaside cliff. It raises its wings and rises slowly into the air. There’s the lift, generated by the movement of the wind over the curved upper surface of the wing. The bird then noses down and glides off on fixed wings toward the distant sea. It can’t have moved forward without thrust. The source of the THRUST? The LIFT just mentioned!
As the albatross tilts its wings slightly forward, the LIFT vector is no longer vertical. This angled vector can now be resolved into more useful vertical and horizontal vectors. The vertical component is almost as great as the angular force generated by the wings in their new position, i.e., the lift is nearly as great as it was. But there is now a horizontal component, and it is THRUST. The bird has traded a bit of lift for some thrust. It can go faster by trading more lift for thrust, but that requires losing more altitude. The force of gravity, which had been counteracted by lift, is converted into thrust. In other words gliding flight is a controlled fall.
To rise in a thermal -- like a hawk, stork, pelican, or anhinga -- requires a minimum of thrust, just enough to keep the air flowing smoothly over the wings so lift can be generated. The bird is still gliding, it is just executing a tight spiral while gliding. That is all it is doing. The rest comes from the rising column of hot air. The bird is still falling, a gliding bird is always falling relative to the air, but the air is rising faster than the bird falls. The net takes it higher and higher relative to the earth. A free ride to the heavens.
In ’99 the folks around here told us the javelinas would kill our dogs. Javelinas are little pigs that roam the deserts and woodlands in groups of ten or so. They’re known as Collared Peccaries as well as javelins. They’re not very big, but pigs are tougher than you think, and in a group they could be a real problem. We heeded the advice and kept the dogs close at hand.
This morning JoJo saw her first javelinas. We were finishing up our hawk-check along the Portal and San Simón roads. She had been vigorously inspecting the roadsides as well as doing her sled dog thing down the middle of the road. It was no surprise to me when she ventured into the tall grass again. Her gaze was directed at three stationary javelinas about 15 yards away, down by the streambed. We stared a bit, then she flinched or moved her feet, the smallest disturbance. They bolted and ran off. Good. “We do not chase those,” I said paternalistically. I’m sure she will take it to heart, but the leash is her best friend.
We had another first on that walk, a Northern Pygmy-Owl, calling along the creek. They have round heads and big yellow eyes, and are smaller than a robin. They are diurnal predators of birds, as well as other small vertebrates and invertebrates. And they are bold. I once released a chickadee I had just banded, heard a scuffle, and looked up into a nearby pinyon to see a perched pygmy-owl with a dead chickadee in its talons, my band clearly visible on the poor chickadee’s leg.
Although the species ranges north into Canada and south to Guatemala, it sings differently in different parts of that range. Because vocalizations are innate in owls, this geographic variation suggests genetic differences great enough to justify species rank for several of the included populations. It so happens that the northern limit of one of these populations is right here, in the mountains of the Gadsden Purchase. These birds, informally called Mountain Pygmy-Owls, give the characteristic toots of the species in quickly-repeated doublets. The ones I frequently heard from my front door in Oregon gave singlets at longer intervals. I never heard one in many years in New Mexico, even though the chickadee incident showed they were around. The birds of the Rocky Mountain population apparently don’t call much.
The bird I heard, and recorded, this morning gave some doublets, but his cadence was generally rather rambling. Maybe he was a bird of the year, practicing in his first autumn, as many do. I don’t know whether birds with innate vocalizations have to practice. I suspect they do.
This morning was nippy. “Nippy” is a flighty little word I use to characterize chill autumn air. It has emotional as well as physiological content. Even in grade school I was aware of the transition from the balminess of September to air that was cold on an October morning. A predilection for nippiness followed me through a generation of poignant autumns in North Carolina, Colorado, and here in the Chiricahuas. In all three places, you go to the heights if you can’t wait for it to join you in the flats.
Turkey Vultures were flying to and fro over the woodland to my west, flashing gray primaries as they wheeled. One landed on a power pole in perfect light, so I rigged my video camera to study its warty red head. The Acorn Woodpeckers’ sycamores straight down the hill, as well as the sycamores by the mailboxes, were also festooned with roosting vultures. I grant that “festoon” is overused. I grant that perched buzzards do not evoke ribbons, garlands, and balloons. But the trees were full of the big red-headed birds, and they were doing weird things with their wings. I decided to haul the gear and the dog down to the road and point my camera up at the beautifully-lighted vultures from below.
Vultures sit in the open and catch rays from the rising sun while waiting for it to heat the ground and create their thermals. Once their bodies are warm they spread their wings and heat them up. Each bird does it its own way. And from below, with the sun to my left, they looked like metal sculptures named “Agony 1,” “Agony 2,” and so on. I am sure, though, that to them it felt like a good stretch.
This was at the mailbox sycamores. They must be very old, those sycamores, because they are very big. Up close, multiple trunks originate from immense rootballs and rise side-by-side on idiosyncratic paths toward the sky. Backing away, one sees a spangling of large star-shaped leaves interrupting the smooth lines of foot-thick limbs, white with un-furrowed bark. Or as Cezanne might see it: Splotches of green on gently bending stalks of piercing whiteness.
While I was photographing the vultures, one or more Bridled Titmice set up a racket. They were using their equivalent of the “chickadee” call so well known around North America. We have seven species of chickadee (genus Poecile) and all of them have a version of it. These titmice, which look like crested chickadees with pied faces, do too. The funny thing is, the same thing happened yesterday at dusk, in the very same sycamores. It started suddenly and ended suddenly after several minutes. And today, it started just as suddenly, around 7:30 a.m.
Although I could not follow the birds in the dense foliage of the sycamores, I had an idea then what was happening. I have seen Mountain Chickadees going to roost, in an old nest hole or other cavity, and against all odds they brought great attention to themselves with calling like this. Why would they do that? I can’t imagine, but I suspect several titmice were going to roost when I was here yesterday. Then I heard them again this morning as they came out. We shall see. I can set up watch here on days to come, and sooner or later the leaves will fall, and I’ll be able to watch them disappear. I look forward to it.
P.S. At 6:30 p.m. on the 22nd, the previous evening’s titmouse activity was repeated in all particulars.
I hear the Scott’s Oriole through the window. It is a spare song, about six notes, each different, rising or falling, dipping or cresting a wave. They are clean and pure notes, with no vibrato, no distortion. And they are stretched out, making the song seem unhurried -- or is it hesitant? – an effect compounded by the long pauses between songs.
I have been hearing this song in the middle distance since the first day here. Yesterday I saw the bird for the first time, again in the middle distance, singing from the top of a juniper in full sun. Indeed, it was a fine adult male Scott’s Oriole, his black hood unblemished with lesser pigments, his lemon yellow body pure, and his wings jet black with white edgings. He sat there singing for a good, long time.
One of these days he will be gone, probably down to the warm lowlands of western Mexico, where so many breeding birds of western North America spend the winter. Not very far, just a few hundred miles, but it never gets really cold there. Here It will soon be in the 30s every night. I wonder, will it be the first frost when he gets the urge for going, or does he have it already, stored in some chemical or synapse that is watching the shortening of the days.
I will miss his daily singing, cheery though it is not. I will miss the occasional glimpses of black and yellow. I will miss knowing he is still here. I dread the leaving of the summer birds, and so every day they remain is a blessing.
Today and yesterday I have seen Mexican Jays doing trapeze work in the small pinyon pines that are intermingled with older junipers on the gentle slope above the house. I am confident they were harvesting the seeds, called pinyon nuts, of the local pinyon pine. Pinyon nuts are known as piñones in Spanish and pignolias (or pignoli) in Italian. The ones in the Mediterranean are produced by the Stone Pine (Pinus pinea), and are famous as a key ingredient in pesto. You can make a fine pesto with piñones, too.
According to Ron Lanner’s charming and informative book The Piñon Pine: A Natural and Cultural History (1981, Univ. Nevada Press), there are eleven species of pinyon pines in Mexico and the southwestern U.S. A recent study recognized ten of those, and affirms that they comprise a monophyletic group, i.e., they are all more closely related to each other than to any other kind of pine. This jibes with Lanner’s treatment of the evolution of the entire complex from a single species, probably in the Miocene and in Mexico. Piñones are just as tasty as pignoli, but their sources aren’t closely related. The latter probably evolved their large edible seeds independently in Eurasia.
Lanner proposed that the evolution of large, wingless seeds in pinyon pines was facilitated by jays that selected the largest seeds available for caching. That would set up a positive feedback loop with seeds getting bigger and bigger and the jays getting more and more dependent on them. This has come to fruition in the Pinyon-Pinyon Jay system, studied so productively by David Ligon, my graduate advisor at the University of New Mexico. Pinyon Jays can’t ordinarily raise a crop of young jays without caching a crop of pinyon nuts the fall before.
For my dissertation, I studied a population of Mountain Chickadees in a pinyon-juniper woodland. Although it was not originally part of my research plan, it turned out that the annual cycle of these chickadees was also strongly influenced by the pinyon nut crop. If a good crop was available, the chickadees, along with the Pinyon Jays, Steller’s Jays, and Woodhouse’s Scrub-Jays, cached the seeds in the ground and in the trees and used them all winter. If the crop was poor, most of the chickadees disappeared in October, to return in March. That is, they migrated.
Pinyon pines, as well as most other tree nut producers, have a boom and bust schedule of seed production. Three to seven years between big crops, called mast years, is typical. Although physiological stress may be the driver, huge crops of seeds do in fact satiate the predator base at times, leaving uneaten seeds to germinate. Predators cannot specialize on a masting species, because of the many lean years between crops. That is the theory. Except that birds have the power of flight and migration, and birds of conifer forests, be they boreal taiga or southwestern pinyon-juniper, have the capacity to seek out warmer climes and unusual habitat for over-wintering when the seed crop fails.
Mexican Jays are, I think, primarily acorn cachers. Oaks are more abundant in their range than pinyon pines, and there are several species of oaks to smooth out the boom-bust curves of the various species. So, it is still a cause for concern to see Mexican Jays foraging in pinyon trees. And while some of the small trees have numerous green cones, many of which have opened and are presenting their seeds for the birds to see, I’m not yet confident those seeds contain pinyon meat within their stone-hard shells. This calls for more observation.
I wrote the following in late September of 1977, just 47 years ago.
I have not yet fully unpacked. The house is still a mess. But the canyon calls, and I go. I go up the South Fork Canyon beyond the quiet campground, past two creek crossings and then three more. There, a long log spans the stream. Ten feet below, in the wet gravel by the water, grow white geraniums.
Geraniums are ordinary plants, on first view. But then, there is the rickety way their stems branch, as though they were constructed of tinker-toys. Some, like these below me, are sticky to the touch. They are covered with closed ranks of tiny glandular hairs. The “hairs” of plants, although not “real” hairs like ours, are likewise outgrowths of an outer epidermal covering, analogous (but not homologous) to ours. The hairs of plants are of many kinds. Some bend down, others up, some split in two, others are crowned with stars. Animal hair, split ends notwithstanding, can’t match that diversity. These geranium hairs are as straight as masts, and topped with spherical droplets of resin, like thousands of gaslight lampposts with their milky white globes aglow.
And finally there is the flower. The petals are broad and protrude flatly from their foundation. From their midst rises perpendicularly a shaft containing both stamens and pistils. When this “stylopodium” has risen to a dizzying height, say half an inch, it begins to spread, as you knew it must. But the stamens, which are always on the outside, hold fast to the center while the styles arch outward between the filaments, like partners passing shoulder to shoulder in a Virginia Reel. The styles of geraniums, viewed through a hand lens, are among the most erotic appendages in nature. This is not through any similarity to human anatomy. The sleek pale green of their surfaces, the way they taper gradually and yet are blunt at the tips, and, most importantly, their stately tightening arcs, are erogenous in their own geranium way.
A geranium watcher brings such experience to bear on a first white geranium. House plants do not count. They are to wild geraniums as Herefords are to cape buffalo—tame. These are wild, and new to me. A first white geranium represents a small but real quantum leap in experience. Additional lucre for the treasuries of the soul. And these plants are beautiful from a distance to boot. The leaves are bright green. The petals are of a flat but pure white. It is all very simple.
That log became a very special place in my year of wonder in the Chiricahuas. I had two close encounters with Northern Goshawks there, and once I watched yellow sycamore leaves spin as they fell from their temporary abodes in the trees to their final resting places on the ground. Today I paid the place a visit. The log is long gone, of course, and I had a hard time deciding if I was at the right place. But, actually, there are only five creek crossings to choose from, and this one had to be it. It had the right orientation for the goshawk that flew in from the right, perched in front of me, then curved downstream when it left.
White geraniums were all along the trail, not just in the creek. I paused and tried to study them, to see the sexy styles. Alas, my old brain had forgotten to bring a hand lens and my old eyes could not resolve the styles any better than my fancy iPhone. And my old body was tired from the mere two miles it took me to get there.
Luckily, I wrote down my impressions back then, and I still remember my delight in that moment with the tinker-toy geraniums. I have often quoted Thoreau, “When I was young, I was all alive.” It seems appropriate here, but don’t conclude I’m going to rest on memories. I will be back, with a hand lens. I want to see the sexy styles again, give wonder a chance to repeat itself, and feel the magic of a place ripe with memories and fecund with potential for more.
I have been thinking, even brooding, about good old Ron Lanner and his Pinyon Jay story. Back in the 80s, when I was in grad school and attending several scientific meetings a year, the ornithologists who studied Pinyon Jays and their collaboration with pinyon pines made a lot of the coevolution of the jays and trees. The trees, for instance, produced cones that opened upward, so the jays could more easily access the seeds, while typical pines that had wind-dispersed seeds opened downward, so the seeds could more easily fall out and take flight in a breeze before hitting the ground. Most specifically, Lanner specifically says that the ancestor of all pinyons evolved in Mexico from a tall typical pine with wind-dispersed seeds.
In the last two days I have decided I have to take issue with that story. You see, it is possible these days to google “phylogeny of X,” where X is some group of interest, such as penguins, or oaks, or katydids, and more than likely find a recently published scientific paper that has worked out the phylogeny, i.e., the genealogy, of that group. With the help of a diagram called a phylogenetic tree, or dendrogram, such a paper shows how closely each “terminal taxon,” usually each species , is related to all the others. Two days ago when I was writing the post about Lanner’s work, I googled “phylogeny of pines (Pinus),” and found a very rigorous paper with several phylogenetic trees. I referred to it obliquely in the post.
The source of my angst is the suspicion that Pinyon Jays were not around when the pinyons were originating. I found a very recent paper that estimated the origin of the Pinyon Jay as early Pliocene, less than 5 million years ago (5 ma). That paper put the origin of the entire crow-jay family Corvidae in the Miocene, 11.2 ma, when pinyons were originating. Corvidae is a cosmopolitan family, and it is not likely that the family originated in Mexico in a co-evolutionary dance with the original pinyon. It’s possible, but not likely.
I was also dubious about the pinyons evolving from a stately pine with wind-dispersed seeds. I thought I would look up the dispersal strategy for each pine in the clade (branch) containing the Eastern and Western White Pines (Pinus strobus and P. monticola). But I didn’t have to look up anything, the authors of the paper had done it for me. In the non-pinyon branch of the soft pines (subgenus Strobus of genus Pinus), large seeds dispersed by animals are at least as well-represented as wind-dispersed seeds. In fact, the authors think large, animal-dispersed seeds are likely to have been the ancestral state of the entire subgenus, which originated in the Paleocene, some 50 ma. That would mean the stately white pines evolved their wind-borne seeds from an ancestor that fed large seeds to animals. As if to drive that point home, the European Stone Pine, source of the pignoli for Italian pesto, is not in subgenus Strobus with the other nut pines. It is in the other subgenus, and it did therefore evolve from an ancestor with wind-dispersed seeds, just not in Mexico.
When I was in grad school in the 1980s, we evolutionary ecologists were fond of thinking we were studying the evolution of this or that behavior by showing how it worked to increase the fitness of its practitioners. It took a stern “whoa-boy” in the form of a book by a behaviorist and a phylogeneticist to remind us that history is as important as “current utility.” In the case of the pinyons, animal dispersal of large seeds was probably well-established before caching birds came along to join the party. They may have made the system even more effective, and wonderful, but they didn’t create it.
So, the haunting question arises, what animals did create the partnership, maybe 50 ma rather than 15 ma? Are they gone, extinct now for millions of years? Are they hiding in plain sight? The wonderful thing about the “revisable truth” aspect of science is that you can get goosebumps over the intricate mechanism of pinyon jay – pinyon pine cooperation (or reciprocal exploitation if you prefer), realize it is not the whole story, and get more goosebumps over the mere question, “Then how did it happen?”
Ants. Since the first day I arrived I have seen columns of ants crossing the San Simón road but not the Portal road. Yesterday afternoon there were seven of them. I need to look into this.
Dumb luck. On this morning’s walk, along the San Simón road, I heard a multi-note descending call that I didn’t recognize. Luckily I was able to whip out the iPhone and engage Merlin. Merlin didn’t hesitate long, identifying the bird as Montezuma Quail, the always-present, seldom-encountered specialty of lower elevation woodlands. I have lived in the Chiricahuas 27 months in total and have been lucky to see this species twice, and I heard it once. I know they are here and that they will come to water. My wildlife water trough is always ready and waiting for them. I would love to see them regularly.
Vulture update. There were 68 vultures in the sycamores visible from the deck five days ago, and they were present the next day as well, then for the next three days they were absent. I knew they had to fly in early in the morning, because they are never there at dusk. This morning I saw them fly in, at 5:50, all at once. Quite a sight. I counted 72 once they had settled in the treetops. I’m sure they’re there to take the sun, as many will spread their wings while sitting. What I don’t know is why they don’t roost there, as they did in 1999. And what did they do those three days they were absent?
Hiding in plain sight. In yesterday’s post I pointed out that large, animal-dispersed seeds of pines were unlikely to have originated with the encouragement of seed-caching jays. What was the original avian partner? How about woodpeckers? A quick check of the internet suggests they originated 45 ma. That’s a much better time frame for co-evolving with pines than is available to the jays.
Birds were sparse on this morning’s walk through the pinyon-juniper-oak woodland on the road to Portal, until suddenly every bush held a songbird. One of the ones I focused on was the size of a warbler, had streaks on its sides, and a yellow patch on each side of the breast. Then I saw a yellow throat. I looked for the definitive yellow rump patch, but I missed it. Still, there can be little doubt it was an “Audubon’s Warbler,” the western version of the ultra-abundant Yellow-rumped Warbler.
I will have more to say about those names at a later date; today the point is this is the first one I’ve seen this fall. It has been a few days since I last saw a Townsend’s or Black-throated Gray Warbler. The former were passing through from the Pacific Northwest to the tropics; the latter may have nested right here, but they are going south, too. On the other hand, the Audubons are arriving, probably from the north, to spend the winter here.
All three are migratory species, as are the Dusky-capped Flycatcher I didn’t hear for the first time today, and the Zone-tailed Hawk juveniles, whose squeals have been absent for several days. It is a time of transition, some species leaving, others arriving. I saw a Red-naped Sapsucker a week or more ago. It’s here for the winter, and there will be many more. The hummingbirds are still consuming sugar water on the deck, but their days in the neighborhood are numbered.
A friend in Charleston sent me a photo of two graceful birds overhead, with very long narrow wings, and a long deeply forked tail. Frigatebirds! They are not migratory; they were probably pushed there from tropical waters by Hurricane Helene. He was concerned that they might have a hard time getting home. I think they have a good chance of it. They are masters of soaring. They can find food in our warm waters. And they know how to get there! They may not have chosen their route coming north, but absent a hurricane in the way, they will be able to chart a direct course home, and most likely they’ll execute it.
Both migratory and nonmigratory species of birds have the same two extraordinary tools. One is called the map. With it, they know where they are on the earth’s surface and where they’ve been. The other is called the compass. If the map tells the frigatebird it needs to fly due south, the compass tells it where south is. These two tools are essential for all navigation, so let’s look at them in more detail.
The compass is more familiar and easier to understand. If you’re the helmsman, the captain gives you a heading and you steer that course. It’s pretty mindless, but very useful for going in a straight line across featureless terrain, like the sea or the Sahara. Let’s say the course is east, a bearing of 90 degrees. You make sure your magnetic compass needle is aligned with N on the compass bezel and you proceed consistently in the direction of E, or 90. If you lose your compass you can make use of the rising sun to define east and the setting sun to define west. At night, north is in the direction of the star that never moves as the hours tick by, and east is always one fourth turn to the right of north. Animals use both of these compass modalities, and several others, most importantly the orientation in space of the earth’s magnetic field. The way they read the magnetic field involves quantum physics and is too weird to describe here. Read about it in Scott Weidensaul’s World on the Wing (2021), beginning on page 85.
Almost all navigation in birds requires both the map and compass. The major exception is the first trip from the breeding grounds to the winter grounds. The distances and the directions to travel are inherited, encoded in the genes of the young birds. It is just like that helmsman, except instinct rather than a captain tells them how far to fly and in what direction. For examples warblers in captivity in Germany will face southwest toward Gibraltar and flap their wings enough times to get there under average conditions, then face south and flap enough to get to West Africa. Crossbreed such birds with others that go southeast and then south and their offspring face south all the way.
Imagine, setting out with a 5,000 km trip ahead of you, not knowing where you are going, but going without hesitation. I have to believe, evolution being what it is, that they are full of confidence and excitement, that it is perhaps the most fun they ever have. After all, they dare not overthink it, they must just follow their instincts. All the other trips, though, will be on them personally, because, taking that first trip, they somehow acquire a map of the world. We will discuss that next time.
How birds’ navigational maps work is not well understood, but there is no doubt they exist. Homing requires a map as well as a compass, and homing has been encouraged in pigeons for centuries. Many of the experimental displacements of wild birds are also tests of the ability to return home. Let us look at the logic of homing before casting a wider net for navigation to a third point, which is neither home nor the point of displacement.
Consider a homing pigeon in Bill Keaton’s loft in Ithaca, New York in the 1970s. Keaton was a high-strung over-achiever who joined the Entomology Department at Cornell as a millipede taxonomist and decided to write a general biology text book. It became the industry standard. After that, per his own testimony, he looked around for something to do. He had kept pigeons as a youth, so he decided to get into orientation and navigation. He revolutionized that field before dying of a heart attack at age 47.
Keeton’s protocol was to take a brace of pigeons from his 2000-bird loft to some point in the countryside around Ithaca, release them, and record their disappearance bearing with a compass. Assistants back at the loft would record the time of return of each bird. His experiments would manipulate some feature of their navigation system to see how it worked. Time mattered, because the birds eventually found their way home, using unmanipulated modalities, and time to loft was a useful dependent variable.
For example, by turning on the lights in an experimental aviary at midnight rather than 6 a.m., he would reset the birds’ internal clocks. They instinctively associated sunrise with 6 a.m., so when he released them at, say, 10 a.m., they thought it was 4 p.m. At 4 p.m., the sun is 90 degrees farther west, as measured at the horizon. When they all departed in the direction 90 degrees to the left of the correct direction home, Keeton inferred two things. One, they were using the sun as a compass, because their error was as predicted from the manipulation of their internal clocks. Two, they knew the correct direction home, because they all headed in the same direction home, and they would have been correct but for the compass manipulation. This is the essence of homing experiments, they are always testing the compass and not the map.
[If you’re interested, this is what happens. Pigeon clocks are set ahead 6 hr = 90 degrees. Release at 10 a.m. and home is 200 degrees. They think it is 4 p.m. At 4 p.m. sun is at 150 degrees on the horizon. (The height of the sun is not considered; they project it down to the horizon.) To accomplish 200 degrees they therefore depart 50 degrees west of sun. But sun is actually at 60 (because it’s 10 a.m.), not 150 degrees. 50 west of 60 is 110, which is 90 short of the correct 200 bearing, i.e., they depart 90 degrees left of the correct direction.]
If the birds weren’t manipulated, they went straight home, as homing pigeons have done for centuries. How do they know which way to go without a map? They don’t. If you’re hiking in the Chiricahuas and you stumble on a coyote – an immigrant smuggler -- and he abducts you, moves you for hours with a blindfold on, then releases you at night in the desert, which way would you go? Polaris is a compass. It will help you go in a straight line. But would you go west, north, or east? (Presumably you’re smart enough not to go south). You would have to just go in a straight line until you intercepted civilization. That’s not homing, though, that’s hoping.
Do humans have a map like the birds’ and cats’ maps? I would wager a chimpanzee could find its way home. What has happened to us? Robin Baker, a professor in Britain, used Keeton’s protocol to test the ability of his students to orient toward home, and reported that they were successful. Ken Able, an American professor whose research specialty was navigation and orientation, replicated the experiment and found no aptitude for homing. He published it. I tried this with my students and they too were clueless about the direction home, but they had a lot of fun riding around in a van for an hour with bags over their heads.
Let’s say your coyote told you he would either give you the coordinates (in the UTM system) of your release location and the nearest town, plus a trigonometry book and a pencil; or a map with your location and nearby towns on it. Both could get you to safety, although the direction to walk in would be more accurate if calculated with trig. But the birds don’t have a coyote to tell them where they are on the map. It is supposed that every place on earth has a unique magnetic signature, based perhaps on the inclination of the magnet field and on its intensity. Again, it is supposed, a bird can read its coordinates on this magnetic map somehow, perhaps with magnetite in their beaks, perhaps not.
In the most remarkable of all experimental results so far, migratory White-crowned Sparrows were captured during autumn migration in Washington state and released near Princeton, NJ. Some were young birds on their first migration, others were experienced. The researchers radio-tracked these birds from the release site in a light airplane. As expected, the inexperienced birds continued in the right direction to reach their winter grounds, IF they had not been displaced, confirming that they have good compasses and innate headings that will not succumb to displacement. The researchers wondered, would the experienced birds head back to the capture location, or recalculate the heading to get to their winter quarters? They did the latter. Remember, they had been there before. They knew that location and they knew where they were being released, and they adjusted their flight plans accordingly.
This is a very good skill to have; it’s just mind-blowing that it evolved by natural selection. So, the final question is, did they use three-dimensional spherical trigonometry to calculate the great circle route from New Jersey to California? Possibly, and wouldn’t that be awesome? But I wonder if an analog system wouldn’t be sufficient. If you have a representation of the globe in your brain, and you can “see” your location and your destination on it, you can estimate the heading of the great circle route "visually", but correct it as the track you take appears on your virtual globe. I can imagine something like that evolving. Quite simple, actually.
In preparing this post, I consulted Weidensaul’s book and particularly Wiltschko and Wiltschko’s review article.
I just saw a Hutton’s Vireo in the PJ behind the house. It didn’t make a sound, but true to its vireo nature, it moved slowly and perched conveniently for me to get a silhouette view of the thick bill, too thick for a warbler or kinglet, and prominent wing-bars. It’s the first I’ve seen, although I have heard one off and on since arriving.
In the spring of 2000, when we were living in this same cabin for a sabbatical, a couple of crack birders from Seattle came down for a visit and a bit of birding. Sue said, “What’s that?” to a birdsong on one of our walks, and I said, “Hutton’s Vireo.” “That’s not what they sound like in Washington,” she said, amazement on her face.
There are two reasons a birder who knows the song of a species at home might not recognize it in another part of the range of the same species. One is that the song-types in different places, though following species-specific rules of form and organization, are different. The other is that the birds in the two places aren’t actually in the same species, and so their songs are different. We’ll focus here on the latter problem, using Hutton’s Vireo as an example.
Take a look at a range map of Hutton’s Vireo. If you have the Sibley guide you immediately see that these vireos are found in four distinct areas: (1) the Pacific coast zone of the western U.S., (2) the Cabo district at the southern tip of Baja California, (3) a long strip running from Arizona down the Sierra Madre Occidental, and (4) another long strip running from west Texas down the Sierra Madre Oriental. Hutton’s Vireo has a fifth population on the Edwards Plateau of Texas, but we’re going to set that one aside. The range map of Hutton’s Vireo pretty much maps the distribution of pine–oak woodland in the western half of North America, although it includes some deciduous oaks in the north. The range map of Acorn Woodpecker is the same.
The large gaps of uninhabitable habitat between the four major zones of pine–oak woodland tend to prevent those birds, which are quite sedentary, from moving back and forth. And so, with isolation by distance reducing gene flow, the “allopatric” populations of vireos and woodpeckers are free to evolve independently. The vireo has not been studied, but the woodpeckers of Arizona and California are slightly differentiated.
The range map of White-breasted Nuthatch looks similar, except they bust out of pine–oak to the north and go all the way to the Atlantic. Genetic studies show four well-differentiated populations, but all the birds look alike and hence have not been split into four species by the taxonomic authorities. But they should be. Nuthatches in Arizona and California sound nothing like each other. With vocalizations that different, they should have different names.
The erstwhile Plain Titmouse has been split, into California’s Oak Titmouse, and Juniper Titmouse, which inhabits interior juniper woodland rather than pine–oak woodland. From Arizona southward the latter is inhabited by a very different-looking species, Bridled Titmouse. If you combined the range maps of Oak and Bridled, you would get something very similar to the Hutton’s Vireo map. So it seems that the California and Arizona pine–oak woodlands, though taxonomically somewhat distinct, may be ecologically equivalent.
The titmice throw a bit of a monkey wrench into our explanation of these patterns. This kind of distribution, with closely related or identical species inhabiting isolated blocks of habitat, is generally thought to come about by “vicariance.” It’s an unusual word, but it’s easier than saying “formerly continuous ranges that are divided into unconnected segments by environmental change.” At some moister time in the past, so the hypothesis goes, the western pine–oak woodlands were continuous. They had one Hutton’s Vireo, one Acorn Woodpecker, one White-breasted Nuthatch, one scrub jay, and one plain titmouse. Then it got drier and the pines, oaks, and their denizens retreated upslope to track the environmental conditions they liked*, leaving big gaps of unoccupied aridlands in between mountain ranges.
Since then, the woodpecker and vireo haven’t differentiated enough to be split, but the others have. The titmouse problem is that one would expect the two sister species to occupy the same habitat that their undivided ancestor liked, pine–oak woodland. But the sister of Oak Titmouse is not in the oaks, it’s in the junipers. A similar thing has happened with the scrub jays. In Arizona the larger and more social Mexican Jay presumably keeps the Woodhouse’s Scrub Jays out of the oaks and relegates them to the junipers, while California Scrub-Jays have no such competitor and get to enjoy the pine–oak woodlands. So it goes.
As for population-based differences of the songs of Hutton's Vireo, I don't know. But I do know the vocalizations of Oak and Juniper Titmice are different.
*By the way, it is close to an iron law of conservation biology that plants and animals move to track conditions they like rather than adapting in place to conditions they don’t like. This takes longer for plants than for animals.
I feel a little like Charlie Brown. I was up at 5:10 this morning to watch the crescent moon rise. It never came. This “crescent-moon-at-sunrise” thing started with me a long time ago, in 1977, during my first sojourn in the Chiricahuas. It seems to only come up when I’m here, I think because the sky is so big here, so ready to be watched. Here’s the back story, written October 12, 1977:
I saw something amazing yesterday, a crescent moon on the eastern horizon, just above the sere edge of the Peloncillos. Not far behind was the sun. The horns of the crescent were pointing straight up. I have been moonstruck all my life and yet have never noticed that on the day in each lunar cycle that the moon falls behind the sun in their voyages across the sky the horns of the crescent moon flip-flop. One day they point up and the next day they point down. This is a little disconcerting. It does not fit in a world in which we complacently expect changes to be smooth and gradual.
So here is the new moon, turning a somersault right before my mind's eye. Of course it's all an illusion. The sun and the moon have only flip-flopped relative to one another, and that they did quite gradually. But I'm still amazed that it took me this long to notice it. I would have liked a picture of the horns of the moon pointing up above a rising sun, but it is too late for that, for I only realized about the flip-flop when I started planning to take a picture today. So, I will have to settle for the horns of the moon pointing down to earth with the sun above.
. . . Morning came and I braved the chill and set the tripod with camera on the cobble slope, and waited. But the moon never appeared. The sun is just too bright at sunrise for the new moon to be seen. The horns are indeed pointing down at this hour, but not visible. The horns of the crescent moon always point away from the sun, but are only visible when they are pointing “up.” Now I wonder how to block the sun so I can see them pointing “down.”
I would like to see that flip-flop. Formerly, I wanted to see the moonrise right after sunrise, with horns pointing down. I would still love to see that, but it seems unattainable. Seeing the actual flip-flop, in real time, perhaps even filming it, is a new objective.
From our points of view, the sun and moon race each other across the sky. The sun is faster, which is why the moon rises and sets later every day. As the moon falls behind, its exposure to the sun changes, from full face, which gives us full moon, to back side only, which we see as new moon. The flip-flop of the crescent’s horns happens as the sun overtakes and passes the moon at new moon. Take the simplest case, where the two orbs are on the same path. As the sun begins to overtake the moon it illuminates only a sliver of the side we can see, and the points of this sliver point away from the sun. When the sun catches up we have a total solar eclipse, the sun is hidden by the moon. As soon as it emerges, it begins to illuminate the opposite sliver of the visible face of the moon. The moon has gone, in a few minutes, from a crescent to a new moon to a different crescent. This is a 180 flip-flop with eclipse.
If the moon and sun are not on the same path--the usual situation--the illuminated crescent will not be perpendicular to the path of the moon, but biased toward the sun. As the sun catches up, the illuminated crescent will track its light source by sliding along the edge of the moon, with its center pointing always toward the sun. By the time the sun has passed the moon, the crescent seems to have flip-flopped, with reference to the sky, albeit not with reference to the sun.
I would like to see that happen, or see a time-lapse movie of it. Alas, I never will, but I just saw it in my mind’s eye, and now I know what it looks like. And that’s nothing to scoff at.
Today was a travel day. I picked up my wife at the Phoenix airport for a trip to the Grand Canyon. On the way down to Phoenix I stopped by one of my go-to birding locations, southwest of Eloy. A few years ago LeConte’s Thrashers were found there, farther east than previously known. Before that you had to go to a spot west of Phoenix to find them. The habitat is right: widely spaced desert shrubs with lots of friable soil in between. I went there in 2022 and managed to see and record the species. Bendire’s Thrashers are there too; their co-occurrence with LeConte’s will be the subject of a future post.
This spot is also one of the farthest east for Crested Caracara, a broad-winged, boldly-marked, carrion-eating member of the falcon family. As all three of those characteristics are atypical of falcons, one cannot help but be amazed at what evolution has wrought in creating a vulture-like bird from a falcon-like ancestor. Especially now that we know that falcons and hawks, though both raptors, are not at all closely related. I was therefore quite pleased to see two caracaras winging over the ag fields as I drove out of the area, protected from the 105 degree heat by modern technology. Needless to say, no thrashers were perching in plain view in that heat, although they were no doubt hiding in the shade somewhere.
Driving north on I-17 out of Phoenix we ascended through the Saguaro Cactus zone, which had been apparent on rocky slopes since Tucson. At the top of a five-mile grade where motorists were advised to turn off air conditioners to avoid over-heating, we emerged onto an exquisite grassland, presumably facilitated by fine soils on a broad plateau. More hillsides followed, and they were covered with Mountain Mahogany, a shrub of middle elevations. Just outside Prescott, the shrubs were joined by tall, rather slender, short-needled pines, which must have been One-seed Pinyons. Three javelinas scurried across the road as we drove through an upscale housing development in the hills above town. At White Spar Campground, just south of Prescott, but a bit higher, were well-spaced and tall Ponderosa Pines. Among them were short and bushy Gray Oaks, barely tall enough to be called trees.
White Spar Campground, Yavapai County, Arizona. So here is yet another manifestation of Pine-Oak woodland. In the Chiricahuas, there are two manifestations, one in the shade of the canyons, watered by their subterranean rivers, the other on the peaks, watered by snowmelt. (Both benefit from thunderstorms.) The lower is the domain of titmice, mentioned earlier; in the upper forest chickadees replace titmice. The White Spar forest is equivalent to the upper one in the Chiricahuas. The chickadees are different species, Mexican there, Mountain here. The White-breasted Nuthatches and Pygmy Nuthatches and Acorn Woodpeckers and red-shafted Northern Flickers and Steller’s Jays are all the same.
But the juncos, they are “different.” Here we have Dark-eye Junco, down south there is Yellow-eyed Junco. In between is the great divide: Dark-eyed ranges from here up to Alaska; Yellow-eyed lives in the pines from the Gadsden Purchase south to Guatemala. Dark-eyed has all manner of geographically-based plumage variations, leading to its former division into multiple species. But here in the contact area there is only one difference between Dark-eyed and Yellow-eyed. Eye color, which is more than likely the result of a single genetic mutation. As long as the dichotomy between dark and yellow eyes doesn’t draw our attention away from all the geographic variation in the genus Junco, no problem.
The campground is peaceful, lovely, and cool. We are above the heat. A few years ago, a little fire started on a hill a quarter mile from our campsite. It was put out quickly, but it changed the look of the forest significantly. Some pines were cut down, those that remain have black soot on their bark. I wish they had left the dead ones for the woodpeckers, but I guess they are a safety hazard in a campground. No Gray Oaks are there, while root suckers rising from the remains of an Emory Oak are arresting. A stand of Mullein and dense clumps of a tall bunchgrass benefitted from the fire. (I wonder if Bunchgrass Lizards occur this far north.) Each of these signs is part of the story of pine-oak woodland.
South Rim of the Grand Canyon, Coconino Country, Arizona. Yesterday we drove due north from Prescott through a vast grassland. Then we ascended through juniper and then pinyon-juniper woodland to I-40 at Ash Fork. At Williams we picked up the great ponderosa forest that extends east to Flagstaff, but turned north and soon found ourselves in PJ again. None of it gave any indication of what was ahead, the awesomely intricate and colorful spectacle of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. People were everywhere, but mostly they spoke in hushed tones, it seems, out of respect for the immanence of infinity.
Today we will drive way around through Marble Canyon to the North Rim. It was something the Abert’s Squirrels of 7 ma were unable to do, so when the canyon appeared, the ones on the two rims began evolving separately. The Kaibab Squirrel, restricted to the North Rim forest, evolved as a separate species. Somehow, though, the rest of the population, which extends from the South Rim southward, then eastward, then northward to the Front Range, in a great crescent, managed to maintain the gene flow that keeps the species coherent. This was the first story of speciation I ever heard, way back in grade school in the 1950s. It’s still true.
This trip was not planned to catch the peak of aspen color on the Kaibab Plateau north of the Grand Canyon, but it did. The leaves were mostly golden, some orange, in the morning sun. All fluttered in the breeze, as their laterally-compressed petioloes intended.
(I don't know why they flutter, but the funny shape of the leaves' stems implies that the fluttering was intended. By whom? The designer, that's who. Natural selection, that's who. Meaning fluttering confers some advantage in survival and/or reproduction upon the trees with fluttering leaves. I can't imagine what it would be. The only other explanation is fixation of a random, non-adaptive mutation that produced aberrant petioles, not an attracitve alternative.)
The most beautiful aspens were mature trees that were mixed in with almost-black spruces. These forests were mostly above 8000 feet, halfway from Jacob Lake, where we camped, to the North Rim. Just south of the pines of Jacob Lake were vast stands of short aspens punctuated with the blackened spires of dead conifers. Here was a perfect spot for an ecology field trip. The story on aspens is that they do not grow from seeds. All the aspen shoots you see in the Colorado town of the same name, or here on the Kaibab, grew up from roots that were already there. (This begs the question of how the roots ever got there, and that's how we will leave it for now.)
Aspen shoots appear after a fire, grow into trees with ashy white bark, live for many decades, are carved upon by local swains, and are eventually overtopped by conifer trees unbothered by the puny shade of the fluttering leaves. The shade of these spruces, firs, and douglas firs is not puny. It blocks the light of the sun and the aspen shoots slowly die. Or rather, the rest of the plant, under the ground, gives up on them, decides to pull resources from its above ground organs, and waits for the next fire. If you look at an aspen-covered slope in autumn and see adjacent patches at different stages of yellowing, from green to gold to gone, each of those patches is a different individual.
Aspens seem highly problematic for the selfish gene approach to evolution. Ecologically, they are early successional plants, which hold the soil together while the climax conifers are getting back on their feet. They fix lots of carbon for the decades they are in the ascendancy, powering a whole ecosystem with this primary production. And yet they never produce seeds, which are they only way they can spread their genes. They may live forever, but so what? None of this seems selflish, it seems to be for the good of the community, which is the way it was seen a century ago.
Aspens are in the genus Populus, the poplars and cottonwoods. Cottonwoods live by streams. Limbs blown off by storms will take root in the sand and silt downstream from their origin. This is dispersal. The genes of the parent are spread to a new place where they can augment the fitness of the parent plant. It doesn't matter that they are genetically identical to the parent. This counts in the selfish gene model. Look at it this way. If you live by streams and winds frequently blow your limbs into the water, wouldn't it be adaptive for those downstream limbs to grow into a clone of yourself? Yup.
Are aspens misplaced cottonwoods marooned on mountainsides, with no streams to drop their limbs in? Cute idea, but it's too simple. Cottonwoods produce so many seeds, which fly in the wind on linty wings, that it is called "snow." Aspen flowers and seeds have been described, they just aren't commonly deployed. Vegetative reproduction frequently takes over when an ecological partner is lost, a pollinator or seed disperser. We just saw that wind seems to be that partner for close relatives of aspens. So what is going on with aspens. Why don't they flower?
I didn't see a Kaibab Squirrel on the Kaibab Plateau, but I did see a Least Chipmunk. I'll use that as an excuse to mention a classic study involving the Least Chipmunk and two other species of chipmunks. On one mountain were all three species, on another mountain only two of them happened to occur. Both mountains were covered with chipmunks, in elevational bands consisting of only one species, from bottom to top. The bands were wider for the two species than the three.
The width of the bands on the two-species mountain showed that those two could tolerate the environment and habitat at a wider range of elevations than manifested on the three-species mountain. The limitation of each band to a single species meant that interspecific competition caused exclusion of one species by another at certain elevations. This is called the competitive exclusion principle. It says that if two species have the same ecological requirements, one will outcompete it, and the loser will eventually be absent where the winner is present. This is seen all over the world in all kinds of habitats.
It is rampant in the Chiricahuas. The Mexican Whip-poor-will occupies the forests, while the Common Poor-will is on the arid slopes. Farther north, where "whips" are absent, poor-wills are everywhere. It's the exact same story for the local scrub-jay and the closely related Mexican Jay. North of the range of the Mexican Jay, Woodhouse's Scrub-Jay is very comfortable in the canyons occupied by Mexican Jays in the Gadsden Purchase. It's the same for deer. Mule Deer are everywhere in the Rocky Mountains, in the Purchase they are restricted to desert slopes, while the Coues White-tail Deer enjoys the canyons and forests.
The obvious question is, why are the extra species in the Purchase and not farther north? That is an entirely different matter. Whereas the problem for the excluded species is "synecological," the failure of the dominants to live farther north is probably "autecological." A little etymology should answer the question.
Today we left Bryce Canyon National Park, and descended halfway down the "Grand Staircase" from its top step, the Pink Cliffs, through the Gray Cliffs and White Cliffs at Zion National Park to the charming Mormon town of Kanab. The concept of the grand staircase dates all the way back to geologist Clarence Dutton in the 1870s. The series of colored cliffs, from Pink to Gray to White to Vermilion to Chocolate, is a brilliant way of organizing several hundred million years of geological history into an enjoyable and comprehensible presentation.
The combined Grand Canyon plus Grand Staircase sequences account for close to two billion years of Earth's history. Such vast quantities of time are beyond our imagination, but not our ken. We have learned to know them, particularly relative to one another, through our invention of numbers. We invented numbers to help us deal with quantity. Quantity and magnitude exist independently of humanity, while numbers do not.
When I was a lad, the National Geographic said birds can't count. That's why "Doc" Arthur A. Allen, the nation's first ornithology professor, would walk into a bird blind in Alaska with two others, and then have them leave, so the birds would think no one was in the blind. It seemed to work, the birds let him photograph them at the nest through the slit in the blind. But it turns out Doc Allen was wrong. Birds can count, up to seven at the latest assessment. That is to say, they can, in experiments, distinguish between different quantities, up to seven, of discrete objects. Does that mean they can count, with numbers, as in 1, 2, 3, 4? I doubt it, they probably use another mechanism. After all, we can calculate great circle routes with numbers, and they do it with some mysterious, probably analogue, representation of a globe, I hypothesize. Numbers are a wonderful, marvelous, extraordinary invention. We are quite special to have come up with them.
Today we drove from Kanab, Utah, down to the Flagstaff area, passing through the abomination called Page, Arizona, after crossing the river in sight of the Glen Canyon Dam, which, sadly, Hayduke failed to blow up way back when. We stopped at the vista point and looked for California Condors, emblems of humankind's guilty conscious, good intentions, and highest calling.
It's debatable whether the rescue of the California Condor or the Whooping Crane is more dramatic, heroic, and exhausting. Both species were reduced to around 20 individuals in the 20th century, and would be extinct now but for human intervention. Efforts to save the Whooping Crane began earlier in the twentieth century, with an early attempt to breed them in captivity at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans. Once the nesting location of the sole remaining population was found in Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada, efforts could be made at that end of the migratory path as well as the winter quarters, in coastal Texas. After extensive, government-sponsored research on the closely-related Sandhill Crane, it was decided to try cross-fostering Whooper eggs from Canada to Sandhill nests in Idaho. The goal was to establish a second migratory population in a different part of the continent, thereby "spreading the risk" of extinction.
This was biologically feasible and ethically inconsequential because Whoopers at Wood Buffalo never succeeded in producing two independent chicks from the two eggs they laid. Biologists took one egg per nest and left the other for the parents, a gambit that did not reduced their reproductive successs. They carried the purloined eggs in padded suitcases in their laps as they flew away from the Canadian site. The foster parents accepted the eggs and raised the adoptees successfully in some cases. The young whoopers followed their adoptive parents to New Mexico for the winter, where I saw several of them at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in the 1980s. Although the initial steps in the plan worked, it did not succeed, because most of the female Whoopers died in accidents, and the males attempted to pair with Sandhill Cranes back at their breeding grounds in Idaho.
To prevent the cross-species imprinting that had doomed the Sandhill project, the International Crane Foundations in Wisconsin undertook to hand-raise Whoopers. This required feeding the young with Whooper puppets so they did not imprint on humans, which would have happened otherwise. George Archibald, director of the Foundation, would don a Whooper suit and dance with female Whoopers to contribute to their successful ovulation. They would then be artificially inseminated. This herculean effort has produced many Whooper chicks, which have been used to establish a nonmigratory breeding population in Florida (later phased out in favor of one in Lousisiana) and a migratory population, which was taught an original migratory pathway from Wisconsin to Florida, not by adult Whooping Cranes, nor Sandhill Cranes, but by an ultra-light aircraft. This led to the establishment of a second migratory population.
In the 20th century, the California Condor, like the Whooping Crane, was a victim of wanton shooting and habitat loss, but also suffered from lead-poisoning. Condors are vultures, and therefore carrion eaters. A major food source for them in their remnant population near Santa Barbara, California, was deer carcasses, many of which resulted from shooting with lead shot. They also suffered poisoning from eating ground squirrels that had been poisoned as nuisances by the same U.S. Government department mandated with saving them from extinction. These poisons interfered with their reproductive biology.
In 1987, despite vociferous opposition by humanist David Brower, who felt the condors should be allowed to go extinct with dignity, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and nongovernmental partners captured the entire wild population of condors and placed them in captivity for decontamination, captive breeding, and re-introduction to the wild. In a word, this audacious and desparate maneuver has succeeded.
Condors breed with little hesitation in captivity, although re-patriated birds have to be trained to avoid power lines and people, from whom they are tempted to accept handouts. I saw a couple of them in the wild in 1971, and in 1990 I was on a tour of the captive rearing facility outside Los Angeles, where we were allowed to view an aviary full of condors from a great distance. This indignity was necessary to save them from extinction, a step that has been endorsed by the Yurok People of Northern California, who have whole-heartedly welcomed the Condor back to the redwoods of their homeland. This is on top of successful re-introduction to the Grand Canyon, Big Sur, and the Sierra San Pedro Martir in Baja California.
So both majestic species are strong candidates for most heroic rescue, but I will note one difference. The decline of the Whooping Crane, and of half the crane species on earth, can be laid at the foot of Modern Man, mostly through habitat destruction. Saving it is an act of expiation by a culpable humanity. Many environmentalists think that is all we should do. They may even think we are only culpable for the sins of Europeans, the rest of humanity being, I guess, noble savages who are free to do whatever they want in pursuit of reproductive success. I do not agree. The condor is a relic of a time when big carrion eaters, like it, feasted on big carrion, the carcasses of the Pleistocene megafauna. All those beasts, mammoths and giant ground sloths and sabre-toothed cats, disappeared a few thousand years ago, approximately all at once, and although Clovis hunters may have eradicated them, it seems unlikely, and so the rarity of the condor, while exacerbated in the last century or two by us, was probably not caused by us, humanity in toto. It was probably all natural.
Gifted with run-of-the mill selfishness, but unique foresight and hyper-cooperativeness (both the products of natural selection) plus a runaway altruism meme, what are we here for if not to pro-actively take care of the world, including pathetic Pleistocene relics like the Condor. And why not bring back the mammoth, or something like it? And their gut flora as well? And while we are at it, we might work on treating our fellow humans better.
I have driven through Flagstaff, AZ two dozen times in my life, and each time I have gazed admiringly at the San Francisco Peaks, which rise to 12,000 feet and more just north of town. And each time I have not stopped to climb them or even drive a mile or two up their lower slopes. This despite their importance to ecology and to me personally, because every time I think or talk about Pinyon-Juniper Woodland or Ponderosa Pine Forest I am standing on the shoulders of a giant named Clinton Hart Merriam. This time, they got their due. We ascended yesterday evening to the Arizona Snow Bowl, well up in the spruce-fir zone, Merriam's Hudsonian Zone.
Merriam was a New Yorker, the son of a congressman, who grew up in the woods and was fascinated by nature. He attended the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale (as did Aldo Leopold after him, but that is another story), then moved down to the city and took an M.D. degree at Columbia. After practicing medicine a while, he returned to natural history and became an eminent mammalogist and government biologist. Among his many contributions was a study of ecological zonation, which he carried out in the Grand Canyon and on the San Francisco Peaks.
Merriam's scheme is a little too simplistic for current science, but when I was a youth it was in wide use, especially for interpretative displays in National Parks. And so, on family trips up the Blue Ridge Parkway to Mount Mitchell, I first read of the Canadian Zone and the Hudsonian Zone, and dreamed of the birds I could see there. Many of them were on display right there in North Carolina, because the amazing thing was that we traversed the Canadian Zone to the deep, dark spruce-fir forest that gave the Black Mountains their name. This was the Hudsonian Zone, and with its abundant Red-breasted Nuthatches and Common Ravens, it felt as exotic as Churchill, Manitoba, on the shores of Hudson Bay.
Merriam recognized that when it comes to ecological zonation altitude = latitude. His transect up the San Francisco Peaks saved him the long train ride to Churchill, if that was even possible in the 1880s. He saw, I am sure, the abrupt change from the mixed conifers of his Canadian Zone to the spruce-fir of the Hudsonian, and from it to the treeless tundra, be it Arctic at Churchill or Alpine at Flagstaff. Flagstaff itself, at the foot of the mountain, sits in a vast pine forest. This Merriam called the Transition Zone. Unlike the zones above, it is a fire-maintained climax forest of widely spaced Ponderosa Pines with grass ground cover. Few shrubs are to be seen among the pines in the Flagstaff area. The transition he referred to must have been from desert to forest, as he named his bottom two zones Upper and Lower Sonoran, in honor of the dramatic cactus deserts of southern Arizona. Saguaro Cactus does not grow at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, the bottom rung of Merriam's ladder, but other desert plants do. The Upper Sonoran is dry woodland. Locally, and all over Nevada and western Colorado, and eastward into New Mexico, that is Pinyon-Juniper Woodland of one type or another.
So thank you, Dr. Merriam, I love all your zones.
No mountain in Arizona is a perfect exemplar of all Merriam's Life Zones. As mentioned, he had to extend the study area into the Grand Canyon to find the bottom of the altitudinal transect, and the Grand Canyon lacks Saguaro Cacti, emblematic of the Sonoran Desert. The San Francisco Peaks do have Alpine Tundra, though, which is the capstone of the transect.
The best place I know for a Lower Sonoran to Hudsonian transect is the ascent of Mt. Lemmon outside Tucson. There the statuesque cacti are on full display, and when the bitterbrush is blooming under them in spring they make a a stunning picture, especially when viewed from above with the eastern suburbs in the background below. The Mt. Lemmon experience is augmented by the many excellent interpretative signs erected by Coronado National Forest, and for me by knowing that Robert H. Whittaker used this transect to promote the individualistic concept of plant community organization. I will go into that some other time.
Today we visited a third excellent moutain for appreciating Merriam's contribution. It is called Mt. Graham. Like Lemmon, its base is in the Lower Sonoran Zone, and its top is in the Hudsonian, although Mt. Graham is higher and has an observatory and an endemic squirrel on top. It is not fringed with Saguaros, however. Mt. Graham sits at the western edge of the Chihuahuan desert, which is a bit higher, wetter, and grassier than the Sonoran to the west. I once read that Saguaros cannot survive two consecutive nights of sub-freezing temperatures, so clearly their own "autecology" rather than the "synecology" of interspecific competiton is the reason the Sonoran Desert stops and the Chihuahuan Desert starts a little west of Mt. Graham. The thing that most impressed me about Mt. Graham, which is so close to the Chiricahuas that Mexican Chickadees were once released there, is the abundance of manzanita in the Upper Sonoran woodland. The Chiricahuas have plenty of manzanita, but not as such an important component of the oak-juiper Upper Sonoran Zone. Hmm, could be autecology.
Paradise, Arizona. Nearly a week ago, at Jacob Lake Campground on the Kaibab Plateau, the first birds to catch my ear were Red Crossbills uttering the familiar "Type 2" kip-kip-kip flight call as they bounded over the tall pinetops. The Pzew and Pew calls of the more numerous Western Bluebirds sounded similar. Both species were there in numbers because, probably, a favorite food was there in abundance. That would be Ponderosa Pine seeds for the crossbills, but juniper "berries" for the bluebirds. The Utah Junipers we had seen on the South Rim were loaded with "berries" (actually cones, but the fleshy arils are the attraction for the fruit-eating bluebird genus Sialia.) They'll be in the Chiricahuas soon, I thought to myself, remembering the numbers of bluebirds around Paradise during my sabbatical year (1999-2000).
We returned to Paradise yesterday afternoon. As expected, the hummingbirds had given up on the feeders, which I had left full on the October 2. By nightfall, only one had been seen. Not so the Acorn Woodpeckers, three of which took over a hummingbird feeder as soon as I refilled it. The Mexican Jays were similarly inclined to accept their handouts of sunflower seeds, left on the ground. And a woodpecker clung to the hanging feeder, to my delight. If he had found it while I was away, other species will follow suit.
This morning, JoJo and I resumed our morning walks up the road to Portal. No squealing Zone-tail graced the sycamores by Sycamore Place. Similarly, no Scott's Oriole was singing anywhere in the distance. Two or three hummingbirds had come by the deck right after sun-up, when the feeders would have welcomed a dozen or more at the end of September. Those are the summer birds. On the other hand, winter birds are moving in. I heard bluebirds overhead while an American Robin called insistently from the top of a dead juniper. A small bird moved into view near the robin. It was a Yellow-rumped Warbler, probably here for six months. And, unexpectedly, a single Steller's Jay flew resolutely past the neighbor's cow herd up the slope from the cabin. It is unlikely to have come from farther away than Rustler Park; its migration, if more than a day-trip, is altitudinal migration. Whether down here to stay for a while, like the Mexican Chickadees that come down slope every winter, or just looking for food, it is probably happy to see the bumper crop of pinones hereabouts. I am happy to report that all the small green cones I was worrying about in September have burst and are now presenting a few stone-hard seeds to the jays and chickadees for storage in the ground. They would rather the woodpeckers stick to acorns.
I have been fascinated by the phases of the moon for a long time. I mark their progression on bedtime walks with JoJo through our leafy neighborhood in Charleston. Although I was originally transfixed by the horns of the new moon, and whether they pointed up or down, recently I have been noticing the demarcation between dark and light sides of all phases. I want to understand how it changes angles in the course of a single night.
My method is to imagine the rays of the sun coming from beyond the western horizon, or from beyond the eastern horizon, its nearness creating the shape of that shadow. I know the moon’s orbit wobbles with respect to the sun’s, and that we get an eclipse when the wobbling path of the moon is briefly lined up with the sun’s. Most of the time there is no eclipse and the moon is “off to the side” of the sun. The result is a shadow line that should be, in my reckoning, pointing at the sun. By that I mean that a line bisecting the illuminated part, and therefore perpendicular to the chord of which the shadowline is an approximation, should point straight at the sun.
Often it does not, and this dismays me. I mumble something about parallax, a word I admire but whose meaning I don’t know. I suppose that because the moon travels across the sky on a curved path, the crescent should point at the sun along a curved path parallel to the earth’s surface, rather than along a straight line through the two-dimensional sky I think I am seeing.
Another challenge to that 2-D conceptualization has just arisen. The skies being so clean and clear here in Paradise, I have resumed thinking about the orientation of that shadow-line on this week’s waxing gibbous presentation. That moon was white against a deep blue sky yesterday afternoon. Silver Peak was off to the right a little bit. I took a still picture of that moon, and then again every hour or so. I forced myself to stay up for moonset, and as there was no Aurora Borealis this far south, its departure behind the Chiricahua peaks was dramatic. Viewing the sequence of stills confirms what I knew I saw: the moon rolls over as it sets. This makes some sense, but it is still disconcerting.
From looking at the internet it appears there is a standard view of the moon from earth. In it, Mare Crisium, which is the landmark I have chosen for measuring the flops, is a round, isolated “sea” a bit above the equator and near the right edge of the near side. Shortly after moonrise this afternoon Mare Crisium was “north” of that standard location. It rotated downward maybe 7 degrees in the next 45 minutes. The next photograph was three hours after the first, and by then Mare Cirsium had rotated below the horizontal, to about 20 degrees south lat. The shadowline rotated similarly.
The sky holds many illusions. The stars appear to revolve around Polaris. They do not. The sun appears to revolve around the earth, but in fact it barely moves at all. The moon appears to rotate around the earth; it does, but not every day. Once again it’s the earth’s rotation that creates an illusion of movement
I wager that the apparent rotation of the moon’s face as it crosses the sky is also an illusion. When the moon is at its closest to the observer, the surface of the earth is locally flat, and Mare Crisium appears where it’s supposed to. As Paradise, or any other place on earth, rapidly rotates away from the almost-stationary moon, the curvature of the earth causes the observer to be canted with respect to the moon. Imagine you are on a nearby moon watching the Little Prince rotate away from you on his tiny planet. If he is standing straight up, his angle with respect to the planet’s axis will appear to be more and more acute, until he rotates out of view. At the same time, the Prince will see the face of the moon twisting clockwise as it rotates out of view. I am hypothesizing that’s how the moon appears to roll over as it crossed the horizon. And remember, this illusion does result in the bisector of the illuminated crescent’s curving in toward the departed sun like an arrow shot from afar, which is just the explanation I was looking for.
I need to mention the plants around the cabin before all the animal-dispersed seeds are carried away and all the wind-dispersed seeds dance off on the afternoon gales. I suppose the little walk I just took can be considered a start, although I took it to investigate the exposed limestone bedrock in the “North Ravine” of this property. My report on the limestone, it turns out, can wait.
Of the several kinds of grasses that have been so luxuriant since I arrived, two, Side-oats Grama and Blue Grama, are in the same genus, Bouteloua. You would never guess it from their appearance. Blue Grama, the most productive grass of the Short Grass Prairie, has its florets dangling from horizontal spikes in tight rows. Each of these rows looks a bit like a small mustache comb, or maybe the baleen of a miniature whale. Side-oats Grama deploys its florets on the sides of a sinuous vertical stalk. Although the internet says seed-bearing florets fall to the ground, my experience is that they stick in your socks, like those of Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum).
Cheatgrass is an exotic annual that has invaded the semi-arid West. Its seeds germinate in their first autumn, then grow to maturity early in the following spring, sucking up all the moisture provided by snowmelt to the surface layers of soil. Side-oats Grama is a native perennial that is a prized forage plant, and it flowers in late summer. The only thing the two grasses have in common is the use of human socks for dispersal. At the right season, walking through a flower-heavy stand of these two species will result in florets leaving the plant and penetrating the socks of the passer-by. These things have sharp points and are annoyingly uncomfortable to the ankles. The fur of passing mammals was presumably the original target of this gambit. The sock-based alternative may be an evolutionary dead-end; I am not sure how many of the seeds are shed in suitable habitat.
After donning another pair of socks, I went for another walk, with JoJo, just after sundown. I directed us into the grasses up the slope from the house, rather than charging down the driveway as JoJo suggested. Shortly I came upon a dense pile of plant material that looked like grass seeds. It occupied a circular space about two feet in diameter and covered the ground evenly. I looked around for the source of all these fallen florets, whose size suggested Side-oats Grama, but in truth it didn’t look “natural,” i.e., it didn’t look like passive seed fall.
Another hypothesis immediately presented itself. The mat of grass seeds was right next to a harvester ant nest. A circular area of bare earth five feet in diameter surrounded the several holes in the ground that marked entry to what was probably a labyrinth of tunnels. Ants were marching in and out of the holes. In my experience farther north, such ants build hills a foot high over their portals, but otherwise the sizes of the clearing and of the ants were familiar.
I checked seven more ant colonies and five had similar collections of grass parts off to the sides of their main clearings. I collected some of this material and examined it with a hand lens. It seems that most of it was chaff, i.e., the bracts that protect the seed-producing floret. I think I was looking at the threshing room floors of these colonies. I’ll make some more observations to try to catch them in the act, but I suspect the ants gather florets from the ground, bring them back to the threshing area to remove the unwanted bracts, and then store the seeds underground.
It was an exciting discovery, something I may have seen but have never noticed before. It was well worth another pair of hair-shirt socks, too, for although I tried to avoid letting the tall grama grass stalks rub against my socks, I failed.
The cabin is on the lip of a gentle slope populated with pinyons, junipers, and oaks. Below this lip, the ground falls off steeply to the road and Turkey Creek. The vegetation gets increasingly mesic (i.e., moisture-dependent) as you go down that slope. Two ravines gouge the wooded plateau. The cabin’s stilts rest on the edge of the South Ravine, making it seem especially exposed. (This exposure facilitates excellent views of the Crest in the distance and of the treetops in the foreground.) The North Ravine is backed by a sunny (Yang) slope that is covered with desert vegetation. I have been wanting to check out the exposed limestone bedrock in the North Ravine.
Rather than slide or tumble down the slope of the ravine onto the murderous water-sharpened limestone, I picked my way down the steep driveway and entered the ravine through its mouth at the San Simon Road. There on the right, a climbable slope invited me up into the desert vegetation on the Yang face of the ravine. It’s where I’ve heard or seen a Crissal Thrasher a time or two and, chance encounter not having done the job, I will need to do some searching to have regular contact with this species, which was a totem for me back in ‘77 in the flats of the AVA Ranch.
After finding the north corner of the property, I made an easy descent into the ravine via a tributary cut. There I found limestone blocks, mostly covered with alluvium, on either side of a little channel filled with rocks of various kinds, kinds that could tell a story of the geological formations exposed upstream. This limestone formation, along with Crissal Thrasher (the species), is shared with the desert’s edge outside Portal, and I searched it for the Permian fossils Jack Oviatt showed me in 1978. Before I could find any, my attention was distracted by life, life exquisitely adapted to a great scarcity of water. Growing from the cracks in the limestone were stringers of moss. On the rock faces were tiny crustose lichens. And from a shady spot on the side of a rock protruded withered gray leaves, leaves which I believe are very much alive and belong to a desert fern waiting for the next rainstorm. It may have to wait for weeks, and that will be okay.
My humble mission accomplished for now, I scrambled up the alluvial slope until I picked up a little game trail angling out of the ravine. I could imagine a troop of javelinas trundling up that trail, but it probably also serves the doe and fawn that drink daily from the wildlife watering feature behind the cabin. On the way to the cabin I stopped by a harvester ant colony to check on the piles of chaff. In less than a minute I saw four separate ants emerge from the entrance of their caverns with a grass fragment in its mouth. Each of these went deliberately to the chaff pile, dropped its load, and hurried back to the hole in the ground. So, it appears that the threshing room is below ground, and that the chaff is returned to the surface for disposal in the midden. What an elaborate and wonderful system.
A crystalline fall morning. Downright cold at the mailboxes, nippy as we ascend out of that trough up Main Street. The signs say "South Turkey Creek Road" but locally it's known as Main Street. And a fine straight street it is. One can imagine the comings and goings of wagons and horsemen when this town held hundreds of souls a century ago. Now, stillness, Last Picture Show stillness. Yes, the lightest of breezelets is moving the grassheads, but there is no sound. Not depressing, like the movie, just still. As only autumn can do it.
Three Mexican Jays are in the road far ahead. JoJo is unaware. Eventually the soundtrack returns; Acorn Woodpeckers give their ratchet calls, Mexican Jays martial their troop with a flurry of zreek-zreeks. There are five houses on this stretch of Main Street, but no one is home. Most come only for week-ends. Dogs bark inside the home of the permanent residents, whose car is absent.
We approach the party house and I see a single Turkey Vulture sunning with half-spread wings on a massive sycamore snag. I have not seen any vultures for several days; I thought they were all gone. A small raptor, probably a Sharp-shinned Hawk, floats toward the sycamore, flaps once and routs a group of four Acorn Woodpeckers, who scatter in all directions with loud alarm calling. The hawk seems uninterested and disappears into a leafy tree.
JoJo spies a chipmunk in front of the George Walker House. She strains on the leash to give chase. I resist. Now really engaged with the hunt, she strains this way and that as we retrace steps down Main Street. Despite her energy, the place is still overwhelmingly calm. The grassheads barely move. The jays have gone silent. Autumn is not easily misdirected.
Things noticed on the morning walk:
The weather has "jizz" and today's is very different from yesterday's. . . . By mid-afternoon a haze enveloped the valley of Turkey Creek, and Cave Creek Canyon. This also happened once in September. The situation persisted and the extensive cloud cover that came with it mostly blocked our view of the comet after sundown. Caroline and I both had good views of it the night before with binoculars.
A green agave stalk. Century-plant (Agave) rosettes are common along the driveway up to the cabin, and indeed everywhere else around here. Most are small and therefore young, but the ones by the driveway are large and therefore probably nearing the end of their lives. Agaves, at least the ones in the U.S., spend years accumulating biomass and with it reproductive potential, and then they spend it all in one great effort at leaving progeny. You might say they are the salmon of the plant world. This strategy is called semelparity, and it seems to work very well, because it has evolved independently in numerous plant and animal lineages.
One of the large agaves by the driveway has a green stalk rising out of its rosette, meaning that it intended to flower this year. But the stalk is truncated where it runs into the large limb of an overhanging oak. It doesn't taper to an end, it looks like it was hacked off with a machete. I doubt that it was, but the green stalk is incongruous. Then today I noticed a small inflorescence off to the side of the stalk. So, the plant, having been stymied, tried to save the day with this rather puny reproductive effort. You can't help but be sad for it. I guess I will watch this plant wither and die in the months ahead, its immense potential not realized because it happened to germinate under the limbs of an oak.
A section of granary on the ground.
Packrat caves in a roadcut through alluvium.
JoJo tries to catch a kinglet. She was off the leash as we walked up the main road. She lunged at a kinglet foraging within a foot of the ground in a herbaceous plant. It was rather slow to escape in my opinion, but it did make it.
Chipping Sparrows move up the hill. A flock of juveniles, birds with brown streaks on their breasts, has been observable in the brush below the trees along the road since I arrived. Most likely the ones now frequenting the water feature at the cabin are the same ones. They no longer have streaks, but most have a first-year "jizz," to use that word again. And some have a very dark patch between the wing-bars, a feature not apparent in Sibley's illustrations.
"Sycamore leaves do not go gladly from green to gold," I thought recently as I looked at the trees by the bridge. I was thinking they shriveled up as they turned yellow. On closer inspection today, I will admit they do tend to crinkle up as they go from yellow to brown, but the yellow ones are pretty shapely, like their green predecessors. It is that shape that evoked a smile of recognition and a flood of memories.
The leaves of the Arizona Sycamore (Platanus wrightii) hang down. They have long stems (called "petioles"), and the leaf blades are divided deeply into four or five pointed lobes. When laid out flat, such a leaf has a star shape. But a leaf in life is seldom flat. The blade is folded along the petiole's axis such that the two outermost lobes are side-by-side. As a result, it is not difficult to glance at a green leaf and think it is entire and lanceolate. But that is merely one of the lobes. If you rotate that leaf length-wise you will see point after point of the star, each looking like a whole leaf.
Now why would they do that? Maybe to have a photosynthetic surface facing in every direction? If so, why don't other plants do this? I don't know of any that do. I am quite sure it is not to be beautiful, and yet....
As they age the points of some fold around so that opposite sides almost or do touch. When these stars finally cut loose they float down to their resting places in water or mulch as though the one purpose of their creation was to descend as beautifully and distinctively as possible. The basic theme is a spin about the point where petiole and leaf blade meet. With some the petiole is upturned and becomes the sixth point of the rotating star. With others it goes before as a sort of advance shaft, a feeler or Pitot tube. Those which are tightly folded spin fast and hurry down like a bullet intent upon boring itself into the ground. The broad ones float down languidly, and may take all day to arrive. The small ones, or the deformed, may somersault. No leaf descends without some show.
That was written in 1977. I haven't located the date, but it was a little deeper into the season than now. Even though I'm in no hurry for the season to advance, as it is going fast enough already, I look forward to the falling of the sycamore leaves.
Lawrence Durrell's acclaimed Justine begins thus:
The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of Spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes…
That passage comes to mind because today the wind is unpacking, and ransacking, the great planes along the creek bed below me. My "planes" are the same trees I wrote about yesterday, Arizona Sycamores; Durrell's were Oriental Planes (Platanus orientalis). Durrell's winds were harbingers of spring, mine are harbingers of winter. His rose up in the afternoon, and probably washed the "hot nude pearl" out of the sky. Mine have been blowing since last midnight and they are pushing an armada of fluffy white airships northward. In my experience around here, such winds come out of nowhere, blow awhile, and disappear. This episode is predicted to end tonight, followed by much colder temperatures.
The genus Platanus has numerous species in North America and two with rather limited distribution in Eurasia. They are mainstays of riparian ecosystems in our Southwest, Mexico, and California. The Oriental Plane occupies similar habitat from Greece to India. The ones in England are cultivars of hybrid origin, a nicely symmetrical union of east and west in the form of P. orientalis and P. occidentalis (the familiar sycamore of eastern North America).
The name "sycamore" comes from a fine old Greek word that invokes figs and mulberries. It is interesting that is applied to Platanus in America, because it is applied to a maple (somewhat ironically named Acer pseudoplatanus by Linnaeus) in Europe. Perhaps this is another case of mistaken identity by English-speaking colonists, like "robin". The planes in England look a lot like their sycamores.
I drove up to the crest and took a short hike this afternoon. I had wanted to go to Centella Point, in hopes of seeing some yellow-leafed aspens up close, and of seeing the famous view from that prominence. But, I took too long getting ready, and by the time I pulled into the trailhead at Rustler Park it was 3 p.m. "I'll just walk up Long Park Road for a bit and see what happens," I decided.
The air was chilly but the sun was bright and the sky blue as I trudged up the steep, rocky road. Our van could have made it up this road, but I wouldn't want to subject it to that kind of punishment, ever, especially after enduring the road from Paradise to the Trans-Mountain and thence to Onion Saddle. I was pleasantly surprised that I was not badly winded by the grade or the paucity of oxygen at 9,000 feet.
Long Park Road parallels the uppermost reaches of East Turkey Creek, the same stream that waters the sycamores below the cabin. Evidence of wildfire is all around. Looking across the canyon to the opposite slope, I noticed a ladder-like pattern of treeless and forested patches on the side ridges that descended the long (1000-foot?) slope to the creek bed. The moister "Yin" slopes held pines that had survived the fires; the drier "Yang" slopes were treeless. Some dead snags were there among the grasses and dried up composites, but it seemed possible that these slopes were not heavily forested before the fires. It's a testable hypothesis, as I'm sure pre-fire photographs exist. I mightguess that the pines survived either because they were spaced out enough to prevent the creation of a deadly crown-fire, or perhaps because the ground cover was too moist to support a fire at all.
The latter hypothesis was soon refuted. The deep, narrow bed of Turkey Creek comes to an end below Long Park. A steep "Yin" slope there once supported massive Douglas Firs. They are all dead, their entire wooden bodies still standing, their limbs still present and locked in the gesticulations of fiery death. Because their limbs are still present I dare hypothesize that fire didn't kill them outright, but that they died afterward from stress. Someone who knows could straighten me out. I did see some limbless Douglas Firs that were charred the full length of their trunks. Regardless of how the trees died, they have not been replaced. There is scarcely any sign of reproduction, no seedlings, only a few saplings on the aforementioned warm slope.
I got to Long Park, looked it over, and decided to chance following the Crest Trail back to Rustler. It was definitely the long way, but upon rounding a bend, far above the road, I was treated to a view of the campground from the flank of a great talus slope below a massive outcrop. It was cold and shady at 4:30, and it hosted a who's who of Rocky Mountain cold-hardy shrubs, down here on the border. And down the slope was a single true fir, Abies, topped with a great crop of green cones. Hope for the future.
I was awakened this morning by the loud chirping of a Canyon Towhee just outside the bedroom window. Then I heard a sort of rattle that I have come to associate with a Canyon Towhee soliciting food from another Canyon Towhee. I opened my eyes and there they were, facing each other, on the window ledge. I saw this same behavior a month ago. I presume there is a young bird that is still successfully getting fed by a parent. A month is a long time for them to put up with the insistent soliciting, but eagles feed their babies for months. So, towhees? It's a stretch, but then, they are unusual birds.
Speaking of the birds on the window ledge, Canyon Towhees are famously tame. They hung around the house where I lived in 1977, and, by the way, they had dependent young in September that year, too. After I had been there a week or two I realized they were going through the open back window of my Land Rover and poaching sunflower seeds from a bag I had left there. So, I placed a few seeds on the floor of my living room and left the front door open. They found them too. It is pretty funny to be sitting on your sofa and hear the chirp of a towhee and then hear its footfalls as it hops across the floor.
Back then, in 1977, Canyon Towhees were called Brown Towhees. So were California Towhees. Both kinds are mostly brown, and are about the same size, but still can be told apart visually. But the real difference is in their vocalizations. Joe Marshall had already argued that the two populations should be classified as separate species on account of their vocal differences. He was a champion of using vocal differences in taxonomy, long before it acquired some credence among more conservative taxonomists. His work led to the recognition of Eastern Screech-owl and Western Screech-owl as separate species long before molecular genetic data supported the split. This opened the door to the splitting of numerous polytypic Megascops (screech-owl) and Glaucidium (pygmy-owl) species, which is good for conservation and scientific understanding of owl evolution. And the same goes for brown towhees.
Tonight Caroline and I are in Ramsey Canyon, on a brief get-away from Paradise. We're overnighting at the Ramsey Canyon Inn, next to the Ramsey Canyon Preserve, which was once part of Mile Hi Rach. As such it became famous as the best place in the United States to see several species of hummingbirds that are at the very northern edge of their ranges. Most of those species have expanded their ranges, including into the Chiricahuas, where Portal now gets almost all the "special" hummingbirds every year. But still, Ramsey Canyon is a beautiful spot, choked with Arizona Sycamores and Big-tooth Maples growing along a stream that, at times, tumbles out of the Huachuca Mountains.
Long before present Inn owners Scott and April Kepner were born, someone at Mile Hi planted a couple of Giant Sequoias by Ramsey Creek. The have conical trunks and dense foliage arranged in a perfect Christmas tree shape. At first I took them for the native cypresses, then noticed the upturned fronds of closely-packed evergreen scales that I had struggled to identify in Eugene, Oregon, in the early 2000s. I did the work then to figure them out, so this time the out-of-place tree was recognizable. The perfect, leafy, form of the 50-foot trees is also incongruous if one thinks of the fully mature trees in California, whose 200-foot trunks look like Karnak pillars, and whose tops record the ravages of the last two millenia.
Sequoiadendron giganteum has a very limited range in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada, presumably because the conditions they require are rarely found and widely separated. This is a recipe for extinction, but don't worry about the "Bigtree," as it is also known. Its genes are in safe-keeping along a tumbling creek in arid Arizona, and in parks in Oregon, and probably many other places. Unlike, say, Florida Torreya, it does well around humans. Pinus radiata, aka Monterey Pine, may be growing naturally only on the Monterey Peninsula and a couple other spots along the coast, but it is the main timber tree in New Zealand. Would that Torrey Pine could suffer a similar indignity. My point is that all any species wants to do is to survive and reproduce; it doesn't care how it does it. Both Monterey Pine and Giant Sequoia are ready and able to be as widespread and successful as Ponderosa Pine and Douglas Fir, when their number is called, that is, when conditions are right.
Conservation biologists like to maintain genetic diversity in a species, even in a rare one, even when it involves intervention, because genetic variation is the raw material of evolution and a species needs it to survive changes in the environment. So today's oddity may be tomorrow's star. You never know what is coming, so it's good to have as many variants in the bank as possible. (That's why heirloom varieties of apples, corn, tomatoes are preserved. They could become the mainstay of the food supply in the future.)
Conservation biologists say less about the utilitarian potential of currently endangered species. They seem to consider extinction of anything, especially human-caused extinction, to be an environmental sin that must be combatted on moral grounds. I hold that view myself. But it is also true that rare species, just like rare genes, may become ecologically dominant or economically important in the future, especially if we accept that we must adapt to climate change, as well as trying to prevent it. "The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to keep all the parts."
We left Sierra Vista early in the afternoon and drove downhill for several miles through desert vegetation. Eventually we crested a rise and saw a ribbon of brightest green ahead. It was the cottonwood gallery forest (known in New Mexico as a bosque) of the San Pedro River. I am torn with emotions as I write this, grateful that efforts to restore the San Pedro have met with some success, that the green is there; and, dismayed that the Gila, into which the San Pedro flows, is still “a river no more”, in the words of Amadeo Rea, an ornithologist who chronicled humanity’s sucking the life out of this living river in his book Once a River.
In our journey south from Flagstaff earlier this month we descended Oak Creek to Sedona, then went overland to the Verde, which we followed downstream for a while before climbing into the piney woods of the Mogollon Rim. We crossed the East Verde up there, and passed through Payson before dropping down to Tonto Creek, which we followed to its confluence with the Salt, now under the waters of Roosevelt Lake. Then we crossed another divide and found ourselves on the main stem of the Gila at Globe, which we followed upstream to Safford. We turned south and eventually found ourselves paralleling San Simón Creek as we ascended to Paradise. The whole trip was in the Gila Basin. The Gila extends its fingers into New Mexico, Sonora and most of Arizona. In the nineteenth century it was navigable from its mouth on the Colorado to the Phoenix area, 40 feet deep in places. Today, when you cross it on I-10 between Tucson and Phoenix, don’t blink or you’ll miss it.
In the early nineteenth century the San Pedro had so many beaver that the trappers called it “Beaver River.” Beavers are known as “ecosystem engineers,” because their dams and ponds create habitat niches for so many other species that the character of the landscape is dramatically altered. When the trappers removed the beavers, floods gouged gullies in the floodplain. Then range cattle were introduced and they ate the alkali sacaton grass that had brushed the bellies of the explorers’ horses. In the middle of the last century, the San Pedro was in bad shape. But beavers have been re-introduced and grazing has been managed and now we have a ribbon of green again.
I wish the same for the rest of the Gila Basin, especially the Gila itself, a ribbon of green cottonwoods from the New Mexico border to the Colorado, populated with hundreds of Common Black Hawks and thousands of Southwestern Willow Flycatchers, our only currently endangered flycatcher endangered no more. And the ever-flowing waters of the reborn Gila, may they teem once again with the gigantic (and edible) minnows and suckers (Colorado Pikeminnows, Humpback Chubs, and the like) that are such a distinctive feature of the Colorado Basin.
Sulfur Springs Valley is vast, flat, and dry, but irrigation has made it an agricultural area, and of course it is warm in winter. Enter the cranes. Tens of thousands of Sandhill Cranes, from as far away as northeastern Asia, spend their winters there. One of their hotspots is the Whitewater Draw Wildlife Area. Caroline and I dropped by this morning to enjoy the spectacle of large gray birds circling overhead and landing, bugling all the while. Cranes have very long tracheae (windpipes), so long in fact that they are arranged in loops within cavities in their sterna (breastbones). The added length lowers the pitch of the sounds they make, both on the wing and on the ground, sounds that hauntingly evoke not just the Arctic tundra, where some cranes nest, but the sky itself.
Despite the exquisite wildness of cranes, Whitewater Draw reminds me of Gaddy's Goose Pond. Long before the completely migratory Canada Goose had been induced to nest in the lower 48, to just about everyone's dismay, Mr. Gaddy fed wintering honkers on his farm in Anson County, North Carolina. The word apparently got out in the goose world, and by the time he had hundreds or maybe thousands wintering there, he started charging admission to human visitors. My parents took me there several times as a pre-teen in the 1950s, and even though the pond was muddy and its banks were bare of vegetation, the birds were majestic. Remember, the Canada Goose used to be an emblem of wildness, so much so that it was made the logo-bird of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). I loved going there as a neophyte birder, not least because a few Snow Geese, including the "blue goose," a color morph that was considered a separate species at the time, were usually present.
Of course every good deed attracts third-party exploitation, and one could see hunting blinds on neighboring land when leaving the Gaddy refuge, where hunting was not allowed. The same is true of Whitewater Draw. While driving in I noticed a large sign advertising "legal crane hunts on private land." Yes, they hunt cranes. The take is of course regulated by Arizona Game and Fish, which owns and manages Whitewater Draw. The same is true at many of the refuges managed by our federal game managment agency, USFWS.
Shooting cranes, who are possessed of a mystique that would seem adequate to enthrall all of humanity, may seem deplorable, but it highlights a conundrum. Sport hunting, such as shooting cranes, may be objectionable, but some form of culling is needed to keep consumer populations at a sustainable level. Otherwise, they will either overwhelm us, or eat all the food and starve, or both.
Subsistence hunting by humans is morally much more defensible than sport hunting, but unregulated subsistence hunting has led countless times to the eradication of the resource, and although that eradication is often just local, it has been global in numerous cases, especially on islands. There are no dodos or moas left to ask what it was like to be extirpated. In fact, there is next to no evidence of any consumer in nature self-regulating its consumption of resources.
So, regulation of harvesting by an authority not dependent on the managed resource for survival or prosperity is required for resource populations to remain stable. Now that's a conundrum.
There are places JoJo fears to go: (1) Into our bathroom at home. No reason is known for this. (2) Across the little bridges at Ramsey Canyon Inn. She learned to do that. (3) Across the functional cattle guard down San Simón Road. That is smart. It was designed to keep four-leggeds from crossing. I could carry her across, or release the leash and let her go under the fence, but usually we just turn around there. That's what we did today, but not before hearing titmice.
These are Bridled Titmice. They are much smaller than the bulky Tufted Titmice of the East and a trifle smaller than the Plain Titmice with which they share the West. In fact, they have been likened to chickadees more than once. But neither chickadees, with their dark caps and bibs, nor the other titmice, with their jaunty crests, can match these little birds for ornamentation. From the neck down, they are barely distinguishable from all the other species just mentioned, but from the neck up they are quite saucy. First, there is a crest, as expected of a titmouse (genus Baeolophus), but it is two-toned, gray in front and fringed with black that extends to the tip. Head-on it looks a bit like a mullet haircut, especially because "white side-walls" are next below the black fringe of the crest. This white bit is equivalent to a typical "superciliary" line, except that it flares upward to follow the line of the crest, and then it sweeps down around the ear toward the throat; it runs into the gray body before it gets there. The black fringe of the crest follows the midline down the back of the head, then bifurcates to parallel the white that wraps around the ear. A black line runs from the bill through the eye, then curves toward the front in parallel with the black and white just mentioned. It connects to the throat, which is also black. The rest of the face is white.
"Bridled" is a pretty good word for this pattern. I don't expect you to visualize it from my wordy description, any more than you could draw it based on "bridled." The point I'm trying to make is that the pattern is intricate. It's also rare. Very few bird species have such detailed color patterns on their heads. If you assume white is the base color, I reckon at least six black segments vary independently, i.e., are controlled by different genes. Think of them as different polygons on a paint-by-numbers outline. On this view, all the titmice have those color blocks, they just aren't black in the other species. In support of this conception, the Crested Tit of Europe has a nearly identical facial pattern. It's not likely something like that evolved twice, so it seems most parsimonious that Bridled Titmouse and Crested Tit inherited it from a common ancestor. And that ancestor may have inhabited North America and Eurasia.
There were five titmice at the cattle guard. Two of them looked like chickadees as they flitted across the road at the level of the treetops, but the others didn't muster the courage to cross, at least not while we were there. They were still calling as we walked away.
Early this morning I heard a junco in the brush giving the emphatic but muted smack call. I don’t have juncos where I live, so I haven’t heard this sound in a while. It took me right back to a very cold afternoon, after sundown, in Green Mountain Falls, Colorado, when a Northern Pygmy-Owl took a bird from a flock of juncos. All its poor flock-mates could do was sit on twigs in a nearby bush and give this pathetic call. Chickadees or jays would be scolding insistently with loud, polyphonic calls, giving the predator what for. In fact, Steller’s Jays, White-breasted Nuthatches, Pygmy Nuthatches, Mountain Chickadees, and Juniper Titmice were all doing just that on the occasion of another junco kill I came upon. All the surviving juncos could muster was a flurry of smack calls. It is all the juncos have to scold with. You speak with the voice you have.
And that may be all they need to do. Their smack calls may be all it takes to activate the whole guild of owl-mobbers, who will try to chase the predator away. They may also be used to teach inexperienced juncos what a predator looks like. An experiment on a different species showed that young birds need to see the predator while hearing the innate predator-alarm call to associate that species with danger.
It is good to have juncos here. I saw several and these are "pink-sided juncos." They nest in the Northern Rocky Mountains. They are one of several regional populations that are identifiable visually. But all of them sound alike, and are considered a single species, for now.
I am doing this writing gig in this location for four reasons: sky, mountains, plants, and animals. I have no effect on the first three of those, but the animals swarm around because I feed and water them. Yes, they were in the vicinity because they belong here, all of them, but I have baited them in. “Bait” doesn’t have to be a bad word. I am baiting them in to see them and to enjoy being in their presence, not to take them, and they get something they want in return, food and water. Water is usually in short supply in these parts, and free water is certainly hard to find at this season. And food, it seems to be abundant this year, but optimal foraging theory says they will come if you put it out.
Today, the big ones arrived. Sometime in the morning a javelina (Collared Peccary) strolled by the bedroom window. It walked over to the sunflower seed feeder that hangs from a line and sniffed with great interest. Unable to reach the seeds it clearly smelled, it strolled on off. Later I saw it with two others, one smaller. Perhaps this is a family unit. I would expect them to be attracted to the water feature and visit often. We shall see.
Sometime in the afternoon the turkeys arrived; at least eight toms were in the troop. They moved slowly and carefully, but calmly, through the baited area, nibbling here and there, then gathered for a while in the PJ upslope, then walked down the slope toward the creek. They are said locally to eat a provider out of house and home. We shall see.
It’s funny. I have been lamenting the Mexican Jays’ taking all the sunflower seeds off the ground each morning before the other birds -- quail, towhees, and cardinalids (Northern Cardinal and Pyrrhuloxia) -- have a chance at them. Now, it may be that turkeys get all the seeds. Mexican Jays are early risers, though; I imagine they’ll get their share. And I just bought a 40-lb. bag, enough to last until the next trip to town.
While writing this, I looked to my side and saw a “red-shafted” flicker at the sunflower seeds I had placed on the handrail of the deck. Mexican Jays and Acorn Woodpeckers are there frequently, but this is the first time I’ve seen the flicker come to the rail. A Mexican Jay flew up to assert its rights to the seeds. The flicker responded by crouching and spreading its wings, lined with red that is not visible when they’re folded at its side. A couple of feints by the flicker and the jay, which looks larger, departed.
I am impressed by the tameness of all these animals. They are wild of course, but I am not treated as much of a threat. Even the doe that uses the water feature stood and watched as I walked from the house to the van today. She walked around behind a tree when I got closer, but did not run off. The turkeys are the same, they just slowly walk away if I get too close. They are tame because, in general, the two-leggeds are not dangerous. I dare say they were not this tame a century ago, when over-hunting for subsistence had made endangered species of deer and turkeys. Their recovery to their present status of pests, in the minds of many, is one of the great success stories of wildlife management. It shows what can be done with regulations and enforcement. The turkeys may become pests here in my “yard.” They haven’t yet, though, and I look forward to seeing them again.
It is not surprising that everyone in 1700 believed in the "fixity of species." Fossils were barely known, the earth was thought to be only a few thousand years old, and the different kinds of plants and animals seemed, well, very different. And, for as long as anyone could remember, lions and tigers, for example, had been easy to distinguish. The ensuing Age of Discovery revealed that lions and tigers varied geographically, fossils put the lie to the assumption that extinctions had not occurred, geologists realized that the earth was ancient, and Darwin, inspired by the work of pigeon fanciers, concocted a rational hypothesis of how the whole grand menagerie came to be.
It is therefore not surprising that we, in our age, assume that the way nature is now is how it always has been and always should be. Lacking an appreciation of deep time, we fail to realize that nature is always changing. But consider this, despite global climate change, species of birds are expanding their ranges southward into the Southern Appalachians. As climate warms, we expect ranges to move northward, not southward, and many have. But Magnolia Warblers, Yellow-rumped Warblers, and Swainson's Thrushes have all colonized the spruce-fir ("Hudsonian Zone") forests around Mt. Mitchell, N.C., and farther south in the last few decades. Legions of birders intent upon seeing species new to their favorite birding areas have documented it.
My humble hypothesis explaining this counter-intuitive phenomenon is that spruce-fir forests moving north with the retreat of the continental glaciers a few thousand years ago passed the southern mountains by because those mountains were too cold, at the time, for the forests to thrive. The birds that nested in spruce-fir forest were swept northward with their favored habitat, a generation at a time. Later, as the climate warmed, spruce and fir colonized the southern peaks from the north. Those three species, I hypothesize, are not as good at dispersal as those trees. There are many examples of animals not moving as fast as their habitat does. But, dispersing in from forests to the north, they have finally made it to western North Carolina, where, by all rights, they "belong." They have rejoined the Golden-crowned Kinglets, Winter Wrens, and Common Ravens that also "belong" there, and with which they co-occur everywhere else in eastern North America. Overall, the repopulation of North America after the devastation of the last ice age is still a work in progress.
The "pink-sided" junco is a product of that progress. Genetic studies reveal that the many kinds of "dark-eyed" juncos nesting in the mountains of western North America have differentiated (evolved differently) in the last few thousand years. As the mountain forests became hospitable with the retreat of the glaciers, a founding population of juncos would island hop northward from one mountain island to the next. Once there, it would take some time before the population grew enough to encourage or necessitate a move of some to the next mountain range. During that period, the superficial appearance of the local juncos would change a bit. This scenario repeated itself enough times that we now have "gray-headed" juncos in the Southern Rocky Mountains, "pink-sided" juncos in the Northern Rocky Mountains, "Oregon" juncos in the Pacific Northwest and down into California, "white-winged" juncos in the Black Hills, and "dark-eyed" juncos in the vast boreal forest of Canada and the mountains of the eastern U.S. The dark-eyed form has even colonized the Southern Appalachians, FROM THE NORTH, insuring that this lineage now occupies all the mountain forests of North America, plus the climatically similar boreal forest, where it "belongs." If you want to imagine a species "yearning" to go home, to the habitat where it "belongs," think of Yellow-eyed Juncos in Guatemala and Mexico. It is their aunts and uncles who made the trek.
In 1993, George Barrowclough, a prominent systematist participating in a symposium on species -concepts at the annual meeting of the A.O.U. (American Ornithologists' Union), showed an illustration of what he called "the twelve species of juncos." (I don't remember the exact number, the point was that it was a lot, not the one species the naming authorities recognized. And they haven't changed their minds on that.) He was advocating a "phylogenetic species concept," whereby identifiable regional variants of a single lineage should be given species rank. The juncos are a perfect example of this pattern, called a polytypic species by one camp and a superspecies by the other camp. I think I prefer Barrowclough's approach, although I'm not militant about it, and it requires a level of indeterminacy of birding records that the birding authorities should but do not enforce. (That is a topic for another day.) My point now is that the only point of differentiation of the very young "species" in the Barrowclough scheme is plumage. If enough "gray-headeds" moved to the Black Hills, the "white-winged" could be swamped in a few decades. Plumage-based variants are easy come, easy go. Enjoy them while they last. Evolution is not static, it is a temporal process of descent with modification.
SHORT TAKES:
The sycamores at the mailboxes are at peak color. Some green leaves, mostly yellow, a few brown. The brownies were falling this morning, one at a time, performing as described before. They were delightful. In the early afternoon a big wind came along and ransacked those great sycamores, but the leaves held fast. It is not yet time for devastation. In the late afternoon, several trees at the north cattleguard were majority brown.
While walking to the north cattleguard, JoJo and I looked for the columns of ants that had spanned the road earlier in the month. Nada. They must have gone done for the winter. But, up on the mesa behind the cabin, the harvesters are still active.
The last of the migratory hummingbirds, a Rufous, has disappeared, and now we have only two Anna's males left. But, the nectar-eating bats must still be around, because the feeders are being emptied every night.
A White-throated Sparrow joined the flock of seed-eaters in the bird hospitality area this afternoon. It's an eastern species that is common in the Southeast in winter. It's unusual enough here that Ebird.org required details for me to list it. Luckily, the species is pretty unmistakable.
Neither the turkeys nor the javelinas have returned.
I got up early this morning to watch the sun light up the sotol stalks on the south-facing slope northeast of the cabin. It wasn't necessary. Although the sun came up early, as expected, sunlight didn't reach that Yang slope until much later. When it did, I got what I expected.
Sotol is a yucca-like plant with a basal rosette of narrow and rather stiff leaves. Unlike yucca leaves, the margins of its leaves are armed with curved spines. Beware. Its flowers are borne on a tall straight stalk, which emerges from the center of the rosette. The flowers have long since done their duty, but the stalks are still present, and it is they that are conspicuous from a distance. The ones on the ridgeline stand out, but the entire slope is covered with this species, and there the stalks blend into the background. I predicted, though, that they would be highlighted when the sunlight first slipped over the ridgeline.
That's what happened. Bit by bit, as the sun rose higher and higher, sotol stalks farther and farther down the slope emerged from darkness and stood out against the dark hillside behind them. For a moment I gazed at a sea of them, seemingly disembodied, then the sun rose higher, illuminated the slope, and the ephemeral effect was gone. The sea of stalks became a desert slope again.
FOLLOW-UPS:
I wanted to see sotol up close, but it doesn't actually grow around the cabin. I could see some up the slope to the west, so I ventured ove the sagging barbed wire fence and entered a parcel recently inhabited by a number of beef cows. I have been relieved that they didn't smell my puddle of wildlife water and traipse down here. They seem to have moved on, at least for now.
The first part of the slope held no sotol, but plenty of agave. Most of the skeletons looked to be a year old, i.e., products of a bloom in the summer of 2023. Plenty of juvenile rosettes were there, too. As I climbed higher, the "north ravine" and "south ravine" from the vicinity of the cabin converged and created a narrow ridge. Pinyon pines, junipers, and oaks grew on the sides of these ravines.
Finally, I got to the sotol stand. They were growing on steep rocky ground, while agaves were more abundant below, in deeper colluvial soils on a gentler slope. Their flowering stalks are tall, up to 15 feet high, the remnants of the flowers tightly appressed. Agave stalks are even higher, up to 25 feet, and the flowers are attached to lateral limbs, giving the whole inflorescence the look of a candelabra.
Also present were clumps of beargrass. Their leaves are very narrow and flexible. They can bend in all directions, and as a result the clumps look like gorgons' heads. Their flower stalks are flexible, too, so the spent ones are now on the ground. Sotol leaves are a bit wider. They are flexible dorso-ventrally but not laterally, so the rosettes look neat and organized. Agave leaves are thick and succulent. They are not flexible at all. Their rosettes are elegant.
Two days ago the mailbox sycamores looked golden. Yesterday the wind blew all day. Today the foliage is the color of raw copper. I wanted to see how this could happen so fast. Had all the green leaves fallen in the gale, or had they all turned? JoJo and I walked down there in the late afternoon. The formerly green leaves were not to be seen. They were not on the ground, so they must have turned, probably to yellow, in two days' time. The brown leaves are worth mentioning. They do not look dead, their brown is rather lustrous. They could hange there for a long time, until they're ready to go. Then the miracle of abscission will occur and they will flutter to the ground, each one doing its own thing.
The javelina family returned to the water late this afternoon. They also scarfed a few sunflower seeds from the ground. Caroline is worried about JoJo. I don't blame her. Whereas I had resolved to keep JoJo close to the hearth at all times, I have relaxed my vigilance recently. She has become fixated on the chipmunks outside. I know she will not run off. She stalks chipmunks for hours at a time. She will never catch one and she's having the time of her life. It's not bad for them either, or the cottontail she chased today. It's good for them to be a little wary. I don't think JoJo will be wary, so I'm going to have to be a helicopter dad and keep her safe.
Speaking of wariness, the sparrows eating my proffered seeds need to be wary, too. I saw a Sharp-shinned Hawk today. They are known for sitting out of view near bird feeders and taking a meal from among the less wary congregants. Indeed, if this hawk, a juvenile and therefore inexperienced and inexpert, is to survive the winter, he (it's a small sharpie, so likely a male) will need to take a toll on the birds feeding here. They are not only easier pickings than birds in the woods, the woods are probably empty. As I said, if you put out free food, they will come from far and wide. It's one of the downsides of baiting. So, choose your preferred risk, birds. Will it be starvation or predation?
I am very happy that both Northern Cardinals and Pyrrhuloxias find the abundant food and dependable water around the cabin attractive. I never get tired of looking at either species. The cardinals are ultra-familiar from my yard in South Carolina, but they are brighter red here, and that is always arresting. As for the Pyrrhuloxias, I have seen them often enough through the decades, but never to such great advantage. The male comes regularly to the water fountain on the porch, and both male and female are frequently visible, from my desk, on the ground outside.
I am fond of telling birders on the Flocks and Rocks Trek that the Arizona Cardinal logo is a chimera; it has the body of a cardinal but the bill of a Pyrrhuloxia. The bill of a male cardinal is red, although it does look somewhat yellow at a distance. The bill of a male Pyrrhuloxia is in fact yellow, especially in summer, and its top, called the culmen, is more curved than the cardinal’s. The same is true of the logo’s culmen. Both species occur in the Arizona deserts around Phoenix, home of the football team, but I don’t think the yellow bill was intended to honor the slightly smaller Pyrrhuloxia; the first logo to use the bird’s image, for baseball’s St. Louis Cardinals in 1922, inexplicably featured a yellow bill.
Of more interest to me, as an ecologist, is how the two species manage to co-exist in Arizona. The Pyrrhuloxia is strictly a desert bird, and does not occur in eastern North America where most of us encounter the Northern Cardinal. The odd thing is that the cardinal is able to thrive in the deserts of the Southwest as well as the moist woodlands and homesteads of the East. Is there a disjunct desert population that is functioning like a separate species?
Apparently the answer is no, because the density of observations on the ebird.org map for the species is continuously great as one goes from eastern forest into Tamaulipan thorn-scrub in south Texas. Pyrruloxia joins its “congener” there, and they are together throughout the range of the latter. So, how Northern Cardinal does it remains unexplained, but how then do they co-exist? The competitive exclusion principle says they should not.
For a layperson’s introduction to that principle, try David Lack’s (1973) Ecological Isolation in Birds. He was a true believer and this book documents all the cases he, as a renowned ornithologist, knew of. The idea is that very closely related species will not be able to co-exist, because one is bound to be a better competitor than the other, and the inferior one will be “excluded” by aggression or failure to thrive. So, very closely related and ecologically similar species will be separated in one of the following ways: (1) geographic range, (2) different habitat within over-lapping ranges, (3) different foraging niches within the same habitat. Differences in size, especially size or shape of the food-caching-organ, usually the bird’s bill, are taken as indicative of different niches.
By the way, are Northern Cardinal and Pyrrhuloxia actually closely related, or only superficially similar? Pyrrhuloxia was formerly Pyrrhuloxia sinuata, but morphometric and genetic data showed they are too closely related to cardinals to have their own genus. So yes, they are closely related.
The cardinals here are a bit bigger than the Pyrrhuloxias, and the former chase the latter away from feeding areas. Aggression of this sort is one mechanism by which habitat differences are enforced. (It may not be that both species are where they want to be.) Another factor is the difference in bill shape, which may be correlated with different efficiencies at cracking different kinds of seeds. So there’s a potential habitat difference and a potential niche difference, but all that is out the window around feeders, where the ease of getting food can allow all comers to co-exist, even if uneasily.
I went birding this morning at Lake Cochise in Willcox, Arizona, at the north end of Sulfur Springs Valley. The "lake" is a wastewater pond adjacent to Twin Lakes Gold Course. It had a nice collection of ducks, dozens of small sandpipers ("peeps") and dowitchers, and exactly 40 Sandhill Cranes. I enjoyed the birds but was especially impressed with the warm welcome from the local humans. The large sign proclaiming the golf course also mentioned the "birding area." Willcox has discovered birder dollars, and even has a birding festival every winter. The state highway department has gotten into the act, decorating an overpass with lifesize (or bigger) silhouettes of Sandhill Cranes.
Birding has become a mainstream activity enjoyed by millions, whereas it was an eccentricity when I was growing up in the 1950s. I am very happy to see the change. The increasing popularity of birding and birds is a cause of improved bird conservation, and although Arizona does allow hunting of cranes, the thousands of humans who see them at Whitewater Draw, and the enlightenment engendered by those visitations, undoubtedly portend a better future for cranes and other birds, even if not for the unfortunate individuals who are taken by shooters.
Ecotourism abroad has had direct impacts. In A World on the Wing, Scott Weidensaul tells of the congregation of tens of thousands of Amur Falcons near Pangti in India's Nagaland. Before birders discovered the concentration, the locals were trying to make a living off killing and cooking the birds. Now, they take visitors to see them.
Visitors to the Amur Falcons may be foreigners, but many countries are growing indigenous birding communities. One way, albeit unscientific, to assess the developmental stage of homegrown birding is to look at the names of the top 100 birders in a place, as complies by Ebird. The Top 100 in India and China, for example, seem to be around 90% native, based on the likely languages of the names. That is very heartening, because there is nothing that can match local citizens at making conservation work. Thank you, Pangti, India, and Willcox, Arizona, for getting on the train.
The list of species seen from the cabin grew by four today. A large male coati showed up and climbed up onto the deck, only to be chased away by the barking of JoJo, who, luckily for her, was inside. He later walked by again and got into a trash can full of bird seed I had left open on the front porch. I expect to see more of him.
Also new were a Lark Sparrow and two Lincoln's Sparrow, which are not too surprising. Then there was an unexpected species, Rose-breasted Grosbeak, most of which are in the tropics by now. It was not in the easily identifiable adult male plumage, so after identifying it as a female Rose-breasted on the basis of heavy streaking on the breast I tried getting some video for documentation. I managed a very short clip as an Acorn Woodpecker chased her away from the hanging sunflower seed feeder. I threw a quantity of seeds under the feeder and by day's end she was foraging unharried on the ground. Perhaps she will stay around and I'll get a better photo.
"Grosbeak" is an apt descriptor, but not reflective of phylogeny. The "gross beak" of these birds is used to crack large seeds; it is a convergent adaptation in two families of songbirds. North America has five of these species. Pine Grosbeak and Evening Grosbeak are in the family Fringillidae. This family is found worldwide except for Australia and Antarctica. Pine Grosbeak is one of the species with a "holarctic" distribution; it is found in subalpine forests across the Northern Hemisphere. The Fringillids are fairly colorful. They tend to forage for seeds in the treetops.
Rose-breasted Grosbeak and Black-headed Grosbeak are a species pair, and replace each other geographically; their females are very similar looking. (cf. Ruby-throated and Black-chinned Hummingbirds.) They and Blue Grosbeak are in Cardinalidae, along with other colorful seed-eaters, such as the cardinals and Passerina buntings, which forage mostly on the ground, and our North American tanagers, which forage mostly on fruit. This is an exclusively New World lineage with a tropical flavor.
As we know from the great scientific work on the finches of the Galápagos Islands, bill size in birds can evolve easily and rapidly when the size of available seeds changes dramatically. Try imagining a cardinal with a towhee bill or a towhee with a honker like a cardinal's. It's possible, and it might even happen some day, or have happened in the past. And here's an oddity. The four "gross-beaked" cardinalids hereabouts have been feeding on small seeds on the ground with towhees, rather than going for the sunflower seeds that the cardinals monopolize in South Carolina. Why? I guess because the Acorn Woodpeckers and the Mexican Jays monopolize all the sunflower seed sources. Just ask that female grosbeak what it's like trying to access your optimal seed size in this ecosystem.
Since I arrived here on September 4, the skies have filled with clouds a couple of times and a few drops of rain have made it to the ground, but it hasn't really rained at all. Record high temperatures have continued to torture the desert cities of Tucson and Phoenix right into November. All that changed yesterday as the clouds built up to produce the first "female rain" of the winter rainy season.
The Navajo concepts of slow and steady "Female Rain" that sinks into the ground and violent and torrential "Male Rain" that washes away soil and deepens arroyos is known to me from a secondary source, the novels of Tony Hillerman. Provided he got it right, I would say the concept resonates with the Chinese concepts of "Yin" and "Yang." But they are not synonymous. The Yin/Yang dichotomy refers to slope aspects, and the consequences of evaporation by direct exposure to the sun's dessicating radiation. "Female Rain" on "Yin" slopes would produce the most vegetation.
The rains fell last night, slowly and steadily. Today, the sky is mostly blue, and the peaks I described on September 5 are white. As I look at the frosted "Yin" slopes to my southwest I imagine a future of growing shoots and flowing streams, and I give thanks.
Walking north on the road to San Simón, JoJo and I crossed the “first cattle guard” without incident. That was easy, as it’s no longer a cattle guard. I think it once was one, as the road narrows to meet barbed wire fences coming in from the right and left, and yellow reflectors stand on either side, as they do for functional cattle guards. I guess the hardware was taken out and the signs were left behind. At any rate, JoJo, who is deterred by the “second cattle guard,” doesn’t hesitate to cross the space.
As we walk on down the road, I notice something that had escaped my attention on numerous previous passages. Except for the sycamores along the stream banks, all the trees in the flood plain of Turkey Creek are of one kind. The flood plain is a forest of Alligator Junipers. The expected Arizona White Oaks are missing. My focus changes a bit and I’m reminded of similar flood plains north of the Mogollon Rim where Rocky Mountain Junipers play the same role, while cottonwoods replace the sycamores. An idea begins to germinate as we walked on.
JoJo is no longer flummoxed by the second cattle guard. She just walks under the fence on the side and avoids the bars that break bovine legs if they try to cross. I didn’t teach her that; she just figured it out. The road leaves the flood plain on the other side of the cattle guard, and the Alligator Junipers are joined there by white oaks and a few Red-berried Junipers. We walked here yesterday and I heard a single scrub jay, most likely a Woodhouse’s Scrub-Jay. Voice only identifies the super-species, not the Rocky Mountain allo-species that has been split out of that complex. Scrub-jays are relegated to lower-elevation, drier woodlands that the Mexican Jays don’t want. (This arrangement is almost certainly the result of contest competition, see below.)
It’s two thirds of a mile to the first creek crossing. The creek is flowing now, after the steady rain of Sunday night. My nascent thought crystallizes into a single word, “phreatophyte.” It’s the aqueous equivalent of “blood-sucking.” That’s the view of cottonwoods and sycamores, and of Rocky Mountain and Alligator Junipers, all phreatophytes, held by some humanists who believe that the water was put here for them, and that anything that takes it away from them is their enemy. This boils down to competition between humans and plants for scarce water in the arid West.
Ecologists recognize two kinds of competition: scramble and contest (also known as interference and exploitation competition). In scramble competition, all competitors have access to the resource, and their fitness is a function of their harvesting efficiency. This is an unstable situation and all may die if the number of competitors is greater than the resource can support. In contest competition, some competitor(s) can monopolize access to the resource, insuring that they obtain a sufficient amount of the resource to thrive. Contest competition tailors the size of the population to the richness of the resource. This may be brutal, but it averts extinction of the entire populations in lean years.
The phreatophytic plants are classic scramble competitors, all pumping water into their shoots and leaves as fast as they can. When humans cut down the phreatophytes, they are being contest competitors. But it doesn’t stop there. Humans eschew scramble competition among themselves. They have devised water laws that allocate certain amounts of the water in a stream to owners of “water rights.” The rights are typically allocated according to priority of use, not position on the stream. So, the owner of a property that contains a flowing stream isn’t allowed to use the water if it “belongs” to someone downstream with a prior claim to it. This leads to a lot of litigation, but most of us think litigation is preferable to warfare. And these days even the phreatophytes, and aquatic organisms, have their champions in court. Maybe this is better than all the alternatives.
On the morning after:
The wind still tousles the sycamore leaves, which are still golden at a distance, flooded with sunlight.
The moon still rises later than yesterday, its crescent swelling toward gibbous.
The birds and chipmunks still relish the food and water I provide.
Friends and family are still a phone call away.
Representative democracy is still a great idea.
"Hold fast to the center."
I heard a loud impact on the window. I knew what to do. I went there and looked down. A male spotted towhee lay on the ground, his bill opening and closing as he breathed his last. He is still there, head folded over his back, eerily like the first Archaeopteryx fossil.
He is still there.
He is still there.
I bury him, violating the ways of nature to bring him into our tent, so I can honor him in our way. It is the least I can do.
I can take the food away that lured him into the madding crowd that startled him into that window. It is a tough call. There are dozens of white-crowned sparrows here now. A few juncos, goldfinches, a dozen chipping sparrows, two or three pyrruloxias and cardinals, three now two spotted towhees, several canyon towhees, a covey of quail and a flock of jays and a group of acorn woodpeckers, plus two flickers and two or three sapsuckers. Bridled and juniper titmice, and a pair of nuthatches. And the misguided grosbeak is still here.
Their risk of starvation is reduced, their risk of predation by the young sharp-shin increased, their risk of colliding with a window great. And it is indeed a crowd, with abundant opportunity for strife.
Help and harm encircle each other like yin and yang. Where is the center?
A hawk was sitting in a small tree right beside the brushpile early this morning. Although it had a long tail, like a sharp-shin, it was too big. It had to be a Cooper's. I fetched the video camera to record it; the tripod was already in place by the bedroom window. Fortunately I took a glance with binoculars and saw the brown vertical streaks that marked her as a bird of the year. I say "her" with some confidence, because the hawk was quite large, and female accipiters are significantly larger than males. (Females are larger in all three raptor clades [hawks, owls, and falcons], especially so in the bird-hunting genus Accipiter, which also includes sharp-shins and goshawks.).
By the time I finally got the video camera ready, the hawk was gone. A few minutes later I saw an accipiter flying away to the north. We'll see if she comes back. There is a lot of food around here, and very little out in the woods, if my walks are any indication. I did see three Phainopeplas to the north of here a few days ago, and they tend to perch in the tops of trees for long spells. I wonder why, they seem to be sitting ducks for accipiters.
By the way, the turkeys have not been back. Nor has the coati, since his second visit. The javelina family is still around but they only pass through and haven't paused for water or to root for seeds. That's in the daytime. I need to get that night-vision camera set up.
I started worrying about missing the maples, so I took an impromptu trip to South Fork in the afternoon. The weather was perfect, the sycamores were perfect (with many green leaves, not on the downslope as the ones here are), and the maples hold promise for the future. The first ones I ran into, at the second stream crossing above the parking lot, were mostly green of leaf. I hiked all the way to the sixth crossing, and then some, to get a glimpse of Sentinel Peak at the head of the canyon, and passed quite a few maples. A few of the larger trees did have red leaves. Most of the small saplings did not. I hatched a plan then and there to come back at least twice. Next time I will include Maple Camp, a little flat spot farther up canyon that is completely enshrouded in maples. I have camped up there in a red cloud, and it is very peaceful. I'll do it again in a week or two.
I met three groups of hikers, a group of three men, another threesome of men, and a group of five women. All the hikers, save one, were in the senior category. We are all fortunate to have lived this long, and to be able to hike up rocky trails. JoJo got lots of attention from the hikers, and fortunately they weren't offended when she barked her own "greetings." She is a good companion, and, at ten pounds, is cute rather than menacing when she barks.
At sunrise the wildlife water fountain on the porch was frozen for the third morning in a row. The hummingbird sugar water was frozen for the first time. That means the air was significantly below 32 F. The temperature read-out (how can I call such a thing a thermometer?) in the van said 27. And the concrete water feature in the yard was empty. I had work to do.
I took the water fountain inside and de-iced it. As I placed it back on the porch rail, Lesser Goldfinches swarmed around. As soon as I backed off a foot or so, they descended en masse to the rim of the fountain and drank. I retreated to the kitchen and watched through the small window above the sink. I counted a dozen there.
The Mexican Jays and Acorn Woodpeckers zeroed in on that water source as soon as I put it up a month or more ago. It is a stainless-steel pan 3 inches deep and seven inches in diameter, with a slotted saucer on top. A little pump sends the water from the reservoir below to the saucer above via a goose-neck spigot. The jays and woodpeckers will sit on the rail and crane their necks over the rim of the saucer to drink, but the smaller birds just sit on the rim and drink. Sometimes they lean over and sip from the falling stream of water. Sometimes they bathe. For the goldfinches and titmice, it is probably just the right size.
It piques my curiosity that these goldfinches, which are aridland birds year round, are such water lovers. Their number has grown from a steady three for several weeks to the present census of over a dozen, and they seem to be constantly descending to the big water feature, a two-foot by two-foot square less than two inches deep and expertly laid out to be shallower at one end than the other. Consultation of Birds of the World has not enlightened me. Perhaps it is a bad question.
Speak of BOW, it is awesome. In my recent visit I learned, for example, that although they are in the same genus, Spinus, with the siskins, the three species we call "goldfinches" in America comprise a clade, i.e., each others' closest relatives. The definining characteristic of a siskin, but the way, is yellow in the wings. Two of the American golfinches have white, not yellow in the wings, but Lawrence's, alas, has much yellow. I would have to assume yellow is "primitive," i.e., the original color in the genus.
Speaking of siskins, the first of the season were here this morning. Two Pine Siskens have been seen so far. Despite their small bills, which would seem to be made for smaller seeds, one was parked on the hanging feeder devouring sunflower seeds at a rapid clip.
Coming home from South Fork Thursday afternoon, I paused on the bridge just below the vacation cabins to scan the creekside for birds. I was rewarded with a good look at a tiny bird working the water's edge. It was very dark brown and had a very short tail, which was held vertically. You know what that is, a winter wren.
I can't say "Winter Wren," with capitals, because that would indicate greater precision in my identification than I could muster from a distance of over 50 yards. A few years ago I could have said "Winter Wren" with confidence, because the name then referred to the entire world population of a species characterized by very small size, even for a wren, the aforementioned short tail, and a rolling song that has been called the "pinnacle of complexity" in birdsong.
That broadly construed species, with populations throughout the temperate zone of North America and Eurasia, has now been split into three: Eurasian Wren in Eurasia, Pacific Wren in the rainforests of western North America, and Winter Wren (sensu stricto, as they say) in the boreal forests from Alberta to the Atlantic and in the mountains south to North Carolina and Tennessee. Those are the ranges in the nesting season. In the winter the winter wrens go to milder climes, and both Pacific and Winter are possible here.
These splits are all to the good, as long as we can tell the named kinds apart. If we can, the more granular data reported on eBird.org can tell us more about the health of those distinct populations. Different trends in the Pacific and Winter Wren populations, should they occur, would not have been recoverable when we were reporting all the winter wrens (sensu lato) as the same species. The two forms can be distinguished if seen and/or heard well, but failing that, they should be reported as Winter/Pacific Wren, which is what I did.
Birders in the Chiricahuas know both forms are possible here, and most take pains to observe diagnostic characteristics, or punt as I did. But I suspect that most people seeing a "winter wren" (sensu lato) east of the Mississippi, winter or summer, put it down as a Winter Wren (sensu stricto) without checking to make sure it's not the unlikely Pacific Wren or the extremely unlikely Eurasian Wren. That is an error, in the statistical sense of that word. It's a Type II Error, an error of omission, meaning they failed to exclude the two unlikely species and thus conferred "pseudo-specificity" on the record. How will we ever find the first Pacific Wren to cross the Mississippi if no one is looking closely enough to recognize one? (I'm confident quite a few crack birders are, but I know I've committed that error, and I bet many others have, too.)
Every "winter wren" I've ever seen in the East in winter should have been reported as Winter/Pacific Wren. Why haven't I done that? Because it feels, . . . "anti-social." No one does it. If you go to punch in "dowitcher sp." (shorthand for Long-billed Dowitcher or Short-billed Dowitcher) on your eBird phone app, it will more than likely tell you that combination has never been reported from your location. I suggest that birders need to be scrupulously honest about the precision of their identifications, and that eBird needs to map less precise id's, such as "winter wren sp." and "dowitcher sp." along with the more precise ones, as they do with subspecies. That is, choosing Winter/Pacific Wren for the Species Map function would produce a map including Winter, Pacific, and either/or, i.e., all the sensu lato "winter wrens." You could always map the two species separately to get an idea where the uncertain sightings are, as you can do now with subspecies. Then the data would be a lot more dependable.
As I opened the door at 7:48, a large, long-tailed hawk launched from a short tree near the brushpile and flew rapidly upslope with a burst of wingbeats followed by a glide six feet off the ground -- a sure mark of the erstwhile accipiters. Now that widespread and venerable genus has been divided into five, but, by any name, including its new one, Astur, that was a Cooper's Hawk, and most likely the one who was here three days ago.
So she is back, and I need to rejoin the issue of feeding birds seeds and thereby feeding seed-eatiing birds to accipiters, both Cooper's Hawks, who'll prey on the quail, woodpeckers, and jays, and Sharp-shinned Hawks -- still in Accipiter by the way -- who will prefer the smaller birds. Well, everyone has to eat, including the predators.
PETA wants to eliminate carnivory (or is it just predation?), but I don't agree. The very first living things were heterotrophs. They consumed all the "food," and were replaced by autotrophs, who made their own. New heterotrophs soon evolved to eat them, and so it has been ever since. It's hard to imagine Homo sapiens managing all the consumption that occurs on Earth. We can't even manage our own.
By the way, vegetarians kill plants. If you're only interested in reducing or eliminating the pain and suffering caused by carnivory and not concerned about the death that precedes or accompanies it, please consider that plants experience "pain" in their own way. Pain for us is an experience designed to prevent bodily injury through avoidance behavior. Plants may not have nervous systems like us, but they do have ways to sense danger and communicate about it internally and externally. The two mechanisms don't seem very different.
When it comes to our impact on the beings we consume, we cannot deny that our impacts are usually negative. It is that way with all consumption. We are left with trying to maximize their welfare before we consume them, and assuming an attitude of gratitude and humility in takng their lives, their limbs, or their progeny.
A pile of feathers. Specifically, tail feathers of a Spotted Towhee, not 20 feet from where the towhee slammed into a window. They are not his; I buried him whole, in the Archaeopteryx position, his long beautiful tail feathers intact.
I have spread seeds farther and wider and the apparent population of White-crowned Sparrows has greatly diminished. Maybe they are skulking better, or maybe some left; I do not know.
As I have mentioned, predators are about. The towhee feathers were in a little pile. Only a few rufous flank feathers were with them. I looked directly above for the telltale sign of a plucking perch, but no feathers dangled from the branches. It is possible that a would-be killer made a strike and got only tail feathers. Could it have been JoJo? She fancies herself a predator. I have watched her stalk chipmunks and charge at birds, but she has seemed rather inept, her fervor notwithstanding. I will be watching for a tailless towhee. I'll be relieved if I see one.
I had cataract surgery a few years ago, and it had a life-improving outcome. I don't need spectacles to read highway signs anymore, and birding is a lot easier and successful. But I do have to wear readers to read, and work at the computer. My desk is at a window that looks out on the slope of the "south ravine" and a bare spot where I throw small birdseed for the sparrows. The pile of towhee feathers is just to the right. I was working busily at the computer at 7:50, bright sunlight illluminating a scene that was blurred by my readers. But I saw an unusual blob in the shrubs in front of me.
I pulled down the glasses and saw, barely 20 feet away, a beautiful "blue darter" perched in a bush. It wasn't resting. It jumped to the ground and chased a sparrow on foot. It perched again. "Blue Darter" is a vernacular name applied to both Cooper's Hawk and Sharp-shinned Hawk in the previous century. They look alike and hunt alike -- darting through the woods in pursuit of birds. I studied the bird through binoculars, hoping to determine its species. It was an adult. It had a long neck and small head, right for Cooper's. I couldn't tell if the tail was rounded or squared off. And size was indeterminate. It was too small for a male sharpie, but female sharpies and male Coops overlap in size. I wasn't sure it was large enough for a female Coop. I need to see that tail, and I suspect I will in the days to come.
I ran for the video camera. I got back and got the machine started and was zooming in on the bird when it flew by chasing something. Only then did it dawn on me that this wasn't a return visit of the previous bird, because that bird was an immature. The pile of towhee tail feathers acquires new meaning. I don't think I'm going to be seeing a tailless towhee.
Back at the desk, at 2:48 p.m., with tthe sheer curtain pulled to reduce glare, something moved from left to right across my field of view. I took a peek. Another accipiter! It was sitting in the juniper just past the towhee tail feathers. The streaks on its front told me it was an immature, and the squared off tail said "Sharp-shinned Hawk." It seemed large, so I guess it was a female. Let's say it was. She sat there for a long time, long enough for me to fetch the video camera, set it up on a tripod, and take so much video through the window that I was satisfied I had enough and stopped. She was still there when I closed the curtain. A bit later she was gone. I bet I'll see her again too, but I'm not sure how the adult Coop/Sharp will take to her. You can see her picture on eBird.
The adult "blue darter" was back this morning. I saw it flying away from the feeding/drinking area, just like the one on the tenth of the month. I got binoculars and went in search of it, and I caught a glimpse of it crossing the nearest ravine as it headed farther upslope. I had been alerted to look out the window by the jumpy behavior of several quail I was watching. Later in the morning, there were moments when the place seemed devoid of birds. I think they, the would-be prey, have gotten the message. For my part, I only scattered seeds under the cover of thickets of leafless shrubs. Towhees still ventured into the open. Three Spotted Towhees were seen at once. All had tails, so I guess that means five a few days ago, or maybe this threesome includes new arrivals.
The juxtaposition of these two hawk species visiting here and the recent news that Cooper's Hawk has been removed from genus Accipiter to Astur has provoked new attention on my part to something every American birder knows: Cooper's and Sharp-shinned Hawk are nearly identical in plumage coloration and pattern. It's not that anyone ever thought they look similar because they are very closely related, as do female Pheucticus grosbeaks and female Archilochus hummingbirds. Most birders know, without saying it, that east-west species pairs like that are identical in size. These hawks are dramatically different in size, and now we know for sure that they are not closely related. Moreover, Sharp-shinned Hawk has populations in South America that do not look like Cooper's Hawk. No, it seems to be mimicry.
Everyone knows about tasty Viceroy Butterflies mimicking unpalatable Monarch Butterflies to reduce predatory strikes by birds. That's called Batesian Mimicry. Another kind of mimicry, called Müllerian Mimciry, features two unpalatable species evolving to look like each other, to share the job, so to speak, of educating the predator population about their undesirability as food. Another kind, called aggressive mimicry, is practiced by the Zone-tailed Hawk, who poses as a vulture to sneak up on its prey. I choose Batesian for this situation. I think the sharpies are mimicking the Coops. Why? Because the sharpies only look like Coops where the sharies co-occur with the Coops. Those populations in South America, where Coops don't live, do not look like them.
That is, it seems that northern populations of Sharp-shinned Hawk have evolved convergently to look like the "sympatric" Cooper's Hawk. This fits the robust results of an exhaustive study of interspecific mimicry in woodpeckers. In North America, Downy Woodpeckers look exactly like the larger Hairy Woodpecker. EBird staffer Eliot Miller and several co-authors described several pairs of look-alikes and found that all of them overlapped in range. They eliminated other possible reaons for the resemblance, leaving mimicry as the most likely explanation.
So why? In the case of the woodpeckers, posing as a larger species might make it easier to get along in mixed species flocks. But raptors don't flock, except in migration. How would posing as a larger bird help a small bird-hunting hawk? Send your ideas to Paradise at archmccallum.com. And what about a very small owl, Flammulated Owl, that sounds very much like the much larger Long-eared Owl? But that's a story for another time.
At 7:28 the bare place in front of me is aswarm with birds. At least a dozen white-crowns just emerged from the bushes and are busily scratching the ground for seeds I last replenished two days ago, before the accipiters returned. Two kinds of towhees have joined them. I'm concerned for their safety, especially because the woodpeckers and jays are nowhere to be seen and therefore must be wary of the hawks of death.
The two Anna's Hummingbirds are unfazed, knowing they are too small and quick for a bird-hawk to bother with. They should be gobbling sugar water now, before the bees wake up and take over the two dispensers with sheer force of numbers. The hummers are too small for hawks and there is no roadrunner afoot. Back in the 70s Sally and Walter Spofford welcomed the birding public to their property near Portal to view the birds attracted to their feeders, just as Dave Jasper and Bob Rodriguez do now. For a while the Spoffords had a roadrunner that preyed on hummingbirds who visited their feeders. It just sat on a wall and caught them in mid-air as they passed by. Sally even reported the behavior with a note in The Condor. So, even sprightly hummingbirds are not immune to predation.
. . . It is now the end of the day, and I didn't see either hawk again. I haven't come upon any more disembodied feathers, either. A lull in the hawks' battles for survival.
The wind has been unpacking the great plane trees by the mailboxes all day. The sky is not hot nude pearl though, thank goodness, as I don't like that color of sky. For some reason the sky is cerulean today. And that does remind me of the Cerulean Warbler, which has some feathers that are the color of this sky. I recently read that the blowdown of tall trees along the Blue Ridge Parkway by Hurricane Helene might be creating habitat for that blue warbler. That surprised me because I always thought Cerulean Warblers like very tall trees. I'm sure the gaps in the forest will be good for some kinds of plants and the birds that prefer such places, I'm just not convinced about the warbler. On the other hand, if the habitat modification makes it easier to find Cerulean Warblers on the BRP I will not complain.
Back to Paradise, a walk down to the mailboxes this afternoon revealed something new, windrows of sycamore leaves. These leaves are piled lightly on one another, just as dry now as they were yesterday before the rite of abscission was celebrated. I watched a few of them doing their spiral descent, considered getting my video camera, then thought better of it and hatched a plan. Yesterday afternoon the sycamore leaves in Cave Creek Canyon were perfect. The place looked like it had been painted by Gustav Klimt. I will go back there tomorrow and take a shady walk in the moring, because shady walks in the morning are poignant, as fall itself can be. I will drive down to Douglas and shop at midday. (Having examined my larder, I find that I have plenty of main dish material in the freezer, but I haven't seen a live vegetable in a while.) I'll go vegetable shopping in Douglas, then hurry back to take a sun-drenched walk in the canyon around two in the afternoon, like yesterday. If a sycamore leaf ballet is on stage I'll try capturing a bit of it on video, and failing that, in words.
But that's not all. Rain is forecast for Sunday. I need to get up to the crest and take a hike before it gets snowed in. So, I'll go up there Sunday morning and do a little hiking before the wind shifts from southwest to west and blows the weather in. I think all the yellow leaves have blown away by now, but I can see some places from here that I want to explore. Then I'll settle into the van and watch the snow fall in the afternoon. I haven't seen snow falling in 13 years, as best I can remember. And I bet JoJo has never seen snow. It will be fun to watch her experience it for the first time. We'll snuggle into the eider down and survive the 20 degree night in fine style. It will warm up past freezing Monday afternoon and we'll ease down the hill to Paradise then.
The first hummingbird I saw this morning, as seen from behind with the sun behind it, inspired me to say, "Boy, that's a pretty green," as though it was not typical of the two adult Anna's that have been hanging around. Also, it had a red bill. I was in a hurry so I dismissed it as back-lighting.
The leaves in Cave Creek Canyon were spectacular. Where were all the carloads of autumn-color-seekers? The canyon is rightly famous as the "Yosemite of the Southwest," and the birds of the Chiricahuas are unusual and accessible, but I don't think I've heard of this place as a fall color destination. I think I know why. No red. It's all yellow of a dozen kinds. Well, you haven't seen lemon yellow until you've seen an ash created by Cezanne, which I saw near the information kiosk. And you haven't seen goldfinch yellow until you've compared a cottonwood to sycamore gold. And I know where to find the red, across the street from that cottonwood. It's just that the big-toothed maple leaves are still mostly green. Give them time.
Outside the canyon, the wind was blowing hard. It does that a lot. I headed into it, knowing I would have a tailwind on my return from Douglas a few hours later. Shopping there was uneventful and successful, and the tailwind did not disappoint.
Back in the canyon the colors were again respendant. The leaves jiggled and rattled, making the sounds of autumn leaves. But they did not fall. I saw not a single sycamore leaf take a spiral path, or any other path, to the ground. That is rather astounding. It was a fine wind, more than up to the task, I would have thought. There must be something to this rite of abscission, which I posited rather whimsically yesterday.
Back at the cabin, I saw a hummingbird in the shade who looked all black. That is without the benefit of iridescence, but still too dark for an Anna's in the shade. The binoculars showed that it was an adult male Broad-billed, rare at this late date, but not unprecedented. I took some video for documentation. The colors of a male Broad-billed, when seen at the right angle, are nothing short of tropical. I now have three hummers, all adults. I will try to keep them fed so they can stay if they want to.
I woke up thinking about the moon, its phases, and the way it rises and sets in a different place on the horizon every day. I'm going to have to chart it and see what the pattern is. Data collection: the key to discerning pattern: the key to appreciating cyclicity: the key to understanding permanence: the Tao.
I am off to the top.
Turkey Creek Road starts out okay in Paradise, survives a couple of unpleasant creek crossings, skids (in wet weather) across a potentially impassable 200 yards of rutted dried mud, and then begins a rocky ascent that is indecent if not illegal. I had almost reached deliverance at the upper end when I saw three pine cones in the middle of the road ahead of me. One of them moved, and I stopped just in time. Out the driver's side window I spied a male Montezuma Quail, his harlequin head markings suitable for an Aztec god. He walked slowly into the tufts of grass at the roadside, as these birds always do if you give them time. He was invisible in seconds. I turned my attention to the other two pine cones, which had not moved. Now they did, and as they did, they morphed into female Montezuma Quail, making their way to the roadside. They too disappeared into the bunchgrass on the slope of the road cut, while I scrambled for a camera. I expected nothing from the effort and I got nothing.
This is the only way I have ever seen Montezuma Quail -- by chance. If you put in your time in the right habitat you will now and then have an experience like mine today. How often is now and then in laymen's terms? The easy answer is "long enough that you had forgetten they were a possibility." This is my second encounter in roughly 60 days of 24-7 presence in their favored haunts, so I could say once a month. But I think that is too optimistic. I would perhaps be willing to put a wager on once every three months, but it would be a small one.
This reminds me of E.O. Wilson's 1500 rule. He declared that after studying a kind of wild animal 1500 hours, one begins to see rare behaviors that were previously unknown and unexpected. Having studied Mountain Chickadees for that long or longer, I agree with him. A previously unseen chickadee behavior and any sighting of a Montezuma Quail are in the rare event category, and rare events certainly have their own mystique, even if there is nothing more seriously mysterious about them.
Close to the top of the ascent to Onion Saddle, the 7800 foot pass over the crest of the Chiricahuas, lies an unusual roadside campsite. The road as now configured cuts through a shoulder of a ridge, but a track follows the contour around the remnant of ridge outside the road cut. Every time I have been up here someone is camping in that ideal spot, which has plenty of privacy and a great view of the inside of the front peaks of the Chiricahuas as well as several counties in New Mexico. Today it is vacant, and I choose it for my vigil.
When I arrive around 1 p.m. the sky is blue and the air is balmy, if a bit breezy. At 2:25 a mysterious fluffy cloud has assembled over Portal Peak. It descends in the distance and enshrouds the highest Peloncillos. The Chiricahuas are still bathed with sunlight and the sky is blue overhead. By 2:31 the puffy cloud has spilled over the east front of the Chiricahuas and is beginning to clog Cave Creek Canyon. The storm is building in from the east, not the west as I expected. All the better, as I chose my parking spot because of its commanding view of Silver Peak, the west side of Portal Peak, and the incisions surrounding them. Sitting here stationary, instead of bouncing down the mountain, I am seeing ridges I have never noticed before.
The cloud to the northeast is the color of a gray-headed mollymawk, aka hot nude pearl. To the northnortheast it is almost purple, to the eastnortheast it is the color of smoke. At 3:10 there is a small amount of blue sky above me, and it just happens to be allowing the sun to shine on Turkey Creek Valley, and on the west facade of Portal Peak. Otherwise, the visible part of the earth's surface is deep in shadow. At 3:12 that patch of blue has now gone gray. At 3:51 three successive intermountain basins to the east are illuminated, their ranges dark, perhaps by breaks in the clouds caused by the mountains. To the north, it is raining on the northern Peloncillos. In between here and there is a shaft of blue light, wider at top than bottom. I have never seen such a thing before.
And that is all. Nothing else happens. The stars come up. Distant villages sparkle on the valley floors. I check a couple of times for moonrise, but see none.
At 7:03 p.m. it's dark and I hear a strange noise outside, like something dripping. I lock the car with my fob. When you do that the lights come on for a moment. I see that the windshield is covered with snow. I slide into the driver's seat, careful not to kick JoJo, who is curled up in her bed between the two buckets. Once I get the engine started and the wipers on the lights illuminate a steady snowfall and a covering of snow on the ground and bushes around me. It happened! It snowed! Well, I'm not going anywhere now, and so far the voltage of the utility battery is holding at 12.7. The battery-powered heater is on and we will run it until it drains the batteries and then snuggle in the eider down. My laptop is running on its batteries. I'm using battery-powered lanterns for light. I turn the cooler off. The plan is in effect. Tomorrow afternoon we will drive home.
The battery gave out at 1:30 a.m. The inverter beeped to let me know. I brought JoJo under the covers. I was in a down bag inside a conventional bag and as snug as you could ever want to be. I could see the scene out the back window; the snow had stopped and everything was bathed in white light from the moon.
I jolted awake with light streaming in over the snow that had drifted down the windshield. The eastern sky glowed behind Silver Peak. I pressed the button on the dash and the van's diesel engine hesitated a second as it always does and then spun into quiet, odorless motion. What a long way diesel has come. The van's heater began to roar. I put on outside layers to go with the inner layers I already had on, and jumped outside to greet the day.
After a little bit of exploration I brought JoJo outside to experience the snow. She surged down the snowy road as if it were South Turkey Creek Road. "Now this is real Iditarod" is what I guess she was thinking. We made tracks in the snow for half a mile down the Trans-Mountain, then I made her come back. She wanted to keep going, but she was shivering. I then took a bird walk toward Onion Saddle, on which I saw two Acorn Woodpeckers and a White-breasted Nuthatch. The woodpeckers were a male and a female. I doubt they have helpers up here, I thought. A comparative study with the canyon is called for.
On my second bird walk I headed downhill again. The road was now muddy from the passage of two vehicles and warming by direct solar radiation. Another pair of Acorn Woodpeckers was off to the left, and three Pygmy Nuthatches foraged together, in a big pine, with the faintest of contact calls. Then two birds flitted from a snowy cutbank to the roadside. Yellow-eyed Juncos. I watched them with glee. I remember fondly watching members of this species, right up the road at Barfoot Junction, hopping on grass stems and riding them to the ground, then plucking seeds from the prostrate plants. The bird in front of me had no need to ride the stems down, as the delicate panicles were reachable from where it stood in the snow. I watched as the junco methodically harvested the seeds and efficiently husked them with its small conical bill, a bill just right for these small delicate grass seeds.
These juncos seem bolder, more confident, than their dark-eyed relatives from the north. Probably it is an illusion created by their eyes. Their irides (pl. of iris) are orangish yellow, with the intensity of neon. I hesitate to call them gold, as there is too much red there, but then again, these eyes match the intensity of the ducks called goldeneyes. I think I will go with yellow-orange. These birds look crazed, or perhaps menacing, as though they would slit your throat given the chance. This is all imagination, created by a yellow-orange orb, surrounded by black feathers, and punctuated with a coal black pupil. The black dot in the middle of the circle of bright color is the thing that has my amygdala heaving. The White-eyed Vireo's eyes are similar. A little less so are the orange eyes of the Curve-billed Thrasher, maybe because they are not surrounded by black. This is all inconsequential to the junco, who flits off after finishing off that batch of grasses.
But I can't get these junco eyes out of my head, because they seem to have been taken so seriously by the nomenclaturists. I think these juncos were once called "Mexican Juncos." Back at the house I pull off the shelf a copy of the Golden Guide to Birds of North America, a mainstay of birders from the time it came out in the 70s until it was eclipsed by the National Geographic guide in the 80s. There it is on p. 314, "Mexican Junco." On page 208 is "Mexican Jay." These are fine names, but Eugene Eisenmann, for a while chair of the committee that decides nomenclature of North American birds, had a vendetta against geograpic references in the official English names of birds (so said John P. Hubbard, my source on skulduggery in avian taxonomy), and engineered name changes, most outrageously in the case of the Mexican Jay, which was renamed "Gray-breasted Jay." I hypothesize that the switch of "Mexican Junco" to "Yellow-eyed Junco" was likewise based on nomenclatural philosophy and not on new information regarding the systematics of juncos (systematics being a science while taxonomy is not). The committee had the good sense to restore "Mexican" to the name of that jay a few years ago, but changes these days are made as a result of proposals and effected only by majority vote of the committee, and I guess (really, it's only a guess) that the restoration of that good and proper name for the junco simply had no champion. I do not intend to spend the time necessary to learn the truth about my guesses, conjectures, and hypotheses.
So what is wrong with the name "Yellow-eyed" for a species that has such a bright yellow-orange eye? I might add that the species extends out of Mexico and into Guatemala, and despite geographic variation in the color of the back and the flanks, the eye color holds steady and is as bright at that end of the range as at this. (Baird's Junco of southernmost Baja California also has this bright orange yellow eye, which is really interesting because it indicates that Sierra La Laguna was colonized not from the north, as with several other endemic populations of that very isolated sky island, but from across the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. But that is indeed quite another story.)
This cabin, owned and peopled for decades by ardent and expert naturalists from North Carolina, has a wall of bookshelves, and on those shelves many vintage field guides. I recently picked up one of them, Peterson's Field Guide to the Western Birds (1941), and to my surprise found my name in it. I must have left it here when we lived here a quarter century ago. I knew it was too old to mention "Yellow-eyed Junco." I looked for Mexican Junco, but did not find it. After a bit of confusion I realized that the form in question, the one that ranges from here to Guatemala, was treated therein as a sub-species of Red-backed Junco, Junco phaeonotus. The other subspecies has a dark eye and is now known as the red-backed form of the egregiously polytypic Dark-eyed Junco. Quite clearly, eye color held no great significance for taxonomists of the 1930s, if they could put yellow-eyed and dark-eyed populations in the same species. And why shouldn't they? After all, Eastern Towhee has a polymorphism for eye color that is now treated as taxonomically irrelevant. A white eye is just an eye in which the gene for pigment is defective. That's what we learned from fruit flies in Biology 101. Defective genes that are not lethal can become fixed in a population. That may be what happened in White-eyed Vireo. But did it happen in these juncos, or in Common Goldeneye? I think there could be a gene for that yellow orange color, meaning it could be produced by a pigment and not the absence of brown or red. It seems too intense not to have its own special pigment. And they seem to know it.
Having been introduced to the warmth under the covers on our outing, JoJo tried for a repeat last night. I let her. It was cold, at least a one-dog night, even inside.
Sunrise confirmed it. Although water was flowing in the pet water feeder at 5:00 a.m., by dawn it was frozen. So, I broke the ice on the wildlife trough with warm water and lavished the safer sites with seeds. The birds responded energetically. As I was throwing out sunflower seeds I noticed that a back-lighted agave has red spines on its leaves. It's a big one, behind the brush pile, and the sun was lighting it up like a desert Christmas tree. The spines, which line the edges of the long succulent leaves at half-inch intervals, are retrorse, which means they curve backward, toward the base of each leaf. They looked smooth on the distal side, so I took a chance and ran my finger from spine to spine toward the base of a leaf. No harm done. Don't do it the other direction, though; they work as well as catclaw acacia, known locally as "wait-a-minute bush."
Of course I knew agave leaves are lined with spines, as are sotol leaves. I probably knew they were red, which is fairly obvious in normal light. I did not know how beautifully they glow when back-lighted by the morning sun. I needed to make sure this wasn't a fluke, so I strolled around looking at agave plants. Most were in the shade. I found another large one that confirmed my generalization. Its spines, too, glowed red in the morning sun. How nice to notice that!
On the way back I glanced to my left and saw the sotol stalks singing their visual reveille on the distant dark slope.
I took a stroll out back, mid-morning, to think, and I came across a sotol plant. The "back yard" up slope from the cabin is not in the sotol zone, it's in the agave zone, and at least on this slope those two zones don't overlap. But here was a sotol, tucked away in a spot I had not visited before.
"I'd better check for red spines," I thought. They were yellow, not red. And they were not retrorse, at least they did not point toward the bases of the leaves, they pointed toward the tips. I did the finger prick test. Yes, you can run your finger painlessly along the edge of the leaf toward the tip. On leaf after leaf. They don't get this kind of thing wrong. I guess a spine is a spine, no matter which way it points, but I should point out that these spines on the edges of leaves are different from spines on stems of, say, mesquite. The latter are modified stems or leaf bases. These edge spines are clearly modifications of leaf tissue and that is why, I would guess, they don't point straight out. But I don't know the why of that "why." It seems to be related to being a leaf structure, but why that would make them curved I can't guess.
I wonder about beargrass, which has flaccid leaves compared to sotol and agave. There's a nice one in front of the deck. I know I'll need a hand lens, so I fetch one. Yes, beargrass has tiny spines on the edges of its leaves, like sotol, but much smaller. Still, you can tell the difference with the finger prick test. It's smooth sliding toward the tip of the leaf, rough going toward the base. Not painful, just rough. But the spines are there, hard to see even with a lens, but they are there, evenly spaced and curving toward the leaf tips.
By the way, I came across a species of grass out there by that sotol plant that still has green leaves. It has a fine population toward the edge of the north ravine. This reminds me that I haven't yet described all the kinds of grass out there. I know I should, the morphological diversity is great and wondrous. But grasses are difficult. They're still there, though, stil identifiable if they ever were. I'll get it done.
From the deck I can hear the rustling of the spent, brown leaves on the creekside sycamores. They will fall soon enough, in some wintry gale perhaps, but for now they cling to their twigs and evoke the plane trees in the turn-of-the-century Paris street scenes that accompany YouTube presentations of Erik Satie's plaintive piano solos. I admit I like those paintings, perhaps as much as the Satie, so I did some research to find out who painted them. I thought it would be a single person, but in fact an entire school turned out those pictures of well-dressed boulevardiers, trendy store fronts, monumental architecture, and of course Platanus orientalis.
In the distance, the peaks are snowy down to 8,000 feet or so. This vista isn't as showy as the well-known photos of green grass, yellow aspens, and snow-covered peaks in Colorado, but it tells the same story: mountains create variety. Merriam's life zones march up the slopes from Portal to Chiricahua Peak. The transect displays all of them except Tundra, and it can be found on the peaks north of Flagstaff. Every state in the West has this kind of variety, created by mountains. It's probably why I love it so much out here.
JoJo and I haven't taken many morning walks lately, so I decided to head up the road toward Portal, as we did every day in September. Looking over to the left as we passed the hawk perch at Sycamore Place, I saw, on the slope of the big limestone ridge that defines this valley, prickly pear cacti, a lot of them, that I had never noticed before. Certainly I have seen them many times, but what does that mean? Photons bounced off the succulent green pads and after traveling some distance reached my eyes.
Oh, a shiny object just caught my eye. By that I mean the question, "What happens to a photon when it meets the lens of an eyeball?" The lens is a substantial thing, right? The photon is the physical, as opposed to energetic, manifestation of light. It's sort of subtantial, too. Clearly (What a swell pun!) light gets through the lens, there's no problem there. It's only the theory of light that's not clear. Maybe the photon just assumes its energetic form, and passes through the substantial but translucent lens that way. Does it then reconstitute itself as a photon once past the lens? Or is it always both at the same time? You know, light isn't omnipotent, it can't pass through a brick wall, even if it can pass through a lens. Oh, Quantum Physics, thou damned thing!
Back to the cacti on the hill. Light has gone from them to my retina a few times before, I'm sure of it. My brain probably holds unremembered images of those perceptions right now. But I didn't notice! Not any of those other times. I'm not asking why I noticed today, I'm just reporting it. I'm glad it happened.
You might call those concentrations of plants an "infestation of cacti." People generally don't want prickly pears around. They took over the whole continent of Australia for a while. I admit I don't like the looks of them. They spell over-grazing to me.
But I could be wrong about that. They seem, in fact, limited to rocky outcrops. Most of that ridge is covered with colluvium, material that has weathered off the rocks, rolled down slope in the grips of runoff from rainstorms, and settled on slopes to become soil. It is the home of sotol and juniper, and, this year, lots of grass. But there are outcrops of what looks like a gray limestone up there. That is where the cacti are clustered. I look around for other cacti. I see very few away from the outcrop. One needs replication to interpret an observation as a pattern. I finally find it behind the cabin, a cluster of maybe six large prickly pears on a sunny outcrop. I suppose they like rock outcrops. Now I have to find out why.
Walking in the "back yard" this morning I was reminded of the puny production of pinyon cones in general, despite a couple of small trees that are loaded with them. Many of the cones on these trees did not open. Others still have seeds in them. I pried out one of the seeds still sitting in an open cone and cracked it with my teeth. Nothing, except a little pitch, which I tried eating. It didn't taste bad, and wasn't too sticky.
I decided to collect some data on the pinyon crop, so I summoned JoJo and we headed down the north ravine to the San Simón Road. The first thing I discovered was the absence of mature pinyon trees. The flood plain on the east side of the road held many saplings but no mature trees. The species was not represented at all on the slope that ascends west of the road. Occasionally I encountered a larger tree with the saplings. These I estimated to be 20 years old, with the saplings ten. But pinyons grow slowly and those were underestimates, as I discovered when I decided to count branches on the six-foot saplings. Pines typically add a new whorl of branches every year, although they do "auto-prune" the lower ones as they get bigger. The saplings mostly had 10 or 13 ranks of branches, with a few at 16. Those intervals are just right for the interval between big seed years, called mast years, of the pinyons I know in northwestern New Mexico. So, those saplings were older than they looked, and the taller young trees must be 30 years in age or older.
I had assumed that the slope on the left was too dry for the species, but I was wrong. Mature trees, as large as the dominant Alligator Junipers, appeared as we continued down the road. They all had few to no cones. So, I had now found three age classes, none bearing cones. I did find two small trees that were laden with cones, just like the ones in the back yard. So, it seems that young adult trees were the only one that had attempted to produce seeds this year. My conclusion is that it is a bust year for pinyon seed production.
While walking back I was stunned to see something I had missed on the outbound leg -- a little stand of "doghair" pinyon trees. Pine trees tend to occur in even-aged stands, because the conditions for germination are rarely met; and, they are "scramble competitors". Frequently the result is a dense stand of stunted trees, none of which is able to get a competitive edge on the other, all of which are likely to die without reproducing. It's a frequent phenomenon in Ponderosa Pine populations, but not for pinyons.
These trees were on the west side, at the base of a slope, under the shade of Arizona White Oaks. I counted branches and discovered that the little trees were of many ages, not even-ageed as I had expected. I looked around for the seed tree, the single adult that would have dropped seeds here. But I know better, and in a moment the light went on.
I had stumbled on a former caching area of Mexican Jays. The jays must have cached seeds here for many years, and over the years a few of them were not recovered, and germinated. Now we have a mixed-age stand of young trees of a variety of heights. The risk of failure is spread among them. Maybe one of them will survive and grow into a large tree capable of producing an abundance of seeds from time to time. And by the way, the risk is spread in another way. The seeds that were planted here by the jays were gathered over a wide area, from a variety of parental trees. This little stand, quite unlike a paradigmatic doghair stand, is embued, thanks to the jays, with genetic variability. Different ages and different genes. The trees couldn't have planned it better if they had brains.
Perhaps the most enchanting thing about the Chiricahuas to me is the Big-toothed Maples that turn red in the fall. The leaves that is. Although scattered here and there, they are concentrated up South Fork a couple of miles past the parking lot. When I was last there, the leaves were mostly green. Today I will hike farther than I have in quite some time, to Maple Camp and beyond to the last maple, to look for red leaves. I have been monitoring a cluster of maples in the main canyon, but I don't know if they will accurately predict the situation at Maple Camp. It is a beautiful day and should be a wonderful walk no matter what color the leaves are.
THE MAPLES DID NOT DISAPPOINT. THEY ARE AT THEIR PEAK! IF YOU LIVE IN THE AREA AND ARE A FALL COLOR ENTHUSIAST, YOU MIGHT WANT TO TAKE A HIKE UP SOUTH FORK IN THE NEXT FEW DAYS. WORD TO THE WISE: IT IS ABOUT A MILE FROM THE PARKING LOT TO THE BEGINNING OF THE MAPLE ZONE, BUT AFTER THAT IT JUST GETS BETTER AND BETTER. A thorough description of the trail is Here.
Bigtooth Maple is closely related to Sugar Maple, but its teeth are all rounded. This gives it a particularly benevolent aura. Long decades ago I especially enjoyed sitting under the low-hanging branches of a small maple, reading, thinking, or meditating. The upper part of South Fork Canyon has an abundance of such spots. They are serene whether the leaves are green or the red-orange-yellow of fall.
Bigtooth Maple leaves are not glossy; they have a matte finish. This is true also of Sugar Maple, while Red Maple, another eastern species, does have bright red leaves in fall that are somewhat glossy. The matte finish gives Bigtooth leaves a luminous quality, even in the shade. The intermediate colors, where red blends with yellow to make something much more complex than mere orange, seem to glow.
Bigtooth Maple is partial to canyons, but its distribution is spotty. Some mountain ranges have them, others don't. The populations seem to be relicts of a much broader distribution when the climate was moister, perhaps just a few thousand years ago during the late Pleistocene. The farthest afield of these is in the Texas Hill Country, where the state has conserved a population in the Lost Maples State Natural Area. What a quaint and evocative name. I have read up on the place and I plan to visit it as soon as I can. The cothembination of Bigtooth Maples, and a suite of bird species - Black-capped Vireo, Golden-cheeked Warbler, Tropical Parula - that I'm dying to see, make it irresistable.
You've heard of how birds can sense changes in weather before they happen. The "Portal Weather" page on Google said "nothing happening." The birds' behavior said otherwise. Dozens of them raced around the feeders all morning, grabbing seeds as fast as they could. By noon clouds had begun to assemble. By late afternoon the sky was totally gray. I wanted to watch the setting of the waning crescent moon, but it was not to be seen. I imagined rain on the slopes, snow on the peaks. Then, nothing. Google was right.
Birds need body fat to survive cold nights. Like us, also homeotherms, they break down fat to release energy, which they use to shiver, which produces heat, which keeps their brains from falling below a lethal minimal temperature. I have no idea if they are miserable when they shiver, as I am. I hope not. I hate to think about all the birds that winter at this elevation and latitude being miserable every night for months. I bet the hummingbirds aren't miserable as their bodies go into torpor, a sort of overnight hibernation, because their metabolic rates are probably too low for them to feel anything. (Just guessing.) Four hummingbirds are regular here just now, and all are adults, evenly distributed among sexes, and the species Anna's and Broad-billed. These two seem to be the hardiest of the small hummingbird kinds.
Birds feed hurriedly as storms are approaching to put on extra fat so they can survive extra cold. Physiologists tell us that on warm winter afternoons they snooze, to limit the likelihood of being seen and killed by a predator. They then have a feeding frenzy at dusk to top off their energy reserves for the night. One group fine tunes this strategy by caching the seeds they find during the day, then retrieving and gorging on them right before going to bed. Why? So they can stay lean and maneuverable, and hard to catch, as long as possible. These high-performance athletes are the chickadees and titmice, in Family Paridae. Parids, Sittids (nuthatches), and Corvids (jays and crows) are the only families known to have the extra brain development for remembering hundreds or thousands of storage sites, in some cases for months.
Bridled Titmice were among the most active seekers of black-oil sunflower seeds this morning. They are cachers, as are their look-alike cousins in Europe, the Crested Tits, as are all the chickadees of the world, whether they are called "chickadees" or not, as are the coal tits of Eurasia and the varied tits of the East Asian island arc. I am convinced that they, at least the Mountain Chickadees I studied, not only remember cache sites for hours, but for days and months, like the jays and nutcrackers studied by Russell Balda and his students at Northern Arizona University. But I guess I don't have proof of that.
So, this major clade within the Paridae caches seeds, and another, comprising the blue tits, great tits, and African tits, do not, apparently cannot. Here is what I find fascinating about that division. The noncachers are very colorful, decked out in yellow, blue, green, black, and white, or some subset of those primary colors. The cachers are mostly gray, black, and white, with some rufous, but there is no hint of blue or yellow in any of them (except three anomalous species in East Asia). The cachers live, in winter, in highly organized social groups regulated by individual recognition. All the members of a given species look exactly alike to us. The noncachers communicate status or the power to maintain it with "badges," for example the width and blackness of the "mid-ventral stripe" in Great Tits. Cacher groups defend group territories in winter; noncachers travel in flocks, but do not defend group territories. This one family is divided down the middle between two radically different "adaptive strategies," and both are very successful. And they, be they Black-caped Chickadees in North America, or Blue Tits in Europe, are among the most beloved, and well-fed, of all wild birds.
By the way, the cloud-cover blanket trapped some of the sun's heat, and the next morning dawned sunny, still, and warm.
I was walking out back this morning when I hear the Peek calls of a Dryobates woodpecker. The bird was really going at it. Thinking it was an Arizona Woodpecker, whose Rattle I hear frequently but hardly ever see, I thought, "how nice, maybe I can get a glimpse of it." I tried to sneak up on the bird, which was in a dead tree not far above the feeders. I had no binoculars, but I did have my phone, with which I could submit a recording to Merlin. The bird did not give me a good look, but I thought I saw white, which is not abundant on Arizona Woodpecker, and black, which is practically non-existent on that species, the back being brown rather than the typical black of this genus. It flew stealthily away, but not before I got a short recording that Merlin identified as Hairy Woodpecker. Merlin can be wrong.
I trudged up the slope, got some more recordings, but still no view. Then it flew long past the fence. Rats, I said. But it perched in view on another dead tree far away. My eyes, refurbished a few years ago by cataract surgery, thought they saw black. But black and brown are pretty similar. I can't be sure. Then, thank heaven, the bird showed a white back, which rules out Arizona and rules in Hairy, and I was pleased. Although I still haven't had a decent look at an Arizona Woodpecker all fall, at least its pattern of not using the Peek call around here does not require amendment.
Now why should there be two mid-sized species of Dryobates here in the Gadsden Purchase when there is only one in the Rocky Mountains and everywhere east of them? Answer: the Sierra Madre effect. You get more species as you go south. Arizona is at the northern end of its range here. Hairy, though, is not at the southern end of its. It goes all the way to Panama. Sibley says Arizona is an oak woodland specialist, while Hairy prefers mature forests. Guess today's bird was just passing through.
I got up "before daylight" to look at the waning crescent moon. It was there in the eastern sky, with a faint glow along the horizon below it.
I will try to catch it as well the next two mornings. I want to watch it rise from behind the eastern hills, first as two points, these then growing toward each and eventually merging into a crescent. Then, losing ground to the sun as it does every morning (and in fact around the clock), one of these mornings it will flip, and the points of the crescent will rise last rather than first. And of course they won't even be the same points as the day before. Everything about the moon's phases, and its perpertually losing race with Phaëthon across the sky, is a misinterpretation. It is only that, it is not a deception. And yet, I wonder how our predecessors saw it.
The sun came up in its usual spot. The temperature was 61°. A week ago it was 25° less. The wind was stiff and warm. I looked and found the faint crescent in the blue sky. This was not to last. By noon the overcast was complete. Late in the afternoon I checked for the sun. It was nowhere to be seen. The sky did not get immediately darker the moment the it reportedly set, at 5:15 or so. And yet, with advancing minutes on the clock the sky became progressively darker. By 6:30 night was totally upon us.
I am here to muse on the difference between day, and the thing that causes it, the sun. Every living thing that needs to, knows the difference between night and day. The biological clock resides not in organs but in cells. It works the same way for all of us and all of them. Its several incarnations are all ancient beyond imagination. The result? Male birds wake up before dawn so they can sing in the darkness, so the neighbor female can come over for a very quick tryst, the better to endow her offspring. Or, if you prefer the Hallmark Channel, the plankton can begin their nightly migration to the surface from the lightless depths where they hide from predators during daytime. Any predecessor you choose had a biological clock of great precision. And so they didn't need to understand the sun. I wonder how many creatures out there pay any attention to it. Oh, of course they know how to get out of it: I've seen meadowlarks use the shade of a power pole, and I've seen beef cows try to. It works better for the meadowlarks. But to notice it enough to think wrongly that it moves across the sky every day; I wonder when our perceptiveness got to that point. To put it another way, for almost all living things it does -- for all practical purposes -- move across the sky every day. What did it take for our ancestor, perhaps alone among the beasts, to wonder about it? And then to tell stories about it? You can bet story-telling came first. To make the leap, extreme sociality was a prerequisite for the evolution of consciousness.
On the way from there to here, this afternoon's sunless sky may have been problematic at some point along the path. It's not a problem for the beasts who rely on their internal clocks. It's not problematic for us. But for early Phaëthon watchers its disappearance behind the clouds may have been as scary as a total solar eclipse. A little consciousness is a dangerous thing.
I am grateful to be alive and in good health at an age that was not reached by my father.
I am also grateful to be alive in these times, because, as trying as they may seem, they are, as Stephen Pinker has shown us, the best of times to be a human.
I am grateful to be a human, and therefore imbued with a capacity for awe that reveals to us, as to no other earthly organism, the immensity of creation and the smallness of our place in it.
I am grateful that all we have to do is notice the world to praise its creation, and thereby to love it.
And to begin your feast of thanks, I commend to you this poem by a long-time and dear friend of mine: Luther Allen's Blessing.
Texas Canyon Rest Area, Cochise Country, Arizona. I stopped here on the way to a Thanksgiving feast in Tucson to give JoJo a walk. The place is spectacular, with huge granite (I guess) boulders strewn up and down steep grassy slopes, small live oaks (Emory Oaks, I think) here and there in the Cyclopean rubble. The first time I ever drove through Texas Canyon, more than 50 years ago, I immediately recognized it from Saturday afternoon shoot-'em-ups at the local movie house. That familiarity made it special for me, and it has been ever since.
Another traveler, a lady from Juárez, took a liking to JoJo. She said her dog had short hair like that. Her dog had been killed three weeks ago, she said, by a pack of neighborhood dogs. Her dog tried to defend the house, she figured, and the mob was too much for it.
Yes, nature is "red in tooth and claw." If dogs are to behave like responsible domestic animals, we need to prevent their assembling in packs. And if we humans are to behave like responsible civilized animals, which is our form of domestication, we need to accept limits on the feral liberty of individuals. A sobering thought as we go in our hordes to the malls on "Black Friday."
Holy Trinity Monastery Center, St. David, Arizona. Everyone knows the American Robin, and its penchant for pulling earthworms from summer lawns. Travelers to Europe might have noticed a similarly-shaped, but all black bird, doing the same thing in parks there. That is the Eurasian Blackbird, of "four-and-twenty blackbirds" fame. These two species that do the same thing on different continents are in fact closely related, and their common features are no doubt inherited from a common ancestor and not independently evolved. Add the Tibetan Blackbird and Chinese Blackbird and 99 other species and you have one of the largest bird genera, Turdus, in the world. I have seen several of them, in Europe, Asia, and Central America.
In the U.S. we have two regular species of Turdus, the aforementioned American Robin, and the rather drably-colored and well-named Clay-colored Robin. The latter, like all the others, sings very well, and is greatly celebrated in Costa Rica, where it is the national bird and is known as Yigüirro. It occurs all along the eastern side of Middle America and up into south Texas. On the western side of Mexico it is replaced by the Rufous-backed Robin. This Turdus does not nest in the U.S. but several are seen every winter in our southwestern borderlands.
I have never seen a Rufous-backed Robin, and I would like to. (Let's leave the reason for that desire for another time; it's a pithy matter philosophically for those interested in the sense of wonder.) Having spent the night with friends in Tucson after some fine feasting yesterday, I thought I might try for that species on the way home today. It has been seen in several places in southeastern Arizona this month, but alas, after stocking up on groceries at several stores not available to me near Paradise, I had time for only one stop, the one not far off the interstate near Benson.
I have heard of St. David since my first birding foray to southeastern Arizona in 1970, but I have never been there. A Rufous-backed Robin was seen there recently, at the Benedictine Monastery. St. David is in the valley of the San Pedro River, a river that had water in it in the 1870s when it was founded. The main highway through St. David is lined with trees, a very unusual feature for a desert town, unless it was established by Mormons. St. David was, having been visited thirty years earlier when the Mormon Battalion passed through on the way home from the Mexican War.
The Holy Trinity Monastery Center was established in 1974, nearly a century after the founding of the town. The grounds no longer house a monastery, but do serve as a retreat center. I went there in the middle of a warm afternoon, the sky blue, the lingering cottonwood leaves lustrous yellow. I walked all over the place, noting numerous birds, speaking with a couple who spend a week there every year, admiring the peacocks. It was as peaceful as any place I've ever been. I did not see a robin, but that is perfectly all right.
One might assume that art has to be created by a human, that artifice is a necessary ingredient. Looking at the remains of dead agave plants in the back yard, and seeing some of them as works of art, I have to say that artifice is not required. I would agree that an artistic sensibility is the magic that transforms a pile of plant bones into art.
It all started a few days ago, on a walk down the road to San Simón, with a rosette of dead agave leaves following gravity's pull down a little slope beside the road. I thought, that looks like a work of art, and snapped a picture. That inspired the tour of the back yard this morning. One could do a decent cross-sectional study of the death throes of agave back there. Some have leaves in place with stalks still standing. I would guess that they flowered this year. Others have stalks on the ground beside their rosettes. Leaves have separated from the base of the plant in others. And so on.
I thought I might like to look again at the plant that inspired this investigation, so JoJo and I took a hike down there in the afternoon. We passed several agave carcasses and then there were no more. What? I've run out of the agave zone? No, after a while I saw more, quite a few, on limestone outcrops. Then we were at the creek crossing. I had missed it. I looked more carefully on the way back and found the plant, with the help of the photo on my phone. I was examining its dead leaves when I felt a prick. I thought nothing of it, until I noticed blood on my wrist. I thought little of that until my wrist began to throb. The bony knob on the outside of my right wrist, the styloid process of the ulna, was twice the size of its twin on my left wrist. It continued to throb for some hours. I consulted the internet. Yes, agave leaves do this to you, although I didn't get a name for the enzyme that does it. It appears that I will survive.
I had planned to gather a bagfull of these leaves and deliver them to an artist friend. I thought she could conjure real art out of them. But I guess I will not. Better to leave them alone, falling where they may, being seen how they might by any passing being who might tend to see their pattern of repose as something more than random.
SHORT TAKES:
Two Arizona Woodpeckers in the back yard this morning. That's a first. In fact, it was the first time I've seen one well. After the first one left, the second sat in the top of a dead tree for a while, its white facial patch gleaming in the sun. It didn't stay long enough for me to fetch a camera, though.
Looks like three of the four hummingbirds have left. Only the male Broad-billed has been seen the last two days. He has been the most pugnacious, chasing the other three from the feeders. They haven't shown up elsewhere in Paradise, though; at least not on eBird.
Lots of RV parks in Benson and St. David the other day. I see why the snowbirds like this area. Barely any weather. Sure, it's cold in the morning, but it warms up quickly and cloudless afternoons in the 70s are hard to beat.
I found something else pointed on the agave walk yesterday, pointed flat needles on a small sapling conifer. It had to be a Douglas Fir, the first one I've seen along Turkey Creek. Add that to two Apache Pines seen previously, we are edging toward the species list of Cave Creek
The outer knob of my right wrist is still swollen from the agave prick, but the pain has subsided. My survival seems assured.
Some neighbors, who also saw the columns of ants crossing the San Simón road north of the mailboxes in September, got an answer to their identity from an expert. They are Big-headed Ants (Pheidole rhea). The individuals with enormous heads apparently stay down in the nest. I didn't see any and I'd like to, at a safe distance. The ones crossing the road were small with normal-sized heads. I said at the time I needed to learn more about them. I wish I had. I look forward to investigating them further in the spring.
I grew up in South Carolina and I taught ecology and ornithology at the College of Charleston in that state. Longleaf Pine is in my blood, and I enjoyed nothing more than taking my South Carolina students to a pine forest to see the young trees, which look like they were created by Dr. Seuss. A tree ten feet tall would have a trunk about two inches in diameter, with a top knot of very long (ten inches or so) needles. There might be needles on a couple of short lateral branches, but there might not be. These saplings looked like the venerable artist's conception of a living scarecrow. Such trees were at least 15 years old. Among them would be youngsters which were nothing more than a dense spray of very long needles. This is called the "grass stage" of the Longleaf Pine.
Longleaf Pine is extremely fire resistant. The long needles at the apex of the growing stem protect the all-important apical bud from being damaged by fire. I have seen this spray of needles blackened and nearly destroyed by a recent fire, but harboring a living bud inside its vestiges. The needles of the grass stage provide the energy for the young longleaf to sink a long taproot deep into the sandy soil it favors, whereas many conifers have very shallow root systems. A dependable water source secured, the plant then grows for the sky, not bothering to lay on lateral limbs. This produces the troops of Seussian scarecrows with green heads. Once the bud is above about ten feet it is safe from the cool fires the Longleafs are designed to survive. They can then thicken out and become the stately trees that are among the most beautiful of the genus Pinus.
Knowing all this, you can imagine my delight at encountering a troop of Seussian pine saplings upon approaching the first creek crossing of the South Fork trail. These were surely Apache Pines, sometimes called Arizona Longleaf Pine, and they looked for all the world like the southeastern longleafs I know so well. Their form suggests they have the same fire- resistance strategy too. This species is fairly common in South Fork and in the main canyon of Cave Creek, and also along upper Turkey Creek. But not down here at Paradise. Not until I saw a sapling in deep shade beside the San Simón road a few weeks ago. Later I saw a full-sized tree beside the creek.
I went back today and looked for more. Still just two. One wonders where the two seeds that made these two trees came from. Their seeds are wind-dispersed; they're not big enough for a Mexican Jay to bury in its larder. The smaller one began life only 10-20 years ago. Maybe a big wind blew its seed in from way up creek. On the other hand, the big tree is producing its own seed, I saw cones on it. Does it have offspring below it? I would think so, but I didn't trespass to find out.
Up in the cooler elevations of the mountains, Ponderosa Pines and their close relatives Arizona Pines are also fire resistant, but they lack the long-needle adapations for protecting the apical bud. To me, they are very similar looking to Apache Pine. But I learned a trick in South Carolina, where mature Longleaf Pine and mature Loblolly Pine can be hard to tell apart. Just look for the young ones. I'll be deploying that trick on the slopes here to see if I can delimit the ranges of Ponderosa and Apache Pine in the Chiricahuas. Then I can start wondering if Apache Pine has a long taproot.
Today's an airport day, which also means a Tucson shopping day, so not much time to notice Paradise. I did notice a female Broad-billed Hummingbird in the morning, back for the second day in a row after being absent since Thanksgiving Day. The resplendant male Broad-bill hasn't missed a day patrolling the feeders since he first showed up. The male and female Anna's Hummingbirds that also graced the feeders before Thanksgiving have been absent since a few days after the pugnacious Broad-bill showed up.
My daughter Sophie and her partner Xandi arrived at 8 p.m. They exclaimed over the saguaros we saw driving out of the airport. It's a good thing they planted some here, I pointed out, because we won't see any driving east from here, as they grow on the rocky slopes, not in the flats, and in the frost-free zone. Not to mention that it was dark. And by the way, the waxing crescent moon was spectacular.
The drive through the desert south of San Simón was uneventful. Sometimes a drive through the desert can net some mammals, but it is the cold season. Same for snakes. When we hit the woodlands two miles north of Paradise we saw a Gray Fox and then another. That prompted me to list the mammals I've seen around Paradise since September. Most abundant have been Cliff Chipmunks, and the cottontails. Up to five White-tail Deer have come to the water at the cabin; I haven't seen the desert mule deer yet. Javelinas are frequent visitors, but it's always two adults and a smaller one, not the big herds you see around Portal. A large male coati has come by twice. Nectarivorous bats were at the feeders every night in September and up into October, but they are gone now. I didn't get around to identifying which species they were. Same goes for several insectivorous bats. No cats yet. No bears yet. That would be something!
I have a wildlife camera I haven't deployed yet. That could swell the list when I get it up.
A ribbon of chartreuse, then gold, then brown, through the ever-greenery of oak, juniper, and pine, the streamside sycamores allways stand out. Those brown leaves are now mostly earthbound. The few that reman on the trees hang in neat rows on horizontal twigs, each folded neatly into a cone, the points of the stars flaring out in suggestion of bells. A row of brown bells hanging from the white twigs.
Don't think I'll stop writing about syacamores when the leaves are all gone. There is still the bark to exclaim about.
Complete overcast at dawn. The clouds are down to the 8,000 foot level, the peaks thereby enshrouded and invisible.
A planned maple walk in South Fork may be postponed. Or maybe the clouds will burn off.
They did not, but in the middle of the day, two White-winged Doves strode to the water trough and drank. They are the first of their kind to be seen here in three months, foreshadowed by only a single Mourning Dove. When quail are so plentiful, why are doves so scarce?
While walking just beyond the feeder area, I came across a most unusual agave. The fleshy green leaves were strewn around in the manner of the dead ones recently described as art. I carefully moved them away from the center of the plant with my foot. There I saw the decapitated root of the plant, flush with the ground. The bud was gone, probably in the stomach of some mammal, perhaps one of the pigs that had foraged for seed under the bird feeder all afternoon.
The dog's bedtime outing produced a surprise, a starry sky. I turned on my heel. The crescent moon was saying good-bye from the west-southwest, the Chiricahua peaks about to put it to bed. When it rises again, we will be on the flanks of Silver Peak, heading for the summit.
If you stand at Portal, Arizona, and look toward the Chiricahua Mountains, most of what you are looking at is a massif in the foreground. I used to think of that huge chunk of rock, which looked like a throne to me, as Silver Peak, and I addressed it so. But technically, Silver Peak was not the whole mountain, but a particular summit, upon which sat a fire lookout, The mountain had other prominences, all of which were nameless. Seeing this deficiency, some scientists over at the Southwestern Research Station of the American Museum of Natural History petitioned to name the highest point on the whole massif Mount Sceloporus. They filled out the required paperwork and their wish was granted.
Sceloporus is a genus of lizard, which has four species in these mountains, an impressive feat. I would have preferred "Mount Quercus," to honor the all important oaks, or perhaps "Canis Peak," to honor the wiley coyote and its cousins, or even "Roadrunner Mountain." But those guys were herpetologists and you have to admire their chutzpah for naming a mountain after some lizards. Actually, I would prefer they hadn't named that peak at all and we could still call the whole throne Silver Peak, which I do anyway, and for that matter the part I can see from Paradise IS Silver Peak, sensu stricto.
As we approached the 1800 meter level on the broad eastern shoulder of the mountain, the first and easiest set of switchbacks behind us, names didn't matter much. On the other hand, we had the Peloncillo Mountains in the distance, Cave Creek with its ribbon of sycamores off to the right, Portal in the middle distance with 11 domed observatories in the desert beyond it, and just down the slope in front three Yin-Yang ridges. The ridges trended east, so one side of each ridge faced south, while the other faced north. The north facing slopes, all three of them, were covered with trees. They were small trees and this was a woodland not a forest, but the contrast with the south-slopes opposite them could not have been more dramatic. The south-facing slopes were treeless, supporting instead grass, agave, and other desert plants, a completely different life zone.
I explained that these were not rain-shadow effects, that rain shadow characterized whole mountain ranges, not small ridges. No, we assume that the opposite slopes with different vegetation receive the same amount of precipitation. We hypothesize, though, that they don't retain the moisture equally. The sun is mainly in the south, and its evaporative power takes away much of the soil moisture from the south-facing slopes before it can be used by the plants. The result, a desert facing a woodland across a virtual abyss, the sun's rays glancing on one side, direct on the other.
I mentioned that the opposite would be true if we moved Silver Peak to the same latitude in Chile. The trees would be on the south-facing slope, safe from the dessicating rays of the northern sun. And so, I prefer to call the sunny slope Yang, and the shady one Yin, where ever they are. Yin and Yang, as ecological terms, aren't context dependent, they always mean the same thing. "More information with fewer words," said Xandi. Exactly.
We found more ecological wonder on the cold, north side of the massif. Silver Creek was below, Cochise Head was visible to the north, and Border Pinyons mingled with Mountain Mahogany to create a dense cold-tolerant woodland. Douglas firs posed as pinyons here and there. Bigger pines were in the deep ravine between the Silver Peak and Mt. Sceloporus. Adding to five species of evergreen oaks, deciduous Gambel Oaks arched over the trail, their leaves all on the ground. Despite half a dozen sets of tight switchbacks and tip-toeing along the edge of very steep slopes, we still were looking nearly straight up at the lookout site at 2:30. It was time for me to turn around. My younger and more vigorous companions agreed. And I am fine with the result. Without the spectacular view from the top in my head, I keep recalling the feathery seeds of Mountain Mahogany, the carpet of Gambel Oak leaves, and the red polyliths I dubbed "the soldiers," towering over the trail.
TRIFECTA. There's a lot of bird activity around here. An accipiter passing overhead at 500 feet could pick it up easily. And so it's no surprise when a bird-eating hawk shows up in the back yard for a look at the bounty. It's no surprise, but still thrilling, when a hawk as big as a red-tail, but with a blue-gray mantle, a black cap, and a white line over its eye, lands awkwardly in the top of an Alligator Juniper.
"Sophie, Sophie," I shouted, "Come now, come now! It's a goshawk!" (The urgency of coming immediately is something that novice birders have to be taught.) She saw it, and later Xandi saw it. And I got some documenting photos through the branches before later seeing it in the open on the top of a more distant snag. Then it came into the top of the tree next to the feeders. To my surprise, the jays did not set up a racket and mob it.
After that, we saw it no more. The adult Cooper's and immature Sharp-shinned Hawks who visited here did not become habitués of my bird-filled "back yard," so I'll assume the same for this the largest of the three accipiters, even though suitable prey species, such as Mexican Jays and Acorn Woodpeckers, are abundant. Later I looked for signs of a kill and found none, but the grass is so high that I easily could have missed one.
Goshawks seem to be fairly numerous in the Chiricahuas. I have seen several, and a subspecies was described from right here in Paradise. These birds, which are nonmigratory residents from here to Jalisco, are said to be larger than other American Goshawks, and to be darker on the back. I would love to have a chance to check that out again.
The sky is especially blue today. Southwestern skies can be that way. They're famous for it. Not much moisture, most days, to haze it up. This is one of the best of those days.
Usually when I notice something my mind goes straight to mechanism. I'm remembering, sort of, what I've read and repeated about the scattering of light and the wavelengths of the blue. Checking the internet, I was reminded that the violet end of the spectrum has shorter wave-lengths than the red end, and that shorter wave-lengths are scattered more easily when they hit dust particals and aerosols in the atmosphere. So, the sky is blue becuase the blue light doesn't make it to earth, instead bouncing around and entering our eyeballs.
That's one explanation of the blue. Another is that the sky gods like blue and paint the sky that way most days. That's a sweet, poetic explanation. I like it, becuase blue is my favorite color, especially the blue of the flag of Greece, and the blue of the flag of Israel. Those countries at the east end of the Mediterranean have their own dry air creating piercing blue. I have painted two offices that color over the years.
A post-modernist might say both explanations are equally true, as they 're both just naratives. I don't buy that. Science is not just spinning a yarn or telling a story. Science is searching for objective truth, truth of the kind you can bank on when you need to get Apollo 13 back and all you've got to do it with is a slide rule and some thrusters.
Actually, though, the post-modernist challenge raises an interesting point. The sky gods could no doubt paint the sky any color they want to, but can Mother Nature? Yes, it turns out. Think of sunsets, when light rays are coming in at a low angle. Purple skies have even been seen. They are apparently a combination of sunset pink and the prevailing blue.
It has been claimed that during the Permian extinction 250 ma the seas were purple from the bacteria that were able to survive after everything else died as a result of the acidifiction caused by the dissolving of super abundant atmospheric carbon dioxide resulting from volcanic hyperactivity. In this model the skies were green as a result of the hydrogen sulfide outgassed by those purple bacteria. Detractors claim that green skies were impossible. Be that as it may, a repeat of the Permian catastrophe is the real peril of the present day spike in carbon dioxide concentrations. Sea level rise is inconvenient and collapse of the global conveyor belt would probably change terrestrial climates and lead to human famines, but the death of the oceans is what we really should be guarding against.
At 2:45 p.m. from the upstairs window I began to see deer through the limbs of the junipers that fringe the water trough. They approached one step at a time, cautiously. I wondered if the caution is because of JoJo chasing or barking in the past, or some other menace. Or just general wariness.
I hoped JoJo would not interfere, knowing she was on the other side of the house, sunning herself under the deck or digging for chipmunks. Two medium-sized junipers make the upslope portal to the water. One deer stood between them a long time, sniffing and looking around. Eventually another one became impatient and passed her, and went to the water. Another joined it. They drank and then wandered off. Then a young buck with twin spikes between his ears came down for a drink, He was joined by the watcher. They finished and moved off, never disturbed by the 4-legged human under the house.
I noticed the shiny blackness of the deers' noses, and white rings separating the black from the tawny gray of the muzzle. I thought about the placement of the nostrils at the end of the long snout, of the fact of the snout in the first place, and how nostrils, ears, and eyes, move around so readily on an animal’s head to facilitate its chosen way of life.
Crocodiles and whales have their nostrils on top, for the same reason, even though they last shared an ancestor in the Paleozoic. These similarities evolved independently. The eyes of an owl are on the front of the head, so binocular vision can locate prey; the eyes of a woodcock are on the sides and near the crown, so they can detect predators while they probe in the ground. Of course nothing tops the elephants for moving their nostrils to the end of a proboscis, several feet away from the head. Mirabile dictu!
I knew it was going to be a cold morning last night at 8 p.m. when I went outside and found the Oiwliur Pet Water Fountain frozen solid. I brought it inside so I wouldn't have to thaw it at dawn. The prediction was accurate: all the hummingbird feeders were frozen when I got up. The male Broad-billed Hummingbird was clicking from a perch, as if to say "hurry up." (Actually he clicks every morning.) Two of the feeders are metal-free and fit into the microwave, so I just thawed them there. The third had to be loosened with hot water -- thank goodness for the water heater -- and the sugar water had to be heated up on the stove. Both hummingbirds were seen using them after my treatment. Clearly they made it through the night and most likely will fatten up quickly and be fine as the day warms up. I do feel the need to be here on such cold mornings, though, and the thought of a feeder with a heater crossed my mind.
I scattered extra seed, put out extra suet, and thawed the water trough. The situation reminded me of my boyhood in Dillon, South Carolina, when it snowed. Invariably Fox Sparrows would show up on the ground under out feeder. And an immature Baltimore Oriole often did the same. These birds wintered in our area, they just didn't bother with people most of the time. The same was true of the last snow in Charleston, a few winters ago. I kept the hummingbird feeder thawed and was rewarded with an adult male Ruby-throat. An oriole also came to my orange jelly dispenser designed specifically for orioles. I won't be surprised if something similar happens here. Maybe an Anna's Hummingbird will come in from the cold, or an unusual Zonotrichia sparrow, such as a White-throated from the east or a Golden-crowned from California, will show up. Orioles don't winter here, but that didn't stop me from trying to feed them. The only orange thing I have is a crockpot, so I put it on the deck and smeared grape jelly around the rim.
Alas, no strangers showed up for my hospitality. The Mexican Jays found the jelly quickly, and demonstrated a liking for it. Most of the usual birds were seen, and the seldom-seen Bewick's Wren showed off chickadee-level acrobatics clinging to the hanging suet feeder. It warmed up well in the afternoon, and we all had a fine time. A warming trend is expected tonight.
We drove up Cave Creek Canyon on the way to the South Fork Trailhead. Two truckloads of Arizona Fire workers were parked across from the Forest Service buildings. I had seen them before, clearing brush in the canyon bottom. It appears (although I haven't asked) that their purpose is to reduce the fuel load along the forest floor so an errant wildfire will not get hot enough to become a crown fire and destroy the forest that enhances the beauty of the soaring cliffs and the blue sky above.
It makes some sense, although I do not know if it will work. Ponderosa Pines survive cool fires, but most of the trees on the canyon bottom are not pines of any kind. They are mostly Arizona White Oaks, Arizona Cypresses, and Alligator Junipers. I think the thick bark of the latter two would pretect them from a cool fire, but I don't know about the oak. Still, although the parklike configuration they have created looks a little unnatural, I think this is a gambit worth trying. We don't want a conflagration in Cave Creek.
On the trail, after feasting visually on maple leaves and red cliffs, we noticed numerous trees with blackened bark. They had survived a fire, perhaps a spot fire from the Rattlesnake fire of 1994, perhaps a small autonomous fire. Regardless, the trees had survived and the overstory of the forest was mostly closed, as elsewhere in the canyon. Most of the shrubs and young trees could easily have been less than 30 years old. It looked as though the species mentioned above could indeed survive a cool fire, of the type intended by the treatment being applied by Arizona Fire.
After throwing extra seed on the ground and hanging two goldfinch socks, filling the water trough to overflowing, and hanging three completely full hummingbird feeders, we shoved off at 10 a.m. for a four-day trip to central New Mexico. Around Apache Creek, which is northwest of Silver City, we left the sub-Mogollon world. New Mexico lacks the clearcut geomorphic boundary of Arizona's Mogollon Rim, but the ecozone boundary is still there, marked by the northern extent of Emory Oak, Arizona Sycamore, and Arizona Walnut. The animals follow suit. Apache Creek is well known for its population of large, handsome Arizona Gray Squirrels; I have seen them there. For someone from the supra-Mogollon world of the Colorado Plateau coming south to escape winter, the first sycamores and the first Arizona Gray Squirrels are welcome reminders of the warm temperatures and biotic diversity that lies ahead.
We weave our way up the canyon of Apache Creek and top out on a ponderosa-clade plateau, following it for dozens of flat green miles to Quemado, a hamlet on transcontinental but little traveled U.S. Highway 60 (a pre-interstate route of importance), which records the country's lowest temperature several times a winter. Here we are in Pinyon World.
The Colorado Pinyon (Pinus edulis has larger cones than the Border Pinyons in the Chiricahuas, and the it's a two-needle pine. To be continued.
My home country is the Zuni Mountains of New Mexico. As much as I may love the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina and the swamps and marshes of Lowcountry South Carolina, I am even more attached to the Zuni Mountains. I was led there by a devotee of the Cottonwood Gulch ethos, and lured there by a job working at the summer camp of the same name. The Narrowleaf Cottonwoods in that moist gulch, the pinyon pines of the surrounding mesas, and the moisture-loving plants, with their birds, of the slopes leading up to the 9,000 foot level, got into my blood and they have never washed out.
Back in 1978 the Gallup Area Audubon Society asked me to organize a Christmas Bird Count for their area. I centered it near "the gulch" at Bluewater Lake, which is home to numerous species of waterfowl every winter, until the water's surface freezes over. With five to fifteen birders, or fewer, to cover the standard 177 square miles of a CBC circle, we ran the count when we could. I bowed out at the end of the 80s. Others tried to keep it going. For the last several years my fellow Zuni Mountain addict John Trochet has driven out from Sacramento to run it. This year 16 hardy birders gather at the exit 72 Dairy Queen on I-40 at 6:30 to get our assignments and head out for the day. Before dawn at the DQ the temperature was around 20 F.
Sue Trevathan and Jim Bazemore joined Xandi, Sophie, and me in covering the Las Tusas Valley and Cottonwood Gulch. After reasonably productive efforts there, we headed for Bluewater Canyon, a beautiful chasm with walls of Glorieta Sandstone, which is one of two major suppliers of water to the lake. Bluewater Canyon is the portal to the high country of the Zuni Mountains. I have passed through it countless times heading upslope, have stopped to record the songs of canyon birds on numerous occasions, and I have explored the creekside paralleling the road a few times. But, I have never hiked all the way down the canyon to Bluewater Lake. That is my assignment today. The count compiler gave me three species of interest to look for, along with all the ones that are expected here.
The expected ones are seen in small numbers. The weather is glorious, bright sun, cloudless sky, air not too cold. The creek is mostly frozen. Narrow enough to jump in most places, it is even easier to cross with the well-marked trail by walking on the ice. Then the canyon takes one of its characteristic abrupt right angle turns. The new orientation must be due north-south, affording maximal exposure to sunlight, for the creek is ice-free, and luxuriant green algae sway in the current of the tiny stream. No sooner do I notice this change than I hear the unmistakable call of an American Dipper. And there it sits, on a rock at water's edge, bouncing up and down on its stout yellowish legs. The rock is covered with whitewash. It is the bird's latrine. This dipper is living here for the winter, and my heart fills with excitement at the good find, joy at seeing a wonderful species, and nostalgia.
Dippers are very unusual songbirds that get their food from the bottoms of rushing streams by walking along the bottom. Their plumage is waterproof, and their plumpness suggests it is thick, keeping them warm and dry while exercising their unusual preferences. The "push-ups" they do while standing on streamside rocks are unexplained and characteristic, but not unique; other streamside birds, e.g., water-thrushes and wagtails, do it, too. All the rushing mountain streams of the world (well not in sub-Saharan Africa, and Australia) have one kind of dipper or another, except for those in eastern North America. Those streams must have had dippers at one time. I guess an ice sheet pushed them so far south that they found no rushing streams to live beside and they went extinct. Introduction of the American Dipper to eastern North America would be seen is meddling with nature by most, but nature is not perfect, and in this case needs an assist. Every mountain stream deserves a dipper.
I moved to the Zuni Mountains in 1979. John Trochet arrived a year later. The avifauna of the Zuni Mountains is transitional from the well known Rocky Mountain avifauna of Colorado and the tantalizing Madrean avifauna of southeastern Arizona. As birders with a biogeographic bent, we were keen to find, for our home turf, northern species south, and southern species north. It is a long time since either of us has lived there, but we keep going back to add to the list of species living in the Zunis. One of our first goals was to find streamside birds in a range with very few streams. We found our bonanza in Bluewater Gorge, below the dam that creates the lake. In the first few years we found nests of Black Phoebe and American Dipper, and we regularly found Pacific Wrens there in winter. Dippers in the Gorge became a rare but regular addition to our CBC list.
So, seeing the dipper above the dam today was exciting and nostalgic, but I thought the gorge walkers would get several. At the count-down dinner, though, John told me I had the only one. Domestic herbivores (cows) have been fenced out of the stream in the gorge, allowing emergent aquatic vegetation to grow in, which has made the stream unsuitable for dippers, which need flowing streams to dive into. How ironic! Cows were giving us our dippers all those years. The spot in the canyon, where the sun is just right to maintain open water, is the dipper's last stand, for now.
I wanted to show Sophie and Xandi the hundreds of Sandhill Cranes and Snow Geese that come in to roose in shallow water at Bosque del Apache (BDA)National Wildlife Refuge at dusk every evening. We made our way southward from the Grants area along the eastern edge of El Malpais National Monument to Pietown, where we ate some delicious pie, by the other-worldly Very Large Array (VLA) of multi-story parabolic reflectors (i.e., huge "satellite dishes"), which collectively make up the world's largest radio telescope, and into Socorro by mid-afternoon. We stopped by to see friend Susan Oviatt on our way to the birds at the nearby refuge. Susan told us she had heard that the evening flight was a dud at BDA, but that she and Jack had seen a great display at Bernardo, 25 miles to the north. She made some phone calls to confirm this, and sent us on our way to the Ladd Gordon Waterfowl Management Area, a state refuge.
Cranes and geese have probably been wintering here for millenia, but there is no question that they are attracted to the cornfields that have been planted by humans for the last few centuries. They spend the night standing in shallow water to as a deterrent to predatory coyotes, and fly out to the fields in daytime to glean waste corn kernels from the already-harvested fields. State and federal wildlife agencies assist them by planting corn just for them and maintaing shallow ponds for roosting.
We found hundreds of geese and cranes, and two dozen carloads of people watching and photographing them, at Ladd Gordon. We watched them feed, change fields, and eventually take off for a nearby pond, for an hour or two. The dessert for this visual feast was the rising of a full moon over the distance eastern edge of the Rio Grande Rift, and a look at the moons of jupiter through the telescope of two or our fellow watchers. It was the right place to go, and we were lucky to have Susan's assistance in getting there.
After driving through Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge and spying a variety of colorful ducks, but very few geese and cranes, we headed southward toward home. The Rio Grande, and I-25, parallel each other from here to the Texas border, following the Rio Grande Rift, one of earth's major rift valleys. A rift valley is created when a block of rock slips vertically along two parallel faults. This creates a deep valley, called a graben. The graben in this case is thousands of feet below the lands east and west of it. And mountains, most notably the Sandias, which absorb the eastern skyline of Albuquerque, can rise up along the fault's face as the graben slides downward. We did a whole Flocks and Rocks Expedition focused on the Rio Grande Rift in 2017.
At Truth or Consequences, a town that changed its name in response to a dare by a radio station, we turned right and began a winding assent of the contact between the graben and the "horst" on the other side of the fault. We passed through the charming frontier village of Hillsboro, and then began a second ordeal of winding up the steep slopes of the Black Range. On the other side was Silver City and the balmy climes of Gadsdenia. We arrived in Paradise in time to watch a huge moon rise over one of the limestone ridges to our east.
Having watched the nearly full moon slide behind a hill inordinately far to the north this morning, I am excitedly awaiting the chance to chart its full course tonight. I have been very impressed noticing the various rising and setting places of the moon in this valley. I'm glad I wasn't an archaic astronomer, as it is hard to figure out what's going on, but I can see great appeal in trying to (figure it out).
Meanwhile, turkeys showed up today. The last time was October 26, when eight came by. Three of them walked in before noon and patiently pecked at the small seeds I had spread early this morning. The copper or their backs looked almost pink. I took a good bit of video to capture this iridescent splendor. I will have plenty of video to rekindle better days when I'm too old and frail to go out or even go to the window. Besides, that window is not likely to open on a spectacle anything like this.
I just happened to be looking at those three from an upstairs window when a fourth bird burst through the juniper portal behind the water trough. He was more splendid than the others, and he had his feathers loosely erected to show it. I thought for a moment he might spread his tail and strut. He didn't go that far, but he will probably be strutting next spring, and if not then, then someday down the road. He didn't have a snood though, so I know he has to develop more masculine extravagance before he'll get a look from a female. The "snood" is that fleshy wattle that drapes from the top of the bill on male ("tom") turkeys. It is useless, and that is the point, to show that you can still feed yourself with a useless wad of flesh hanging from your feeding apparatus. I'm not making this up. Amotz Zahavi noticed the extravagance of such male ornaments and coined the "handicap principle" in the 1980s to explain it. It has stood the test of time.
I missed the moonrise last night, but I remembered to take a look at the moon around midnight. It was pretty high in the sky, but not directly overhead. Canis Major was up by then, and the moon was well above it, and Orion. All these objects were southeast of me. This morning, the moon set close to where it set yesterday, behind a desert hill maybe a mile from here. It was on the south slope of the hill today and the north slope yesterday, a surprising amount of slippage.
I used my phone to take the compass bearing toward the moonrise location of Monday night, and then the moonset location of today. They were different from the official bearings for San Simon on timeanddate.com, but the difference between them was the same, 122 degrees. That is only two thirds of a circle, so the moon's path does not divide the sky in half. As an archaic astronomer, I find that interesting. My midnight observation of the moon's location confirms that the moon did not follow a direct path from rise to set. Instead, it curved across the sky, going south before going west. Or so it appears. Maybe I need to rethink my concept of the sky. Maybe it's not a flat sheet of birchbark, or cave wall. But what could it be? Isn't the world flat? It seems to be. And isn't the sky flat? It seems to be. And what of the bizarre rotation of the moon's face as it curves across the sky? What the hell is going on?
I took a little walk, a descent into the south ravine. Over on the other side is a great house site, for what it's worth. Another broad shoulder of the slope, like the current house site, and a great view of Silver Peak. The ravine itself is enticing. Part of it descends gradually, other parts in stairsteps of rock that looks almost like granite, but isn't. I would love to see the runoff from a downpour bounding down those steps. I would love to see these hills covered with vegetation watered by 40 inches of rainfall a year. I would love to see the Great Basin clothed in Pleistocene forest and mammoths roaming Cochise County they way they did before the arrival of the Clovis hunters, who may have driven them extinct, but probably weren't the culprits. And then, having had my peek at that grandeur, I would prefer to return to this place and time to play out the hand that fate has dealt me.
There is a certain grandeur, as Darwin said, in the evolutionary view of life. I see it as I bounce down the stairsteps of the present-day ravine. On my right are oaks, Arizona White Oaks, fine ones, not as tall as those in the flood plain below, but healthy oaks. Under them are Silk Tassel bushes, another sub-Mogollon species with the same range map as the sycamores and walnuts mentioned recently. They are clothed in their evergreen leaves. At mid-morning these plants are deep in shade. On the sun-drenched slope to my left are leafless bushes. I don't know there names. I'll wait until their leaves return. Here it is, right belong the deck, Yin and Yang balancing things out. One side waiting for wetter times, the other for drier, to expand out of the crease of the ravine onto the flats above, taking that fine house site for their own.
This afternoon we explored a part of the Chiricahuas I have seldom visited, the main fork of Cave Creek, from the Southwestern Research Station to Herb Martyr Campground. The creekside vegetation is similar to South Fork's very diverse forest. After passing a few enviably-sited vacation homes we saw a small waterfall through the limbs. A tiny cascade plummets about 15 feet over the lip of a very small dam. The impoundment behind it now consists entirely of alluvium, leaving impotent the large drainage pipe which once could have drained the "lake" in minutes. At the foot of the rock dam a chute carved by the creek bisects the massive rock. It is narrow and five or more feet deep. I remember seeing, in 1977, a grainy movie of Walter Spofford inspecting an American Dipper nest along this waterway. I bet it was at this very spot.
This dam is at the former John Hands Campground, which became the former John Hands Picnic Ground. A similarly-constructed dam, with a similar cascade, and a similarly defunct impoundment, is at Herb Martyr Campground. The campground retains very minimal improvements, while John Hands is now completely "primitive." I look forward to camping at both spots when the spring birds return.
At Herb Martyr I consulted Rick Taylor's birding guide, which describes these locations. I learned that a fine view of Winn Falls had been available to us as we drove in through the oak-juniper woodland. On the way out I stopped in the road and found it, a frozen shaft of water one hundred or more feet long, dangling from a cliff to the right of Sanders Peak. When the runoff begins next year, the ice will reach the ground, nearly 400 feet below the top.
Sanders Peak, which looks like a giant shark's tooth, is an easily identified landmark from my deck. Back home at dusk, knowing where to look, I spotted the waterfall. I will be noticing its waxing and waning, as I do the moon's, as the seasons roll along.
I was wrong about Winn Falls. It is not visible from Paradise. Even though it is between Sanders Peak and Paradise on the big topo map in the bedroom, I could not find it in the scope in morning's clear light. A return trip to Herb Martyr revealed the reason. It is hidden in a slot between two slabs of rock. And that slot is obscured from Paradise with a bigger rock. But, by the way, Cathedral Rock is spectacular when seen from the Ash Spring Trail.
Meanwhile, we keep looking at the ribbons of broad-leafed trees along the rivers and creeks of the Southwest. Driving by Portal today we noticed the few cottonwoods emerging from the ribbon of sycamores. Up Cima Creek, as in South Fork Cave Creek, we saw sycamores but no cottonwoods. Yet the Rio Grande was swathed in cottonwoods with no sycamores.
I haven't researched this, but I do notice that although both are riparian, sycamores occur along rocky streambeds, while cottonwoods are most common along watercourses with silty floodplains. Indeed, cottonwoods are known for propagating readily from fallen branches that lodge in sandbars. It is said that the current Rio Grande bosque dates from major floods in the pre-reservoir days. Flood control, then, is the enemy of cottonwood propagation and bosque regeneration.
I have seen cottonwood bosques down in Chihuahua, but I have not seen sycamores north of the Mogollon Rim. It seems that sycamores, at least the Arizona species, Platanus are limited by colder temperatures.