Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
When I think of flower stalks I think of the delicate stems of the wildflowers I’d see on hikes through most of my life, like daisies or columbine or fairly slippers. The soaptree yucca, on the other hand, has a towering stalk that’s thick at the base like a tree limb before tapering into thin branches at the top. Even so it is a testament to how impossibly light birds are that this bedraggled thrasher only slightly depressed its perch as it sang on a sunny winter morning.
With a headache not yet relenting I was delighted to be greeted as soon as I stepped off the parking lot by the songs of a mockingbird, perched on the flower stalk of a soaptree yucca. Technically the sun had risen but it would be a little while before it cleared the mountains and bathed us in its warm light. For now the mocker and I enjoyed the cool and the blue of the waking desert. I tore myself away in time to reach my target for the morning, a ladder-backed woodpecker, just as the sun arrived.
A male and female kestrel share a perch high atop the tallest saguaro on a cold winter’s morning in the Sonoran Desert. I was able to watch kestrels in the Pacific Northwest, on rare occasion at very close distances, but there they tended to hover in place above the meadow while looking for prey below, while here the old giants give them a similar viewpoint from a sitting position. On the rocks below them is a Harris’s antelope squirrel, keeping an eye on the neighborhood. It wasn’t bothered by the kestrels, I suppose it’s too big to be carried off by the little falcons. Scattered around are smaller saguaros of various ages and sizes, with a barrel cactus in the middle.
We’ve had a string of nights recently with temperatures near freezing, so since I get cold easily I wore one more layer than normal, stripping off layers as the morning advanced and the air warmed. I felt for this poor saguaro seemingly shivering in the cold as the sun rose, it probably didn’t help that its friends to the left and right didn’t seem to mind the winter weather. I don’t know what causes them to grow like this but I confess the oddballs are my favorites.
In the damp of the Pacific Northwest it wasn’t hard to find moss, stand still long enough and the moss found you. I was surprised though to find it growing in the desert far from any water, covering a rock hidden in the shadow of a boulder. I was even more surprised when it matched my smile with its own, so joyful and exuberant, beautiful if unconventional, as I told it of the glory of the rising sun that it could never see.
The fruit of the jojoba reminds me of an acorn, taken on a sunny spring morning up on the Marcus Landslide. Acorns remind me of the pup, always a good thing.
Jojoba has wonderful upright leaves and comes in male and female forms (this is a male), the female has a fruit that reminds me of an acorn which reminds me of Ellie. When we were in Portland we had many old oaks in the neighborhood that dropped a multitude of acorns each fall. They smelled like food to Ellie, not enough for her to eat one but enough that she wanted to smell each and every one just to be sure. The pup did not believe in letting food go to waste! The male jojobas don’t fruit although this one sprouted a white-crowned sparrow.
I don’t normally associate the word ‘soft’ with saguaros but they do have this soft white material on new growth where the spines develop. A few weeks ago this cactus wren gleefully ripped out as much as it could carry in its beak before flying off, only to return for more. Normally I would assume it was looking for soft material to line its nest but at this time of year it must be that the male cardinals dress up as Santa Claus for Christmas and the wrens do their part by gathering material for the long white beards. This desert does know how to put on a show!
To show how slow I can be on the uptake, it hadn’t quite dawned on me that buckhorn cholla must be named because it grows and branches like a buck’s horns until yesterday morning, when the desert sort of rubbed my nose in it.
Boolie 