backyard – Boolie

mlem

A long thin beak necessitates a long thin tongue. We had a ton of bougainvillea when we moved in years ago but had it ripped out as it was a nightmare to maintain. The local wildlife misses it as our backyard is rather sparse now but this is not entirely a bad thing with Bear around. I do miss gardening from our time in Portland but I don’t have the bandwidth for it here. Something to look forward to in retirement though I’ll need some lessons as I have no idea how to grow things in an area where everything stabs you.

📷: Sony A6500 | Sony 100-400mm | Sony 1.4X
🗓️: May 12, 2019

Backyard Beauty

Both of our backyard tarantulas emerged from their winter slumber last month though one completely sealed off her entrance again and this one I haven’t seen in a few days, though perhaps I’ve just missed her. She didn’t retreat to her hole one night a week ago when I let Bear out to go to the bathroom, so I grabbed my camera and she sat still for the 2.5 second exposure (sitting still is what she does most of the night).

📷: Sony A6700 | Sony 100-400mm | Sony 1.4X
🗓️: May 31, 2024

KEEP OUT!

One of the tarantulas living in our backyard covers its hole before sunrise with a patchwork of webbing, removing it come nightfall when it emerges to wait for prey to walk by. I hear crickets in our front yard and elsewhere in the neighborhood but not in our backyard for some strange reason. While many spiders spin webs to catch prey this is more like a ‘No Solicitors’ or ‘No Vacancy’ sign. A larger tarantula living 12 feet away doesn’t cover its entrance hole however.

I’m not the only one taking a break for the fall and winter, they have both sealed their entrances with dirt and rocks as they tuck in for the cooler months, the larger one a couple of weeks ago and this one last night. Enjoy your long rest, see you in the spring.

A Lucky Break

I’ll be posting more frequently the next few months and I feel I ought to explain why.

Last year after we adopted Bear I was caught off guard by how intensely homesick I suddenly felt for Portland (this is Ellie and I playing in the snow in our backyard a decade ago). It’s not that I hadn’t missed Oregon before — you can’t love a place as much as I loved the Northwest and not miss it when you leave — rather I missed it in the same way I’d miss the desert if I could snap my fingers and give us our old lives back. But I’ve never had a problem mourning the beautiful things I’ve lost as long as it doesn’t keep me from loving the beautiful things I have and have gained. And if you’ve followed me long you know how much I love the Sonoran Desert.

Something else was going on.

A big part of it was I had been having trouble sleeping, leaving me physically and mentally exhausted. Bear was more of a challenge to integrate into our lives than Ellie had been. Sam died around the same time, not that any of their death’s have been easy but I always knew his would be hard. There was pandemic fatigue, the school shooting in Uvalde, the stress of a car commute after so many years taking the train, an especially challenging project. To top it off I got sick twice and had to miss a week of work each time, burning off a huge chunk of my time off, time I usually spend letting my mind spin down. And even though I try to live in the moment and am keenly aware of how good my life is and how many people are genuinely suffering each day of their lives, I still reached a point where I couldn’t keep going and needed to find a way to retire.

Thankfully my boss offered an option to take a leave of absence instead and I took him up on it. Tomorrow I start my four month break and I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity to step away and recharge. I may not get to play with Bear in the snow as I did Ellie, but he is about to start going on a lot more desert hikes. Looking forward to doing more photography and editing old pictures, my backlog goes back many years (including this one!).

Woodpeckers Without Woods

As a child in Michigan we had woods behind the house where I fell in love with chipmunks and squirrels and woodpeckers. In memory the woodies were downies and redheads but the memories are blurry at best. I was in graduate school when I got my first camera and binoculars and fell in love with woodpeckers all over again. Now in Virginia, the memories are sharper, flickers and downies and hairies.

In Oregon where I spent most of my adult life we had flickers in our urban backyard, I was always alerted to their presence since they were also a favorite of Emma’s and she would chirp at me from atop the cat tree on their arrival. On the trails in addition to downies and hairies I saw pileated woodpeckers and red-breasted sapsuckers too.

Before the move to Arizona I was intrigued when looking at real estate listings to see what looked like bird holes in the saguaros of some yards, and upon learning they were made by woodpeckers wanted to see them more than anything. So imagine my delight at arriving and finding them ubiquitous, I can sit on my porch and regularly see Gila woodpeckers and commonly gilded flickers and on rare occasion ladder-backed woodpeckers, so much more often than I saw their cousins in Oregon.

Who knew to see woodpeckers I had to leave the woods!

This is (I think) a tail feather from a Gila woodpecker, having served its duty helping its owner navigate the desert, now fallen to ground in our backyard.

At Least the Rain Was Soft

From July during a summer rain with no lightning or thunder. This photoshoot was the straw that broke the camel’s back and made me start looking for a camera with focus bracketing, though it took me another 5 months to pull the trigger.

Snout Slurp

An American snout enjoys the remains of lantana fruit in our backyard. After the monsoons this summer and fall when the flowers were in full bloom I’d close my mouth as I walked past this bush to make sure I didn’t accidentally inhale a butterfly from the mob that flittered about. We recently had landscapers dig up the many bougainvillea plants in the backyard and a couple of palms that had died or were struggling, initially I was unsure on whether to keep the lantana but after seeing how the butterflies loved it I decided to keep them.

Cloudless Above and Below

A yellow sailboat tilts on the gentle waves.

M&M’s

Another look at some of the patterns in the wings of the male black witch that sought refuge at our door, this time the bat-like M’s at the bottom of his wings.

The Adorable Assassin

Speaking of wildlife right outside our door, a couple of weeks after the first black witch appeared my wife was trimming some bushes that had overgrown the water spigot and was startled by this kingsnake. You might not expect it from its adorable little mug but one of the many things these constrictors eat is rattlesnakes. I wish I could keep it on retainer, I’d put up tiny little signs at viper eye level around the yard saying “Beware of Kingsnakes” and I don’t think we’d have to worry about venomous snakes anymore. Not that I don’t love seeing rattlesnakes, just I prefer seeing them in their home rather than mine.