Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
This picture is a little bittersweet as while watching animals feed on saguaros is one of my favorite things, I shouldn’t have been there. It was a Thursday and a succinct note in my hiking journal says “Couldn’t sleep, so a quick hike before work”. I’m thankful I have trails nearby as after a short drive and hike I got to watch this white-winged dove enjoying breakfast for quite a while. Too soon it was time to leave and get ready for work with hopes the next night would be more restful.
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.
Whenever I see the tarantulas living in our backyard I’m reminded of the painting “Truth Coming Out of Her Well” by Jean-Léon Gérôme, as contrary to how they are often portrayed on screen they just come out at night and sit beside their holes and wait for prey to walk past. I decided to try to photograph the one that’s easiest to see, in the darkness it required a 15 second exposure at ISO 3200. I left the exposure dark to emphasize this is a night shot of a nocturnal predator, but light enough that you get a feel of the beauty of what I see when I take Bear out at night and catch a glimpse of one of them at the diffuse edges of the flashlight’s beam.
One of my favorite sights of spring in the Sonoran Desert is when the birds have faces completely pancaked with saguaro pollen. When I finally got around to getting my first Nikon so I could do more macro photography I wanted to get a close-up of these large flowers, the desert’s powder rooms. However each saguaro blossom only lasts for about a day and I needed to find one on a day off when I was up early and with no wind and with a saguaro with an arm that bent towards the ground and was right next to the trail and which wasn’t covered in bees. It proved to be a tall order but on Memorial Day I was up before sunrise and found an obliging giant.
Due to some mix of the early hour and lack of practice and a general tendency to forget to setup the camera properly when I get excited, I left the shutter speed far too low and even with almost no breeze ended up with a little motion blur. Plus I should have stopped down one more stop so there would be less blur in the focus stack due to the large separation between stigma and stamens.
Nevertheless these shots will bring a smile to my face for years to come. As I wrote in my hiking journal while lamenting my mistake but hoping the pictures would come out: “It was great fun regardless”. The breeze soon picked up so I went home and got Bear and came back for a hike out to see the saguaro I call Witch Hazel, my first time seeing her in bloom.
Just a lovely day all around.
I had four days off for the Labor Day weekend and not coincidentally Bear and I went on four hikes in the desert. After rain Thursday night on Friday I waited for a gap where the trails would have dried out but before the next rain showers hit. Temperatures had plummeted so I took Bear up to the overlook on Brown’s Mountain, as I didn’t let him do it all summer as I won’t let him do big elevation changes in the heat.
On the way down he paused for a while, I thought it was the expansive view as he does enjoy the view from up high. After giving him a moment I encouraged him onward as I wanted to beat the rain if we could. As we descended further he came to a standstill and it took me a moment but I eventually saw what he saw (or smelled): a gray fox peeking out through the desert scrub! A new species for both of us!
It was more Boo-sized than Bear-sized so I was glad it wasn’t scared of him (or me) and we were able to watch it for a while as it sauntered across the hill side, occasionally looking back at us before continuing on. What a glorious tail! When it finally disappeared into the hills we continued on down the mountain and arrived at the car as the first raindrops fell.
A quick snap from the spring of an owl atop a boulder with wildflowers blooming in the desert below. I was busy and didn’t look closely at the picture until much later, when I realized an owlet was also looking out. And it was months after that as I finally edited the picture I realized an antelope squirrel was running down the rock on the right. I took other pictures as we circled around the loop, some with compositions I like better or with softer light, but I love this little slice of life. This section of the desert has few saguaros and the wildlife is dominated by small mammals and those that eat them.
You won’t see Bear in the picture but I do, not only was he standing beside me but I only found this trail because of him, as it is the easiest to access from our house and a great place to hike with him when I’m short on time. So for me this picture is as much about a slice of my life as theirs.
Diffuse light from the rising sun falls on a white-winged dove and a bee and the very tops of the saguaro flowers, but not yet on the ripening fruit or the saguaro below. One of a seemingly infinite set of pictures as I play with light arriving or departing the desert, taken on a rare pre-sunrise hike without Bear a couple of months ago.
In January while walking Bear we passed some large granite boulders and my pattern recognition self thought he saw an owl deep in the shadows of one of the boulders. The rest of my selves thought he was being ridiculous given the distance and while I had seen owls in the area, mostly what I see are protuberances in the rocks that at a distance look like owls. He was so insistent there was an owl there I took a picture and zoomed in just so I could prove him wrong and we could continue on our way.
Except to my delight and chagrin there was an owl there. If the owl seems blindingly obvious in the first picture I took it two months later on a rare occasion when I brought my super-telephoto into the desert and happened to find it in the same spot, with the high magnification and exposure for the shadows the hidden subject is easily revealed. The second picture was taken on the day in question and is still a moderate telephoto shot, zoomed in several times compared to these naked aging eyes, but even so you get a feel for what I was seeing on the day. The owl is in the shadows of the boulder on the right, with some rocks-not-owls on the boulder on the left.
It was a nice find and helped me understand more about the owl and how it manages the brighter parts of the day. The zoomed-in shot is a nice reminder that while I think of the boulders as being solid monoliths they are rather beaten up from so many years of wind and weather, and not so homogeneous to boot.
So I cut that same self some slack weeks later when he thought at first glance he saw a bullfrog in the middle of the desert. In this case all it took was a second glance for the frog to turn into the greens and yellows of the paddle of a dying prickly pear. Though I saw many bullfrogs in my years in the Northwest it was a particular bullfrog that triggered the recognition, a giant fellow sitting undaunted beside a trail in Portland, when I later looked at my notes I realized that sighting was 18 years ago. So if I’m still alive in 18 years I suppose no matter where I am on this great blue ball I’ll be seeing owls in shadows that aren’t really there, except maybe they are.
This picture of Bear at the end of a winter afternoon hike has several layers of meaning to me. When we first adopted him he was overweight and slightly limped even on shorter walks in the neighborhood, and his manners precluded taking him into areas with lots of people and dogs. It took months getting him physically and mentally ready for long walks before I was willing to try him on less-visited trails far from trailheads. Take to the trails he did, while he enjoys his neighborhood walks he has a special love for the desert and when we’re about to head out he practically knocks me over as he scampers to the back of the garage and waits beside my hatchback.
As his progress continued I started taking him to more and more populated trails, culminating in this our first visit to my favorite place, the Brown’s Ranch trailhead. We took my favorite hike, finishing up at Sunset Vista with the sun sinking low in the sky, stopping for a snack break and some pictures before dropping down the hill to the car. I was growing confident we had a lot of desert hikes in our future, as he did well even with the off-leash dogs we encountered.
I snuck Brown’s Mountain into the background as I love to do, as this landmark more than any other was the anchor that helped me find my bearings when we moved here and it felt like we were in a never-ending whirlwind, with this part of the preserve my refuge in stormy seas. The looming mountain would add an extra layer of meaning to the picture a week later when for the first time I took him up its flank to the overlook, watching him enraptured as it slowly dawned on me he had never been up that high before.
It’s now far too hot for any evening hikes and we haven’t been into the desert for weeks since I haven’t been able to get up early enough to beat the heat. Long swims will have to do until I can manage an early rise, but even then I’ll avoid trails with elevation gain until cooler weather arrives in the fall.
Back in April Bear and I came across this tiny desert cottontail hiding in the middle of the trail. I happened to have my telephoto zoom that day which was fortunate, even though Bear wasn’t showing any interest I was able to keep my distance and grab a quick picture and continue on our way. I almost walked right by except I caught a glimpse of the eyes, staying well hidden is a good skill since there’s a pretty long list of predators in the desert that would eat the tiny thing.
Boolie 