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.
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.
A gilded flicker uses saguaro fruit as a perch, taken a couple of weeks ago while the fruit was ripening. Taken at the end of a short sunrise hike after barely sleeping the night before.
Taken last year on July 4th with the light fading as the sun slipped below the mountains, a white-winged dove enjoys saguaro fruit before calling it a night. I had planned to focus on saguaro flower and fruit photography this year but life had other plans. I wasn’t able to do much hiking this spring or early summer, and while the saguaro in our front yard blooms it only does so up high and regardless didn’t produce much fruit this year.
Though house finches have been backyard birds for me everywhere I’ve lived, I love seeing them out in the desert proper as it boggles my mind that they thrive here. I’ve only been out for a few hikes since the early spring and before that was mostly doing macro shots, so my bird photography has gotten rather rusty and I didn’t set up the camera properly so I was delighted some of the pictures came out.
It’s perched on a compass barrel cactus, surrounded by fruit, though because it isn’t juicy and pulpy it doesn’t invite the feeding frenzy that saguaros do. We have a couple of barrels in our yard and I’ve noticed birds like woodpeckers and thrashers poking holes in the fruit to get at the seeds inside. I wondered if some of the other birds would like a crack at them so I took some of the ripened fruit and broke it open by hand and laid it in the backyard.
The next morning a huge family of quail came in and it was like Christmas and Easter combined, a little group would find one of the fruits and they’d dance around and fervently gobble up the seeds, then they’d walk around the yard and find another until within minutes all of the seeds had been consumed. I repeated the experiment last night and by this morning all of the seeds were gone.
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.
This is what happens when two leaf-footed bugs love each other very, very much. Not enough to stop sipping fruit juice but very, very much.
Getting your back rubbed, sipping on fruit juice, enjoying the warmth of a summer evening in the desert. Sometimes life is good.
I sometimes find cacti a bit awkward looking when the flowers have died but not yet fallen off, but I liked the look on this compass barrel cactus with the dried flowers atop green fruit, a couple of buds waiting to bloom, nestled beneath the large red spines.
After the hawk I had been watching flew off and sat beside another member of its family on a transmission tower to the north, I wandered up to the saguaro where it had been sitting. Wanting to extend the tranquility of the morning and with the sun about to rise, rather than hoof it up the trail to find the saguaros I originally intended to photograph, I stopped for a water break and to enjoy that moment when the light sweeps over the mountains. I lazily pointed my long lens at the old hawk’s nest I saw last year, I didn’t think it was being used so I was rather shocked to see one of the adults atop it. I put the camera on the tripod and got off a shot before the pink skies disappeared. When the sun rose, the hawk’s face was in shadow, as it was last year. A deliberate choice? I’d certainly do the same, the sun here is something else altogether.
Boolie 