Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
When we first moved to Arizona I instantly fell in love with ocotillos, their long thin arms spiraling into the sky. Their tips usually bloom with an explosion of reds and yellows and oranges although sometimes it’s a more subtle mix of browns and grays and whites with a splash of rufous.
A xenolith provides a handy perch for a Gambel’s quail to survey the surrounding desert. This xenolith has tricked me many times as at a distance it looks like it could be a spiny lizard sunning on the boulder, and even though I know better I often can’t help from looking through the long lens, just to be sure. It’s not an entirely bad instinct, it’s how one day I went back for a second look and turned a cactus into a bobcat.
This black-throated sparrow, nestled back in a buckhorn cholla, almost seemed reluctant to emerge and greet the rising sun but perhaps I was projecting.
I was off on Friday but woke with such a severe headache I didn’t even get out of bed for a neighborhood walk. Saturday morning I was mostly feeling better and ventured out for a gentle hike on a favorite loop. Awaiting me in the blue light, the sun still thinking of rising, was not only a male ladder-backed woodpecker but this female, perched a few feet below. I saw her briefly the previous week though I didn’t know it at first, while photographing the male I stooped down to get a drink and returned to photograph him, only realizing later while reviewing the pictures that his red crown disappeared in the second set. The old switcheroo! May you raise a lovely family, little ones.
With the sun rising behind me and Brown’s Mountain before, this is my more typical view of curve-billed thrashers, watching me watching it from high atop a saguaro on the wonderful Latigo Trail.
One of the problems with hiking early in the morning, apart from it being early in the morning, is that several of my favorite trails go east from the trailhead straight into the rising sun. While I liked how it backlit this mockingbird high atop an old saguaro, maybe the sun could sometimes rise in the west? The south? The north? I’m willing to be flexible.
I wouldn’t describe flickers as quiet birds though it seemed so relative to the pairs of wrens and thrashers and Gila woodpeckers that were making a ruckus around him on a winter’s morning. As I watched him watch the others he reminded me of a driver atop a massive vehicle and I wished the saguaros could slowly shuffle across the desert, so that where you found the old giants would depend on where the birds last parked them.
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.
A flash of red
atop my head
because you said
you loved me.
“I wonder who’s been pecking at this tree. You’ve no idea? I’ll keep asking around then. Have a nice day!”
Boolie 