Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
I love this old saguaro with a seemingly endless number of arms along the Whiskey Bottle Trail in McDowell Sonoran Preserve. I put my backpack beside it for scale (this is my Tom Bihn Guide’s Pack). The pack probably misses the Pacific Northwest where I didn’t sweat all over it but if so it hasn’t said a word and has faithfully carried all my water and other hiking essentials every time I go out.
A cactus wren prepares to enter its nest in the arms of a saguaro, the nest has a side entrance and a covered roof.
The skies on the 4th of July exploded in color as a white-winged dove fed from fruit bursting at the seams atop a saguaro. Taken early in the morning along the Latigo Trail in McDowell Sonoran Preserve.
The sun was up and shining on the tops of the saguaros but when this white-winged dove dropped down to feed on the fruit on a lower arm I was able to photograph it in the soft reflected light. The full sun arrived seconds later. Taken on July 4th while the saguaro were fruiting and the white-wings still flew above the desert.
This is what the Lord Almighty said: ‘Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. Do not plot evil against each other.’ But they refused to pay attention; stubbornly they turned their backs and covered their ears.
Zechariah 7:9-11
Let us not delight in the suffering of others, nor celebrate lies and cruelty. We know why assault victims don’t come forward, it is because we are monsters. Enough. We need not be. To those who suffer in silence. To those who suffer in public. To Anita Hill. To Christine Blasey Ford. To those who stood tall, to those knocked down, to those who suffered for us, you are heroes, still.
As a child when I learned a saguaro stores water in its body I assumed water flowed through pipe-like structures and was stored in reservoirs. But as you can see from this arm that had fallen off, inside the skeleton is a spongy tissue that holds the water. And because of the way the saguaro processes carbon dioxide during photosynthesis, the liquid is acidic and not safe for human consumption.
A female Gila woodpecker brings a moth to the nest as the male prepares to leave (the moth was for the hungry babies inside). The parents brought a variety of insects (and spiders, as she has in her beak below) to their nest in the old saguaro. The male seemed to spend more time in the nest and the female more time hunting during the mornings I watched them. It required a bit of a hike to get to the nest so I couldn’t get there right at first light but it was a treat to watch them nevertheless. I will always be amazed by the relentless energy parents spend getting their babies past those precarious early days.
I also have a 4K clip of them at the nest which I’ll learn to edit at some point and post here. Both pictures are from this spring after we had been in Arizona for about six weeks.
A saguaro at first light on the Chuckwagon Trail. The old ones don’t have so many spines left at their base.
The classic image of the saguaro is of arms lifted towards the sky, and many do grow that way, but the arms may twist and turn in all directions, even growing down, like this splendid old example along one of the off-map trails at Brown’s Ranch. I especially liked the unusual ones when we moved here as I could remember them and they helped orient me on a web of trails winding through an unfamiliar environment.
Boolie 