The Big Yard: Birdwatching in a Time of Quarantine

Or: The Evolution of a Pajama Lister

Arizona’s state butterfly, the Two-tailed Swallowtail, which favors blooming thistles in high canyons and riparian woodlands and in my yard.

Cloudless Sulphur Butterflies will travel 200 miles or more from Mexico in response to the monsoon rains. This one (at center) is surrounded by Tailed Orange Butterflies.

Day 536 of the Pandemic (September 5, 2021)

            Record monsoon rains—14.75 inches for the yard—has brought out the flowers with wonderful names like tufted four o’clock and twining scarlet morning glory, firecracker bush and cardinal flower.  Mountain Dalea like tiny lavender explosions and narrowleaf tick clover so purple it hurts the eyes.  But it’s also the season of yellow, thanks to the profusive, gnarl-rooted sunflower goldeneye and the five-foot-high nodding-heads from the uneaten birdseed. 

With the flowers come the butterflies.  My friend in Oracle says is snowing snouts.  To me, the dark, threading butterflies look like ash fall.  My neighbors, Hayley and Todd, who’ve lived here 20 years, say they’ve never seen so many—it is a fallout.

            The rains have also drawn out the butterless flies, biting flies that bathe in DEET while sucking up a stomach-vial of my nutritious B positive.  Houseflies swarm in numbers that darken skin.  Three Rescue fly traps (“Catches up to 40,000 flies”) hang in the trees, thick with a crawling black soup that wafts so much stink into the air the vultures circle the yard.  I’m not exaggerating.  Turkey vultures stretch their black wings above the oaks and lean into the smell of decay.

            Butterflies and flies.  Psyche and Beelzebub. The sacred and the profane.

An American Snout Butterfly showing its beak-like extension from where it gets its name. Late-summer migratory flights sometimes number in the millions. Photo: Hayley Smith.

The Dull Firetip, one of the largest of the so-called Skipper Butterflies, are common during mid-summer in oak woodlands like those in the Mule Mountains. Photo: Hayley Smith.

Another Skipper Butterfly, the Mournful Duskywings, enjoy the arid oak woodlands of the Southwest, especially where they can find blooming sunflower goldeneye. Photo: Hayley Smith.

            The season of yellow is also the season of harvest.  Tomato vines sprawl with heavy fruit, which we pick and sun-dry or slow-cook into sauce or freeze whole for winter vegetable soup.  Apples and pears drop from the trees and turn into pie filling for holiday desserts.  Rhubarb stalks blush and raspberries hang from their stems in fat clusters sweet enough that the tanagers and orioles and the newly arrived hermit thrushes poop carmine onto the wife’s Subaru.

But not if I get there first.

A Western Tanager with a guilty berry face.

A Hepatic Tanager caught red-beaked in the act.

The Hermit Thrush, a notorious berry eater, waits for an opportunity.

What materializes when I beat the birds to the harvest.

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