The Big Yard: Birdwatching in a Time of Quarantine

Or: The Evolution of a Lister

An unsatisfied Acorn Woodpecker remodels the nest box

Day 110 of the Quarantine (July 1, 2020)

Yesterday afternoon, I screwed two nest boxes to two power poles.  This morning, an acorn woodpecker is already remodeling one of them.  Furiously.  Urgently.  She’s widened the entrance hole, which now looks like a ragged oval, and fits her upper body inside to make it just so.  No appreciation, I think, as she hammers away and the woodchips fly.

Half of 2020 is done and I’m also fixing to hole up for the remainder of the year.  Time to fit the hammock in the Quarantine Shed, which is as close as I will get this year to my annual fishing camp on the East Fork of the Black River.  No long, glorious days of solo trekking in rugged, fir-clad canyons with my split bamboo fly rod.  No drifting wooly buggers in quiet pools.  No electric wire brown trout stripping line off my reel.

            The best I can hope for is a monsoon season chubasco to raise the backyard creek and make me believe again in trout—it’s more about the faith than the fish. 

Arizona has some great trout fishing in the White Mountains—the birding isn’t bad either. This is where I saw my first Clark’s Nutcracker

The Red-breasted Nuthatch is a year-round resident of mixed conifer forests like those in the White Mountains

The Red-faced Warbler arrives in summer from Mexico to breed in these pine-oak and fir forests of Arizona

            The season of rain has sputtered through two dry weeks, but tonight the wind shoulders into the canyon and clouds like black irises glom onto the Mule Mountains.  I smell the shift, the air thick with moisture from the Sea of Cortez.  Now things begin to happen.  Columns of rising hot air penetrate layers of wetness and boil over into brilliant thunderheads that corkscrew upward tens of thousands of feet.  Updrafts become downdrafts.  Dust billows into giant, apocalyptic storms called haboobs.  Lightning flares.  If we’re fortunate, rain will pummel the ground.  If not, hope evaporates, the thunderheads trailing wildfires beneath purple rags of virga like so many dried-up promises.

            You know desert dwellers when the rains come.  We never run for shelter.  Our doors fly open and we rush into the downpour, flinging ourselves into the cold, hard deluge with abandon. Then, we slow our pace, pause for a time to slip into a plunge pool and uncork a bottle of Merlo, reveling in wet summer skin like a Couch’s spadefoot after rising from a year’s sleep in the parched earth.

If I can’t be one with the fish, I choose the toads.

 

The Couch’s Spadefoot emerges from underground during monsoon thunderstorms to breed in rain pools. It holds the record for metamorphosis, from egg to tadpole to froglet in just nine days.

The end of a great monsoon day begins a hundred yards from my front door.

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