The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher
September 30, 2022
Today is the last day of the monsoon season (officially), although as I write this, thunder cracks open the canyon walls. Our famous seasonal wind that draws moisture into the Southwest every year mocks the calendar, raising dewpoints and sending deluges by whim (or design). This summer, the monsoon brought 18.52 inches of rain to the yard, recharging creeks and wells and the dry roots of the mountain while shifting the landscape’s spectrum one hundred nanometers from xanthophyll to chlorophyll.
18.70 inches now.
This morning, the spectrum of birds shifts by a similar degree. The yard has welcomed 86 species this month, the last half dozen appearing in the final few days. The first wave of our winter residents: Two red-naped sapsuckers mew from the pear tree, spiraling up the trunk as they stab the bark for sugar and insects. A hermit thrush chup-chups from the oak, abandoning the fanciful liquid fluting of dark, summer forests for something more pragmatic and unromantic. The yellow-rumps, our only winter warblers, return from nesting in the piney woods of central Arizona and as far north as Canada and Alaska.
And finally, the first of the sparrows. A pair of Lincoln’s ushers in a dozen or so sparrows that will pass the next months scratching at the ground or stripping seedheads on dry stalks in places the weedwhacker fails to venture. Chipping and Brewers. White-crowns and black-throats. Fox, vesper, and clay-colored.
Soon, there will be juncos.
Thanks for supporting the Big Yard! More to come!