The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

A Violet-crowned Hummingbird arrives from western Mexico to nest in our corner of Arizona.

June 21, 2023

Summer solstice.  The planet lists to the sun and shadows retract to their shortest length for the year.  Layers of heat slam the landscape and suck dry every green blade.  The wind offers nothing.  It’s a dry heat, they say.  Sure. Like a blast furnace.

Even the season’s first violet-crowned hummingbird, my monsoon harbinger, can’t take it.  The bird checks in and then flees without feeding.  Maybe I should freeze the sugar water into hummingbird slushies. 

A look of disdain if I ever saw one.

A Warbling Vireo has the right idea.

Yesterday’s oddity: despite the heat or the celestial posturing, a Nashville warbler needled the chokecherry leaves for insects.  A spring/fall migrant that Finding Birds in Southeast Arizona says is “accidental” this late in June—or nonexistent.  I reported it as a rare bird, although it’s not a “mega” rarity like last week’s yellow grosbeak.

This Nashville Warbler should be spending the summer in the cool coniferous forests of British Columbia rather than blistering itself in southeast Arizona.

Last weekend, Youngest Daughter and husband visited after she gave a couple of presentations in the area about her new book, Brave the Wild River.  We listened to the evening elf owls and whip-poor-wills, grilled salmon, and talked about books and writing.  On Father’s Day, as a gift to me as much as my daughter, a review of her book appeared in the print version of the Sunday New York Times.  The Holy Grail of writers.

We also hiked the new property adjacent to the Big Yard: 44 resplendent acres of Mule Mountain canyon, choked with manzanita and catclaw and oak and split by Banning Creek with its tumble of granite boulders.  Ideas were flowing, even if the creek was not.  I’ll write more about this in future posts, but the family plans to create a bird sanctuary here with cherry orchards and wild grapes and thickets of blackberries...among other green projects.

So stay tuned as the Big Yard becomes the Ginormous Yard.

One of the property’s historic structures is move-in ready!

A reliable water source? I’m on it.

Trail maintenance, anyone?

Banning Creek. On a good day.

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