The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

Monsoon rains come to the Big Yard at last.

July 31, 2022

The yard hosted 56 species of birds this month, somewhat shy of last month’s 66 birds and July of last year’s 65.  Highlights include July rarities like the black-throated gray warbler and white-breasted nuthatch, two vireos, three orioles, nine different hummingbirds, and the first brown-crested flycatchers fledged from the yard’s nest box.

An odd one for July, the Black-throated Gray Warbler.

This is only the fourth visit in 2022 of a White-breasted Nuthatch.

One of my favorite yard birds, a Warbling Vireo.

One of the nesting Brown-crested Flycatchers.

We’re not even halfway into the monsoon and my gauges measure better than ten inches for the season, which is no longer reckoned by arbitrary dewpoints but with precise dates—June 15 through September 30.

The dates serve, although I still prefer the historic start of June 24, Saint Juans Day. The feast day of St. John the Baptist.  The day in 1540 that Spanish explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado prayed for rain to save his dying men.  And the skies opened.

 This year, the monsoon delivered its first sky-cracking chubasco on June 19 with back-to-back squalls, a flooded yard, and surging creeks. 

The change came into the Southwest sultry and wet, merging with the torrid desert landscape to release its gift on cactus and rock.  The air was creosote, not the oily pungency of waterfront pilings and railroad ties but the fresh citrus tang of crushed hops. 

It greeted me with its concoction of wind and water, pulled from the warm currents of the Gulf of Mexico and Sea of Cortez to sheathe every blade and thorn with dew in the early morning darkness.  I rose and opened my windows to breathe the first rations of relief from the heat.  The first storm rushed northwest across the scorched canyon, raising the scent of earth from the hardpan and pounding a rataplan on the metal roof. 

I drank the first raindrops with an upturned face.  Sipped them with lifted arms and bare skin.  Abandoned my desk and room and house.  Tropical monsoon with fat, cold drops like pumice stones.  Mountaintop monsoon with retina-flash and detonations that weakened the knees and quickened the blood.  Monsoon with a sweet mist that dollops follicles.  Monsoon with storms of dust and hail pelt like that called down from heaven by an Old Testament prophet. 

Water is a holy thing in the desert.  Like the stone pools in sun-cracked, shadowless borderlands that are no larger than a baptismal font.  Shallow tinajas scattered among hundreds of miles of sand and rock like grace sprinkled from an aspergillum.  The desert raises water to the level of a sacrament, blessed by wind and the bone dust of those who have come and never left.  Those who have knelt and wet their brows and lips with water enough for two fingers. 

This time of year, we all pray the same prayer.  We pray for life.

One of the miracles of water in the desert, the sudden presence of life—fairy shrimp (above), tadpole shrimp and tadpoles (below). Photos courtesy of the Middle Daughter.

Thanks for subscribing! Next up—the great tadpole rescue with granddaughter Gia.