The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

June 12, 2024

I’m awake at 3 am.  The crescent moon set in the west hours ago, darkening the sky, the oaks and manzanita, the entire canyon.  Scorpio crawls along the ridge to the south, as it has all night, with red Antares at its heart lighting the way.  My favorite summer constellation. 

I’m awake because something is moving. Two somethings.  I hear footfalls, and a quick huffing, like hot breath panting and lolling of tongues.  The pace is fast and quartering away from me on the ridge.  Stones roll, clacking into other stones as they tumble toward the dry creek. 

The motion-sensor light at the tool shed snaps on.  Then nothing.

I reach for my headlamp and an elf owl begins barking in the tree right over my head.  As it has all night.  He—or she—is probably upset because I’m too close to her nestbox.  Last evening. I grabbed my sleeping bag and dragged it down to the new property to spend the warm June night under the stars with the calling goatsuckers.  The poor-wills and Mexican whip-poor-wills seemed to compete for sound bites.  And, as I lay zipped into my bag, the first whiskered screech-owl I’ve heard since early December sent its evenly spaced toots into the woods.

I slept with my eyes and ears open.

The next morning, in the pre-dawn light. I look for tracks in the sandy ground.  I find deer and javelina and something larger with a central pad and round toes.  Something feline.  Or canine.  It’s too small for coyote.  Probably mountain lion—I’ve seen their scapings all over the place.  Except the pad has two lobes, not three.  And those nail marks on the toes of the track...which my brain wants to turn into “wolf.”

I recall that less than two months ago, the US Fish and Wildlife released a pair of wild Mexican gray wolves into the Peloncillo Mountains in far southeastern Arizona.  The two wolves, “Llave” and “Wonder” (officially F1828 and M2774), are the southernmost wolf pack in the US and the first to roam our Sky Islands since the 1970s when we nearly drove the subspecies into extinction.  According to wildlife officials, the hope is that populations already in eastern Arizona will continue to expand southward and eventually meet up with this pair or some of their progeny.   

The Peloncillos are only a hundred miles from here.

I scuff out the track with the toe of my shoe. 

I need more sleep.

Aldo Leopold’s “Fierce green fire” in the eyes of a wolf. From a pencil sketch I made for a friend many years ago.

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