The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

Crissal Thrasher, from the Latin root crissum, for the bright color of its nether regions.  The red-rumped thrasher.  Rusty butt.

July 15, 2024

The wife and I return from a weekend at Las Cruces, New Mexico, visiting our life-long friends, Gabriele and Jeff.  Two days of eating, swimming, and hanging out, catching up and reminiscing about our Y-camp counseling days four decades ago. 

Yes, there were birds.  And hiking.  Gabriele and I joined her hiking club, the “Ocotillos,” for a four-hour off-trail scramble along a ridge above Soledad Canyon in the Organ Mountains.  I checked off mockingbirds, rock wrens, and a dozen white-throated swifts darting around our heads. 

Gabriele shared with me stories of her sightings of a local favorite, one-eyed, one-horned African Oryx, a large black-and-white-faced antelope native to the Kalahari Desert.  Biologists introduced the species into the nearby White Sands Missile Range 50 years ago, and the “gemsbok” have thrived without natural predators—mountain lions being no match for the three-foot spears thrusting from their heads.  The New Mexico Game and Fish Department estimates the population at 4,000 to 6,000 and allows for legal hunting.

On our hike out of the Organs, we spotted three Oryx crossing a distant hillside.

Look closely at the center of the image and you can see a pair of Oryx watching us.

The best bird of the weekend was a Crissal thrasher that flew across the pool deck of their house, a bird I’d only seen twice previously and never photographed.

In the late afternoon, I hear a groan of thunder.  The wind shoulders in as clouds like black irises glom onto Mount Ballard.  Could it be happening?  A chubasco? A monsoon thunderstorm and I get to experience it from the new gazebo? 

Thunder like a sudden rockfall.  Its echo in the earth beneath my feet, shuddering from shins to spine.  Dark clouds tossing shafts of brilliance that leave shadows on my retinas. 

Then the rain.  The mountainside funnels the storm into the canyon, and I imagine a rushing Banning Creek that empties into the San Pedro River on its way to the Gila and Colorado rivers before joining the sea in Mexico where it all came from.  I can see the entire jumbled, sinuous route in my mind.  A living, breathing conveyor, carrying the geologic organism of rain.  A pulsing, thrashing penetration of elementals—air and water meets fire and earth.  If the ocean created clouds to explore the land, it also created rivers for the return home.

I turn my face to the rain and raise my arms. 

Bird of the week: A single Band-tailed Pigeon makes 52 birds so far this month.

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