The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

The Mountain-Gem with the blue throat.

September 6, 2023

The infamous heat dome...again.  At 5.73 inches of rain since early July, this is the worst monsoon in our 15 years in the Mule Mountains.  The stress is visible.  Pale grasses.  Sullen oaks.  Deer and turkeys keeping to the yard shade.  A mountain lion climbs the neighbor’s back porch searching for a morsel of Felis catus.  A bear, on its way to becoming a problem, turns over trash cans and ice chests and rips hummingbird feeders from six-foot, wrought-iron poles.

My neighbors have ordered bear spray.

Who needs a trail cam when the wildlife waltzes into the yard?

This morning, watching the swarm of hummingbirds at the feeders, I wonder if the 2% capsaicin in Counter Assault (which comes in a nifty and durable canister holster for quick access at your hip) deters skunks.  Fight spray with spray, I say.  I’ve trapped two so far, rehoming both at the river 12 miles away, after one slipped into the house the other night and lost control of both anal glands.  The Wife and I woke after midnight with burning eyes, choking and retching, flinging open doors and windows.  We never found the culprit.  The cat blamed us.  After bleaching floors and walls, after stripping the house of cushions and rugs and blankets to bake in the sun, after boiling cinnamon and cloves in stock pots and burning scented candles down to nubbins, I still smell skunk. 

The stink rises from my hands as I write.

Four species of skunk visit the yard—some, like this Hooded Skunk, might even get a ride in the truck.

Of course, with the stressed lions and bears and skunks, come the birds.  If there were no summer drought, would the yard have hosted that yellow grosbeak?  Those two (!) first-ever (!) flame-colored tanagers?

When I look up, a large dark hummingbird flutters among the Anna’s and blackchins and rufous.  Oversized black tail with white corners, gray breast, white stripe behind the eyes.  Bluethroat?  I haven’t seen a blue-throated mountain-gem (hummingbird) since before the monsoon sputtered its first failings.  With this morning’s stunning Rivoli’s (hummingbird), another species absent here for five months, this makes 12 kinds of hummingbirds in one day.  Another record for the yard...for a yard that has seen a number of firsts.

I still prefer the name Magnificent Hummingbird over Rivoli’s.

The late Barry Lopez says the place itself is not all that important.  “It’s your intimacy with the place that’s really important.”  And I might add that intimacy requires fidelity.  I have no favorite “patches.” No regular places I visit to see birds.  I only have this place, this yard, my home.

Even if it smells like skunk.

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