Lovey Dovey

It's spring again, at least in the Sonoran Desert (we do jump the gun a bit), and love is in the air.  And on the ground, and on our rafters, and in our flower pots -- despite our best efforts.

Who's keeping an eye on who?

Don't get me wrong.  I'm all for love.  All the time.  It's just that when it comes to our mourning doves it's so comic and so tragic so often.

They are not the first to get into the reproduction act, not by a long shot.  The diminutive Costa's hummingbirds laid eggs weeks ago.  But the mourning doves are so clumsy and obvious about it.

While my head was turned...

First we are treated to the males humping along behind a female, any female, multiple females, in a usually vain attempt at mating.  Even when successful it is over in the blink of an eye -- the females almost don't seem to notice and barely pause in their hunt for food.  But then the paltry excuse for nest building begins...a few twigs scattered on a rafter or in a plant pot, or heaven help us, in a tree or a cactus; the merest excuse of a nest.  Last year's attempt on our sloping metal porch light cover met with a sad disaster shortly before the eggs were set to hatch.  When it comes to nest building, mourning doves are neither members of the Craftsman's Guild nor the Brain Trust.

There's a favorite nesting spot in a raised planter immediately outside our front door.  When I first spotted the tell-tale pile of twigs a few days ago I cleaned them up and inserted five chopsticks and added two balls of aluminum foil as dove deterrents to the six inch pot already containing a petunia.  Foiled again (pardon the pun), as when I next looked a dove was happily esconsed between the chopsticks, leaning on the peturnia, and gazing at her fractured reflection in the aluminum foil, all while keeping the two eggs she'd almost instantly laid warm.  We'll be using the garage door and backyard gate for the foreseeable future while mama dove hatches and raises her chicks.

Maybe it's the ambiance...

Mourning doves really are lovely birds, but as with anything there's an overabundance of, it's value decreases, at least to us.  But as my husband reminded me, without a lot of doves, we wouldn't have as many raptors.  So true.

Cooper's Hawk in search of dove

Snow Day

The rare beauty of a cloaking of snow on the Tucson Mountains

With predictions of wind and rain and snow (really?) last night, we went to bed wondering what the morning would bring.  The howling wind and lashing precipitation in the middle of the night coupled with the pacing of our nervous dog made for less than sound sleep until the wind abated before dawn.  Finally things quieted down and I awoke well after dawn to find our nearby Tucson Mountains heavily powdered with snow, a serious rarity around here.

Before noon most of the snow was gone, but the frenzied activity of the birds gave credence to the freeze predicted for tonight.

A male Gila woodpecker topping off at the suet block

A male Costa's hummingbird busy defending this feeder

After the catastrophic freeze a few weeks ago, three nights with temps in the high teens and low 20's, we figure what was going to suffer from serious cold will have already done it and will likely not bother to cover much tonight.  What doesn't survive we'll do without (simplify, simplify, simplify), or replace with plants that can survive temperatures in the mid-teens.

At least we had good weather for a wonderful and long-overdue visit with my daughter and son-in-law recently.  Tucson is like a third home to them, the San Francisco area being their first, so they were not interested in playing tourist every day, though we still got some of that in.  The Desert Museum is always a must, especially when your hosts volunteer there -- one as a docent and the other volunteer with the botany department.  Then we also managed The Cup Cafe at Hotel Congress for breakfast, Tohono Chul Botanic Gardens and lunch at the Tea Room there, and lot and lots of walking the hills of the Tucson Mountains, be they snow covered or not.

Trailside in Sweetwater Preserve, Tucson Mountain foothills

Mother and child reunion hike

In the shade of a saguaro older that
his great-great-grandparents

The early afternoon sleeting has just stopped and once we get past tonight it looks to be highs in the 70s and 80s.  Bring it!

The Big Chill

When the weather cools to that perfect high of around 70, we start seeing hot air balloons more frequently, early in the mornings when the atmosphere is cool enough for their warmed balloon interiors to make a difference and provide the essential lift.

Chilly morning hot air ride

Tucson gets about 20 nights of freezing temperatures a year, usually a glancing blow of a few hours just below 32 degrees.  The first one usually occurs right around Thanksgiving, so we were right on schedule.  Problem was, it was predicted to be a hard freeze -- 24 degrees.  It was time to deter the Big Chill.

Out came the styrofoam cups, insulating caps for columnar cacti.  Out came the paper bags, ditto.  Out came the plastic picnic tablecloths with the fuzzy underside (important), old beach towels and coverlets.
We even used a few baseball caps for our larger cactus "heads".

One of my very favorite plants in our backyard is the chuparosa.  It begins flowering in November and flowers all winter long, its tubular orange flowers providing nectar for our year-round Anna's and Costa's hummingbirds along with the nectar robbing mustard headed perpetual motion verdins.  We have a few of these magic winter plants, but my favorite is right outside the dining room window and is the size of a Volkswagen beetle.  I was determined to save this plant from freezing -- it wouldn't kill it but would literally nip it in the bud, likely nixing any more flowers for almost a year.  Several years ago we had a freeze in the high teens and the chuparosa looked like it had been freeze-dried.  We cut it back to medicine ball size in the spring and it bounced back, but I wanted a natural food source for our hummers.

I took every large plastic tablecloth I had, plus some old towels and a bedspread, draped them over the chuparosa and clothes-pinned them together.  We put a trouble light under the cover and kept it lit all night.  It looked like The Blob was having an eerie picnic in the back yard.  Out of appropriate covering, the two rows of green beans we'd been nursing along in our feeble winter vegetable garden would have to fend for themselves.

By night

By day

We saw hummingbirds zipping under the cover at first light, the sugar water in their feeders frozen solid. As I uncovered the chuparosa today, a Costa's hummingbird flashed his royal purple gorget at me, whether in thanks for saving his favorite winter plant or to urge me to get out of the way, I'll never know.

Success!  At least for Round One...

The hummers' food survived.  The green beans -- not so much -- but I can get great ones, cheap, at Costco.  Our flashy hummingbird winter companions?  Priceless.

If You are Thinking This is a Bird Deterrent...

...you'd be wrong.


Not more than a few hours after carefully sowing our seeds in nice straight rows, plant stakes in place with names and planting date, we went out to finish the watering job Mother Nature had started.  Our lovely garden, well mulched with an even coat of alfalfa hay, had big gouged out areas, hay tossed aside, spots in the amended soil -- amended with steer manure -- showing dark and moist.


As this area is inside our block walls, the culprit couldn't be a rogue javelina, mule deer, or bobcat.  No birds around are big enough, or interested enough, to so seriously mar the new garden.  No children here to run amuck.  

The real culprit

The string and tin foil solution?  So far so good.

Winter Garden

Queen's wreath, tangled in the limbs (and shade) of a palo verde tree

We're not novice gardeners.  For many years we've learned, mostly through trial and error, about what will work in our desert garden and what won't.  We've become increasingly committed to native or desert adapted plants -- plants that work well here and are of use to the local birds and other critters.

A ghostly aloe in the barrio garden

It seems a bit odd to be putting in a winter garden when we were in triple digit heat a few days ago.  Now there's nothing but highs in the 90's in the forecast, and the nights are promised to be blissfully in the lower 60's, so hopefully we've turned a corner.  Still, while our family in Denver are harvesting the last of their crops, we are just beginning.

We always said that if anyplace could drag us permanently away from Tucson it would have to be somewhere that we could do edible gardening in terrific soil with rain that fell from the sky on a regular basis.  But we both love living in the Sonoran desert, especially now that we have a real cabin in the Colorado Rockies to escape to in the summers, so we're not moving.  Ever.  Recently my husband went to a winter gardening class at Plants for the Southwest, one of our favorite nurseries here.  The class was taught by a woman who's been veggie gardening here year 'round for over two decades.  Soil amendments (organic) and knowing what to plant when were the keys.

Pew

Do you know how stinky big bags of steer manure are in the back of an SUV on a hot day?!  Luckily that trip was followed by a trek to get a bale of alfalfa hay which has a lovely grassy smell and left enough of itself behind in the car to freshen up the Honda C-RV.  A dozen packets of seeds, some additional drip irrigation sprinklers, and a "flat free" puncture-less foam filled wheelbarrow wheel and tire to replace the far from "flat free" inner-tube (thorny deserts are hard on them) pretty much completed the necessities for planting our winter garden.

Double digging in the last of the shade

We chose a sunny wall to plant the garden against.  After moving a couple of plumbagos, a Mt. Lemmon daisy, and a salvia, Bob began the double digging process to incorporate these new organics.  This is not an untouched area; we have amended this before.  Deserts are not know for their rich humusy soils, and our yard is no exception.  Developing our vegetable garden's soil will be an ongoing project.

Deep digging and existing drip irrigation systems always clash, but after a lot of digging, a few repairs and additions to the drip system, some raking, with a well-deserved brunch mixed in, we were ready to plant.

Big brunch for hard workers

Ready for seed sowing

By the time we were ready to sow some seeds it near noon and in the high 90's, but we were determined.  In less than an hour we had rows of two kinds of snap beans, snap peas, sweet peas (the flowers), quinoa (our experiment), spinach, two kinds of kale, swiss chard, and garlic.  When it cools off a bit more we'll plant some lettuce mixes and radishes.  Herbs are growing in containers.  Onions will go in after Thanksgiving.  Bob spread a nice layer of sweet smelling alfalfa hay over the bed as a mulch to retain moisture and shade the seedlings.  Eventually it will be dug into the soil for enrichment for next years winter garden.

Just went out to check it...nothing yet.  I guess five hours is a little too soon for germination.

Watch this space

Hatch Watch

When we got back from Colorado 20 days ago we spotted a female Gambel's quail roosting in one of our flower pots out back.  We don't know when she finished laying her clutch of 10 eggs, but we do know that incubation is between 21 and 24 days, so we can't be too far away from a hatching.

Last night we noticed a male Gambel's quail lurking around the nest.  Suddenly he squatted down on a bare expanse of gravel.  Had he been on dirt we'd have been expecting to see him take a dust bath, but he hugged the stoney ground, looking over toward where the female sat on her eggs under a potted flowering euphorbia.  These quails are monogamous and both take an active role in raising the chicks, but we had to wonder if this was maternity ward waiting room behavior.

It didn't take long to get our answer.  After a couple of minutes the male rose and cautiously approached the pot with the nest and tentatively joined his mate, carefully settling on some of the eggs.  After doing some research we learned that the male incubating the eggs is not unheard of, but quite rare.

You can see the female in the above picture, her shiny eye just above the edge of the pot.  The male is behind her, his black and chestnut head facing the other direction.

I guess we're the ones waiting anxiously in that maternity ward waiting room.

Sanctuary and Answered Prayers

Shortly after the official start of summer the Sonoran desert is well into its infamous heat, but the notorious dry heat is giving way to a steamier version.   When the weather pattern shifts, usually around the 4th of July, our desiccatingly low to nonexistent humidity gives way to an inflow of tropical moisture, bringing the novelty of clouds, and we wait anxiously for the first rain in months.

We like to help out our tough desert birds by providing fresh water, native food sources though habitat gardening (and the occasional handful of bird seed), shelter, and places to raise their young.  Our efforts are rewarded by the constant presence of some of the most fascinating and adaptive birds in the world.  In the middle of our hottest season we are seeing lots of fledgling birds -- slightly smaller than their parents, frequently seen harassing  them with begging behavior, and not quite as expert in the flying department.  We've had juvenile doves, cactus wrens, thrashers, gila woodpeckers, finches, and even a young pyrrhuloxia seeking the shade of the back porch.

While desert birds have strategies to deal with the long months without rain in a land of little standing ground water, an easy source of water for drinking and bathing is much appreciated.  This early clutch of Gambel quail are being shown the ropes by their parents, visiting the bird bath for a quick early morning drink.

While some quail families are just finishing up their parental duties with their fledglings, others are just beginning, or beginning again.  This clutch of ten eggs is usually hidden by a dedicated female quail, and is due to hatch any time now.  Seeing a string of puffball quail chicks obediently following their mother while papa quail stands guard duty on the garden wall is one of our favorite desert experiences.  A year with abundant (for us) rainfall insures the resources needed to raise more than one family a year, and we are witnessing a banner year for wildlife.

Late this afternoon, bolstered by adequate humidity and triple digit heat, we had our first brief rain of the monsoon.  There is nothing like the first rain after months without, months of searing heat.  The first drops steam off the hot flagstone, and the fragrance of creosote instantly fills the air.  The cool rain on hot parched skin is an exquisite study in contrasts.  And the breaking of the long absence of life-sustaining rain is an answered prayer.