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Trail cam pics from our front gate

Monday, October 31st, 2022

Wonders of nature

Thursday, June 2nd, 2022

There are many wonders to living close to the land (and far from other people) as we do. Among them our connections to the seasonality, awareness of the night time sky, and of course, sightings of wildlife.

For the 13 years that we have lived here, we have seen signs of what I was sure was a badger. Very sharp and long scratch marks in the dirt, occasionally clawing at a wooden door. But we never saw a badger.

Finally this morning, laying in bed, I heard something that sounded strange. I got out of bed, and right in front of the house, I saw it — the elusive badger. It was beautiful. Not too large and with a bold stripe running down its back all the way to the tip of its nose. It moved slowly and seemed uninterested in me as it looked right into the glass doors in our bedroom and then slunk over toward the other house and eventually out into the bush. Pretty great way to start the day.

Here’s a quick update on other things here: it is very hot and dry and windy as it often is in the spring. They are talking about a bigger than usual monsoon, which is rumored to start in mid June. We’ll see.

Being unsure what the future holds, we have cut back on the garden. Instead of our normal 10 or so beds, we are focusing on one bed and trying the intensive gardening idea that I have read much about. The idea is to plant a whole bunch of different things all densely in one bed. Since we usually have so many beds going, this hasn’t really made sense in the past, but this year I thought it might be a fun experiment. We’ll see how things go.

It’s so hot and dry, that the birds, especially the quail, are scratching up everything that’s watered. I know it doesn’t make much sense to plant things before monsoons, but it amuses me and keeps me busy so I do it anyway.

In the meantime, garlic is ready to harvest.

Happy August!

Saturday, August 1st, 2020

On this morning’s walk, we had a rare gila monster sighting. This is only the third one we’ve seen in 12 years.

This one was pretty big and seemed quite a bit older than the others we’ve seen.

We’re finally getting some rain and have been seeing a lot of turtles as well. It’s been a relatively light snake year though. Well, something had to go right this year.

Visitors

Saturday, May 23rd, 2015

This morning, I was brushing my teeth, looking out the window as I often do, and saw something unusual out toward the back. It was a large mammal, dark brown, stout, low to the ground. My still half-asleep mind searched to figure out what this might be. A large dog? A small bear?

Yes, you guessed it, it was the evil javelina. It lumbered off into the brush as I was calling Brad, but fortunately he got there in time to see its partner following behind. They were running off from having a drink at the water hole we put in for the animals. Silly us.

While we’ve seen plenty of damage from javelinas in the last two years, this was the first ones I’ve actually seen on our property. They were surprisingly large. All morning, I shook my head in amazement at having actually seen them.

As you may remember, last year, the unseen javelinas did quite a lot of damage to our garden. They ate tomatoes, watermelon, and sweet potato greens, as well as ripping up a lot of expensive insect netting.

Two weeks or so again, we had another visit; it was too depressing to write about at the time. They ate all my tomato starts. After nursing these along from seed for five months and just getting them outside, it was pretty awful. (The good news is that a few have come back, and I still have some starts in the house as well.)

After that, I did some more serious research on the problem and determined that an electric fence was the best solution. So last week, we put one in. It’s only about 10 inches high, and since we’ve put it in, we haven’t had any problems.

In the course of my research, I also found that javelinas are drawn by food outside (especially dog food or bird seed) and by water. Ok, affirmative on that.

 

The grace of nature

Saturday, September 21st, 2013

Today, we took in a deep drink of the beauty here — the golds, fuschias, and scarlets of the wild flowers; the huge, towering rocks hoodoos; the music of mountain streams swelled from the monsoons; the company of good friends; the exhilaration of knowing that life is sometimes very good.

 

(more pics here)

With a friend visiting, we drove through the mountains to the Chiricahua National Monument. It’s a short trip we’ve made several times without ever ceasing to be amazed at the surrounding beauty. The land changes radically with the season, the amount of rainfall, the light, and even our moods and the company we have along. Always, it makes me pause and wonder why I spend so much time worrying about things that don’t really matter.

Truly, this kind of beauty, the people we share our lives with, and the stewardship we exercise over both are the things that are essential.

Oh, and today I saw my first bear in Coronado. I’ve heard many stories about how plentiful bears are here. I’ve wanted to see a bear for a long time. This morning, I decided today would be the day. And thanks to Brad’s eagle eyes, we saw a bear.

It was a magnificent bear. Seen through the trees and across a small stream, it was just the distance from which I’d like a see a bear — close enough to get a good look, far enough to make both me and him reasonably comfortable. It was a large bear, larger than I’d expected, with a full, healthy coat and a solid rump. He looked at us, loped a little further up the hill, and then turned to take another look.

image credit: cogdog (Alan Levine) – CC BY SA

 

We have seen the trogon!

Wednesday, August 17th, 2011

When people come to Portal to birdwatch, the elegant trogon is the treasured sighting everyone hopes for.

After almost three years of living in a world-renowned birdwatching area, we have gone on our first birding expedition, thanks go our friends Sukon and Michele and a new birder friend Elaine. And we saw and heard the trogon!

We spotted a wide variety of other birds as well, most of which I can’t remember, though a list has been recorded. My favorites were the red-faced warbler, the lesser goldfinch, and the lucifer hummingbird. (In fact, we saw something like seven different types of hummingbirds.) Thanks to great tutelage from our friends, we might even be able to do some birding with other visitors in the future.

Very exciting to us on this trip was that we ventured into the national forest for the first time since the fires and found that there was not as much damage as we feared. Many trees were burned, but not killed, and a lot of undergrowth has begun to grow back.

birding

We also saw a lot of beautiful wildflowers, which have begun to come up with the monsoons.

Who goes there?

Friday, January 7th, 2011

An owl landed on our water tower this evening. For those of you who have an idea of how big our water tower is, this picture gives you an idea of how big the owl is. Bigger than the bobcat as Brad pointed out.

IMG_1510

It’s been pretty cold here this week (in the teens at night and 60+ during the day but cold when it’s windy). I’ve been working on filling cracks in the new slab this week so we can cut it, which needs to be done before framing.

Other than that, we’ve been busy with the paying job…making ebooks, doing a social media project (can you imagine? someone paying me to tweet and facebook), and building an online course (which I’ll be teaching in a couple weeks).

How we spent Christmas

Sunday, December 26th, 2010

We got up early Christmas morning (actually set an alarm if you can believe that) and headed down to Whitewater Draw where we’d heard there were a fair number sandhill cranes.

It’s about a 75 minute drive, and we got there at about a little after 9. There are some very pretty ponds there, and we saw some cute ducks, a beautiful bright red bird ( possibly a flame-colored tanager), and a lot of raptors, but no cranes. By 10:30 or so, we started hearing the cranes. (You can often hear them long before you see them. They fly very high and have a loud, though oddly pleasing, call.)

Before long, we could see flocks of 100+ birds overhead, and in the distance, many thousand were visible (with the lovely new binoculars Brad got me for Christmas). After 45 minutes or so of flying, they finally started landing. And landing and landing and landing.

By my very rough estimate, there ended up being between 10,000 and 20,000 on the ground. (They say there are as many as 30,000 there at times.) It was so amazing. For the most part, the birds just sat close to one another making their noises, but every once in a while something made huge numbers of them lift off. Wow!

More pictures here.

(If anyone is interested in coming to see these cranes, the season is roughly Nov. through Feb. Not the nicest time of year here, but certainly more temperate than the snowy north.)

A mew in the night

Friday, October 8th, 2010

At 3:00am this morning, I was awoken by a kind of constant whiny mewing just outside my window. A kitten? I didn’t think so since there are no feral cats around here that I know of and the sound was too small to be a bobcat. Maybe a baby opossum, some kind of rodent, or even a baby skunk?

I listened to it for awhile becoming more insistent and clearly irritated. I woke up Brad.

We went to the window. It seemed to be almost directly against the house, but we couldn’t see anything. We turned on the outside house lights and got a flashlight. Still nothing. But the mewing continued.

Finally, Brad ventured outside (in his underwear…quite a sight, and it was cold). What he saw was a spade footed toad….being eaten by a much smaller snake.

snake-frog

The snake looks big in this zoomed up picture, but the snake was only the thickness of a fat pencil and less than a foot long. We think it might have been a juvenile nightsnake but we’re not sure.

No sign of either party this morning.

Wildlife

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

The monsoons seem to be bringing out the animals. Yesterday, Brad saw mule deer, the bobcat, and a coyote. Then this morning I saw this beautiful coyote. They are very shy and normally not to be seen, though we sure do hear them yipping at night! It’s lovely.

coyote