A Late January Garden and Yard Update

As I’m about to begin my short WINGS tour in Baja California Sur, it’s a good time to post some photos from the yard with an update on my wonderful winter vegetable garden here in Tucson. After the passage of two cold fronts in three days that delivered about 3/4 of an inch of rain, we’ve had five nights of frost, the lowest temperature being this past Thursday morning and yesterday at 26.6°F  (-3°C). The nasturtiums, tomatoes, and basil can’t handle those temperatures, so I put a frost cloth over the 93 square feet of garden.

Amazingly, the tomatoes made it, and this one seems to be very slowly growing four tomatoes. This is a plant I first put in the garden last March, which limped along all summer, not getting enough rain (too much competition from the mesquite tree), not setting any fruit (too hot all summer), it and barely survived my transplanting in early October (though it clearly liked the new soil and availability of moisture). The other tomato is a volunteer seedling.

Some of the nasturtiums look a little frost burned but their growing points survived. This was the first flower, exactly 12 weeks after sowing.

This is mizuna, or Japanese mustard greens.

Turnip Tokyo Market

My favorite for flavor, abundance, and the most lush growth of all my plants are the snow peas, Oregon Sugar Pod. I’ve picked two bowls full already.

The Broad-billed and Anna’s Hummingbirds regularly visit the flowers for nectar.

I have a few other flowers growing and surviving the frost including marigolds and some snapdragons.

Lots of things are volunteering too, some native plants, some weeds that I pull up (especially Sisymbrium irio, London Rocket), and some poppies that continue from a sowing I did in 1998. But I have no idea what this volunteer is; it looks like no weed or plant that I’ve sown over the years, so I’m letting it grow until I can see some identifiable flowers or fruit.

There are other things going on around the yard too. I’m not sure I’ve ever noticed moss growing in our yard. I watered around some of the trees and shrubs a few times in November and December, and since the end of last year we’ve been having some decent amounts of rain, so that may be what has encouraged it.

I also noticed patches of cryptobiotic soil, or biological soil crusts, a sign of a very happy community of microorganisms. This is probably mostly a lichen, but there may be some tiny bits of moss, algae, and cyanobacteria living in here too.

The hummers continue to be abundant, and I’m now keeping up 13 feeders. Anna's Hummingbird is the most abundant, possibly as many as 30 or 40 in the yard over the course of a full day. This is a female.

I may have as many as 10 to 15 Broad-billed Hummingbirds, though at any one moment you can see only about five. This is an immature male.

And for the first time ever, I’ve had multiple Costa's Hummingbirds in the yard all winter. The usual pattern has been for one to show up for a day or two every few weeks – or one will stay at most for a week in late January. There are at least two males (one immature without the long flanges of this adult), and two females that are now present all the time, since at least October. This is a region-wide pattern this year, with a record 83 being tallied on the Tucson Valley CBC last month.

The female Costa’s Hummingbird is often mistaken for female Anna’s or especially Black-chinned, due to the very clean, pale appearance of the underside, especially the throat. But we never get Black-chinned in the winter (at least not from November to late February), and their voices are very different.

A Third Visit With Mr. Nutting

I saw the Nutting’s Flycatcher in California Gulch for the third time this month today. I don’t get tired of birding down there and would be happy to go back tomorrow, but my time in Tucson is running out before my next series of tours begins. Last week I went back there with Will Russell and Evan Obercian in advance of Evan’s first time leading the WINGS SE Arizona tour. We found the bird within seconds of parking (Will wasn’t even out of the car yet). This time presented me with some unique challenges.

One challenge was birding with a couple in their late 70’s and early 80’s who show various and obvious stages of hearing and sight loss as well as expected issues with balance, strength, speed, and stamina. I may not be at my peak either, and Jeff and June hold a special place in my heart. I met them when I was 20 years old, seemingly yesterday but actually over 26 years ago, when I was a junior in college during my year abroad in Freiburg, Germany. They have four lucky children of my generation, so I remind myself to cherish my time with them.

Another issue was the status of the water in the gulch. It must have rained well over an inch from the front that passed through this past Friday night and Saturday morning (which left about 0.6 of an inch of rain in my part of Tucson, not an insignificant amount). All of the washes were running with clear water when normally quite dry. The main drainage of California Gulch was a veritable torrent.

But we were able to make it in my friends’ low-clearance 2WD Hyundai Sonata as far as the usual spot at the junction of the California Gulch and Warsaw Canyon junctions.

Jeff and June are not wimpy tenderfoots. Though they both grew up in New York City (Staten Island and Brooklyn), you should hear their stories of farming in Bozeman while forging academic careers in the 1960's and 70’s. They didn’t think twice about pulling up their pants and wading across the unbelievably full California Gulch. June was actually pleased it wasn’t the icy cold waters one would have expected in Montana.

We spent well over an hour looking, pishing, wading, hobbling over boulders, and pausing for a quick picnic lunch. There was no sign of the bird. We watched a group of Chipping Sparrows, two pairs of Black-tailed Gnatcatchers, a pair of Rufous-winged Sparrows, a wonderful Dusky Flycatcher, and had a bit of excitement with what turned out to be an Ash-throated Flycatcher. I noticed what at first looked like a female Northern Cardinal (with a red bill), then changed my mind to Pyrrhuloxia when I saw the gray back, rump and tail. Then changed my mind again when I saw the brownish breast. Then began to wonder about a hybrid. This is indeed what I’m pretty certain is a rare Northern Cardinal X Pyrrhuloxia hybrid.

It was associating with this male Northern Cardinal.

Then suddenly I saw this bird with a rich yellow belly only 10 meters in front of me, just a meter off the ground. The Nutting’s Flycatcher! We spent some 15 minutes with it, as it foraged on grasshoppers. In the past three weeks it had been feeding on bees attracted to the blooming Desert Olive (Forestiera shrevei), but it was nearly done blooming, and there were few bees today.

I don’t think one could normally expect to see this bird three out of three tries, but I won’t be pushing my luck on this one. I’m home for just another five days before my next bout of travel begins – Baja California, Palm Springs, Peru, Japan, Costa Rica, and Nepal all loom in the next three months

Much Ado About Nutting

This past Wednesday I had the opportunity camp for a night and go birding and botanizing with some friends of a friend. Nina, Galen, and Amelia are past or present students at Whitman College, and this was their last week of enjoying the out-of-doors on their winter break. I chose to take us to the lowest reaches of California Gulch on the Mexican border to look for the Nutting’s Flycatcher found on the Atascosa Highlands CBC by my friends Dave Stejskal and Thomas Staudt. Amelia chose to hang back in Tucson to work on her undergraduate thesis, so it was just Nina, Galen, and I.

We arrived at one of my favorite camping spots at the confluence of California Gulch and Warsaw Canyon, where two years ago I heard a Buff-collared Nightjar on the early date of March 31. This time we heard just Western Screech-Owl, Great Horned Owl, and Coyotes. In the morning we began birding our way downstream about 1/2 mile to where the Nutting’s Flycatcher had been seen.

We didn’t find it right away, in fact an Ash-throated Flycatcher was at the exact spot when we arrived. We took this opportunity to study the features on the Ash-throat that would be different if we were to find the Nutting’s – the color of the belly, the pattern of rufous vs. fuscous visible on the underside of the tail (on the outer tail feathers), the edging on the primaries and secondaries, and the color and shape of the crown and its contrast with the face. The Ash-throat was calling too, which is the easiest way to tell them apart. But we didn’t stand around just waiting, knowing that the bird had been seen quite a ways downstream in the past days. We also preferred to explore, making it as far as the Mexican border, about 3/4 mile farther down the canyon. We said hi to the two Mexican military guys who had camped on their side, on a regular patrol it seemed. We exchanged a few friendly words and made our way back to the flycatcher area.

Here’s a view looking southwest up at the fence line that is the international border, and the overgrazed Mexican side is more evident than the fence itself. No, there’s no wall here as you can see, and nor need there be one.

We finally found the Nutting’s Flycatcher at about 11:00 a.m., after some 2 1/2 hours of searching. It never vocalized, and we were lucky to find it about 1/4 mile away from the original location, upstream from where others had seen it. This is Nina’s photo showing the darker yellow belly, the yellow- and cinnamon-edge secondaries (rather than creamy white in Ash-throated), as well as the rounder and richer brown crown that bleeds into the ear coverts and face (which are all grayer in Ash-throated and blend more with the throat). These are very subtle points, and it was a good thing we had practiced on the Ash-throat.

Lucky for me, both Galen and Nina were interested in everything and enjoyed just poking around, looking at plants and bugs. This cactus is Echinocereus fendleri var. rectispinus, the Pink-flowered Hedgehog. It blooms in spring.

This is the common Ferocactus wislizeni, Candy Barrel or Fire Barrel. This one blooms in the summer, but I don’t know if the scarring in the crown will affect that.

We had two very distant flickers. The first one I used playback to see it fly, and I glimpsed the yellow wing linings. My poor photo also shows the bright cinnamon cap of Gilded Flicker.

Galen spotted this very distant one later in the day, and thanks to a camera with 65x optical zoom, you can see the red tail shafts of a Northern Flicker. The crown is also browner and doesn’t extend as far back.

You wouldn’t know it in the summer time, but one of the dominant shrubs here is Forestiera shrevei, the Desert Olive, which I first identified last year on the Buenos Aires NWR CBC (http://birdernaturalist.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-san-luis-wash-on-buenos-aires-nwr.html). They are in full bloom now before putting on leaves, and they really stand out. They were also swarming with pollinators, largely honey bees as many of these native bees which appear to be some mining bee in the family Andrenidae. I’ll post an update here if my photos on Bugguide are identified. The bees on these bushes seem to be the primary food source for the Nutting’s Flycatcher.
Update 1/18/17 : bee expert John Ascher has identified this for me as the mining bee Andrena impolita, Unpolished Andrena.

We saw two very different red-bodied wasps. This one is a parasitoid Ichneumonoid wasp, either family Braconidae or Ichneumonidae. Update 1/18/17: Entomologist and parasitoid expert Ross Hill has identified this for me as an Ichneumonid in the genus Cryptus.

This red-bodied wasp is in an entirely different family, but I don’t know which. I thought it might be a spider wasp in the family Pompilidae, but I’m not so certain now, and I wonder if it might be a male velvet ant (distantly related and in the same superfamily as spider wasps). Update 1/19/17: John Ascher has struck again, conclusively identifying this one as Xerochares expulsus, which confirms my original suspicion as a spider wasp – family Pompilidae (and continues down the line of classification in the subfamily Pompilinae and tribe Pompilini). It appears to be a monotypic genus found throughout Central America, reaching the US only in the desert SW, and as of a 1985 monograph on the subfamily in California nothing was known of its biology.

The landscapes here near the border are stunning, where drainages lead south into the Rio Magdalena watershed (unlike a vast majority of Arizona, which flows out the Colorado River). This is looking to the northeast back up California Gulch with Montaña Peak on the far left.

Here is looking to the southeast; Flat Top Mountain just right of center is just barely on the Arizona side of the border.

We climbed to a small peak and enjoyed the views.

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This is a 180° panorama taken with my phone.

A Final Day to the Tehuantepec Drainage

We had one last day on my Oaxaca at Christmastime tour based out of our Oaxaca City hotel on December 30. It’s always a fun day as we venture a bit farther afield, driving southeastward on the Panamerican Highway towards the Pacific coast at Tehuantepec. Just a few kilometers beyond the town of Matatlán, considered the birthplace of mezcal, the highway goes over a low pass (reaching only as high as scrub oaks mixed with mountain-mahogany and other dense shrubbery). It then begins to descend, entering TDF – tropical deciduous forest, which is very deciduous this time of year – dominated by a shocking diversity of giant columnar cacti.

Using an article by David Yetman titled “On the Trail of Oaxaca's Great Cacti” in the Cactus and Succulent Journal, I’ve attempted to identify these two species as Escontria chiotilla (L) and Pilosocereus quadricentralis (R).

Appreciating the diversity of giant cactus is the Gray-breasted Woodpecker.

One of the more conspicuous species here (and conspicuously absent from the extremely close Oaxaca Valley) is White-lored Gnatcatcher.

We often miss Pileated Flycatcher, as they are mostly silent and very furtive in the undergrowth this time of year, but this one called on its own and responded aggressively to playback of the song.

We had a few Plain-capped Starthroats, normally found at much lower elevations this time of year and a write-in species on our 14-year-old master list for this tour.

The vegetation here is stark and leafless this time of year, but a few things are blooming. This is a “goatbush” which I label as Castela cf. retusa, not being sure of the species.

This tree in the bombax family (actually now lumped into the mallow family) appears to be Ceiba aesculifolia.

This is a Beaucarnia sp., usually called ponytail-palm, and related to agaves, aloes, and sotol.

We were back in the Oaxaca valley where we had lunch at a restaurant that produces small quantities of mezcal. They have landscaped with native plants including this blooming Myrtillocactus schenckii.

In the same cactus was this Tillandsia sp. bromeliad.

We then visited the small but distinctive ruins of Mitla, made famous by these geometric designs in the façade.

I looked up into a hole in the ceiling of the ruins to discover this paper wasp nest.

Our last birding stop was the Zapotec ruins of Yagul, where we had two new species: Common Ground-Dove and White-tailed Hawk.

But our final stop of the tour which featured only a wintering Blue-gray Gnatcatcher was this spectacular 2000-plus-year-old Taxodium mucronatum, known as the Tule Tree.

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