Birds and Bees

One of the bonuses of having lots of wildflowers in the yards is that we also see a lot of wildlife here in the middle of the suburbs. Birds and bees especially love the flow of nectar and pollen.

Last night we became host to a swarm of honeybees who decided to set up camp in the mesquite tree in our front yard. This morning they have been bulking up on pollen and nectar from the well-stocked pantry of our garden, as well as sweet acacia and orange trees that are in full bloom all over the neighborhood. Now it is noon, and they are still balled up on the branch, bustling and humming and probably freaking anyone out who might notice. I have assured one neighbor that there is no need to call an exterminator ("Please don't!") because the bees will eventually move on to establish a hive in a more protected location.

In the back yard, we've been keeping tabs on a Costa's hummingbird nest that was built in our hop bush by the pool. Hummingbird mamas are the ultimate single parents, building the nest, brooding the eggs, and feeding the young all by herself, while dad galavants around mating with multiple partners.

Male Costa's Hummingbird, Photo by Richard Halliburton

A month ago, we found two white, jellybean sized eggs safely tucked away in the teeny nest. Mama bird spent hours sitting through rain, wind, hail to protect them. After about two weeks the eggs hatched and two gray featherless nestlings lay helpless but warm in the insulated cup of down, leaves and spider webbing. One resource says that combined with the warmth of the roosting mama, the temperatures inside a hummingbird nest can be up to 40 degrees F higher than the ambient temperature! That's a good thing, because many nights cooled down into the 30's over the past month.

Every morning after a storm, I would search anxiously for the mom, hoping she had survived the night, because if she didn't, there is no way those chicks would make it another day. And every day, she would buzz over to her regular perch on top on an acacia, survey the area and swoop in to feed the kids. Her nest site selection instincts are amazing. Even when the wind is howling and rains drenching, that little nest hardly moves and stays dry from leaves overhead.

Now the two chicks are bright eyed and feathered, keeping each other company day and night, since mom only visits to regurgitate a little food now and then. She very likely has a second nest brewing babies elsewhere, as hummingbirds are known to maintain two broods at a time when there is an ample food supply. She seems to have marked my garden as her territory, which is overflowing with penstemons, phacelias, fairy duster, acacia and a potted aloe as a bonus. Lots of little bugs too. I've noticed a male visiting frequently as well, presumably her mate.

Any day now, I expect that some synapse in the chick's little nervous systems will pop, signaling them to perch on the edge of the nest and fly. For now, they wait patiently for another meal from mom, stretching their pin-feathered wings now and then, and depositing fecal sacs all around the rim of the nest. When the urge to fly and sip nectar on their own emerges, I'll have to worry about the other local wildlife: feral cats. Not to mention my own two pet kitties. I'm just hoping that natural selection has somehow worked its magical ways so that the instinct to avoid felines is as deeply embedded as excellent nest site selection!

A Certain Color of Blue

Desert bluebells are blooming in my front yard now, gracing the landscape with a certain color blue that I've found impossible to capture on film, digital media or in print. There must be a certain wavelength of light that just can't be translated by technology, probably leaning towards the ultraviolet, that gives these flowers a certain pizzazz only perceptible to the naked eye. The color blue is often associated with calm or sadness, but this brilliant hue does quite the opposite for me; I find it energizing and joyful. And so, this time of year, part of my morning ritual is to take a few moment to admire this perfect cerulean, this pure indigo light splashing across the rocks.

Here are a few other attempts to bring this azure to the web via my digital camera. But the best and only real way to experience this transformative color is to find these wildflowers blooming somewhere.




This species is Phacelia campanularia, and is related to forget-me-nots. You can find them in the wild, especially in desert canyons in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts in southern Arizona and California. The seeds are used in commercial desert wildflower mixes along with other showy annuals like owl clover, lupines, Mexican poppy and fiddlenecks.

Rooftop View

Looking out the 6th floor window at St. Joseph's Hospital yesterday, I was awed by a peculiar attention to detail. Someone had been thoughtful enough to arrange different colored rocks on the rooftop in a series of waves, lifting an otherwise industrial scene to the status of art. Beyond the rooftop, towers of Phoenix obscure the distant geological magic of Papago Buttes, outcrops of wind-pocked red sandstone rising from an otherwise flat landscape.

Even more curious is the window sized gallery photo of the Grand Canyon on the wall opposite the rooftop view. Below, I've substituted with a photo of my own taken a few years ago when actually looking across the landscape of Grand Canyon above Tanner Wash.

Which way would you rather look? Which is greater art, rooftop or Canyon? (By this I mean the Grand Canyon itself, not the photo.) And where did those lovely dark river polished rocks come from, I wonder?

Hope

Some days I need a little sign of hope for the world. Here is what I found today.

Grass growing through the asphalt.

Rain

When it rains here, the park fills up to make a lake, so we roll up our pants and wade! Today has been one of those rains, all night and all day. If it were snow there would be three feet of it...but alas, we are too warm, so we measure about 3 inches of rain.

Changing Views

Living on the fringe is very temporary here in Phoenix. When my in-laws moved to their brand new home in 1958, they were surrounded by agricultural fields to the north, and feeling quite rural just four miles from the city center. Now they are thirteen miles south of the northern fringe, and the regional population has swelled from 500,000 to 5 million.

Similarly, we have seen our neighborhood become engulfed by other developments in the six years since we moved here at the end of 2002. Last week I was visiting the site that I've chosen to post as the banner on my companion blog, Natural History of Deem Hills, and realized that the view pictured there no longer exists. Between Pyramid Peak and the once wild wash where I took the photo, there is now a soccer field and hundreds of two story 4000 square foot homes. The photo above was taken in March of 2005. Below is roughly what the same view looks like today (though January lacks the blooms). This, people say, is "progress." I'm not so sure.

January 2010

Of course, I realize that our neighborhood, which was built in 1999, has also contributed to the changing views and loss of wildlands in this part of the desert. It is easy to ignore our own impacts while watching the landscape transform around us. A neighborhood just to the west of us is an extension of our own, built within the past four years. From the top of Deem Hills, a 900+ acre desert preserve to the north, I chronicled this progress in a series of three photos. Unfortunately, I had never taken a photo before the bulldozers came, but the first two photos show "before" and "after" views of what it looks like from ground level. I imagine the first is similar to what our yard looked like prior to 1999.

February 2005


March 2005

October 2007

January 2009

My stomach turned another flip yesterday when we hiked to the top of Deem Hills and noticed for the first time the march of a new expressway across a broad span of desert to the north. Light poles and power lines have been erected. The swath of bulldozed lanes that will soon be covered with cement and asphalt is now clearly visible. It's called the "303," logically following the "202" and the "101," a series of expressways that circle around Phoenix. When this road is completed, and surrounding lands similarly developed, the "fringe" will be five miles north of Deem Hills.

This is a good time to get out my copy of "Ancient Landscapes of the Colorado Plateau" by Ron Blakey and Wayne Ranney, and remember just how constant changing views of the landscape are. And maybe find a new "fringe" to occupy?

It's a Jungle in Here!

Late yesterday afternoon I noticed a sweet fragrance wafting through the house. Following my nose, I was led to a plant in the corner of our dining room and was surprised to see it blooming! Copious clear viscous nectar was dripping from clusters of small white flowers. The plant is an eight foot tall Dragon Tree, Draceana fragrans, also known as a Corn Plant since the leaves look sort of like corn leaves. They are loosely related to lilies, but are in their own plant family, the Draceanaceae. This species native to West Africa, Tanzania and Zambia where they can grow to twenty feet tall in the wild. I couldn't find any information about what pollinates these plants in their native environment, but whatever it is must be active at night, because when I woke up this morning the flowers were all closed up and the fragrance significantly diminished. Maybe I'll try a little hand pollination and see if they produce fruit!


This is just one of the species of plants we share our home with. Since I'm not a great green thumb, most of what we grow inside are nearly indestructable vines like Pothos (Epipremnum aureum) and Philodendron (P. scandens), both of which thrive as cuttings in jars of water all over the house.


We also have Prayer Plant (Maranta leuconeura) and Peacock Plant (Calathea makoyana), which really love the misty atmosphere of the bathroom. All of these are indigenous to tropical forests in South America.


Another one that survives benign neglect as a house plant is the Lady Palm (Rhapis excelsa), which was once native to China. Now this species has been completely domesticated and is no longer found in the wild.


Interesting that we recreate a bit of jungle inside with our "house plants." Is this a deeply embedded biological thing, going back to our roots? (pun!)