Some Special Birds

 

 

We like all our animals that come to the porch for meal worms (well, maybe not house sparrows) but some are special. Let's see if I can explain why.

Well, our Roadrunner is an example. First of all, it's a very dramatic bird, one you wouldn't expect to see every day if you didn't have something to draw him in. And, more than that, we have a sort of personal relationship with him. He knows us and is tame around us, or rather, is very greedy around us, but it's more than that: he was tame around us immediately, the first time he saw us, as if someone had already trained him how to act towards humans carrying meal worms. The first time we saw him, he came right up to us, rather than running away. The other creatures we feed first needed to be shown that we weren't going to hurt them.

 

 I'm thinking of two more species that fit this description.

Farther down the yard from our porch we have some big saucers which we keep full of water for the birds to drink. One day Cheryl, who has much better eyes than I do, looked down at the small birds that were foraging around the saucers and said "We've got a Yellow-breasted Chat down there."

I looked with my binoculars and sure enough there was a bird with a yellow breast and eyes with white outlines. Formerly this bird was considered to be a warbler. Warblers are small, brightly-colored, often sweet-singing birds, and this bird is a great clunking bird with an unending song of often harsh noises, or imitations of mechanical sounds. In the latest bird guides I notice they no longer consider it a warbler, but no one has yet decided what it should be instead. But whatever it is, it is fun to see. It has all the bright colors of warblers and it skulks around often in wetlands and is impossible to get a glimpse of, then suddenly gets up on a cattail and does its crazy song in plain sight.

We hadn't expected ever to see one here in the open desert instead of some riparian gulch of heavy vegetation. I was dying to find some way to get close to it so I could try to take some pictures of it. Well the next day it was up close to the house, and then it was on the porch tamely taking meal worms and posing for any pictures I wanted.

Here are some pictures of it wandering around under our feet.

This rather spectacular bird stayed with us for several weeks, then the season changed and one day it was gone. We still miss it.

But a second bird has arrived to take its place. This bird is very tiny (almost too small to swallow the meal worms), its colors are muted, but it  is a real character anyway. One day we spotted it on a little scrappy piece of land by the porch. As we do whenever we see a new bird, we poured a handful of worms on the patch of land, and it instantly began picking them up. The next day when we got up in the morning and came out and looked at the patch of land, it was already there waiting for us. It has been coming every day since. The bird is a Bewick's Wren, a tiny brown bird with a very expressive tail which it often carries cocked up at about 45 degrees. It looks like it's planning to stay with us, at least for a while. Here are a few pictures.

On the Porch 3

 On the blog I just sent I sent a bunch of pictures of Gila Monsters and stated that you could tell individual specimens apart by the pattern of their skins, and a few of you wrote, in an aggrieved tone, that I had sent all the same specimens. Well let me atone by sending three different specimens this time.

These I think are sufficiently different that you should be able to tell them apart.

The Backyard Porch (2)

 

In the last post I described our back porch and how we lured the Road Runners, medium-sized carnivorous birds, to come to the porch and feed tamely out of our hands by offering them meal worms, which they could not resist. In this  post I want to describe some of the smaller animals that decided to show up for the feast as well. One of the first to come was a Cactus Wren, a common, rather attractive bird famous for its wild sewing-machine song heard often in the desert.

But in fact it wasn't birds that came most often, it was lizards. After all, what other kinds of animals are more characteristic in a desert? When it began to warm up in our first spring here, we began seeing lizards in the distance, burly creatures running to challenge every other lizard that came too close to their territories, pumping up their big chests and doing their rapid pushups. With their sharp eyes they quickly discovered the porch and the meal worms, so that when we got up in the morning and went out they were already lined up side-be-side only half concealed in the rosemary plant on the edge of the porch trying to be the first one out each time a worm hit the ground.

The lizards, as well as we can make out, are, first of all, Desert Spiny Lizards. They come in every color. The males often have a purple area along the back.

 

 

Here is one taking a meal worm from my fingers.

 

Next, Whiptail Lizards.

 While we are feeding the Spinytail lizards two Whiptail Lizards will suddenly appear and go running at full-speed through the other lizards, slipping breakneck on the slippery porch surface, at top speed rising up slightly on two legs. This lizard is unusual because most species of whiptails (not our species, however) consist only of females, and the young are born by parthenogenisis. In the wild they are alert and shy, but ours quickly tame down, and will sit in Cheryl's hand while she feeds them meal worms. 

At the end of the porch there is a rather flimsy gate, at the inside of the which is the cement slab. Outside the gate the slab ends, making a sort of curbstone, down to the dirt of the field outside the enclosed area. There is an open space of about four inches under the gate where the Road Runner and other small animals can squeeze through (but which is too narrow to let the Javelinas in, which is its purpose). There is another species of lizard that is too shy to actually live inside the gate, but do all their foraging about thirty feet away across the field . If they are chased by a predator they can run like the wind. These are called Zebra-tailed Lizards. When they are running all-out from, say, a hawk flying close overhead, they carry their two-colored tail up in the air, wriggling it like a worm, so a predator will aim at it, and at worse break off its tail while the lizard escapes with the rest of himself.

 

 

 Why we enjoy them so much is that from their twenty feet or so distance outside the gate they are watching everything that is going on in our side of the gate, and from time to time they can't stand it anymore and they come galloping over, jump under the gate, grab the closest meal worm they see, and then go galloping back out through the gate, their bandit raid a success!

There are two more lizards we don't feed (because we don't quite know how to)  but we certainly need to mention.

The first is a nocturnal species with suction-cup toes, that lives inside the house rather than outside. My guess is that they live in almost every house in Tucson. It's the Mediterranean House Gecko, a non-native species that takes up residence in houses.

You'll find them in showers or unused fireplaces. People often notice they have them in their house for the first time on a hot  evening when they see them clinging to the screen on an open window.

I was talking about their "suction-cup toes" out of laziness but their toes that allow them to walk upside-down on the ceiling are much more complicated than that. (Don't expect me to explain it.)

The last of the lizards I want to discuss is one of the most exciting: the Gila Monster, Arizona's celebrated poisonous lizard. The former owner of our house told us they occurred here, but we wondered how we would ever find one since they only came out after dusk, and spent almost their entire life underground. But in fact we saw one wandering up a ditch, and from then on for several weeks they kept appearing everywhere. They were more or less tame, or at least, totally ignored us. Their bite is evidently very painful though not particularly serious, but we knew better than to try to pick one up. We tried to feed them eggs or meat but they never paid any attention. Each had its own unique markings and we thought if we photographed every one we saw we could check their patterns and work out how many we had, but it wasn't all that easy, and besides it was fun just getting to see them.

 The Back Porch (1)

There is an open porch running along the back (south) wall of our house, somewhat raised, giving a view of the full extent (about two side-by-side acres) of our land, down to where it ends in a wash.  On the right (in this picture), our house; on the left, the Sonoran Desert. The porch is where they come together. This is our closest direct daily connection to nature.

For example, in the top picture you see Yours Truly and at my feet a calm and relaxed Road Runner mother feeding her child. and in the second picture that same mother Road Runner sitting in my lap. It's not because I am a bird whisperer. It's because I have in my hand a magic charm that makes all things possible.

 

 

These are meal worms. The pet trade raises them by the ton as food for your more exotic pets, and people like us buy them by the ton. You feed the worms oat flakes or any kind of meal or occasional slices of  fruit (for moisture) and if you kept the worms long enough they would eventually make a pupa and then hatch out as a nondescript beetle. But the birds and other animals (who don't particularly like the beetles) won't let you keep them long enough to transform. They prefer them as juicy round worms that crawl along just fast enough to make them fun to catch, and the birds and other animals are so wild about them that they quickly tame down enough so they will take them out of our fingers. 

The birds, early in the year, swallow them all for themselves, but as spring arrives, they suddenly have to take them all to their baby birds waiting in the nest. They start picking up a load of as many as they can carry (to save on the number of trips they have to make). They pick up a row of three or for on one side of their bill, then a row on the other side of their bill, and we keep saying "That's enough! That's as many as you can carry!" but  they don't listen to us, but pick up one more, and that makes them drop two, and they try to pick up those two, and the whole load falls out of their mouth, and they have to start over again. By that time the ground squirrels have learned what's going on, and when the birds get halfway to their nest and drop the load again, the ground squirrels are there to waylay them, and grab the worms for themselves. 

(Here's a Round-tailed Ground Squirrel, just so you see what they look like, little ratty things, sort of cute but usually a nuisance. They are  one of the prey animals, so the hawks and coyotes help keep their population in check.)

 The Road Runner is one of our favorites visitors. When we first moved in here, it came running by our window one day. We'd never seen it before or it us, but I said "Cheryl, try it ," and she opened the front door and threw out a handful of meal worms and the Road Runner turned in its tracks and bolted them down, and since then comes by two or three times a day and tosses the worms off like they were free which they aren't. If we don't come straight out when it arrives it gets up on our window frames and stares in at us. If it's the third or fourth time that day and we are short of worms we move to another room, pretending we don't see it, but then it moves to a window outside that room, and keeps it up until we feel guilty and go out and give it the rest of the worms that we were saving for some different creature.

But even if it can be annoying a times, it is still our most impressive big, comical, charismatic animal that comes to our hand, the most entertaining for our guests to see.

Here (just because I like them) is an album of close-up Road Runner pictures. A portrait of an adult, a young bird with its "fluttering wing" begging posture, an adult carrying as many worms as it can, an adult feeding a young bird .

 

Our Own Cooper's Hawk