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 .