I'm (Mostly) Happy Winter is Leaving

 Winter is my least favorite season here in Tucson. It's not the weather, which is mild enough. In fact it might be more reasonable to wait for torrid summer temperatures to relent. After all, in winter all you need to do is put on a sweater, then you can go out and enjoy the fresh out-of-doors. Harder to do in summer when it is 115 outside. Well, that's the kind of thing people say.

But I've always loved summer. I think it was because I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a kid I was always disappointed with our summer. All I wanted to do was jump out of bed in the morning and go out looking for snakes and spiders and insects. But before I got up I would wait in bed sampling the air in the house. If it smelled of heated dust rising from the top of the furnace, it could only mean the central heating had been going all night, and that would mean the cold drenching fog was in, and probably would be in at least till noon which killed most of the day. No living thing would be stirring.

It's nothing like that here.When it gets to be summer, it pretty dependably stays summer. And when it is 115, well, we live on a cul-de-sac off the Catalina Highway, and we can get in the car and drive to Inspiration Pt. at 7,000 feet, in 45 minutes, where the temperature is a balmy 80.

No, it's winter I don't care as much for. It's not for the most part terribly cold, but the birds aren't singing and everything sort of shuts down. By the time we get up to our favorite Inspiration Point there is often a bitter wind blowing.

But there is or there might be a problem this fast-approaching summer. You see, it is at the change of season that new birds come down from the mountain top, or new birds come up from Mexico. But it works the other way, and we may lose birds, too.The last couple of years a hummingbird has moved in along the bushes on the front side of our house, and we got to watch it making a nest and raising a young bird, and we got to watch the whole operation directly out the window. Each time, it was a Broad-billed Hummingbird, and each time it only laid one egg, when usually I believe hummingbirds have two young, and each time it was very tame, and all this made us think it was the same bird--our bird. Also it had what looked like a bent bill from crashing head-on into a window sometime in the past. Our nickname for it was Broken Bill (rather inappropriate since only female hummingbirds build a nest and raise young). I had some close up hummingbird nest photography planned this summer, but so far there is no bird hanging around in the bushes there.

 

 

And we had already lost two birds. First of all, for the last few months we had had a tame Bewick's Wren that we were very fond of. When we got up in the morning and went into the breakfast room, it was already waiting for us looking in the window, its long tail twitching back and forth. We would pick up a small handful of meal worms and carry them outside. As soon as we opened the backdoor it would rush back to a spot peeking out from a behind a bush waiting for us, and it would shoot around and grab every meal worm we threw it, and it would rush back around behind the bush (for some reason it would always insist on eating in privacy. It was so small it had trouble swallowing the worm, and it was as though it were embarrassed to have us see its awkwardness). After it swallowed each one it would come back out from behind the bush and wait for the next one. After five or six its tiny stomach would be full, and it would go on about its business.

 

 

 

And a second bird was hanging around that we got used to seeing every day, a Lincoln's Sparrow, a very pretty, very precisely marked bird.

 

 

 And now on a single day both Bewick's Wren and Lincoln's Sparrow have left, taking off for wherever they go in summer, which is not here.

 

So maybe some very special bird will suddenly appear and stay with us for the winter, but for the moment we don't have any special bird, just all the usual ones, and we feel sort of bereft.