roomthily's Journal

record-breaking monsoon and a unusually cool august day (low nineties high) so why not go up to the swale below the agua caliente hill/forest road junction when it's not too hot to try. worth it - from the trailhead along the ridge and down to the tank, hundreds of snouts and yellows. sootywings and duskywings (more than one of each). red-spotted toads down in the swale. little tortoise trundling around. think that was the biggest congregation of butterflies puddling i have ever seen.

and it's weird, with shoulder-high amaranth and mallow vines twining though the ocotillo and the yucca. not birdy and still not a lot of native bee.

lot of gnats, the tank is over the trail, the trail is overgrown, wear long trousers. the water is still pretty grotty.

windy, cool, all you can do is watch the one damselfly race away from the shoreline into the grass somewhere. no pollinators but honey bees.

pretty grim rn.

found a flock of sparrows, found the dirt clod pile the sparrow has been spotted on for a couple of days, found some burrowing owls (!! super great), found at least four kinds of other sparrows and not the harris.

out there with the one yellow-rumped warbler and some squabbling mockingbirds and gila woodpeckers and the neighbor ran home this morning to find a western screech owl at their porch overhang. that's just mean.

just yellow-rumps and sparrows, who knows where that oriole got to.

thought i would note that amongst ~all~ the yellow-rumps

first week out without seeing a saguaro in bloom.

that is brutal! i do not have the glass for it! but spinning phalaropes and swaying stilts are good any time.

listen, we are unofficially counting the stilt sandpiper but not the plover (i do not think any of the blobs were plovery other than the killdeer).

old baldy to macbeth spring down super trail and in one of the narrow gullies up old baldy, i stopped for a damselfly and heard the whoomph of a raptor's wings ten feet overhead and a light blur down through the trees and gone. to look back up the gully at something light-fronted, red-necked and darting like a flycatcher and i really hope that wasn't a trogon that got away.they did not move like a towhee and it was bigger than a warbler.

because obviously i'm walking it most weekends and those are the same yellow warblers and pine elfins - the weather this year has been really odd and they are doing rock-blasting four days a week mid-trail roughly. like 6/22 is the second day in a row of barely 60F there, the dogbane's blooming and no one is nectaring on it.