Essays

Moseying: Locations of Interest

Papalotito colorado, Big Bend Ranch State Park
January 5, 2005

Six javelinas were near the windmill, slowly and desultorily sniffing the ground, aimlessly wandering around. They seemed bored, not knowing what to do next. At ten a.m. with their morning foraging accomplished, they took a long sip at the creek that disappeared through the narrow and short canyon a quarter mile downstream from the windmill. Soon they would retreat into the brush and circle about, sniffing the ground until they found the perfect place for napping the day away.

I had come to the windmill earlier in the morning and had then been greeted by just one javelina. Thousands of javelina tracks pockmarked the banks of sand spotted erratically along the watercourse. The one javelina had myopically stood his ground until nervousness took him on a quartering course away, constantly eyeing my motionless strangeness. After he slipped into the seepwillow thicket I followed to the edge of the brush. I could hear him moving, and then heard others, so I retreated.

The landscape seemed empty. The sky had no clouds. There was no noise, no bird chirps, and the javelina were out of hearing range. I found a rock upon which to sit that was surrounded by the arching branches of a tornillo (screwbean mesquite.) I picked up a few of the tornillo’s bizarre beans, and rolled them in my fingers, marveling at their construction. I love tornillo – and look for it when I am anywhere near the Rio Bravo, even as far north as Bosque del Apache. I have one specimen at Gone Native that has shot up 15 feet in five years, promising to be tree-form instead of a multi-trunked shrub like the native honey mesquite.

Things appear in the emptiness – in its midst, not its edge. For example, three doves were suddenly rocketing by, their wings “whiffling.” Like arrows on a downward flight they sped out of sight, down into the canyon. I was left with rocks, a half dozen species of cactus, the tornillo, and blue, blue sky. Again, emptiness all around. The landscape was volcanic, with dikes and sills. The ground was covered with rocks fist sized and up, with rubber plant, candellila, creosote bush, guayule, sotol, tree-form yucca, lechequilla, and catclaw growing in a random and sparse pattern.

As I sat, my thoughts turned inward, and when they did, my vision reinterpreted the landscape. Suddenly I saw a blanket of color across the hills. A gold, gray, and black blanket, with silver highlights. The plants were arranged in bands of species arranged according to positions of slope and exposure. The creosote bush was the gold band – winter’s touch had colored the oldest leaves until at a distance that color materialized instead of their normal dark green. I lifted my binoculars and looked at the nearest band. With that perspective green became dominant.

The gray band was guayule. In World War II rubber had been produced in the region by processing thousands of the plants. In more recent times various researchers have attempted to grow guayule as a potential economic venture, but under cultivation and irrigation the plants do not produce rubber as effectively as drought-stricken wild plants. The black bland of vegetation was acacia, each plant’s multiple slender whips stretched upward – how can something skinner that a pencil reach eight feet?

Suddenly, within five feet, a verdin materialized, busy, flitting, gleaning tiny bits of nothingness from the tornillo’s branches. He worked throughout the branches on my side, coming even closer, then worked away, never noticing me, and then suddenly vanished. In its winter juvenile plumage the little gray bird sported a faint yellow cap. I heard its chink from further away, and watched it land near its winter nest in another tornillo. Verdins and cactus wrens build nests for the winter – not many other birds do such a thing. The toy football sized nest had its entrance on the side facing me.

He hopped into the nest and disappeared for several minutes. I finally raised my binoculars, and was rewarded with the sight of the bird sitting in his doorway, watching the world go by like an old man on a porch. When I put the binoculars down, I noticed another regularity within the landscape. At the crest of a hillock not far away, a line of ocotillo arced just below the fence-like wall of the volcanic dike at the top. I reached for my pack beside me on the rock, to get a drink of water and my morning peanut butter and jalapeno cheese whiz sandwich.

A shield beetle with gray elytra sat sunning itself on the strap of the pack. As my hand neared it, it clumsily tried to fly, but was cold and did not manage flight, but merely a drunken lurch to the rock surface. It landed awkwardly, revealing a pollen yellow underside, bright and unexpected. As I ate, other birds started moving. Canyon towhees were first – hopping down the slope toward the water course. Three little hilltops provide a gate to the canyon below and from each a pair of the towhees materialized. Not for the first time did their actions remind me of the behavior of rodents. Towhees mostly move deliberately, with small advances guided by their calm and cautious alertness. Curious as the kangaroo rats that came to the campfire the night before, at times they ran on the ground for short distances, but only for a few feet until the shelter of another rock or plant was reached.

At the ridge top above the little canyon I spotted a bird steadily flying. It came towards me, then over me, to land on a rung of the windmill. It was a Say’s pheobe, with a hint of peach on its underside, and it sat, uttering its soft “wheep,” wriggling and fluffing its feathers. After a minute’s rest, it darted over the stock trough, caught a flying insect and returned to its perch. The hill behind the Papalotito Colorado suddenly had thousands of Lark Buntings flying downslope, the flock a fast moving brown fog that talkatively swept over my head and down to the water in the canyon. The rocks just above the water were covered with birds.

A intraspecies flock of birds had come to the stock trough as I had watched the buntings. House finches, white-crowned sparrows, black-throated sparrows, Brewer’s sparrows, yellow-rumped warblers, a black-tailed gnatcatcher, and some pyrrhuloxias (shaped like a cardinal but with only splotches of red on the chest and under the wings) all were gathered on the ground and in the seepwillows just beyond the trough.

At that moment the javelina appeared. I had been sitting still for so long that they had either forgotten my presence, or had assumed I was gone. Maybe the landscape had been empty because of my presence, or maybe I had just awakened before the birds. Every day, all winter, in timeless fashion, the landscape of Papalotito Colorado is enlivened in such a way.