Social Distancing — The Birds Do It

My friend, Dog and I go up to Cherry Creek trail early this morning while it is still cool.  This Gila National Forest trail is one of my favorites, especially in warm weather because it drops down from the road, following a creek through a canyon.  It may be 75° at 6,000 feet (where my house is) at 8 am; there in the canyon it is 55° and green.

Today, we take binoculars because there are several species of spring arrivals that we hope to see; that is, if Dog will be patient enough to let me put binocs to eyes and focus on the branches overhead.

The meadow, woods and riparian stretches are great attractors for warblers, wrens, vireos, and more.  The challenge, of course, is that the trees are leafing out, giving those little guys lots of opportunities to flit from behind one leaf to behind the next, with a duck behind a tree trunk along the way.  This is social distancing at its most frustrating.

One constant on this trail, at least at this time of year, is the sound of running water.  There are numerous crossings of Cherry Creek to be made, hopping from rock to rock and hoping that Dog, always leashed, doesn’t get too exuberant and pull me into the water.

Friend and I make poor time as hikes go, but great time for birding.  Neither of us are particularly good at identifying by song and not a whole lot better identifying what we see.  Still, there are a few spring celebrants who are impossible to mistake, assuming we can find them high above.

Those lovelies that we see and recognize today include Red Faced Warbler, Painted Redstart, House Wrens, Robins, Juncos, Stellar Jay, Vireo, Acorn Woodpecker, Swifts and an unidentified hawk. If those warblers weren’t so good at staying socially distant, despite my noisy efforts to pish them down, we might see more.

Butterflies are also warming to spring.  A variety of whites, blues, sulphurs and brightly-marked butterflies flutter from flower to leaf to blooming grasses.  Those I recognize are Sara Orangetip, Queen Alexandra’s Sulphur and Swallowtails.  I think I notice a Mourning Cloak – or is that an Arizona Sister?  Such engaging names we give these creatures.

Hard to take pictures of those fast-moving, darting beings.  I am reduced to beings that don’t move much except as the breeze stirs them.  A wild clematis in bloom – I’ve never seen one before.  Various yellow wildflowers, aka dyc or damn yellow composite–they are the equivalent of an LBJ to a birder—fill the sunny spots.  And there’s my hugging tree—a gnarled old grandmother cottonwood. Since we can’t hug our two-legged friends these days, a hug of that old cottonwood gives back a grounded energy.

Depending upon your frame of reference, the damper to the day or the interesting and unexpected find is a mule deer that had been taken by a predator, partially eaten and left right on the side of the campground entrance where we are parked and only 20 feet or so off the main road. Since I’m used to finding evidence of our four-legged neighbors that is far less graphic, I can’t resist taking some pictures and posting them to my tracking group to see if anyone has a clue whether this deer was taken by a mountain lion or coyotes. My guess is mountain lion.  As I said, it all depends on your frame of reference.

I’ll be leading a hike along Cherry Creek for our lifelong learning organization in July.  By then, the birds will be quieter, having found mates and being busy raising peeps. By then, the water will probably be found only in residual pools. By then, a whole new succession of dyc’s will be in bloom.  But it will still be cool. And green. And old grandmother cottonwood will still be giving and receiving hugs in a time of human social distancing.

Social Distancing down New Mexico way

Social distancing requires us to stay at least six feet from each other. Six feet? That is awfully close!   Thus goes one of several New Mexico versions of this bit of coronavirus humor.

Another bit. Six feet is about the equivalent of: 6 Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout (or Gila Trout if you’re in my neighborhood); 2 mule deer bucks; 4 Roadrunners; or 2 Black Bears. This from NM Game and Fish recommendations for social distancing in the field. Of course, I’d rather be more than 2 black-bear lengths from any black bear, but that’s just me!

Down here in New Mexico, six feet of separation isn’t a problem for a large state, home to only about 2 million people, most of whom live in one of three cities.  Practicing social distancing can be as easy as getting out onto some little corner of our millions of acres of public land.

In 30 minutes or less, I can be on a trail in the Gila National Forest, hiking with my dog alone or with one, maybe two friends.  We have the choice of going low:  the Continental Divide Trail (CDT) starts down south in a desert environment at 6,000’ or less, wandering through pinion, juniper and boulders, as though through a carefully landscaped rock garden. Seen from the ridges, Big Hatchet and the Floridas stand stark against the border; Soldiers Return holds the near frame. The snaggletooth of Cookes Peak anchors the east.  The Peloncios, Chiricahuas and Mt Graham bound the south and west.  These days, Mt Graham and the tallest points of stone in the Chiricahuas are snow-topped.

Or I can go high, above 7,000’:  Signal Peak, Cherry Creek trail, the trail out of McMillan Campground, Meadow Creek trail are all favorites when Ponderosa and fir are preferred, and a shady path calls.  This time of year, the Redstarts and Red-faced Warblers are moving in and singing their territory.

We’ve had a wet late winter and early spring.  Rains have come with regularity.  The soft female rains – or farmer rains, depending on your argot – soaked into the land at just the right time and right temperature and the result is a golden explosion.

Poppies. Mexican Poppies glowing along the roadside, in painterly splashes on the hillsides.  And most spectacularly, spread across fields as quilts made of yellow, orange and gold, with love-knots of white. In New England, they go leaf-peeping in the fall.  This week, I have indulged in Poppy-peeping.

Poppies don’t bloom alone.  There are lupines, brittlebush, bladderpod, mustard and other yellow ground flowers whose names refuse to stick with me.  There’s a spot along AZ Rt 191 where for about 3 miles, the hillsides look as though Monet was trying to improve on his Garden at Giverny.

And, the other evidence of generous rains and snow-covered elevations is water. 

Water running in the most ephemeral of streams, bubbling down stony creek beds that rarely entertain a flow outside of a good monsoon.  Seeps become creeks, creeks become challenging crossings and waterfalls sing over rock.

The Gila River gorges on the melt and silt from the snows on the Mogollons, spreading beyond its banks and filling the acequias.

The happening-together of a glorious wildflower bloom set against the backdrop of snowy peaks, and water courses that live up to their names has made for a rapturous spring of hikes and drives, indulging in color and sound, and following Dog’s nose up the trails.  I hope and pray for the recovering health of my community, nation and the world.

 

Here, though, is my refuge.  Social distancing at six feet?  That’s awfully close!

 

 

The earth is flat — until it’s not!

We cross a saddle in a ridge from the trailhead and pass into the Gila Wilderness. Lying before us is almost three miles of flat mesa.  Walking across that wide meadow of grasses and wildflowers, we follow a narrow trail, pitted by mule and horse feet, rocky and muddy thanks to impact of monsoonal drenching.  The views are expansive from the slight rises, and intimate in the dips. I can tell we are approaching the edge of nothing when I start seeing, instead of the trunks of Ponderosa, the crowns.  Through the crowns, a blue haze of air. The trail tends away obliquely, making me wonder how far this mesa goes and when it will drop away from under my feet.

Wilderness isn’t empty, not of people and not of things.  To the right of the trail, silhouetted against the sky is a relic: a 40’s era truck driven out to the edge of the world and abandoned, fodder for curious hikers’ wonder and speculation.

Then we are there, where the flat becomes vertical. Approximately 1500 feet of rocky switchback trail lies between mesa and river bottom.  There’s an overlook where we see our destination, a river-side meadow specked with the white kitchen tent secluded under a clutch of pines. The scary aspect of the view is that we have to get down there. As we pick our way among the trail rubble, we hear the mules coming with our weight of tents and bags.  The outfitter calls down to us, “Move to the downhill side.  Mules spook if a critter is above them.  Is that you behind a bush? Move out where the mules can see you.”  I step down and out of the way, and watch the outfit step on by us, more surefooted than I am, for sure.  Then, we work our way on down to level ground, off the sun-exposed cliff-side and into the shade.

Our first night around the campfire and under the Milky Way.  There’s a flicker on the far horizon that isn’t city-generated.  By mid-night, planets, stars and campfire are overwhelmed by a strong storm cell that parks overhead for the next several hours.  Lightning flashes my tent-sides bright, and thunder rolls overhead and on down the valley.  The storm is centered right overhead and the ground vibrates under my sleeping mats.  What’s to do except lie awake and in awe.  Saturday morning, we stand under the kitchen tent, sharing storm stories, drinking cup after cup of coffee and looking anxiously for spots of clearing overhead.  Suddenly, 

WHAMBOOM — a lightning strike about a football-field distance away.  We all duck and, on straightening, see the smoke and steam rising from a single pine tree on the edge of the woods at the far side of the meadow.  It still stands, but has been split in two and its roots boiled up out of the ground around it.  Splinters scatter on the newly-bared earth.  I’m not sure any of us have ever been that close a witness to the power of lightning’s electric impact.  Over the course of the morning, we go in ones and twos over to look at the result: at the split tree, the splinters, the upheaved earth and the scorched ground scar.

It’s late summer and in the meadow, along the river edges and under the pines, the earth explodes in bloom.  We count perhaps two dozen species of wildflowers, all native because how else would they be, out here in the wild.  Purple, orange, blue and more blue, seemingly a dozen shades of yellow, we wade hip-deep in color.

A diversion is suggested: a hike up river a mile or so to see a beaver dam.  Beaver are coming back on the Gila; they are cutting trees, dragging them distances and lacing them across the river to catch up and slow down the flow.  We find the dam stretching across most of the river’s width.  A cheerful rush of water through the branches, a pond held up behind and extended wetlands.  While we stand on the edge, a ripple surfaces and crosses the pond.

The day comes to leave the magic meadow retreat.  Roll the sleeping bag and mats, drop and pack a dew-wet tent, sort my day-pack to its lightest possible weight and sip a last cup of camp coffee.  Slowlyslowly climb up the cliff from river to mesa; take a last look over the edge at the kitchen tent, to be broken down by the outfitter the next day; face forward the long trail across flat earth and over the ridge to the trailhead.

There are additional images on my flickr page, linked below.