by CKR
Let’s start slow today. I have about a half-dozen posts in mind, some of them even partially written, but it’s allergy season. March in New Mexico fills my head with cotton balls. That’s the good part. The bad part is itchy eyes and runny nose, but for the moment they’re more or less under control.
It gets worse when I go outside, particularly in the wind, which is the facilitator of our junipers’ sex lives. Juniper trees come in two sexes, and the males use the wind to waft their pollen to the females, involving the rest of us in their sex lives. Those little brown cones (a couple of millimeters long) are the culprits.
Juniper season comes just after the days get warm enough that I go out and assess what’s needed in the yard. Then I have to sulk in the house for a few weeks. We’ve had two small snowfalls during that sulking, so I have to remind myself that I wouldn’t have done much in the yard on those days anyway.
My Estonian friends wanted to explore my yard as soon as they arrived, and we found some flowers. Not the winter jasmine that I planted, but plants that were here before I was. Last year they sent up lacy flower heads as summer was coming on. I don’t know if this early bloom is an every-year thing or if our unusually mild and dry winter has forced it. The photo is from this morning; there were many more flowers two weeks ago. Each one is a few millimeters long.
Seven robins perched on the birdbath a few days ago, with one in a nearby juniper; I didn’t have the camera handy, but I did get this white-crowned sparrow a little later with a hostile male house finch protecting his bathing mate. In New Mexico, robins don’t migrate, to the mistaken early delight of newcomer humans.
“I saw the first robin of spring,” they’ll say on a bleak January day. (It can be bleak here when the sun is shining if we’ve had no precip.)
I’m not sure I’ve found a graceful way to explain the robins’ habits to them. They form loose flocks and move to lower altitudes, but they move around a lot, depending on the weather. So you don’t see them for a while, and then you may see one, or eight, then none again.
That white-crowned sparrow seems more indicative of spring to me, although my field guide says that they winter here and spend summers much further north. I usually start seeing them as spring arrives, and they stay through the summer. I haven’t seen a mate yet, but in past years they’ve been paired. Like the robins, they may be migrating up and down the mountains.
The sandhill cranes are migrating, too. My Estonian guests and I saw these at Maxwell National Wildlife Refuge, near Las Vegas, New Mexico.
Now maybe I’m ready to work on the heavier posts.