Essays

Moseying: Exploring the Natural World

A winter daybreak brings chilly birdwatching in a mesquite pasture
January 2, 2008

Within ten minutes of sunrise every bird in a mesquite pasture perches at the top of a mesquite. The sun promises warmth after a long winter night. Each bird wiggles fluffing its feathers, preening by separating the barbels (the hairs of a feather).

The year-around residents pop up first. The curved-bill thrashers are first, usually a pair, usually in the same shrub. They will polish their long sickle beak on a branch before preening. Next up are the cactus wrens in family groups. Every cactus wren has several football-shaped nests of wads of grass in the thicker shrubbery of lote and catclaw, not mesquite. They spend the night alone inside their own nest but tag along together during the morning’s inspection tour. Mockingbirds also greet the sun. They prefer to spend the night near their favorite tasajillo clump under a mesquite, the one with the ripest red berries.

The morning greeting of the sun ritual is the only time of the day that the Cassin’s sparrows will be visible. After spending the night in the angel hair masses of bush muhly grass they will greet the sun with faint whisper songs and then return to the ground to sift the grass for seeds lodged by the wind under the detritus brought to the soil by the freezes and storms of winter. Other birds of the grass will appear – meadowlarks swiftly arcing through the air, their white tail feathers winking, and then they glide down to rest and sit with their yellow breasts facing the sun.

In the thickest brush, pyrrhuloxias fuss together in groups of seven to twenty. Gray cardinals with red vests, their social grouping is a winter-time phenomenon. In the dense mesquite, bristlegrass is plentiful. The millet-sized seeds are choice prizes and as the largest seed-eating birds of the pasture, the pyrrhuloxias claim the most productive feeding grounds, but they too greet the sun.

Long before the residents search a high perch to greet the sun, winter visitors have already searched out food in the dim light of the crepuscular sky. Dozens of small birds scurry on the ground, somehow finding grass and weed seeds on open ground. Most are white-crowned sparrows, a long way from their summer home in the higher altitudes of the Rocky Mountains. Adults have two white stripes on their head, but immatures have two brown stripes.

Lark Buntings awake in their hollowed-out cups in loose sand before daybreak to fly to open ground, too. Their chunky bluish-gray beaks, white wing patches, and large bodies distinguish them from the sparrows. Their natal ground is the shortgrass prairie from Colorado to Saskatchewan. In some years they are more abundant in the sandy country of Cochran and Yoakum County, but in other years they winter in the creosote bush flats of the Trans-Pecos. Until the 1980’s their favorite wintering ground was in Midland and Ector Counties. According to volunteer censuses, their numbers have decreased nationally.

A half dozen other species of sparrows; clay-colored, chipping, Brewer’s, field, Lincoln’s, and song are regular winter visitors to the Llano Estacado pasturelands. As the sun gains strength these birds, in mixed flocks, join the permanent residents in the ritual sun greeting. When the pasture is festooned with birds celebrating the return of the sun for another day a harrier hawk (males are silvery-white) will come gliding low over the pasture, hoping to find a cold-numbed individual bird for breakfast. Every bird will plunge to the ground (except for the defiant curve-billed thrashers who yell at the hawk until the last second).

Every year from mid-November to mid-March in every mesquite pasture on the southern Llano Estacado something similar happens every morning. It is the rhythm of the land. Check it out for yourself. I check on the “neighborhood” at Sibley with fair regularity to see if something new has arrived, or to see if the food supply has run low and some of the regulars have moved on to better territory.

Mockingbirds are often the first “homeboys” to leave if the going gets tough. The winter visitors move on quickly. A pasture full of sparrows in early December can be empty in January as the mixed winter flocks drift south. Sometimes a gnatcatcher moves in from the east or a black throated sparrow from the west, having also abandoned leaner pastures.

Curved-bill thrashers and cactus wrens tough it out, no matter what. Even in the driest or coldest winter they greet the sun every morning. The neighborhood quail stick around, too, the coveys dwindling bird by bird until only a single one will wail the rally call in the morning sun greeting.

Every winter my parents traveled West Texas, doing up to twelve Audubon Christmas Bird Counts. They would often awaken at three or four a.m. to drive a hundred miles or more, then count birds from “can to can’t” and then join other birders to tally up. I always rode with them as a kid, and as an adult I did so as often as I could. Some of the most intense memories of my life are centered on Christmas Counts. It has been over seven years since they passed away. A few days ago I woke up missing them terribly so Deborah took me birding. In two hours we saw forty species of birds along the roads just southeast of Midland.

We idled along. In a cotton field we saw a few hundred sandhill cranes. Harrier hawks trailed our side, as if to use our car as a bird-dog to scare its prey. Shrikes shot like arrows across the road, zipping along a perfect flat trajectory. Flocks of lark buntings festooned large catclaw mimosas like Christmas tree ornaments. A pair of ravens swooped and chased each other, handing off some larger object to each other, darting over a mesquite pasture. As we watched them, giggling at their pair-bonding antics, I was overwhelmed with a feeling that told me I had received a message of love from my parents.

Facets of our soul are shaped by our surroundings. God gives us the gift of the world, so that the creatures and plants of the landscape will add depth to our soul. No matter where we live, feathered emissaries are around us – that blue jay and white-winged dove in the live oak of our urban backyard can be messengers from God, too.