The Peacocks of Baboquivari: a Journal

BY: Erma J. Fisk

Papago Myth of Baboquivari I'itoi, known as Elder Brother, came down from Baboquivari and took the red clay from his mother the Earth, and formed man....I'itoi greeted him and told man that he was the child of Earth, Sun, and Wind. He cautioned the man not to harm the Earth or she would cease to give him all the things he needed.

December Twelfth, 1978.

With final encouraging abrazos"What's an abrazo?" my Harvard granddaughter, Molly, asked me, reading this.

"A hug. Don't you know Mexican?" I slanted my eyes at her. She comes from California. She knows all about abrazos, too. Under another name. All right, start again. The two men who have transported me and my gear for five months embrace me, climb into their yellow Wagoneer, and head for the paved road ten miles distant. Cautiously they negotiate the first washout....I keep myself from running after them.... All my sheltered life I have been fasci-nated by stories of women who man fire towers, live on islands, in lighthouses on On a lonely cow ranch beneath Baboquivari Peak on the Papago Reservation (ABOVE) Fisk extricates a migratory bird from a mist net for study.

PEACOCKS OF BABOQUIVARI

fogbound coasts, in wilderness cabins. Wondering what it would be like, wishing to do it. It occurs to me now, joltingly, that always they have had a sturdy man-a ranger, husband, supervisor, a friendly neighbor with strong arms and protective instincts, to support them. I have no one. Seventy-three years old, seventy-five miles from city, friends, stores. No communication. My car two miles down canyon. A city woman with an arthritic shoulder, a gimpy hip, no resourceful abilities. How crazy can I be? How did I get into this...? I stand at an altitude of 4500 feet in the Upper Austral Life Zone in the Baboquivari foothills of Arizona, southwest of Tucson... Baboquivari Peak...three thousand feet above me.

I explore. In a bunkhouse where cowboys coming up to ride fence presumably stay I find tack and decrepit sofas and furniture and a stove and paint. Then the clearing slants (nothing here is level) down to the original homestead which is my winter home-a small rock cabin with a woodshed at one end of a small porch, dry vines rustling on its walls....

Stepping irregularly out from bamboo and agave, from under Rancher's Wife's overgrown Talisman rosebush, coming to inspect me is a flock of peacocks! Five thousand feet up on an arid desert mountainside, in the realm of the Papago Indian gods-PEACOCKS!

...Watching the peacocks preen and feed, I compare the ludicrousness of this new habitat to our comfortable home full of children in Buffalo; to our Georgetown rowhouse in Washington; to the small cottage that has housed my last thirteen widowed years in Florida, with its citrus trees, flowers, heron stalking....

At heart I am a nester, a housewife. My ornithological career budded only after my man's death, when the world of people had been too close, too abrasive for me to reenter....

What am I doing up here, isolated on this mountain with no neighbors, no telephone or CB, not even electricity? No one dropping in for coffee or beer and a chat? Mail not arriving sometimes for two weeks? My larder stocked with dried beans, dried milk, rice, raisins, prunes, canned applesauce, tomatoes, hash? It's what everyone asks, so maybe I should explain.

I am here to document for The Nature Conservancy the bird life of this remote property. I will do this for them by field observation, and by banding, photographing, and then releasing birds I hope to trap, or to capture in mist nets.

A mist net is about the length of a tennis net, but is five tiers high, stretched as far as I can reach up to extricate a bird. It is made of fine nylon mesh, and comes in different sizes depending upon whether you wish to catch hawks or hummingbirds. I use the all-purpose size and have caught everything, from hummingbirds to red-shouldered hawks; as well as snakes, insects, large butterflies, and moths (which with enormous patience I can extract), dragonflies.... To my dismay I have had chipmunks in my nets, though rarely a gray squirrel; a box turtle and the sign of raccoons, fox, possum, cats, dogs, and people....

When a bird does fly into the net its weight sags the mesh, making a pocket, and your victim-usually-is held by wing or head or clutching feet the latter making its removal slow, as you loosen them talon by talon. Most lie quietly until the bander approaches. Heavy-bodied ones like doves, jays, and small hawks may bounce along the length of the net and out the end often just as I am reaching for them. Small species like wrens, hummers, some warblers may wiggle through, but most remain to regard me with a wary eye, hammer on my fingers with sharp bills, peck my hands....

I have left The Conservancy hanging. I was explaining why I am here. "The Nature Conservancy is a national organization committed to preserving natural diversity by finding and protecting areas that contain the best samples of all components of the natural world.... "Forests, wetlands, prairies, mountains, and islands-refuges for threatened wildlife and rare plants, places of special beauty remain untouched and protected because The Conservancy and its members cared and acted quickly." I am quoting from their brochure.

A branch of The Conservancy is centered in Tucson. Its Arizona Heritage Program, sparked by my new friend and sponsor Bill Roe, is a cooperative effort with the state government "to identify imperiled habitat and natural systems before these resources are lost."

I have volunteered to live on this ranch, protecting it, finding out what birds are resident in winter, what birds come through and when, in spring migration. I was looking at a handful of Arizona Highways and travel folders when I involved myself in this.

Here, I found it, the letter. Undated, probably September: "If you know of a cabin in a canyon where an old crone is needed to count hummingbirds and tanagers outside the window I might easily be tempted. I can think of a dozen reasons why not, but then I have never been a reasonable woman. I'm not as young as in 1945 when I first visited Arizona, and I am not a real ornithologist, just a pseudo, with probably only two or three more years to dig out useful data. So this is only a dream, but thank you for suggesting it...."

December Thirteenth The cabin was tidy, with lamp, matches, two tin plates, a mug, a skillet, mouse tracks wiped off all the surfaces. I tried operating by candlelight but found it onerous.... It was dark by 5:30. There are two lonely cats that try to come in the door every time I open it. And a flock of PEACOCKS, for Pete's sake...! One had to find out what things were not necessary, what things one really needed. A little music and liquor, still less food, a warm and beautiful but not too big roof of one's own, a channel for one's creative energies and love, the sun and the moon.

-T. H. White, The Goshawk

What am I doing up here, isolated on this mountain with no neighbors, no telephone or CB, not even electricity? No one dropping in for coffee or beer and a chat? Mail not arriving sometimes for two weeks?

December Fourteenth The story or legend-of my cabin (twenty by sixteen feet) is that the original homesteader was a Texas cowboy on the lam. He rode into this high canyon, fell in love with it (or found safety in its remoteness), worked on the new road reaching down to Sasabe to afford building materials, trekked them up by mulecart. He prospered.... It is said he served roast peacock. Hmmmmm. At any rate, he was the one who brought in those damned birds....

PEACOCKS OF BABOQUIVARI

December Fifteenth With the surge of interest in our planet since Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 and Earth Day in 1970, an increasing number of young people are making specialized studies in various aspects of ecology.... Anything an amateur can add to this information is useful. Each year Audubon publishes, in American Birds, a Blue List of threatened species. Pick your own kind the list grows longer annually. The imported house finches, which now outnumber the imported house sparrows in some areas, have pushed out our native purple martins. The imported starling, an economic pest roosting by the hundred thousands on the buildings in our Nation's Capitol and elsewhere, drives out our native hole-nesters-woodpeckers, nuthatches, bluebirds, titmice. Banding carried on in the same locations gives data on the rise and fall over years of species, of range expansion and contraction. When I became a backyard bander I didn't know anything except to use care, and to learn the feel and structure and differences of the feathered fellow creatures I was studying. (I'm not sure I know much more now.) Using a special tool I open the individually numbered bands of designated sizes issued to me by our government, and close them, with a special tool, on birds' legs. So that if-IF-my victims are recovered dead or alive, their age, origin of banding, and migration paths are known. The percentage is very small. A bander in Tucson, Charles Cochran, has had only four of some 12,000 migrant white-crowned sparrows reported.... My birds have been reported from Surinam to Ontario each one a piece of information in the jigsaw puzzle-IF the finder reports date, locality, and band number to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Washington, D.C. (zip not necessary).... The bands are made of an alloy, their weight is miniscule. People are always asking me about this weight, worrying. Does your wristwatch interfere with your balance and mobility?

December Eighteenth Tucked down, relaxed, and happy in my nest of blankets, I dream of Brad and his father, whom I also loved. The Indian gods are not the only ones watching over me from above. Slept again and woke to hard and ominous dripping. Mostly outside.... But there are puddles in the bathroom and on my suitcases up under the roof. The cabin stands sturdily against heavy gusts of wind.... To Windmill Ford to admire the elements. Creek a roaring torrent, the road full of brooks to jump. Horse Bars Creek is a more challenging jump, but I do it. Was a broad jumper at Vassar College....

28/Arizona Highways Magazine December Twenty-first Afternoon: I catch my first Arizona bird, a Pyrrhuloxia. Pronounce it any way you want....I say locksia, out here they say locksha. By either one it is a finch, cousin to the cardinals, in the family of Fringillidae....

December Twenty-second Washed hair, pants, and self-Christmas is coming. I did a little banding, juncos and kinglets, a chipping sparrow. Also a sparrow that isn't in the guidebooks. (I have four.) An immature. It looks like a Cassin's, but no Cassin's should be here, not in this season....

December Twenty-fifth I celebrate the actual day of Christmas.... Midmorning: I pack a sandwich and start on a Christmas Explore.... I wear my red jacket and beret so the mountain lions will know it is Christmas. I need to see if the creek has abated enough at the first ford for me to cross it on foot. If so, I will proceed to the second ford and judge my chances of driving my car across it. If so, then I can bring my car up to the windmill and pack my supplies in only one mile instead of two. Hurrah...!

Other times, other places, at Christmas twilight it would be eggnog or champagne in a crush of partying friends.... But I am content. That past has been blocked off by many gray and lonely years. I have built a new life, useful, with new friends. And if I do not recognize the woman I have become, if sometimes I yearn desperately for those former days, it does not really matter. Santa Claus still has found me; the gods of Baboquivari have me in their hands. I light my lamp and select a book....

January Fifteenth The age of a bird can often, but not always, be determined by the degree of ossification of its skull. Proper ornithologists term this "pneumatization"-an ugly word on the tongue. However correct. A bird has a double skull. As a chick matures, the thin columns of bone ossifying between the two layers can be seen with a strong magnifying glass. They look like dots of salt.... Skulling a bird takes delicate handling and patience. I wet the crown feathers to expose the skin. Afterward, on cold days, I breathe warmly on these feathers to dry them before I release the birds. So they won't get pneumonia. Obviously they don't; there are banded juncos all over the place, usually right back in the net. It is On separating the crown feathers that I find ticks and parasites....

January Twentieth. Letter to Anne and Vic Rose "...Yesterday I had to close my nets because it was hailing. This is the desert? Lower Sonoran...? The trees on Baboquivari are snowcovered. There is a skim of ice on the old pots and pans Rancher's Wife scatters everywhere for the peacocks to drink from. I can't net birds in this weather. They need every bit of their energy to stay alive, not to be pestered for scientific purposes. Even on a normal day, if it is chilly, a feathered scrap like a kinglet or a verdin will collapse in my hand, or cling to my warm fingers when I release it. I have a remedy for this. I tuck the bird down my front, where it just fits in that cozy, sweatered hollow. Warmed and revived it will scratch and scratch, demanding to get out.

February Twentieth The third warm, sunny day.... I caught a roadrunner! Sauntering up Sparrow Hill after lunch, no rush (I'd had no birds all day), I saw a sparrow struggling in a net. Caught birds usually lie quiet. Then I saw there were two sparrows, agitated, and no wonder! Between them was a great, ungainly creature that up to now I have glimpsed only once or twice, skittering across the road. I didn't know how to handle it. Roadrunners have long, powerful bills for eating snakes and lizards; big feet, long talons. A heron with its long bill will strike for your eyes, is dangerous. The sharp talons of hawks must be controlled with great care; they can cripple a hand. Gingerly disentangling this problem I found it a flaccid critter that rolled its eyes as if to say: "Who, me? Going for those sparrows for lunch? Not at all, I was just passing by...."

February Twenty-first A small owl in a net has me enormously excited. Owls are always exciting, and difficult to get out, sharp claws making hamburger of my hands, bills snapping....

February Twenty-fourth Afternoon: You can't protect wildlife... without preserving its habitats. Nowadays this involves you with oil spills and energy; polluted air and rivers; mining for shale oil and phosphate and coal and uranium; protection of wetlands and forests and beaches and Alaska and tropical forests, not to mention fertile land on which to grow our food; the effect on the air we breathe of huge industrial complexes some(CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP) Gila woodpecker (Centurus uropygialis); canyon wren (Catherpes mexicanus); author rescues a white-crowned sparrow (Zonotrichia leucophyrs) caught in a mist net. Arizona's bird life is as diversified as the state. Over 400 feathered species find a favored altitude, climate, or food supply within its borders.

PEACOCKS OF BABOQUIVARI

Other times next door, sometimes many hundreds or thousands of miles away; the effect of the chemicals we broadcast so lavishly for agriculture (10,000 robins estimated dead in one potato field outside Homestead, Florida; millions of breeding birds killed in one year in New Brunswick, Canada, from the use of pesticides that after many years have not yet controlled the spruce budworm). Ultimately this all comes down to the prime cause of man's problems-lack of population control. A big field to cover....

March Second

Drowsy in the half dark of 6:30 Α.Μ. I am aware of a silence, an odd quality of air that goes back into childhood winters. I can't identify it. Turning my head, I am astonished to see a white world. Deep snow lies on the tropical bamboo and agaves, on the stone wall, on the roofs of ramshackle chicken coop and dog houses and other abandonments of past living. On vines and mesquite branches as far as I can see-SNOW! I can't see far, only to the nearest hill. Beyond everything is blotted out to the peak by a creamy white sky, down canyon by a sullen purple. A thin sifting of flakes is still falling. March is coming in like a lion. The Papago gods are showing off....

March Third. The Birth of our Firstborn

I commemorate the above in this Sun Belt state...by breaking ice in the peacocks' water pans, and by photographing Baboquivari in snowy splendor. I throw birdseed with a lavish hand for my fellow creatures, at the end of their winter's endurance.

I have listened to too many women in second marriages envy me my independence. There are worse things than loneliness. Widows haven't many options, not at my age. Contentment is not the same as happiness, but it is a very solid state. When the sun is shining and I am handling a new bird I consider I am the luckiest widow in the world. I set my glass down. Back to work.

March Twelfth

I took a chilled, bewildered, black-chinned hummingbird out of a net and held it in my lap for twenty minutes before breakfast, feeding it sugar syrup....

Cuddled in my warm hand my patient revives. Its slender tubular tongue absorbs the caloried liquid first from my thumb, then from a bottle I hold to its bill. Its heartbeat becomes stronger. It exercises its wings tentatively, clinging to my finger perch with tiny, razor-sharp claws. It is a male. The purple stripe below his black throat flashes as he turns his head in the sun, drinks more deeply, looks all about for possible enemies, then zooms off. What enemies can hummingbirds have? Spider webs can entangle them, they have been found snared in cholla cactus. They weigh less than a dime-2.4 grams for this black-chinned, to be exact....

March Thirteenth

"Scut work." Spring housecleaning, which I did this morning with energy and pleasure, is scut work. Washing dishes, watering the flowers that a wing-loud hum-mingbird comes to, chopping a net lane. Driving Brad to work all those yearshow I wish that scut work still existed! Driving children to school and dentists and music lessons, serving punch and cookies at basketball games and graduations, years and years of this chauffeuring, what was that but scut work? Someone has to gas the car, write the checks, answer the phone, run meetings, shovel snow, plant pansies, spread manure, do the mending. It is attitude, not labor, that makes scut work. It's what you build with-people, a home, research.... What a glorious life it gave me! Here I am now, in the warm Ari-zona sun under an incredibly blue sky lis-tening to a cow munch, the remnant creek murmur, a light breeze in the oak leaves above me, a bird tentatively proclaiming spring nearby. I'm mending, which is scut work, but I surely don't feel downtrodden...!

March Fifteenth

Out again before light.... The canyon wrens are early up, hunting in the brush piles and stone wall, singing. Verbena is blooming in a sheet all down the hill where the water tank overflows, and a wide-faced flower, an oenothera. There are deer tracks between them....

March Seventeenth. St. Patrick's Day, when there will be a great, traffic-clogging parade in Boston

This is also the date that visually night and day are equally divided, although the true solstice is not for four more days. Atmospheric refraction makes the Sun appear to be rising and setting over the horizon when actually it isn't. In Florida I could verify this observation, looking out over tomato flatlands; here the ridges block my vision....

I sit at the window coddling a foot I ran a barrell cactus spine into, going out bare-foot before breakfast to fill a feeder an Anna's hummingbird was buzzing at.... Down valley the ocotillo is greening. By the outhouse the bridal white of the apri-cot tree had a curtain of bees around it for days. Then the curtain moved to a tree in the laundry yard that is sprouting leaves and blossoms. An ash? Winter at last is over.

cot tree had a curtain of bees around it for days. Then the curtain moved to a tree in the laundry yard that is sprouting leaves and blossoms. An ash? Winter at last is over.

Only at the moment it is hailing.

March Twenty-second

To celebrate spring I open another net in Sycamore Canyon, having seen a thrush and a towhee foraging in the leaves on the far side of its creekbed. This is also full of rocks, but if I can take a bird it will be worth picking my way across. So what do I take? A thrush and a towhee.

The stream edge opens out at this sheltered, sunny curve into a miniature floodplain, sandy. I needn't watch my every step. A hawk screams and flies off behind trees. Then, suddenly, coasting down from the peak at tree-top level, inspecting my labors, I see an eagle! Its head shines pure white. A BALD EAGLE! They are not supposed to be here! Am I getting at last a rare bird, an incredible record? I run into the open, the bird so low I don't need binoculars. As it passes over-head the light shifts, that white shining head normalizes into the brown of the golden eagle before I have raced back to the ranch and rushed to Tucson to report A Marvelous Discovery.... The experienced birder's motto is "Always Take a Second Look." Oh pshaw. (Every day I get more experienced....)That familiar carol in the yard has to be a robin, and it is...declaring the long winter is over.

March Thirty-first April Seventh

Morning: I find a poor-will in my net at dawn. The Hopi Indians named the species Holchko, the Sleeper. Once thought to be only a folk tale, in 1946 Dr. E. C. Jaeger found a poor-will torpid in a cave in southern California and proved that the bird actually does hibernate. The bird returned to the same spot for four winters, and remained inactive for up to eightyeight days. Its body temperature dropped to thirty percent below normal. What a lot we don't know about our cohabitors...!

Evening: I have read that starlight falls to earth in measurable, if miniscule quantities-one ten-thousandth of an ounce to a square mile a minute. Is it absorbed, I wondered as I climbed last night, by the Earth like sunlight? Does it accumulate like snow so that this glimmer on the hill I climb, that sheen on the Rhyolite Cliffs, is a dusting of starlight on the world? How many questions fill my days

BOOKSHELF

Inquiries about any of these titles should be directed to the book publisher, not Arizona Highways.

Robert McCoy's Rio Grande Press, formerly of Chicago, and for some years at P.O. Box 33, Glorieta, NM 87535, is one of the premier reprint publishers in the United States. However, these are reprints with a difference. In addition to reproduction of the original text (most are classics in anthropology), each volume contains added material: a very personal publisher's preface, an introduction by a specialist in the field; often a new index and/or photographs and attractive endpapers; and invariably an eye-catching, sometimes dazzling hardcover. Among Rio Grande's latest reasonably priced reprints are the followingBy John G. Bourke. 1983. Pages 443-603. $20.00.

THE MEDICINE-MEN OF THE APACHE.

Originally a part of the Ninth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (1887-1888), this paper by the scholarly U.S. Army captain describes medicine men among the Western Apache and Chiricahua Apache and some aspects of Navajo religion, then compares Apache material culture with that of several other civiliza-tions. A new introduction, an index, and literature citations by Alan Ferg of the Arizona State Museum, Tucson, are valu-able additions.

BASKETRY OF THE PAPAGO AND PIMA INDIANS.

By Mary Lois Kissell. 1982. Pages 115-264. $12.00.

Ann Marshall, curator of collections at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, has supplied the introduction for Kissell's early (1916) work published as Volume XVII, Part IV of the Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History. Although there have been vast changes in the craft, much of the text and certainly all of the fine historical photographs of various facets of Papago and Pima basketry still pertain today.

HOPI KATCINAS DRAWN BY NATIVE ARTISTS.

By Jesse Walter Fewkes. 1982. 190 pages $20.00.

Pioneer archeologist Fewkes' popular study of Hopi katcinas, illustrated with the first Hopi paintings ever collected, appeared as the Twenty-First Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (1899-1900). The present edition contains an informative introduction by Erin Younger, curator of art at the Heard Museum in Phoenix.

INDIANS OF THE SOUTHWEST. By Pliny Earle Goddard. 1981 (second print-ing). 191 pages. $17.50.

Goddard's brief study of Southwestern Indians was one of the first (1913). This enlarged-format edition has a scholarly introduction to Goddard and his work by University of Arizona ethnologist Dr. Ber-nard Fontana and a bibliography of pertinent publications, including Goddard's prolific writings. The photos and text are as relevant today as when the volume was first published.

TREE RINGS AND TELESCOPES: THE SCIENTIFIC CAREER OF A. E. DOUGLASS. By George E. Webb. University of Arizona Press, Sunnyside Bldg., 250 East Valencia Road., Tucson, AZ 85706. 1983. 242 pages. $19.50, hardcover.

Few careers span seven decades of incredibly productive research, writing, and teaching as did that of Andrew Ellicott Douglass. Neither do they usually affect so profoundly several major scientific disciplines, nor influence so many individuals. Douglass' work in astronomy made both Flagstaff and Tucson noted for astronomical research. His appointment to the faculty of the University of Arizona in 1906 signaled that institution's march toward an international reputation in the fields of astronomy and tree ring dating, or dendro-chronology. As a teacher, Douglass inspired many capable students to expand upon his work and go on to brilliant careers in astronomy, archeology, dendrochronology, climatology, and related fields. The impact of this scholar's activities upon Tucson, Arizona, and beyond is almost immeasurable. Included in Dr. Webb's significant publication are photos of Douglass and his work, an index, selected readings, and a wealth of notes. Far from being a dull recital of events, this biography of one of the Southwest's leading scientists leaves one pondering how one researcher-professor-administrator could pack so many activities into one lifetime.

THE NAVAJO NATION. By Peter Iverson. Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881. 1981. 273 pages. $25.00, hardcover.

Dr. Iverson's study of the Navajo begins where most others leave off. Primarily, he discusses political, economic, educational, and social developments from the 1920s through the 1970s. Major issues such as livestock reduction, the impact of World War II, health care, tribal government, and legal affairs are discussed in detail. The author is well qualified by virtue of early contact with and residence on the Navajo Reservation and intensive study. His introduction, notes, bibliography, and index are excellent. However, we regret the absence of photographs of Navajo lead-ers and of important places and events which would have provided an added perspective. Nonetheless, this timely survey is of great value to all who are interested in the Navajo Nation.

VANISHING ROADSIDE AMERICA. By Warren H. Anderson. University of Arizona Press, Sunnyside Building, 250 East Valencia Road, Tucson, AZ 85706. 1981. 144 pages. $14.95, softcover.

For the most part they are gone now, those bright, animated signs of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Across the Southwest and beyond they have beckoned us day and night to rest at motels and hotels, to eat at diners and cafes, to have cars serviced here and gas pumped there. Fortunately, University of Arizona art professor Anderson has captured faithfully this segment of American business history and nostalgia, not only in prismatic pencil drawings, but also in extensive captions that humorously outline the history of each of his colorful renderings. Together, text and drawings portray the individual-istic, spirited character of an all-but-vanished portion of American roadside art.

YOURS SINCERELY

I write this while deployed to the Mediterranean Sea in USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69), where we have been flying missions in support of the U.S. Marines.

I have been an Arizona Highways subscriber since leaving the state in 1969 and have received hundreds of wonderful issues, but this one is the one I will treasure always for the special place the Verde Valley has in my heart, and your loving treatment of it. Like Alfredo Gutierrez, I hope one day to return to stay.

Thank you for your dedication to excellence.

Hi! Every time my copy of Arizona Highways arrives, and I've gone through it from "kiver to kiver," I'm ready to jump in my car and take off for Arizona! Tho at 83 that may be a bit ambitious. However, I did survive a three-day ride down the Colorado River at age 71 with flying colors, and I still drive wherever and whenever the spirit moves me, including Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C.

Until I received your January issue on the endangered monarch, I had failed to realize how fortunate we were to provide lodging in our birch tree for thousands of these winged jewels.

Because of your informative article, I now have a new appreciation for these priceless beauties.

...the January issue is perfectly beautiful! The reproduction of the black and white photos, as well as the color cover are up to Arizona Highways always high standards. On behalf of the Campaign Committee for the Center for Creative Photography's Building Fund Drive, I'd like to express our appreciation to you and to Publisher Hugh Harelson for your support of the Center's efforts and for the magnificent coverage which you afforded it in the January issue.

The letters to the Editor in the January issue sound like a shoot-out at the OK Corral! (All about the use of space art in the September issue.) If this affair-of-the-arts comes to a face to face confrontation, reserve two seats for me!

I prefer more articles on the history of the West instead of all your "creative photography."

Your January '84 really took off on the wings of the New Year-butterflies and all. Beautiful.

What a giant step you have taken with the January and February issues! I am delighted!

A picture magazine is fine, but Arizona has so much more, and you are beginning to tell it so much better. I also like the "Arizoniques." If I were down there I'd do my best to go to Yuma to see the quilts.

"Night wanes-the vapours 'round the mountains curl'd, Melt into morn, and light awakes the world." Lord Byron wrote this passage long before my time. But, perhaps he saw a place in Arizona, U.S.A., when he wrote such beautiful words. It is 6 a.m. here in Georgia, and yet here, with my coffee and Arizona Highways, I am in that Arizona Valley watching morning light the world.

I think there is an error in the caption on page 22 of the February '84 issue. The telescope is a 16-inch, not a 16-foot. The "16" refers to the diameter of the primary mirror in inches.

C. L. Sonnichsen in his interesting account of the Arizona Historical Society says: "At public ceremonials such as Cinco de Mayo (Mexican Independence Day)...." That is not and never has been Mexican Independence Day. Please be so good as to correct this.

Thank you for the fantastic January issue! Every issue has something for everyone and for a butterfly lover this is an absolute delight!

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS

Text continued from page 31 and nights, each time I step outside the door! The natural world did not impinge upon the classrooms of the girls' school I attended. I was exposed to reading and arithmetic and not enough history instead of learning the answers I now need. And when young Harvard men took me canoe-ing on the quiet reaches of the Charles River at night, education in the creatures and sounds and stirrings in the trees was not what they had in mind....

April Twelfth Out by six, organizing my nets. There was wind in the night, they are caught on mesquite buds. BUDS, not twigs! After four months, BUDS! I am grateful. An oriole sings matins. I catch a three-gram female hummingbird that can be one of three species.... Measure, measure, measure....

April Twenty-fourth ...I realized without surprise that I have abandoned wondering Why Am I Here? I have abandoned my hope of listing new birds for the area, of sending down reports to excite my sponsors, of making some small reputation in ornithology for myself. My sponsors seem satisfied to have me doing what little I am. Perhaps I have earned this peaceful end to my life. (I doubt this.) If I died tomorrow I would die content....

Undated ...I like words. Day after day, no one to talk to but myself, string words together as I run the nets. Using as subjects the flowers that have come into bloom along my paths, wind in the new mesquite leaves, the horses thumping the ground as they canter off, the cattle grouped, staring, by a fence. Shifting a word here and there; adding, subtracting, until their sounds and shapes satisfy me. When you are alone your interior landscape is as important as the exterior, so I also build stories in my head about what I think and feel-all discarded when finally I find a bird in a net.... I leave paragraphs in the air behind me as I do footprints in the sands of the creek. Like the footprints, a few of them may last and get written down in the evenings-a form of doodling to occupy me once I have recorded the day's meager scientific data, while the lamp hisses and the mice rustle....

May Day In the noon sun, I stand in the yard gazing at Baboquivari, at the clefts and fissures, the shifting colors that soften its harsh majesty. It is my familiar. There for how long? And it will be there for millions of years after I am gone. While it affects my moods, often hourly, it is not aware of me. I am reminded of what Hal Borland wrote in Countryman; A Summary of Belief.

Fundamentally, man is a minor creature on the face of the earth...bigger than a fox but smaller than a cow...vastly outnumbered by the mice, by the grasshopers, by the birds.... My footsteps will mark a path across the land, proof of my presence here: but ten minutes after I am gone the grass will grow again where I walked, and the rain will smooth the sand where I knelt to plant or drink.... The fox and the hawk, the maple tree, and the briar will have no recollection of my ever having lived.... Tranced in the heat and light, I stand imprinting the mountain on my eyes. If I could have had this experience when I was twenty...if I could have learned to handle myself as I have had to here, to find my values, to discover the rocks, metaphorical as well as real, that would slide under me, as against the ones set solidly. I was a scaredy-cat, knowing barely enough to change a lightbulb, leaning on my father, on Brad. What would my life have been like? I would have had a strength, a stronger discipline for the children I spoiled. Life would have been easier, surely, for Brad....

Baboquivari says nothing. Hot sun pours on its granite face and on me equally; on the silken green curve of the big agaves; on the blue of jays, on the emerald tail of Peacock Primero come to see why I am so still.

Long ago I asked you asked-WHAT AM I DOING HERE? I still don't know. It doesn't matter. Do we need excuses for being? The happiness welling through me is a gift from the high gods, a strength to carry me to whatever is the end of my days. No clock ticks. No one waits for me. In the utter silence of noon only the sun moves.

May Third Probably I should stay on another week in the hope of getting further species, but least tern are flying north from South America, I have commitments in the east. I pack papers in cartons, write overdue letters, try to remove those stains I inherited in the bathtub and sink....

May Fifth Only light stuff is put into my car so I will have no trouble bouncing over that "improved road." My escorts slam their van doors and wait. For a long, quiet moment I look. Through the sparkling air that limns everyledge and cleft of Baboquivari I look up to this backdrop of my long winter, this guardian of my days and nights. I send my gratitude to the unseen spirits who have watched over me, to whatever force created this immense, brooding, gold and green weathered peak. The moment is not long enough.

Impatient horns blow. From a bed of ivy a peacock lifts its head to see why. Reluctantly I get into my car. Reluctantly, with blurred vision, I maneuver the washouts of that mountain road for the last time. "Who can stand in the presence of a mountain," Hal Borland wrote, "and remain unchanged...?"

TO KEEP IT OFFICIAL

Mist nets...were used to catch the birds. Three traps were baited daily. The need for frequently checking the nets precluded their being set more than a half-mile distant....

Total net hours for the period number 7555. Individuals handled were 449, of seventy species. Another twenty-five were observed.... A Selaspborus female taken February twentieth was a state record.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service bands were placed on all but hummingbirds under federal permit #7081, Arizona permit #063. Birds were weighed, measured, examined for parasites, molt, and plumage. They were aged and sexed as possible from information provided by the Bird Banding Laboratory of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Some behavior was noted.

Additional Reading

The Birds of Arizona, by Alan Phillips, Joe Marshall, and Gale Monson, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1964.

Birds of North America, by Chandler S. Robbins, Bertel Brum, and Herbert S. Zim, Golden Press, New York, 1966.

The Audubon Illustrated Handbook of American Birds, by Olin Sewall Pettingill, Jr., McGraw-Hill, New York, 1968.