Magpies

Weather: We went from mornings that were cool with hot afternoons, to nights that didn’t cool and hotter days, to cold mornings again. The little rain we got last night was enough to relieve the stress of plants that couldn’t cope with the heat.

Last useful rain: 6/15. Week’s low: 42 degrees F. Week’s high: 94 degrees F in the shade. Smoke from Mexican fires continues to enter area.

What’s blooming in the area: Dr. Huey rootstock, hybrid roses, yellow potentilla, catalpa, silver lace vine, Japanese honeysuckle, red-tipped yucca, red hot poker, Spanish broom, sweet peas, purple salvia, blue flax, larkspur, snow-in-summer, Jupiter’s beard, golden spur columbine, yellow yarrow, coreopsis

The catalpas have been blooming from the bottom up. The smaller trees and branches nearer the warm ground bloomed first. Toward the end of the week, with warming night temperatures, the taller trees and higher branches started flowering. They have bloomed toward the end of May in the past.

What’s blooming beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, showy milkweed, white tufted evening primrose, tumble mustard, buffalo gourd, bindweed, datura, green leaf five eyes, alfalfa, wild licorice, fleabane, plains paper flowers, strap leaf aster, goat’s beard, native and common dandelions; rice, three awn, and brome grasses

What’s blooming in my yard: Betty Prior, Dorothy Perkins, rugosa and miniature roses, Asiatic lilies, catmints, Johnson’s blue geranium, winecup mallow, smooth, foxglove, coral and purple beardtongues, Maltese cross, California poppy, Dutch clover, coral bells, pink evening primroses, Mexican hats, white yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, anthemis; pansy and Rocket snapdragon that wintered over

Bedding Plants: Wax begonia, nicotiana, sweet alyssum, snap dragons

What’s reviving/coming up: The warm nights encouraged a few seeds to germinate, but so far nothing more than one of a kind came up before the mornings cooled again.

Tasks: I spent more time cutting winterfat and raking excess leaves from under the cottonwood. The rain Saturday evening did not penetrate the leaves and reach the ground under the tree. The ones near the river, before humans, must indeed have gotten their water from the rise in the river when it rained, rather than from the rain directly.

I cut more unripe peaches from the twenty-year-old tree to relieve the stress of so many fruits on the ends of branches. There often were clumps of four to six. As I cut them, I could see the branches lifting.

The hoses that spray started to fail this week with the afternoon heat. That meant trying to make them lie flatter so the water went into the bed and not into the weeds. It also mean experimenting with partially opening valves to see if lower pressures would force more water into the beds. It’s still trial and error with hoses that are questionable, but all that’s available.

Animal sightings: Chickadees, gecko, one sulfur and many cabbage butterflies, bumble and small bees, heard crickets, hornets, mosquitoes, small ants

Weekly update: Thursday and Friday afternoons a flock of magpies descended. The members of the crow family are noisy and leave large droppings. They also do not scare away easily. I felt like the abandoned stage characters who cry "Alas, why me?"

Why now isn’t any easier to answer. This is the southern end of the range of black-billed magpies. They evolved three to four million years ago in the Pliocine, [1] and spread when temperatures cooled in the Ice Age. [2] Today they are associated with riparian parts of cold-weather steppe vegetation. [3]

Pica hudsonia are not migratory, although they may move to lower elevations in winter. [4] They also "may erratically wander" after the young are self-sufficient. [5] In Santa Fé on 9 July 2014, Anne Schmauss said she had heard "more than the usual number of magpie reports right in town in the last week or two" but the owner of Wild Birds Unlimited could provide no explanation. [6]

Thomas Hall said congregations often are found around food sources. In the past that was bison and cattle herds. They fed off the insects in their hide hairs. Today it more likely is road-kill or "ripening fruit and nut orchards." [7]

Cherries have been ripening this past week. However, I don’t think there are any orchards in the immediate area, and the scattered large trees are at least a mile away. The quail got all my ripe ones, and left the unripe and half-eaten on both my sweet and sour trees.

The other possibility is some disturbance in their home range. The only local fire is about five acres in El Rito, which is 55 miles north. It has been burning slowly since started by lightening 7 June. [8]

There might be some construction project somewhere. People continue to move into empty land, especially west of the Río Grande.

The magpies landed in the trees around my house, and in the grasses in the back yard. When I chased them off, they didn’t fly toward the open land of the prairie, but circled looking for another place to roost.

They were most attractive when they were leaving. That’s when one could see the black, white, and blue stripes that turned into Vs when the wings were spread.

Notes on photographs: All taken 16 June 2019.
1. Catalpa (Catalpa speciosa); the low horizontal branch has more flowers than the upper one.

2. Clusters of unripe peaches (Prunus persica).

3. Smooth beardtongue (Penstemon laevigatu) that naturalized.

End notes:
1. Wikipedia. Black-billed Magpie."

2. Gang Song, Ruiying Zhang, Per Alström, Martin Irestedt, Tianlong Cai, Yanhua Qu, Per G. P. Ericson, Jon Fjeldså, and Fumin Lei. "Complete Taxon Sampling of the Avian Genus Pica (Magpies) Reveals Ancient Relictual Populations and Synchronous Late-pleistocene Demographic Expansion Across the Northern Hemisphere." Journal of Avian Biology. February 2018.

3. Charles H. Trost. "Black-billed Magpie." Cornell University website. 1 January 1999.

4. Thomas C. Hall. "Magpies." Prevention and Control of Wildlife Damage. Edited by Scott E. Hygnstrom, Robert M. Timm and Gary E. Larson. Lincoln: Great Plains Agricultural Council. 1994.

5. Wikipedia.

6. Anne Schmauss. "Reports of the Fascinating Magpie Abound in Santa Fe." The [Santa Fé] New Mexican. 9 July 2014.

7. Hall.

8. cnfpio. "Carson National Forest Preparing for Firing Operations on Gurule Fire." New Mexico Fire Information website. 15 June 2019.