After an unusually cool winter, it is finally getting warm and it is just about time for us to leave. It is hard to believe that in only a week or so we start back on our way home. The weather has certainly changed and we have had at least two weeks of days in the high 70s to low 80s and the forecast is the same for the foreseeable future. I have taken the insulation off our water tap since most nights have stayed above freezing.
This past week we spent more time than usual with the quail at the quail facility, two and a half days. On Monday (Presidents Day) we did the daily general care by ourselves. It is one of Paula's weekly days off and usually one of the staff biologists does the general care, but it was a holiday as well and both Ann and Dan were away. We volunteered. The general care is not very difficult as we did not have to inspect the birds for injuries, something we are not trained to do. We just have to make sure each shelf of birds has food, clean up any feathers and food from the floors and flush the water system.
This was all pretty straightforward until Ellen found a dead quail in one of the chick room cages. For us this was a first. We might have expected it in the older adult room, where many of the birds are pretty close to their expected lifespan, but the chicks are less than a year old. It does happen, however, and we had been briefed on what to do: remove the bird (yes, it was quite dead, not sleeping), record its location and band number, put it in a plastic bag and then into the bird freezer (they are kept in case further investigation is required).
After that surprise, it was back to feeding birds. It is a little more work for the chicks than the adults since we have to reach into the cages to remove, clean, refill and chick feeders. These are small covered dishes that are filled with mixture of adult and chick food. This is in addition to the feed trays along the edges of the shelves that we can top up with adult food from the outside.
The chicks are nearly full grown now and the chick feeders are just supplementary at this point. Their behavior is changing as well. When we first started at the quail facility, the chicks were quite jumpy and we had to be very calm and slow working around the brooders or the birds would panic. Now the males follow us up and down the sides as we work on the shelves, showing off, puffing themselves up and acting like tough guys. The females are a lot calmer and most move to the far end of the shelf, but a few come up and watch what we are doing.
One side effect of this new behavior is that they sometimes will not leave the area when you are trying to get the chick feeder out. Ellen had a tough time with one shelf of males, one of which was bold enough to peck her hand when she tried to retrieve the dish. The other action they take is to sometimes make a break and get out of the cage. We had no escapees this week, although one managed to get itself trapped between my arm and the spring-loaded door I was reaching through.
After the chick room, the adults seemed almost too calm, so they were easy to care for. The last room, the young birds who were still quarantined recovering from a cold, was also fairly easy, although we still had to climb into Tyvek coveralls and plastic booties to enter that room. They seem to have all recovered, but Paula hasn't gotten the word from the vet to stop with the extra precautions. Since these are also this year's birds, we had to do chick feeders here as well, but there are fewer birds per shelf and we had no escape attempts here. Once we finished at the quail facility, we had to stop at the flight pens back at the refuge to check the outdoor birds. Lots and lots of quail but we were finished by mid-afternoon.
We spent Tuesday and Wednesday with our friends, Bob and Nancy. They had driven from Huntington Beach, CA, to Tucson to visit with us and with Bob's good friend, also named Bob, who we had seen earlier in our stay. On Tuesday we drove Speedy into Tucson to meet them at Bob's house and do a bit of city touring (museum-ing for the most part). After a stop at Bob's house to pat the dog and the turtle, we had a driving tour of the university area with Bob, Bob and Nancy, then Ellen and I piled into Bob and Nancy's new (to them) 2009 VW Eos convertible (with the top down) and drove back to the University of Arizona to look into a couple of museums.
We started with the Center of Creative Photography which was showing a retrospective exhibition of their collection over the last 40 years. It started as you walk in to see Paul Strand's portrait of Alfred Stieglitz and Alfred Stieglitz's portrait of Paul Strand and it went on from there. Photos from virtually all eras, notes and correspondence. One memorable exhibit was a drawer containing a series of items about Ansel Adams' photograph "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico". It contained articles about how the photo came about, the original negative, a contact print, a drawing giving the printing directions (what parts to burn in, what parts to under expose, etc.) and alternate prints. On the wall was the finished well-known print, a far cry from the contact print.
After viewing the exhibition, we went off for lunch at the Frog and Firkin, a pub-style eatery that Bob was familiar with. He actually was more familiar with an identically named pub in England. It was a pretty good lunch and a nice day to sit outside and watch the parade of students and snowbirds.
The rest of the afternoon was spent at the Arizona State Museum. The focus of the museum collection is Southwestern Anthropology, mostly with the pre-hispanic cultures. They have several permanent galleries, but the first exhibit we visited was quite unusual for this museum, it was centered around a copy of Shakespeare's 1623 First Folio. The copy of the folio on exhibit was from the Folger Shakespeare Library, one of 82 collected by Henry Clay Folger and one of the 233 known to still exist (the latest was found in France in 2014). The exhibit is in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death and is traveling to all 50 states and Puerto Rico this year. There are several simultaneous exhibitions, each with its own copy of the book.
We also visited the two ongoing exhibits, The Pottery Project and Paths of Life: American Indians of the Southwest and Northern Mexico. The Pottery Project is an exhibit of just a fraction of the museum's 20,000 piece collection of southwestern pottery. The collection has examples of all forms of pottery from about 50 CE to the present and the exhibit has a wall of pots that traces the lineage from about 400 to the 2000s. It also has examples of pottery from the major pueblos and modern artworks from Native American artists on display. The exhibit hall also overlooks the vault containing most of the collection (unfortunately off-limits to visitors) and the very modern conservation laboratory.
The Paths of Life exhibition is quite extensive and rather information dense as it explores southwestern native cultures from their prehistory to the present. We were dragging by that time and I didn't get as much out of it as was there. It would probably take several days of visits to absorb it all.
Ellen and I headed back to the refuge after that, eschewing an opportunity to go out to dinner, because it is a long drive back and it was getting late.
On Wednesday, Bob and Nancy came out to the refuge to visit us. When we talked to them before they came to Tucson, they were in the process of finding a new car. They had been looking for a small SUV, which would have been ideal for touring Buenos Aires with all its unpaved roads. We were quite surprised on Tuesday when we saw their shiny, red Eos, a bit too low slung for the dirt.
Not all was lost. We talked to Dan, signed Bob and Nancy up as volunteers and borrowed one of the refuge vehicles. This gave us a chance to show them The Border Fence. After a tour of the Pronghorn Loop (no pronghorns to be seen) to view the gorgeous desert scenery, we headed down to Sasabe and the Mexican Border. The refuge runs up to the border and has roads which parallel it and go right up to it. Up until recently this part of the refuge was closed. It had been closed since the early 2000s when the US closed its borders and migrants were forced to sneak in. A major pathway was through the refuge, a grassland valley that led up to a fairly large city, Tucson.
As the Border Patrol ramped up they also built the fence, about 15 feet high and constructed of six-inch diameter steel pipes set six inches apart. It has been pretty successful in stopping vehicle traffic through the refuge, but migrants still come through (but in much fewer numbers), mostly by going around the ends since it extends across the valley, but not up into the surrounding mountains.
We drove along the roads and right up to the fence. No one else was around, no Border Patrol and not even a cow (we'd passed one on an earlier trip through the area).
After our fence trip, we drove over to Arivaca Cienega to walk the paths and find the birds. We were successful in sighting both a Great Horned Owl and a pair of Long-eared Owls as well as the usual cast of raptors that hang out there.
By late afternoon we headed back to the refuge where Bob and Nancy collected their VW and headed back to Tucson, hopefully in time to avoid traveling in the dark. A good time was had by all.
Thursday was now upon us and it was almost a normal Thursday. We went back to Arivaca to do our weekly hydrology measurements in the morning. We had originally been scheduled to help out the Sierra Club volunteers, who were at the refuge for a week to do fence removal. We were going to drive the UTV which is used to take the coils of barbed wire out of the field and back to the road. You have to be qualified by U.S. Fish and Wildlife to use the UTVs and Ellen and I did the qualification course at Aransas two years ago.
However, the Sierra Club volunteers had been reassigned to work on putting up screening at the quail flight pens in the morning, with the possibility of going back to the fences in the afternoon, so we cut our Arivaca trip short in order to be back early. We also were scheduled to check and feed the quail at the flight pens. The Sierra Club volunteers had much to do at the pens, so we never got out to the fences and spent the afternoon in the visitor center. It was supposed to be an off day for Craig and Evelyn and Chuck and Betty, who usually cover the VC on Thursdays were away, so we filled in.
It was back to the quail facility on Friday, as usual. Aside from the normal general care of the birds, we helped Paula assemble a 4x6 pen in the chick room. The quail that are staying here will be moved to the outdoor flight pens soon, but the quail destined to be sent to Mexico will have to stay indoors in quarantine until they are shipped. To give the them some time out of the brooder cages, they have decided to try building some indoor pens to provide a bit most roaming room. The idea is to put pens on the floor and a provide a layer of pine shavings as a base and let them roam and scratch away.
After finishing up with the chicks and the adults in the other building, we all got into our plastic coveralls to care for the no longer ill (but still called "cootie") birds. We opened the door to the room and filed in. A couple of minutes later, as Ellen was checking food in the brooder nearest that door, a male quail came strutting out from under the brooder. This was a bit of a surprise. He had evidently escaped overnight from his shelf.
After capturing and identifying him, Paula determined that he had come from a brooder across the room from a shelf with a group of males. The shelves have a center section which is covered and has access through a pair of plexiglass doors. We've seen the young males pecking at the doors and moving them. The supposition is that they were jostling about and pushed hard enough to open one of these doors far enough for one bird to escape. There was no harm done, but we'd had the front door to the room open for quite a while as we came in which gave us a bit of pause.
We went back to the quail facility on Saturday to help Paula move quail into the new indoor pen. She had completed the set up and we didn't really have much to do except open the door to the pen as she introduced a bird. As this was an experiment to see if this would work, she choose five birds who would be staying since we didn't want to possibly stress any of the "Mexican" birds.
Most of the birds in the chick room have never been out of their brooder cages and when she put the first four into the pen, they just stood there motionless. She decided to add one of her "friendly" chicks as the last one. There were a few birds who, even when young, were not shy and would hop out of their shelves when they were opened for cleaning and stand around on top of the brooder.
When she added this last one to the pen, it hardly hesitated before walking around and scratching at the shavings. The others woke up and started moving around as well. They all clustered together, though, but acted like quail, scratching through the litter as if they had always been on the ground looking for food. This was a fine conclusion to our week.
Photos
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