Autumn Musings

Once again, drifts of autumn leaves shift with the winds in South Fork, in the Chiricahua Mountains. Madrone berries are peaking, and pulling in feasting birds. Above, the sky is frisky with mares' tails, foretelling an impending storm. All this richness!

Autumn along the South Fork Road (Photos by Narca)

And one friend who fully appreciated wild richness, no longer is here to do so. Farewell to Rich Stallcup, who showed me my first Montezuma Quail right here in the Chiricahuas, more than three decades ago.

Montezuma Quail (Acrylic painting by Narca)

Mexican Jay, tossing leaves

The only industrious creatures this afternoon are the jays, proving by their behavior that we've overlooked some subtle relation between them and the leaftossers of Central America... a musing that returns to Rich, who often connected ideas in an original manner. He told Peter Warshall, "They've put vultures and storks in the same family. Seems like a birder's great melding of bringing babies and recycling the dead."

The main idea that stayed with me from reading One Hundred Years of Solitude was Márquez's notion that the key to living well in old age is to reach an "honorable pact with solitude". We also face the challenge of reaching some peaceable accommodation with the loss of friends––with losing all of those whose going leaves an empty place against the sky.

Mexican Jay, a portrait

Autumn Comes

What builds, what informs our sense of a place?

Fresh from yesterday's late-season rain, South Fork in the Chiricahua Mountains is entering autumn. Today I hike up the road, now inhabited by winter birds: the chittering small flocks of Chipping Sparrows, kinglets and titmice. The woodpeckers and sapsuckers are hammering industriously.

A Red-naped Sapsucker is back in his favorite winter tree.

(Photos by Narca)

A Mexican Jay hopes that a picnic is in his future.

A mob of Mexican Jays shadows me, swooping silently through the streamside cypress trees. Across the creek, a large mammal shuffles unseen uphill. Bear? A clumsy deer?

Arizona Sycamore (Platanus wrightii)

Sycamore leaves are rusting into a glorious orange against the deep blue Arizona sky, then dropping quietly into the creek.

The Lemonadeberry (Rhus trilobata) shades into coral and vermilion.

Silverleaf Oak (Quercus hypoleucoides)

A Silverleaf Oak's new leaves are red, too, but they still have a life of greening and photosynthesizing before they fall.

A late-blooming Red Columbine (Aquilegia triternata)

It is mid-day and the butterflies throng to the late-season flowers. Most are Variegated Fritillaries, but they are joined by a few blues, sulphurs, Arizona Sisters, ladies, Red-spotted Purples, one giant Two-tailed Swallowtail, and one of my favorites––a Red-bordered Satyr. Backlit in the sun, the oranges of the fritillaries and the sisters burn brilliantly in a visual echo of the autumn sycamore leaves.

An Arizona Sister (Adelpha eulalia) pauses on a sunlit cypress.

A Variegated Fritillary (Euptoieta claudia) nectars on an autumn composite.

All these details––all these particulars––tie us to the canyon, with its lichen-coated rhyolitic cliffs. These specific encounters create and deepen our felt sense of this place, in this particular time of its own long life. Autumn comes, after the big fire, after the healing rains. And here we are. Rugged Chiricahua hoodoos. Gallery forest of sycamore and cypress, sheltering life, winding between the high cliffs.

Winter Walk in South Fork

The beauty of the South Fork of Cave Creek Canyon never fails to enchant those who stray into it. Most know it in spring when neotropical migrants pour through the canyon corridors, or in summer, when the croaks of Elegant Trogons echo off the burnt orange cliffs, overlain with lime-green lichens.

Arizona Sycamores in South Fork (Photo by Narca)

Now it's winter, and peacefulness lies as deep as the drifts of sycamore leaves.

I often hike up the South Fork road with friends, usually Peg or Rose Ann, but some days when the call of the canyon is especially strong, I go alone, quietly. That's when a Black Bear is more likely to amble across the dirt road, oblivious to a hiker. That's when I'm more likely to tune into the small flocks of confiding Yellow-eyed Juncos that forage unobtrusively at the road's edge.

Today sparkles, after last night's mix of rain and light snow. The luminous cliffs glow intensely orange against the skyblue. Flocks of ubiquitous Mexican Jays probe into crevices and under leaves. An Arizona Woodpecker taps softly in the oaks.

The cliffs of South Fork (Photo by Narca)

Today a troop of Coatis cavorts in the creek bed and noses through the drifts of fallen, rusty-gold leaves. Females and young gather in troops like this one. The males (like this big guy who visited our house last month) are solitary. In Costa Rica, people used to think that there were two species of Coatimundi––those that lived in groups, and those who were solitary, the "Lonely Coati."

A lone male Coati (Photo by Narca)

When our own quiet matches the forest's quiet, we find its life.