I was in Fern Canyon this afternoon, a short stretch of Wentworth Canyon that’s moist enough along one part of the south wall to support a few feet of Adiantum fern. The story is that the place was wetter once and the ferns covered the canyon wall. It’s drier now. But it’s still shady, so I sat in the sand to rest after the short steep climb.

I lazed, looked at the map, gauged the merits of possible routes, came to no particular conclusion.

Fern Canyon is a small palm grove. A few of the palms standing there are dead; killed by some historic fire or other. Most of the palm groves in the Indian Canyons seem ready for fire: a thick carpet of dead fronds spreads from tree to tree. Four, five feet thick in places. Tinder. A tossed cigarette could spark a bonfire. The palms don’t mind the occasional fire: the dead fronds attached to the trunks harbor spider mites and other plant parasites. A small fire is cleansing. But a big one? Evidence of the effect of large fires stood not far away: a charred twenty-foot stub of a palm.

I drank some water and noted a low humming sound. Bees. I’d passed a hive dug into the side of the trail a quarter mile back, scooted on past as deftly as I possibly could. I like bees but this far south the chances of their being those famously irritable ones increases. Bees kill people around here, from time to time. So I am more cautious here than I would be in Oakland.

The bee sound got a bit louder.

The whole goddamn desert is coming into bloom, and so I looked around as much as I could without actually moving to see if some shrub was being especially attractive. There are some plants, chuparosa being the one I’ve noticed down here, that can be identified long before you see them: they sound like enthusiastic bees. I didn’t see any chuparosa. It’s starting to be slightly past its peak bloom around here anyway. I settled back in.

The buzzing got louder, and then louder again. I wondered briefly whether there might be a flash flood of bees tearing toward me as I sat there in the canyon bottom. It got louder still. I decided I’d best stand all the way up and investigate, and then I saw them. They were directly overhead, about fifteen feet up, coming out of a four-inch hole in the dead palm stub’s trunk. There were hundreds of them, and they were far more agitated than seemed normal for bees at the hive, and so suddenly I was a hundred feet up the canyon looking back at them, breathing hard.

They didn’t follow me. Maybe the air just got warmer as I sat there. Maybe I left before they reached consensus. I didn’t know.

I didn’t know what the hummingbird-sized bird was next to me, either. It sat in a creosote, singing sweetly: three descending notes answered in like fashion by a colleague on the other side of the bee tree. It was not obviously marked, a pale buff color with some things on the back of its head that could either have been markings or shadows. I still haven’t puzzled it out. I’ll take binoculars next time. As I was standing there listening, the bird flinched over its shoulder at two far-off shadows in the sky. A pair of hawks, it turned out, looking at that distance like red tails but then again what doesn’t, and they landed together on a pinnacle a mile north of us.

Or I should say one landed, and then the other settled down in on top of her. The male trod his lover’s back, fluttering wings, and a short series of guttural cries filtered through the hazy heat, and then he lifted off again, promising to call. She stood and watched him soar away on the thermal.