Of all the side-blotched lizards I saw on my Sunday hike – and there were hundreds – this was the only fellow that didn’t run out of camera range. He flinched, as they all do, and he did the usual sets of pushups, but then for some reason he didn’t withdraw to the safety of a crevice. I wasn’t advancing on him, to be sure. I’d merely sat about five feet away to drink some water, catch a little oxygen, and let the breeze dry my shirt. He settled in next to me and we watched the city.
I’d been wanting to try a different trail, one which Florian had recommended, but I got too late a start. I decided to go with a quick run up the trail nearest our house. This is rarely a bad choice, though the EMTs were gathered at the trailhead when I got there, helping a heat-stroked and dehydrated hiker down a thousand feet of mountain. It was eighty-five degrees. After the paramedics left, the lizards and I had the trail essentially to ourselves.
My sideblotched friend and I had a good view of Tahquitz Canyon from his rock pedestal. Annette and I were there a week ago, watched an eagle pair launch from an aerie up five hundred feet of cliff. This view wasn’t much different from the one the eagles must have had. I could just about hear the creek tumbling over its bed of cobbles. If not for the noise from town I probably could have. The mountainside I was on faced the door of the Convention Center about a mile away, and the rodeo was in town. Every single whoop and holler that made it to the PA system echoed with preternatural clarity off the rocks. A few minutes after the lizard and I settled in a sweet-voiced young woman took the mike to sing the national anthem. I asked the lizard if we should stand. He didn’t reply. Singing the Star Spangled Banner a capella proved too difficult a task for the woman. She shifted key downward a quarter tone with each two bars, each verse a tonal anticlimax to the preceding. It sounded as though she were a large, very patriotic, slowly leaking balloon.
Swallows had followed me up the cliff. There were almost as many as there were side-blotched lizards. Out hiking again without my binoculars I pulled out my phone, fired up the field guide and sorted through the possibilities. They had bellies of uninterrupted white from chin to tail and what looked like bands of white across their lower backs as if their pants had slid to reveal the cotton briefs beneath. The guide pointed unambiguously toward the violet-green swallow. The birds were singing exuberantly. I played the recorded song in the field guide to confirm the identification, and as soon as the recorded song played about a dozen of the swallows raced toward me to take issue with what I’d said. Perhaps my accent was off. The sudden air assault unnerved my lizard acquaintance, and he dove for cover. After a few minutes, the rodeo providing a country western soundtrack, I moseyed.
Violet-green swallows are common enough throughout the West, but I always associate them with deserts. That may be because the first time I identified one, six years ago or so, it was flitting among the tufa towers at Mono Lake. They live as happily in forests and farm country as deserts. Their scientific name, Tachycineta thalassina, more or less means swift-moving seabird, and you can indeed add the sea to the violet-green’s list of amenable habitats. They seem to do well anywhere they can find insects to eat.
Insects were out in force in the desert. There was an embarrassment of bloom. So many of the local brittlebush were in flower that each large shrub held one or two bees: they’d had to spread out far and wide to reap the harvest. I followed the trail around a rock corner and into a “cove,” a natural amphitheater that blocked the sound from town, and I heard a massive swarm of bees seemingly heading my way. I flinched, but there was no swarm. The cove held a few thousand blooming plants, and each one had a bee or two minding their own beeswax therein, and the hum from each of those dispersed bees was combined by the rock wall acoustics of the cove. It was no swarm but simply the desert going about its business; flowers set bloom, bees sow seeds, swallows make patterns in the air to eat the bees.
It was a slow hike, and not particularly ambitious, and aside from another chance meeting or two;
…it was uneventful. After two hours of poking I got to the famous warning sign:
And I sat for a while longer.
1 comment on "Violet-green swallows"
I guess the word is ‘evocative’.
Hundreds of Uta? And the chuckwalla?
Nice.
Also I loled @ “It sounded as though she were a large, very patriotic, slowly leaking balloon. ”