What’s really wild

A little over four and a half years ago my family moved from Payson City in Utah County to a new home at the desert’s edge in San Juan County, Utah.   Living on the Colorado Plateau has been something of a dream come true. Besides reintroducing me to a more natural (for me) environment, living here helps me cope with the pressures of caring for a high maintenance, special needs child.   Even on days when I can’t leave the yard I can walk out on the rickety second-story porch and see the trunk of a rainbow standing only a few hundred feet away or  take in  the silky ripple of cloud shadow and sunshine across the pinyon-juniper forest stretching miles to the south.   Thunderstorms in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and southeast Utah ring and electrify our kiva-roof sky.   At night, a very good view of the Milky Way’s spiraling embrace and the ceaseless anthesis and waning of moonlight keep imagination astir nearly until the moment I fall asleep.

Advertisement

WIZ’s spring photo gallery

Wilderness Interface Zone  is happy to announce  the arrival of  its spring photo gallery, now  showing in the photo box in the upper right-hand corner of the page  displayed on your screen.   It’s a little late, I know, but flowers,  tree leaves, migratory birds, and torpid amphibians and reptiles have only emerged  in  abundance here in San  Juan County,  Utah over the last three weeks.   I did include some photos from the winter gallery I couldn’t bear to part with.  

My son Saul took these pictures using a Kodak DX6490.   He shot somewhere around four hundred photographs, from which we chose these seventeen.   Many spring flowers haven’t yet bloomed.   Hopefully, we’ll be able to get nice shots of can’t-be-missed subjects  to add  to this collection.

Dances with hummingbirds

Our homemade hummingbird feeders attach at approximately waist level to the two-by-four railing that runs around our second story porch.   This puts the hummers down with us when they stop by for refreshers between bouts of very small game hunting.   Once they arrive mid-April or so, we wind into the lives of these brilliant dynamos to the point of familiarity.   That is, we share the porch space freely, with the hummers chasing past our heads or otherwise threading their paths through ours. It becomes something of a dance, we humans walking along the porch or in the garden, the hummingbirds dipping, weaving, zipping around us.   Except for unusually marked birds, like one albinous male black-chinned that drops by, I can’t identify individuals.   Some of them, however, have no trouble recognizing me.