Ghost Sign: Pay-Less Market, Buckeye, Arizona.
Ghost sign: Harvey’s Place, Buckeye, Arizona.
Ghost sign: Harvey’s Place, Buckeye, Arizona.
Winter roses, at Sahauro Ranch, Glendale, Arizona.
Winter roses, at Sahauro Ranch, Glendale, Arizona.
Resident rooster.
Some of you may have noticed that the fatchance dateline has changed. A few months ago I made a cross-town move, from Tempe to Glendale, Arizona. If you have visited the Phoenix area you know that its vast sprawl has created countless pocket communities. The surrounding older agricultural towns like Glendale have been absorbed into the urban mass, but there are neighborhoods, sometimes whole blocks, where a more rural vibe persists. On the first morning after we moved into the house in Glendale we were enthusiastically greeted (four a.m.!) by the neighborhood rooster, and he has continued to do so every day since. This is no hipster rooster, but an authentic barrio rooster, whose proud ancestors first crowed here in the early 1930′s when a WPA project laid out the community’s first paved streets and sidewalks and the first homes were built.
The rooster in the photograph above is not my neighbor bird, but a denizen of the Glendale library. The library is built on a remnant parcel of the old Sahauro Ranch – the first large-scale farm established here during the territorial era, after irrigation made citrus cultivation practicable. The descendants of Sahuaro Ranch chickens and peacocks and guineafowl now freely roam the library grounds.
Resident rooster.
Some of you may have noticed that the fatchance dateline has changed. A few months ago I made a cross-town move, from Tempe to Glendale, Arizona. If you have visited the Phoenix area you know that its vast sprawl has created countless pocket communities. The surrounding older agricultural towns like Glendale have been absorbed into the urban mass, but there are neighborhoods, sometimes whole blocks, where a more rural vibe persists. On the first morning after we moved into the house in Glendale we were enthusiastically greeted (four a.m.!) by the neighborhood rooster, and he has continued to do so every day since. This is no hipster rooster, but an authentic barrio rooster, whose proud ancestors first crowed here in the early 1930′s when a WPA project laid out the community’s first paved streets and sidewalks and the first homes were built.
The rooster in the photograph above is not my neighbor bird, but a denizen of the Glendale library. The library is built on a remnant parcel of the old Sahauro Ranch – the first large-scale farm established here during the territorial era, after irrigation made citrus cultivation practicable. The descendants of Sahuaro Ranch chickens and peacocks and guineafowl now freely roam the library grounds.
Katydid, perched on a totem pole cactus, at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum in Tuscon, Arizona.
Based on location and population distributions alone I think this is a Mexican bush katydid (Scudderia mexicana). I did not collect it, and could not examine its nether regions, so I can’t exclude the fork-tailed bush katydid, S. furcata. Why are the Orthoptera so complicated?
Katydid, perched on a totem pole cactus, at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum in Tuscon, Arizona.
Based on location and population distributions alone I think this is a Mexican bush katydid (Scudderia mexicana). I did not collect it, and could not examine its nether regions, so I can’t exclude the fork-tailed bush katydid, S. furcata. Why are the Orthoptera so complicated?
Quince.
Dithyramb 