September 30 -- A Rare Bird, And Desert Willow Gets "Attacked"

Waiting for the sun to peek over the Peloncillos --

I check throughout the day to see if the Big Bend Patchnose snake (which I have named "Patch", at least for the time being), so I checked just after sunup -- and he wasn't in his "burrow". I read that Patchnose snakes, unlike many others, are active in the day and dormant at night, so he's probably gallivanting around.. :o) After breakfast I put the trash bags in the back of Tundra Dos (this being "trash day" here) but head down to Willow Tank first; there's a rare-for-the-area Scissor-tailed Flycatcher there. On the way, on Stateline Road, I see 2 fairly well-known street signs -- 

I don't see any around, and never have. Earthquakes? Bad land management, which creates sinkholes? Who knows. I get to Willow Tank, which has been called the most important pond on the eastern flank of the Chiricahuas -- and the Scissor-tailed is right where it's usually been reported to be, on top of a small tree on the west side. There's a local photographer watching the bird, too, and we engage in conversation once the bird has flown further to the west, which happened after after 10 minutes of viewing. And we never saw it again despite waiting for about an hour. (But it was reported later in the day.) But I got some good shots of it, with the morning sun at our backs --

I was using the 100-400 f/5.6 lens as my 500 f/4 is in the Canon repair shop, and I have the 1.4x teleconverter on order from Amazon. The other fellow was using a 600mm lens with a TC also, so his photos must have been phenomenal. There were many Western Kingbirds at the pond, along with a Lazuli Bunting --

After spending over an hour there and realizing that the bird wasn't coming back anytime soon, I left to drop off the trash bags and on the way back up Portal Road I saw this Swanson's Hawk on an electrical pole --

As it turned out, it was a pretty good morning for the birds...The rest of the day was spent pretty much beating the heat; it eventually got to be over 90 degrees outside. As Faranuf is an all-electric house, I'm trying to conserve energy and lower my electricity bills by various means, such as shutting the doors of rooms I don't use and closing the floor vents to each -- and now I'm trying to live without using the heat pump, which is also so air conditioning system. I turn on the ceiling fans which have 2 settings -- the blades go counter-clockwise for air to go down and create cooling, and clockwise for warmer air. So I turned the ones on in the living room, bedroom and an adjoining room that I don't use, and the indoor temperature stays at a fairly comfortable level until around 4pm, when it gets to about 85 inside. Then I turn on the heat pump and a/c to bring the indoor temp back down to 78 -- but I didn't use it for most of the day, so saved SOME money; before I would keep it on all day and night (and I'm also turning it off at night). There has been no trace of "Patch" during the day, and there's been a definite decrease in hummingbird numbers; migration is winding down. There is a drip irrigation system in the back yard, with a control box, and I try to get it to work. There's no instruction manual -- really unusual in that the original owner kept every bit of paper that had to do anything with Faranuf -- so I go online to see if I can figure out how it works. I do -- first, put in 2 "AA" batteries... doh! So I do, set the timer, wait for the water to start flowing -- and nothing. I look at the control box and see that the wires connecting the box to the lines have been cut; apparently the system wasn't very successful after the owner had installed it (he had been trying to grown shade trees, from the looks of it). Oh well, everything else at Faranuf works...and having drip irrigation wasn't a necessity anyway. I then look at the Desert Willow to see how it's faring in this warm weather-- and see that there are small "grasshoppers" eating its leaves. Shoot!  I knock them off, but of course they keep coming right back. I actually see them EATING the leaves; here's a photo --

What to do? Pesticides? I can't of course just keep knocking them off. But it seems like I have a dilemma on my hands...I turn on the a/c, the temperature cools down both inside and outside, and I end the evening watching Cave Creek Canyon go dark. There have been some challenges today, and some of them were solvable, but hey, being a homeower, you realize that not everything can be perfect...