January 19, 2023
The Roadrunner Ride
It’s cold out this morning, just a few degrees above freezing. The temperature dropped significantly after the rains passed, and now Tucson is on the front end of a cold snap that looks like it will cover the next week at least. There’s even a hard freeze warning, with the expected low Monday of 28.
And since we leave Tucson in ten days, one consequence of this is that it looks like our traditional climb of Mount Lemmon is off the agenda for this year. It’s pretty cold down here, but it’s really cold at the top. We’re disappointed to be taking a pass on a fifteen mile, 5,000’ climb, but it can’t be helped. If it’s only 40F when we get to the top, we’ll be solid blocks of ice by the time we coast back down. If we had wanted to do this ride we should have looked for a day as soon as we arrived but we were saving the ride in case Susan wanted to attempt the climb herself.
So blame Susan, not us. We were up for the climb this year, if the weather hadn’t gotten in the way.
So we take our time getting out the door, trying to keep warm and waiting for the day to warm up. While we wait we fill the hours with our current project, the Italian Job. We’d intended to leave much of the last two months unbooked, but we’ve reconsidered when we were making bookings for the final week of the tour and we’re surprised at how much difficulty we had. We decided we’ll be safer by booking the whole tour again, and just make sure everything is cancellable.
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The plan for today is the familiar ride out the northeast corner of the Loop - up Mountain Avenue, east along the Rillito Wash (today, actually the Rillito River), and then southeast to Harrison Wash. We’re going this direction because it looks like we should be able to complete the ride without being shorted by flooded roads or underpasses. I’m viewing it as just a ride, a chance to see the river before it runs dry again and to test out my health with a longer ride than yesterday. I’m not certain how far I’ll get personally, but I’m certain it will be less than Rachael because I’m going to take still it easy on myself.
And I’m not really thinking birds and wildlife. I’m running low on new birds I can reasonably hope to see here without changing habitats, and this is one of the busiest and most popular parts of the loop so any unusual wildlife sightings are less likely.
I’m wrong though. We come to the end of Mountain Avenue and have only been on the loop for less than a quarter of a mile when we have the encounter that brands the day for us. Roadrunners! And not just one or two, but an entire family of them, running helter skelter across the path and back into the underbrush, repeatedly. We join four or five other astonished spectators as the show goes on for nearly a minute. We can’t even count them. The consensus opinion is four, but when I check the video later I’m pretty sure there are at least five and maybe six - one or two of the parents, and four youngsters.
I didn’t really take the video just to photo them though, and it was a complete surprise that I captured them as well as I did. The purpose of the video was to capture the sound, because I’ve never heard roadrunners vocalizing. There’s a strange chatter taking place between them as they scurry around, a sound I haven’t heard before. Roadrunner have several different calls, but the one you can pick up here if you listen carefully is a rapid rattling sound like castanets, made by them snapping their mandibles together. It seems like an alarm or distress sound to help them communicate with each other or warn of danger.
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So the Roadrunner Ride it is. And it really proves to be fitting because we’ll keep seeing roadrunners all along the washes today - so many that we lose count, but our best guess is twelve. But we could also have called it the Hummingbird Ride because I keep seeing hummingbirds too - five or six of them, all standing still alone at the top of a tree. I see the first one almost immediately after leaving the first roadrunners, and I can hardly believe how close he lets me get before finally flying off.
I’m pretty sure it must be the cold, and they’re sitting still soaking up the rays and trying to conserve heat. It leaves me concerned for them, hoping we don’t have a hummingbird die-off on the coldest of the nights ahead.
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How lucky to be able to see the wings like this.
Makes my morning!
Thanks. 🙂
1 year ago
1 year ago
The weather is definitely bringing out more birds, and the sightings have their desired effect - they force me to take my time and stop often, an appropriate program for a recovering sickie. Still, I put in 39 miles which nearly counts as a full ride. By the end of the day I’ll be a little congested and occasionally coughing, but it’s not bad. I’m clearly on the mend.
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As I said earlier, I’m not really hoping for any new birds today. I’ve got a short list in mind though that I’m keeping an eye out for, including a few hawks. I’m hopeful when I look up and see a white hawk drawing large circles in the sky high above. It’s frustrating - I can see him briefly and try to focus on him, but then he disappears into the sun only to reappear a few seconds later. I watch him circle through a half dozen loops before finally drifting off.
I do take exactly one shot, but I’m not sure he’s even in the frame. I’m excited though to pull it up afterwards and find that not only is he in the frame, but is in focus well enough that I should be able to identify him. A large, whitish hawk with a barred black tail. I’m confident this is a new bird, but later I’ll realize it’s another Cooper’s hawk. I’ve never seen one from below, flying high above like this. I didn’t know they even did this until I found a video just like this. So, very neat but not new.
I just make it out to Sellarole Road, the short connector between the Pantano and Harrison washes, before Rachael approaches it on her way home. I’m glad I made it out to Sellarole, because the ranch-like habitat is different here and I’ve made some unusual sightings here in the past. And in fact I see a large hawk on a snag off in the distance that I’m zooming in on just as I see Rachael approach. I turn away to take a shot of her, hoping the hawk won’t fly off behind my back in the meantime.
I have to go to the bathroom, so I tell Rachael I need to slip off into the mesquite and creosote for a minute. So does she, and she asks me to hurry - and then calls out twice for me to hurry back and watch the bikes while she has her turn at watering the desert. I don’t though - the hawk is still there and I keep getting drawn closer, hoping for a definitive shot. I’m risking the Wrath of Rocky again, but can’t help myself. Fortunately it’s worth the debt I’m piling up, and over dinner we agree that it was worth the time when we admire the shot I was lucky enough to come home with.
Ride stats today: 45 miles, 1.100’; for the tour:1,089 miles, 38,600’
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2023 Bird List
48. Harris’s hawk
Today's ride: 45 miles (72 km)
Total: 1,089 miles (1,753 km)
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R
1 year ago
I've had many a bush stop myself, but you were only .8 miles away from Michael Perry Park, where there is a bathroom. I'm getting pretty good at the not so obvious bathrooms. Another one that you might like is by the ball fields at Christopher Columbus Park, on the Santa Cruz.
1 year ago
1 year ago
You two must be getting wired! It’s not long until you leave for Morocco.
1 year ago
1 year ago
1 year ago
1 year ago
I arrived in Tucson on Jan.1 after a leisurely 2 week ride from Anza Borrego. I'd been to Tucson several times before but always at the end of a tour and just for a day or two. This time I was staying for longer and made extensive use of your Winterlude Tucson journals for ride ideas and previews. What a resource!
The fifth was going to be sunny and warm and I started out from my campsite in south Santa Cruz for Catalina Road and the Lemmon ride. I recalled from a journal that you started from a Safeway on Tanque Verde Rd. So I planned on getting some food and water there and as I riding in there was a black SUV with bike racks parked in an out of the way area like they were going to be gone for awhile. And then as I got closer I saw it had Oregon plates! I was stoked!, there was going to be a Team Anderson sighting and hopefully meeting on the road!
Well needless to say I was left wondering how I could have missed you and not until a couple days later when I got back to town and Internet service and another lesson in the folly of coincidences.
Anyway, I'm back home in San Diego now and want to express a heartfelt appreciation for your wonderful journals. They touch people in ways you don't imagine.
( And only afterwords did I see that Ravn is a VW and the SUV I saw was a Ford.)
Jack
1 year ago
And thanks for the generous feedback. It’s always uplifting to hear from someone new out there.
1 year ago
We are thinking this will work out to meet up there. Also,
our email is racpat_rtw@yahoo.com
1 year ago