A couple of weeks ago, I took Shadow for a hike in the Huachuca Mountains, down near the Mexico border, see some fall color. It was a gorgeous fall day, warm and sunny with a light breeze. And the colors did not disappoint, with the maples and sycamores putting on a dazzling display of yellows, reds, and umbers. This is not an eastern deciduous forest, mind you, it’s Arizona and we have to take what we can get.
Most of the color in the Huachucas is limited to the canyon bottoms. The hillsides are covered with a mix of oak and pine that has most of it’s origins in Mexico. The oaks are evergreen and keep their leaves on through the winter, only dropping them during the dry pre-summer. At the highest elevations, which retain some of the Rocky Mountain vegetation left over from the ice age, only the Gambel’s oak drops its leaves in the fall, adding some color among the Ponderosa pines and Douglas-fir.
We hiked up a couple of side canyons. I set up my recorder not far from a hidden spring, and left it while Shadow and I took a walk around. The recorder was set under an Arizona madrone tree, which had ripe berries. I knew these were popular among the bears and coatis, but I didn’t realize how popular they were among the birds until I played back the recording.
One of the reasons the mountains of southeast Arizona support such a high diversity of birds and mammals is not only their proximity to the Sierra Madre and the subtropics beyond, but also the relatively mild climate and almost year-round availability of food, in the form of fruits and bugs. Although it snows during the winter, snowfalls are usually light and it seldom stays below freezing during the day so the snow quickly melts. The toughest time, for both plants and animals, is the dry pre-summer (which is what it’s called here, everyone else just calls it Spring). The streams and springs dry up, the vegetation dies back, and everything goes into a holding pattern until the summer monsoons arrive.
But now it’s almost winter. The winter residents are settling in and fattening up before the first snows. I love this time of year: the light changes, the breeze becomes brisk, and everything seems new and dynamic.
What is your favorite sound of Autumn?
Recording notes: Recorded with a Sony PCM-M10 with Audio-Technica AT2022 mic with Felmicamps SK3.5 pre-amp. Recording subject to amplification and noise reduction.