Downshifting Amid Butterflies

While DocRoc was off up the mountain to do Shakespeare with a bunch of brainy teenagers of different ages, I headed south to Anza Borrego to meet up with a friend from Boston and do some botanizing.

This friend is my best birding buddy, and we’re definitely out of our element looking at things that don’t fly off at the slightest provocation. Before I got to the visitor center she had found a black-tailed gnatcatcher; I pulled the car in under the nest of an incubating Costa’s hummingbird. But we were there to look at flowers, so we armed ourselves with lists, maps, directions, and a bag of Fritos.

North of Borrego Springs was a carpet of yellow stretching all the way up the canyon. This was desert sunflowers, primarily, interspersed with magenta sand verbena and white evening primroses. There were thousands and THOUSANDS of butterflies: painted ladies, they were called, and they were wafting through the morning while the huge caterpillars of some striped moth methodically chomped through primrose petals.

We headed south on our way to ocotillos and Yaqui Wells, but stopped as the colors shifted abruptly from yellow to white. What you do is you get out of the car and see the white flower (desert chicory, in this case). Then next to it you notice another large plant with a white flower which you hadn’t seen from the car (Fremont’s pincushion), but below that is one you couldn’t possibly have seen from the road, and underneath that is a diminutive white five-pointed flower (4mm diameter) I couldn’t find in any of the materials we had and will have to look it up in Jepson, scary though that prospect is.

It’s like Russian dolls. This just isn’t what happens when you bird.

We found our ocotillos. We also found blooming barrel cactus, blooming smoketree, blooming millions of DYA’s (damn yellow asters). And Lawrence’s goldfinches, singing, on territory, busily getting on with spring before summer hits and everything dies out.

I’ll post photos of some of these when I get back to Davis…