Bayou Birding

Sky Island Woman Visits Her Mom In the Deep South

My Mom Birding With Me In The Bayou In Back Of Her House

“Let’s drag it.  It’s a canoe after all and made to take some rough conditions.”  My Mom and I were slowly waking up after staying up late to visit and catch up on each others' lives.  We were on her porch drinking tea and watching the birds feeding and singing in the crisp fall morning air.  Her house sits on a bayou that flows into the Gulf of Mexico.  It’s a pretty nice scene watching the birds coming and going from the lush cyprus trees lining the banks.  My Mom says, “Lets get closer to the birds” and points to a canoe next to the boathouse.  The two of us finally manuever the “heavier than it looks” canoe into the water.  For me, canoeing is a new twist on birding and a great way to forge strong memories with my Mom.      

Pileated Woodpecker In A Cypruss Tree

Stealth Is A Good Thing While Birding

              

As we glide along the water we silently approach a Great Blue Heron making like a statue.  Then it comes to me;  Birding is a walking-, hiking-, biking or even canoe-based sport that gets you out into nature where the birds are.  And sometimes "getting there" can be a great workout as well as fun and rewarding.
                        
A great thing about birding is that you don't have to travel to far-off oe exotic birding places such as Ecuador or Brazil.  Birding is an accessible sport you can do with limited equipment anywhere.  On a bayou, on a hiking trail or even your back yard.  Knowing all the bird names, their habitats, and other facts are not a requirement for birding fun (or I would be in trouble), but getting outdoors is.   Walk, run, or ride your bike to a nearby open space – preferably near a water source even if a backyard fountain or golf course pond.  Be sure to take your binoculars ( a MUST), enjoy the fresh air--and keep your eyes and ears open for activity. When you locate a bird perching overhead or bathing in a bird bath, stop and watch it.  Voila, you are now enjoying the fastest growing sport in America! 

Sky Island Woman Proving She Can Adapt to the Bayou 

As with any hobby, the more time spent on it, the more involved you become. My passion for being outdoors and hiking is what led me to birding.  Now my birding takes me to new hiking trails. and as of now I can add canoeing as a birding platform.  It's a thrill to spot and actually be able to identify a bird. Especially the less common varieties.  Plus I enjoy seeing new places, getting outside, and slowing down enough to REALLY SEE what is going on around me.  . 

So if you are ever out on the trails or on your bike or even canoeing, grab your binoculars, field guide and carry a little notebook to write down your spottings.  Better yet, ask a loved one to join you.  Even if you can’t identify the birds yet,  you’ll make some beautiful memories. 

Knee Deep In Oaxacan Chili



Mounds of Oaxacan Fried "Virgin" Grasshoppers 

What better way to get into the soul of a place then through native food, like the fried grasshoppers pictured here? If you like Mexican food, Oaxaca, the city of 7 moles(mo-lays), is your town. The markets are wonderful, especially for those brave enough to try new things. 

Did I mention the chilis?

Nora Valencia - Fabulous Oaxacan Chef 

Chilis chilis and more chilis.  Chilis for breakfast lunch and dinner.  Maybe its even possible for dessert.   Chilis fresh and dry in endless sizes, aromas and shapes — smoky, red, black, yellow, big, tiny and all levels of both mild, and very kaboom level hot!  Sacks and sacks of chilis that smell delicious in a way you can really experience in a Oaxacan market stall.   

Here I am at our B&B stepping out for my morning yoga fix.  Let me tell you it is challenging to have a "moving meditation" amid the intoxicating aromas wafting from the "hood".  Scents of fresh coffee beans and cacao mixed with cinnamon, sugar and almonds spilling out of the kitchen as the ladies spent an hour preparing mouthwatering traditional Oaxacan food for breakfast such as the stuffed pepper you see here.  This ain't cornflakes!!

Stuffed Smoky Pasilla Chili

Oaxaca's native foods such as chocolate, squash blossoms, chilies, and even fried grasshoppers, date to pre-Hispanic times. Oaxacans mixed these foods with ingredients brought by Spaniards-such as raisins, cinnamon, and almonds to create their own cuisine. Our friends Joyce and Eloy had arranged a day-long cooking class with a well known local chef, Nora Valencia. Mexican markets took on a new meaning with a Oaxacan culinary expert as our guide.  Nora, showed us how to distinguish a deep red, smoky scented pasilla chili from a handful of look alikes. We sniffed and tasted our way through the mercado, but the smiling and friendly women at the market stalls must have been used to cooking school students because they gave us samples and made time for our little group.

Los Caballero Chefs Don, Glen and Eloy

 Our cooking class had the feel of cooking dinner with friends-except that creating a four course meal involving over 31 ingredients which included stuffing and cooking four different types of chilis is hard work. Nora gently directed us and worked alongside. The stuffed chili dish was one of the most complicated dishes I had ever seen, much less made. I will try it at home but we may need a reunion to pull it off! All the chopping and grinding and blending and hours of effort produced a four course feast we enjoyed about 3pm. The complex flavors require a lot of work and I hope I have the fortitude to try it on my own.

Our Food Network Press Photo - Oaxacan Six  - Glen is Behind the Lens

Our feast was missing at least one Oaxacan snack: chapulines (grasshoppers). The saying goes, those who eat chapuline will return to Oaxaca, but I'll be back anyway.

Our B&B in Oaxaca - STAY THERE!! http://estanciadevalencia.com/

Our cooking class - Nora is fabulous!!! http://www.almademitierra.net/index.html

Dia de los Muertos in Oaxaca



Her name is La Catrina - mistress of Dia de los Muertos in Oaxaca, Mexico

 You should be here!!!! In Oaxaca for the Day of the Dead celebration.  Day of the Dead, the Mexican holiday that some mistake as half Halloween and half Mardi Gras, has deep spiritual roots going back at least 3,000 years, to the Aztecs and beyond. The frankness about death in a festival that combines feasting and dancing with graveyard vigils jolted me before I understood the point -- remembering and celebrating loved ones.  It actually provides solace and a way to celebrate the memories and lives of loved ones.  I recommend it for anyone who has ever lost someone, which is to say everyone.

Bread fo the Dead for Family Altars

  

It's been going on for days....all the families building altars to their beloved dead relatives in front of their homes or in their courtyards.  Some create intricate sand paintings on the sidewalks and streets that take days to design and assemble.  Everyone makes traditional foods such as sweet bread, tamales wrapped in banana leaves and the special favorites of the deceased go onto the altar along with their photos.  Tonight is a very special night.  The families carry favorite foods out to the cemeteries, light candles on the graves and celebrate the lives of the their departed. More to come after that lively and late night event!!

Marigolds and Cockscomb For  Personal Altars and Decorations

The markets and roadsides are filled with people selling marigolds and cockscomb. These are the most important flowers for people's altars, called  ofrendas. The orange flowers are everywhere and probably the basis for the orange theme of Halloween. 

The REAL celebrations begin tonite!! More photos and details after the cemetery visits and feasting events on 1 & 2 November. 

Sky Island Woman Paddles With Dolphins In Mexico

 

 

Dolphin Bay Residents

 I come to my feet….gingerly, carefully, my toes digging into the pretend surfboard wobbling beneath me in deep water.  I’m up.  I take a big breath and  resign myself to the fact that if the waves kick up I may end up much closer to the dolphins than I originally intended.  I have just launched and paddled out on my haunches from a white sand beach in the Sea of Cortez, off Mexico's mainland coast five hours south of Arizona.  I've never been paddle boarding before, but did grow up in the midwest watching Gidget and Annette Funicello having a great time on surfboards.  Do I get constructive credit for that?  It sure looked easy when Gidget did it! I can't honestly say that surfing or paddle boarding was ever high on my personal "list",  but as a middle aged woman, I've come to believe in seizing the opportunity for adventure whenever and wherever I can.  Use it or lose it is my Mom's mantra and she is almost always right! 

Paddle boarding is a cool and obtainable sport.  It allows mere mortals such as myself to experience pseudo-surfing.  You get a nice long paddle for balance and the board itself is engineered to be a stable platform for you to stand up and paddle yourself out to sea with the real marine life.  A kind of lone and meditative sport where you can sing your heart out while scanning the water for fish or like today, try to catch up with a school of feeding dolphins.    But even if these slippery, smiling dolphins are too fast for me today I can try try try again.  Because we are staying at Bahia Delphin (Dolphin Bay) and true to their habits they patrol the waters near shore every morning and evening waiting to scoop up the little sardinos as they spill out of the nearby estuary with the twice daily tides.     

My husband Glen and I are four outdoor aficionados doing as much as we can to “use it” and not lose it.  Is paddle boarding my new sport?  Will I buy one and tote it to the lakes up at our cabin and buy Hang Ten shorts and generally become a really cool surfer person?  I think not.  But it does play to my strengths; yoga is handy for balance, hiking dandy for leg strength, and tennis…. Well, tennis helps feed the competitive rat that gnaws away my personal fears and allows me to go a bit outside my comfort zone from time to time.  Like chasing dolphins on a paddleboard in the Sea of Cortez!!

   


Sunset On the Beach

 

Five hours - seems like a world away

What the #$*! Is a Sky Island?

  ''different islands to a considerable extent are inhabited by a different set of beings.''

                                                                          Darwin        (and Sky Island Woman)

map courtesy of Sky Island Alliance

First I say I am a Sky Island Woman and then I forget to explain the Sky Island part!

I am going to go way out on a limb here.  That’s right folks, read on and you will see how a liberal arts major explains a complex and scientific topic.  I know that my nature smart friends are cringing right now – but let me try. 

First off, see the map above of the Rockies pretty much extending down to the Sierra Madres in Mexico.  Lots of really high bumps there right?  Well, when you get down to the Southern Arizona part it is pretty flat.  Well those bumps in the middle of all the flat are called Sky Islands. 

The folks who actually know what they are talking about say that some 15,000 years ago, real forests stretched from the Rockies down into the Mexican Sierra Madres. Treasures of a different sort such as wolves, black bears, grizzlies and jaguars as well as squirrels, birds, reptiles and insects moved along a lush, wooded corridor. Or so we imagine it. The same for tree and plant species – they spread the entire length courtesy of the wind and animal poop.  But when that cooler era ended, temperatures rose, rainfall dropped, and the place pretty much started to look like a desert.  In some places, high mountain desert.  Wildlife that needed water, (and who doesn’t!)  and cooler temperatures, like squirrels and frogs, soon found themselves marooned at higher elevations, like our local Ramsey Canyon.  Those thousands of years of isolation of the cooler and wetter high ground is what we now call “Sky Islands”.   

Here comes the part where I arm wrestle with the Galapagos Islands.  The “Sky Islands” here in Southern Arizona are just as special, if not more so in some ways (I’m going out on a limb here!), than the Galapagos.  Because while all the islands in the Galapagos at least share the same climate, here in Southern Arizona,  we are more unique.  In “our” sky island chain, every thousand feet up that you climb takes you into a climate that's more like one some 500 miles north -- a few degrees cooler and with a few inches more rain. So as I hike through the Huachuca Mountains,  I am at alligator juniper at 4,000 ft, oak at 5,000 and Rocky Mountain ponderosa pine forest at 6,000. In some of the higher islands, like the Huachucas, Pinalenos and Chiricahuas, the forests above 7,000 feet resemble those of the Pacific Northwest with aspen and some Douglas firs.  In some sky islands you could stand on the top of a mountain amid a stand of aspens and with a strong enough telescope see out to the saguaro cactus type desert below.  Try THAT in the Galapagos.

Sky Islands are near-paradise for nature lovers like Sky Island Woman.  Birders go nuts, and it is a retirement mecca for nature smart people. Over 275 species of birds, some of them REALLY beautiful and rare like the Elegant Trogon which looks like it escaped from an Aztec headdress.  I could cite other remarkable statistics but your eyes might glaze over.  Scientists say that these Sky Islands are right behind Costa Rica in biodiversity.  And not all those mammals are the little desert shrew variety.  Which are vital to the cause but frankly, don’t bring me much wildlife viewing pleasure.  In our mountains you can still hike or bird and have a chance to see mountain lions, black bears (small but quick), ring-tails, bobcats, coatimundis, mule deer and a cute little white-tailed deer called the Coues' deer. And the very rare spotting, by a lucky few, of the occasional jaguar and ocelot venturing in from Mexico.

Plus there are 60 species found nowhere else on the earth.  “Rare to the max” I like to say which doesn’t sound as scary as "Endangered".  Even isolated from similar species on other sky islands.  Just like in the Galapagos!  But closer and no passport required.  

So if you want to live in temperate weather surrounded by an incredible variety of wildlife, insects and nature, you can’t do much better than the Sky Islands of Arizona.   Where the rare is commonplace.   And where Sky Iskland Woman lives!

WELCOME TO MY WORLD!!

Hey there!! I'm Julie Bradley, also known as Sky Island Woman.  I'm a middle child who grew up in  the Midwest mostly, doing 60's type things such as....riding a bicycle built for two to school with my brother on the back, playing basketball, watching I Love Lucy and getting my wits scared out of me reading something as benign as the Hound of the Baskervilles.  Nothing in my upbringing, education or background prepared me for my 20 year career as an Army officer or my  "retirement"  adventure of sailing around the world with my husband.  Which started as a three year sailing plan and ended eight years later as we waved goodbye to the ocean life and headed for the high country of Arizona. 

I think I'm going to like blogging!!  I love writing about what pops into my head.  Writing makes me approach every experience with eyes wide open so I can see what is "special" in everything . A nice habit.  Even the everyday stuff.  Maybe I'll become closer to my friends and family through this blog.  Isn't sharing your life with friends and family you love what life, at its core, is all about?
Thank you for allowing me to share!  Julie