What Rodent Emits Low Continual Growl
NIGHT SOUNDS OF THE DESERT
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September 21, 1986
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You go from amazed wondering to tentative naming, aware that, with flashlight in mouth and book in hand, you may be altering the experience even as it unfolds.
What of this rapid put-put-put uttered at well over a hundred times a minute, with a sharp, dynamic intonation? It might be the cactus pygmy owl, which sings all night and most of the day as well, like an overwound cardinal. Can you tell it from the other owls? The spotted screech owl sings four notes all in the same key, faster than you can say ''one-two-three-four,'' and it could be saying the word boot nonstop.
Under that huge and remote, temporarily bloodless sky of the lower Sonoran desert in Arizona, with no horizon to calm you down, burrowing owls make you feel hemmed in as you sit there, emerging from their holes in the ground to make the least owl-like noises on earth: no hooting for them, but an uncanny, aspirated question sung with the same phantom intensity, ending each time with a rising tone. Billy owls some call them. They gossip all night (if you attribute human ways to them, and it's hard not to, groping for comparisons and ways to pin the noises down). All are gone by dawn, whereas the tremulous elf owl, whose pleasing warble-whistle moves up and down two octaves, can sometimes be found by day, cornered by some beast or other, and not so much shamming dead as feigning not to be an owl at all. Tiny, it shoves one wing forward and twists into the semblance of an avian branch or a mutant root.
And it is hard to separate such an image of it from the quaint, bubbling love song it utters for long periods near its nest in a saguaro cactus or a utility pole. When, at night, it swoops through the unsteady light of a low fire to catch the bugs the flames reveal, it comes in silently on wings with soft margins, and its tiny white eyebrows do not show, nor the ever-startled look they give it.
Anything further from the saguaro screech owl, which makes a loud clap with its mandibles, would be hard to imagine. You could spend a lifetime listening to these owls, endlessly pondering and savoring their calls, but all you'd learn is to tell them apart, never quite to learn their repertory in full - the variations on all of their themes.
Night is not all owls, though. Kildee-kildee, the constant squeaky cry of the killdeer, best heard at night, is a long way from the low excited chuckle it makes when swaying from side to side, drooping one wing and wobbling with joy. You can't see that at night, and I wonder if the killdeer does it then. More likely, it flies fast nonstop, rejoicing in the invisibility of air. To this clamorous, maudlin bird, I have to add that lover of the moonlight, the western mockingbird, rehearsing in a whisper a whole gamut of trills, ripples and riffs, plying them against a background of harsh low notes, then doing the imitation faster and faster as it improves, warming to the sham: an insomniac bird for insomniacs, but indefatigable by day as well (when it can be heard yelling at a shrike, as no other bird dares to do).
A Mexican spotted owl (I think) is going whoo-whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo in a steady note with slight upturns at the end, and I do not want my head full of that for long because it will blot out the peent sound of a western nighthawk, or the poor-will of the bird named for its call, looking in the glare of headlights not so much a bird as a huge moth fluttering about after insects in a parody of the zero G familiar to us from astronautics. The black phoebe, however, is a nestbound scold, snapping her bill at the faintest noise, and setting off the neighbor birds into a fit of sympathetic warning. Or are they telling the mother phoebe to calm down and ignore the hulking listener, who lays no eggs at all? Or thinks he doesn't.
The birds of night are easier than the other creatures, but sooner or later, especially when the birds pause a while, you will pick up wild bees, squadron strength, heading for the pollen of the evening primrose. The predators are out: the coyote ringing the changes on its repertory of yips and yaps, barks, yelps and growls - a complete-sounding language; the bobcat mother with her kittens, heard by their motions rather than their cries, although a prowling male at mating time sounds like an amplified, burlier tom.
The hooded skunk is out too, scratching at beds of mold and leaves, digging into the foundations of cholla and shrubs, tilting flat rocks for what might be underneath. It scrapes away at just about everything, nimble and bold. Sometimes you will hear mock fights, an almost rhythmic scuffle with curt, chittering cries as teeth and claws come into play, and the young learn from mother what to do. Only the striped skunk is busier or noisier, and you can hear it, after discharging its scent (an audible, puffy hiss), wallowing in soil or sand to cleanse its coat.
Deer come whispering down from the upper ranges for warmth and you might hear a mule deer browsing on shrubs or, with its tender lips, taking leaves from a spiny plant without being hurt. Their hooves are sharp and clack against outcrops of rock. If you miss the noise of the mule deer careering away across the desert, you are bound to hear javelinas snuffling around and digging for prickly pear fruits and various roots, at least until alarmed, when they click their tusks. They will move into suburbs too, spreading out in loose groups at night, sounding like half a dozen women clattering about in high heels, unable to find their way out again. When trying to escape, they get confused; seeming to charge, they are really panicking away in all directions as if to outrun the smell of the musk they emit when alarmed.
If you hear a puppy or small dog barking, you can confirm the presence of a gray fox by shining your flashlight until, if you're lucky, something glows an intense green-yellow: the eyes. This fox's other sounds are hardly foxlike at all, from antagonized snippy squeals to heavyweight coughs, and you can deceive yourself, much as when, thinking you hear a rattler, you are really picking up the buzzing sound and mandible-clicking of the horned lark in its grassland hole. Defense? Yes. The gray fox, though, does different voices. I have not mentioned the badger or the rats. The former goes after the latter, not pausing to hiss or growl at them as it does at you, and it can be heard digging out the burrows of some hapless ground squirrel or prairie dog until it can enter and attack. These excavations, though, make horses stumble, and the badger is becoming rare, virtually wiped out for safety's sake.
You may hear the rats adjusting a fruit jar lid in their nests of sticks, cow chips, cactus joints, spine clusters and other debris. That faint, whispering, impeded noise is from the pack rat's hauling in green vegetation to line the tunnels, thus creating what Arizonans call swamp cooling: moisture cools the nest, or the home, through evaporation.
I know from books, or others, that what I hear but have not recognized might well have been the sobs and sniffs of a Mexican gray wolf, standing at the straddle while scratching with its back feet. Or a section falling from a jumping cholla. Or a valley pocket gopher hastily shoving a load of dirt out of its hole or dragging greens in and replugging with muck. It spends most of its life, like a bat or shrew, in total darkness: a creature of permanent night.
But when I think I have heard the smooth alto of the grasshopper mouse, I am almost certainly mistaken as this rodent lives mainly in the upper Sonoran zone, on an open mesa, among trees or grass, although there does exist a long-tailed variant here in the lower Sonoran. You would not confuse its call, though, with that of the bannertail kangaroo rat, which hates moisture, takes sand baths (just about audible to a connoisseur), and doesn't vocalize a cry at all, but thumps the ground with its hind feet. Tap its mound and it will answer with a thump of its own. Communication is possible, after all. I think of the famous ornithologist Herbert Brandt, who for many years wandered through this desert, emitting his very professional squeak of the frightened or injured creature, mainly to tempt birds into showing themselves; I cannot do a squeak, but I can make a sucker sound with my mouth, or a champagne-bottle pop, neither of which works at all. I would rather listen, anyway, than stir the pot. I would rather hear scampering rodents as the kit fox hears them, if I can, but I can only go so far: I do not have that meat reflex, that killer impulse, any more than the kit fox can turn my flashlight off. I do it myself. It is almost dawn.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/21/travel/night-sounds-of-the-desert.html
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