The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

July 15, 2026

What a difference a week makes. The monsoon shock of green. Something both visual and audible. I can’t remember the last time it rained every day for this many days, the gauge filling and overfilling. Nearly four inches of rain. Grasses rise to the shins.

The creek is flowing and the water tanks are filling. The canyon rejoices in this season of toads.

I’m wishing for more storage, watching storm-swollen creeks carry runoff through my yard downcanyon to the San Pedro River, to the Gila River, to the Colorado River, and to the Sea of Cortez. With no guarantee the moisture will return.

Our monsoon—not a storm but a seasonal shift of wind—that arises from the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of California as the desert heats up in the early summer creating a thermal low that draws in oceanic air laden with moisture. The usual westerlies dip south and circulate into our region as southeasterly winds.

Then, things begin to happen.

I hear a groan of thunder in the east as brilliant thunderheads corkscrew upward tens of thousands of feet to generate raging snowstorms high above the bone-dry landscape. Dust billows, sometimes lifting into giant, 100-mile-wide, apocalyptic storms called haboobs. But this time, the wind shoulders in as clouds glom onto the Mule Mountains. Lightning flares. Thunder cracks above me like a sudden rockfall. The rain comes as I revel in wet summer skin like a red-spotted toad.

A squall. A chubasco at the edge of the planet.

The monsoon as a living, breathing conveyor, carrying the geologic organism of rain: Mexico slides into Arizona, which in turn rushes back into Mexico in a pulsing, thrashing penetration of elementals—air and water meets fire and earth.

I’ve said it before. Many times. Rain is a holy thing in the desert. I’ve come across stone pools of rainwater in sun-cracked, shadowless borderlands that are no larger than a baptismal font or carved marble stoup. Shallow tinajas scattered among hundreds of miles of sand like grace sprinkled from an aspergillum.

The desert raises water to the level of a sacrament, blessed by wind and the bone dust of those who have come and never left, those who have knelt and wet their brows with water enough for two fingers.

You can always recognize the desert dwellers when the rains come. We don’t run for shelter. Our doors fly open and we leap into the downpour, sometimes even flinging ourselves into washes and runoff in wild abandon.

Or, as I do every creek flow, slipping in quietly with a glass of wine.

Okay…enough reveling in the rain. Where are the birds? Stay with me—I’ll be back next time with more birds, monsoon birds for sure…

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