Alison’s too-brief visit home last week was timed to coincide with the first emergences of some of our reptiles, stretching and yawning after their long winter’s nap.

I think that this one, basking on the rocks along the Rio Salado in Phoenix, was a common side-blotched lizard. Refutations or confirmations, please!

Though our rains the last six months have been refreshingly abundant, their timing seems to have been not quite right for the wildflowers, which are generally sparse and inconspicuous this year. There are a few we can always count on, though, among them the globe mallow Sphaeralcea. Hardy, tolerant, and common, the plant flowers in a range of colors, the most frequent a cheerful orange.

Our Western Screech-Owls are active and vocal these last couple of weeks, waking me at odd hours of the night to listen to their gentle bubbling songs.

But so far they have declined to re-occupy the box that one was so faithful to a couple of years ago. Wonder why: it looks ideal to human eyes.

A marvel of carpentry, if I do say so myself.

Even for those of us lucky enough to live among them, the great columnar cacti remain eery, so foreign that we can talk about them only in terms of other creatures. Standing in their estimable prime, we think of them as “giants,” anthropomorphic monsters that can inspire a chill in the most level-headed hiker through the night-time desert.

Saguaros are even stranger when they fall, though.

Who can look at the toppled cactus without thinking of a sea creature, a leviathan beached on desert sands? And the saguaro grows less and less plant-like as it decays; its skin dries into reptilian scales and its internal structure assumes an ever more skeletal presence.

What a place, this Sonoran desert of ours!

They’re far from common in southeast Arizona, but with a little help from their human protectors, a few of our fancy antilocaprids are still hanging on in the grasslands near Sonoita. Darlene and I ran across three herds last week north of Elgin for a total of something like 65 individuals, far and away the most I’ve ever seen in this part of the world.