Circling the drain

On our evening walk, I spied a skunk skeleton. Kind of hear to tell how intact it is. The only natural predator of skunks is the great horned owl, but it could just as easily have fallen prey to a dog. If you look to the right side of the picture you can see the backbone, maybe? In the same ditch there is the carcass of a raccoon in the water. Fur seems to take a lot longer to return to the earth than both bird or reptile remains.

Corrales has few loose cats, probably as a result of coyotes roaming around. But many people seem to have loose "guard dogs". Everybody loves dogs, but the loose ones are proven very destructive to wildlife.
I saw a large darkling beetle today, these large, ubiquitous insects are not usually worthy of attention, but I was excited because I had identified a larva of one yesterday when I was fixing a bike flat. I use the human experts who are always ready to critique my amateur submissions to Inaturalist app.

And here is it's baby picture...

I mentioned before that I find holes and walls fascinating. I guess it's time to kind of show you why:

This hole is an ant-lion trap, dug into the soft dirt in the hopes of luring in a scout ant. The larva are pretty ferocious looking, with huge jaws, but the adults are often mistaken for dragonflies...

Here is the entrance to an ant colony at the edge of the scuzzy ditch that popped up once the irrigation water started flowing. I wrote about this in a previous entry.

The low water levels and onset of spring have exposed a whole assortment of water level burrows that are dug, or borrowed by different creatures. Vole activity has decreased lately, but it is amusing to watch, in early spring, a whole stalk of a plant shoot into the group. It looks just like something out of a Bugs bunny cartoon! After the voles move on, the burrows are appropriately by turtles, toads, crayfish and who knows what other creatures.

many old growth trees have these holes in them as the heartwood is slowly decayed, often animals such as woodpeckers greatly aid in the effort. It's hard to tell i this example, but I think I saw some honeybees buzzing around the entrance, maybe there is a beehive inside?