molting

There are many mayflies on our stucco walls right now resting in the early morning.

They have just molted and are easy to catch by hand as snacks for the toadlets. By coming out during the early morning they are trying to find the sweet spot between the predatory ants of the day, and the predatory spiders of the night.

 the variety of flowers is bewildering right now. Everything is putting out colors to attract the myriad insects pollinating them. The yellow lillies are only out during the hottest part of the day, but the sweet clover has stout pink blossoms that are out the whole time. Rare sunflower blooms wrestle with abundant bindweed flowers in profusion. The rare hawk is flying overhead

Hazy days of Summer

The bullfrogs have dispersed out of the ditches, and there are very few sightings of them right now.  Other areas of the bosque have lots of toads, but so far there are not many here, other than squashed ones on the road.

There are many more "creepie-crawlies around, such as dobson flies and centipedes. The are usually here when there is more humidity. I noticed a new type of wasp around, after some studying it turned out to be the male velvet ants, which have wings but no stingers, this picture shows the tough wings off very well.

Just under the wing you can see the fuzzy orange of the thorax. There is a fair amount of competition and jostling between these "ants" and the cicada killers.

There was a possible osprey in the bosque, but he was hard to get a picture of. I know of one osprey nest nearby, and the big carp in the ditch should be very visible to these big birds.

The local muskrats might be a little nervous too...

No murder hornets

While there are still not murder hornets around, I thought I'd have a little fun today and look at a couple of insects realted to them. AS we know, many innocent wasps are at risk of being killed because of the association with these (correct name) Japanese Giant hornets. Everything from regular bees, to beetles, to regular wasps are being killed with newspapers, hornet spray, and whatever else.This is a CICADA KILLER, It really fits what the general public considers to be a Murder hornet. It's about the right size, and has the right behavior. Because it never stops moving it is (apart from being really difficult to photograph) seen as being "aggressive". It also can sting, and buzzes in front of people who are shrieking and jerking around. A fascinating predator/parasite.

There are around 4,000 species of bees in North America, they have many different habitats, and habits. Also, they have many other predators apart from murder hornets. This guy is a BEE ASSASSIN and can also "sting", (actually bite) if handled. It prefers to ambush the bees when they land on flowers.

Almost rains

The high thunderclouds with their flat, grey  bases keep taunting us with rains that have not really come yet. Some say its because of a massive dust cloud out of the Sahara that is suppressing the hurricane season that gives NM its moisture. Who knows, we do know that the ditch levels right now are pretty low, which is a boon for some critters. The silt is building up too, without a good flush of water to push them onward to the Rio Grande. The clear ditch is backing up into the Scuzzy section and the microbiomes in that section are fluctuating.

We have lilies competing with duckweed, the pond weed, and the algae. The water switches from clear, to muddy to murky over a span of about a mile. But obviously this muskrat is munching on the plant life pretty much equally happily. He is out most evenings right now, in the middle of the ditch where the dogs can't get to him.

In sections, the flowers are open to receive pollinators like butterflies, bees, beetles, moths and flies.

The dragonflies are mating and flying like crazy, the variety is staggering. Other critters. like this kissing bug, are hunting the pollinators. Most of the other, noticable insects are night critters.

Of course, the pandamonium and activity is on a micro-scale. However, I was also noticing the many dog tracks, and there were loose dogs hunting frogs and ducks in the ditch. Its a shame that those crazy critters are out to terrorize the sleepy "dog days" of summer. 

roadkill

How to start losing your phone. 

Everyone knows its true that we should use our phones less. But we need them for safety, to contact people, for directions to not get lost and for pictures. But somehow, we get stuck inside our air conditioned houses, staring at pictures of cute kittens without even getting out of bed. So, how are we using them wrong? I was thinking of this while I was leaning out over the ditch trying to get another "perfect" picture of a butterfly while my dog was patiently waiting for his walk and the horse flies were buzzing all around us looking for exposed flesh to attack. What I came up with was I really needed to learn this fancy gadget that my smartphone has morphed into. 

Of course, this blurred picture of a towhee can be cleaned up "in studio" which is something I am working on learning too. I mean, I know all the ins and outs of facebook and google, but have barely the first idea how my camera settings work. And that is all on me, that is what I can own, and do something about.

I have four cameras and I can't even use half of them normally, let alone understand their full potentials. I was thinking also about this while I was trying to get my camera to turn off the flash to get a distance picture of my first raccoon. 

Can you see the flash reflected in his eyes?

Eventually the animal got tired of posing and wandered off.  Next time, I'll just put my finger over the flash. I have noticed that taking pictures is great, but they gradually lose context of what a person is trying to do. Which is better? 3,000 pictures I will never see again, or one hand drawn picture in a margin of a book? My amateurish illustrations from a trip to Australia still instantly transport me back there.

I have started carrying a specimen container and a kid's bug catcher around to make it easier to capture and take pictures of small critters. While marveling at all the wasps and pollinators around right now, I noticed the horseflies are the ones actually biting a lot these days. Makes you wonder why people are so against wasps. See yesterday's blog for better background. 

There's a wide variety of butterflies out right now, probably due to all the pollinating plants about. They seem to especially like this one:

 As the ditch water level was low again, there were the usual abundance on baby crawfish marching determinedly up the ditch. I realized they were easily visible against the concrete lined ditch, but also because they were not in burrows along the clay lined sections; they were visible due to different behaviors.

 New Mexico does not have a termite problem, mostly because its so dry.

The termites we do have in New Mexico are not the "type" that eat people's houses, like in the cartoons. This picture is of a family is called Archotermopsidae and they look just like big red ants with wings. They were out in the UV light traps I put outside my house.

Roadkill

There is a big gross toad splattered in the middle of the road, like I wrote just yesterday, the animals usually active in the evening are not moving around at night, and are getting squished. Cars kill tons of animals from mammals to insects, and especially migrating amphibians.

Please drive slow and try to look out for toads in the road!

wasps

Out walking today I noticed there is a large number of different wasps. There was also a large number of cicada emergence holes, which is right for this time of year. With the night time temperatures getting above 60 degrees consistently, many more critters are coming out. Also, others are changing their behaviors; such as staying out all night, instead of just the evening.

    A big problem with getting pictures of wasps is that they are not only fast moving and erratic, but they are complicated. The velvet ants I have been seeing (some are really big) look like ants but are wasps. There are parasite wasps that prey on caterpillars, those are small. There are cicada killers, they are big and orange. The yellowjackets are out, as are the paper wasps ( those are yellow and medium). Of course, so far, there are no "murder hornets". The heat has brought out the bees as well. There are many domestic bees, but look closer. There are many native bees that don't swarm. They forage in the cactus and willow flowers, many look just like flies, (they also don't sting)

Of course, the weather has been great for the plants as well. As most of them start feeling the heat, they are using Solar energy to prep their seeds. It seems like every plant has a different seed dispersal strategy. Some use wind, others use...dog fur.

cat tails will soon be releasing their fluff into the wind.

    Those burrs can be a real painI haven't identified these guys yet, but they are a type of burr that get into everything, especially in long dog fur. I hear from vets that they are having a very bad year with "Fox tails" - A type of grass seed.

    Many people are familiar with the Miller moths were just finished a season explosion of. Others might find they pupae in the tree leaves. I wonder how many have seen the little babies climbing up the sides of houses? Their strategy for predator evasion, apart from the sleeping bag of silk, is to throw themselves off the perch when a questing ant gets close. They dangle from thread, but eventually have to release and climb back up to where the leaves they eat are. Many spend all day climbing and dropping off the sides of my house.

This adult is left over from last year and may not be alive. many are eaten by baby wasps that lay eggs inside the caterpillar's flesh...

This is from Red river, but shows many different caterpillars also use silk as more than just building cocoons.

Here is a tiny miller moth as a encapsulated caterpillar. They stick bits of leaves on them as camouflage.

Finally, I still get dazzled by the hidden world and colors of the common flies I see everyday. They are different

critters when they are seen up close. This is the same picture of a fungus gnat from the side with flash and from above. With some enhancement, you can see the beatiful rainbows on it's back. The abdomen is also weirdly fluorescent in the LED flash

flying jewels

I'm noticing a lot of changes around the ditches as the Summer solstice has arrived. There are a lot fewer bullfrog, and that might have something to do with all the bird predators around, or a change now that mating is done. There are some tadpoles around, but so far most of them are Woodhouse toads. I tend to see the Young of year (YOY; the ones that hatched this year) in late summer. Occasionally I see the ones from last year in muddy, open areas. Something can delay their development somehow.

The best news is the ditches are alive with flying dragonflies and damselflies. Also, they are resting which means they are holding still enough for me to take pictures!

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A clear sign of summer is that the velvet ants are back. Earlier in the month there were the small, velvet ants around, now there are the bigger orange ones. They NEVER hold still, so I only took a wide angle shot. Stay tuned for a better picture when I figure out how to get them to hold still.

I have ants at the house that look like wasps (drones, with wings), and I have wasps on the ditch that look like ants (wingless velvet ants)

crayfish hatch

The ditch this morning was alive with the movement of small and large crayfish. It helps that the water level was low and the water was clear. They vary in size from the size of a small aquatic insect, to longer than my hand.

 We got to see damselfly larva; they look just like the adults, but have three small gill feathers at the end of their abdomen, and no wings. I collected three tadpoles for my personal menagerie: one has no tail, one has only back legs and other has a stump of a tail left.

The spiders down in the ditch are awesomely huge. I think they are funnel spiders.

This picture shows one on cider blocks, but they seem just as at home running across the water. For reference, this specimen is about 4 inches across. We are still not seeing or hearing any owls, but there is an increasing number of night herons around