Youth

 Confirmation bias is a strong and prevalent issue with any naturalist running around with a magnifying glass and a camera. We always see what we expect to see, and fail to see what we do not expect. This simple concept can have weird ramifications.

The cottonwood seeds are still being shed. The trees typically release them just before a rain shower. Here they are entangled in some puncture vines, that spreads out over disturbed ground. Those fluffy seeds stick to wet dirt and to anything that is not dry and dusty. Most of these succulents are slightly sticky. The area under those green leaves also usually have a lower temperature and higher moisture than the bare ground around them, which is prefect for young seedlings. Cottonwoods traditionally sprout along recently flooded braided channels, but they also have other germination tricks up their sleeves.

As caterpillars grow in the canopy of those trees over the summer, the volume and size of their "frass", or poop increases. This picture shows a scattering of frass, which is digested leaves. It is not often appreciated how this frass becomes the soil amendment that changes sandy and clay soils into a rich growing medium. Earthworms are responsible for this process in colder, wetter climates.

The way moths use silk is very interesting too. Here the tent worms have begun to leave their protective and communal feeding sites that have protected them since their were laid in the spring.

The types of dragonflies has begun to be reduced lately as their season moves along. Some, like this flame skimmer have been around all summer.

 

It is kind of strange, but I am not seeing any large, adult lizards right now. These juvenile whiptails are learning fast, however. This one is ignoring me and focused on hunting for small insects in the undergrowth. These lizards have all sorts of fascinating adaptions to avoid being eaten, like speedy bursts of energy and disintegrating tails.

 

 This one is sunbathing while also keeping a wary eye on me and the dogs I'm walking. This juvenile should know better than being this exposed.

 

 This fence lizard is much more of a master of stealth and will hold still for as long as possible before making a run for it up the nearest tree. While he still seems too young, he sports a bright blue throat to advertise himself to other lizards.

 

This young woodhouse toad would have been invisible if it had held still. The ripples in the water attract all sorts of unwanted attention.

The garter snakes are active hunters of tadpoles and young toads. The recent rains seem to have encouraged some sort of migration. You can see the large eyes these snakes use for hunting, along with their fine sense of smell. They are usually found near water.

I spotted this little toad in the parking lot of Wagner's farms in Corrales. There are a few left from the spawning season this year but they should not be hopping around parking lots. I moved him to a nearby patch of dandelions.

Many insects get labelled as a stink bug, but this one actually is in the stink bug family. They usually live on plant sap and most are agricultural pests.

 

 A clouded yellow butterfly. There are so many species around at the moment, but the common yellow ones are pretty eye-catching.

Heidi's raspberry field has a lot of exciting things, but this hole in the end of a blackberry cane was the most fascinating. It is the brood chamber for some sort of native bee that has packed the stem with pollen packets and eggs.

 

 There was also some sort of orb weaver spider than was hiding among the brambles. It is not as colorful as other species, but this individual had some fascinating behaviors while I sat and watched it for a few minutes.

The rains has stimulated many fungi species to put out fruiting bodies. You can see the cottonwood root in the background that this fungus is using to grow from.

Unfortunately, humans often see a tangle of roots as a source of wasps. This pile of wasp killer was left by a crew creating the foundation for a new house in the neighborhood. Using this kind of poison makes all sorts of problems for the local wildlife and does not bode well for the future of Corrales.

flower

The connections between plants and animals are incredibly close and often convoluted. We understand the roles of pollinators, but others are very weird. The best links have not even been discovered by biologists yet.

This desert centipede is a pretty common insect. They are found in damp locations and in the bosque are usually near to well watered lawns under impermeable surfaces, like plastic containers. They avoid strong sunlight and are much, MUCH more shy and fragile than their reputation would suggest.

Damselflies are often found around tumbleweeds. The higher moisture levels and lower average temperatures found in there attract their favorite prey, which are mosquitos. The damselflies also congregate, as this is their mating season.

The profusion of tall plants at the edge of the ditches right now attract many insects to lay eggs in the preferred sheltered spots. Every insect is different in their needs.

This is a pretty common butterfly- the chequered skipper. This on is warming up in the sun. Autumn is in the air and the geese are making their way back into the bosque, so everything is in transition...again.

This is the pygmy blue, another very common butterfly. There are also an abundance of moths around, but they are much harder to photograph.

The ditches have many muskrats in them. I never appreciated until this picture just how important the water depth was to these animals. This one was trying to dive to avoid being seen, but as the water was only a few inches deep it eventually it gave up with a huff, and waddled into the nearby cattails to hide.

A high alpine meadow has different butterflies because of a different ecosystem. They tend to be bigger species than down in the valley. This is an American Lady. The identification cues can be kind of cryptic.

 

This rather battered butterfly is a common wood nymph. Many adults are dying right now after they have laid eggs and can be easily picked up as they limp along on the ground.

 

 I think this is a monarch, but the range made it pretty hard to tell. Monarchs are pretty well known, but many of the similar butterflies are known as viceroys, admirals, ladies...a whole hierarchy.

This fuzzy guy fell out of a tree while I was trying to photograph a garter snake (failed). After a few stunned minutes, it took off at a fast clip for the base of the tree it fell from. I have no idea how it orients itself in the world. Apparently, it is a  tent caterpillar moth.

The Abert's squirrels in the Sandias are very different than the grey squirels down in the bosque. There are many squirrel types around. The Aberts tend to be dark ash colored with tufts on their ears. This one was actually begging, but trying to be nonchalant about it. It didn't seem like a very good climber, actually fell out of a few branches, so it could have been a youngster. Apart from the ground squirrels, most of the species are very connected to woodlands. They are much more omnivore than fairy tales would suggest.

The buffalo gourds are a fascinating plant. Reading the internet sources it seems no-one can decide much about this plant. The fruit is poisonous, but the plant has been used for many things . Below the surface, a giant taproot extends, that at full size can weight up to 100 lbs.

 

Up in the branches, the parasitic mistletoe is growing. There are actually many species of this parasite. The reason one tree is attacked and others are not is pretty cryptic, but these perplexing issues often come up if you spent to much time researching and not enough time observing in the field. The more expert a person is, the less they seem to know...

 

This picture is fascinating. These are the remains of a failed spawning event earlier in the summer. These tadpole desiccated long before they had a chance to metamorphose. When the air temp is in triple digits there is no time, even in deep desert pools, for frogs to grow. Those carcasses are now a fertilizer for a green algae that is growing in what would otherwise be a barren clay. With cooler temps, the water is now hanging around for a lot longer, but the frogs appear to be long gone.

These desert pools are isolated, but I think car tires bring in eggs and seeds. This is the first year of the five I have been observing that these clam shrimp have been seen. Each year the mesocosm I see is totally different. This bad picture shows an invertebrate that looks just like a fairy shrimp inside a tiny clam. It is actually unrelated to either of those species, but a fascinating species I have found around Bernalillo town, but never at this site before.

Food

 I have often thought people have a very strange relationship to food. We eat food to live, sure, but humans use food for almost everything else too. We use it heavily in society, to mark special events, bring people together, show off knowledge, status, or wealth. Restaurants are the only place a mask can be removed indoors, and the servers never remove theirs. It's not surprising that food colors our outlook on how we regard everything else around us in the natural world.

This egret is likely hunting for food, but there is a lot more going on as well. Once it is chased away by too much noise, it is will not come back. So it is looking for solitude as well. Not likely on the ditch banks in the mornings.

These birds are also hunting for food in different ways. The heron is much more tolerant of people's presence, especially if there is good visibility. The shape of the neck is in the classic strike pose, so the wood duck in the foreground is much more focused on the photographer.

With the neck outstretched this heron is more interested in distant objects. It is most likely noticing water rings and movement that suggests small fish, but that could be my human food bias sneaking in again.

 

With the head tucked in, this heron is resting. Heron usually hunt at dawn, so this likely signifies the end of the day for this guy, rather than the beginning. The dead tops of trees are important roosts for these birds that do have some territoriality, but that term is pretty loose in a migratory species. I have never seen a boundary dispute.

My blog is not the best for beautiful, clear, pictures. This sunflower is showing several species of pollinators; from bees, beetles and flies. Sunflowers and cactus produce prodigious amounts of pollen. But sometimes this is dangerous of rthe pollinators as the predator insects are attracted as well.

This bee has dark wings and this might be so they can absorb solar radiation to warm up in the morning. I was surprised to learn that insects sleep. In the morning you can often find them immobile near to flowers.

Here is a fascinating insect I found asleep in a flower. This beautiful insect is a cuckoo wasp. The world of the hymenoptera is very weird and nothing like the world as we are taught in high school. Many wasps lay eggs inside the caterpillars of other species, but this species lays eggs with other bees. Their larva hatches first, then it eats the other eggs around them.

The mosquitos are growing rapidly in number. So far, the best predator seems to be the dragonflies and damselflies, who have definitively stepped up their game and are zipping all over the place

Those young grasshoppers have all grown up and are turning long and brown. They definitely have their wings and have begun traveling. Egg laying season is upon us.

Wolf spiders can grow pretty big, but are no more dangerous for all that. There is a lot of variety, with over 2,500 species. They often can be seen "fishing" close to a vegetated shoreline. they do not use webs to hunt. They often occur in large numbers near moist areas. These ones are always close to the ground, unlike the jumping spiders.

Caterpillars everywhere are planning their pulpation events as they finally finish feeding for the year. This is also when they are very susceptible to infections. In this picture you can see the first six legs that are "real" then the pro-legs at the back, and the spinnerets at the lower end that will produce the silk for the cocoon. This is a species of cutmoth that became desiccated as it looked for a safe place to molt.

The figeater beetles are setting up their nurseries. These are usually at the base of a large sunflower plant. This one is asleep in the goldenrod flowers, but the next generation feeds on the sap of sunflowers after the adults have stripped away the tough fibers protecting the plant vasculature. The sugars in the sap often ferment and bubble out and feeds many insects other than the figeater babies.

 

 This stinkbug also sucks sap, but it uses a stylus to tap into the fluids at the soft plant tips. This bug uses armor and bad smells to prevent the insect attacks that occur above the ground from other insects.

The ground water is very low right now and the irrigation canals are also low. This drying of the interior drains can be healthy, a form of "clearing out" of invasive mussels and plants. By removing fish it can help the diversity of animals found. The ground is still full of water, and as the water table further sinks, the ground begins to have air influx that reduces the anaerobic bacteria process that heads to that swampy smell. The interior drains do need to be dug out periodically to continue to do their job or removing water from the soil.

That capillary layer is responsible for this layer of cottonwood saplings that are growing at the boundary between the water saturated clay soil and the air filled sandy soil above it. Here the shore is pretty steep, this makes the "capillary layer" very narrow. Ideal for small sun loving saplings.

Where the layer of wet, but aerated soil is very wide, the grasses will be better able to spread and complete with those young saplings and push them out. Ultimately though, the coyote willow will predominate and provide a nursery for the cottonwood seedlings, but in much less profusion.

Where there is water, the duckweed will cover the area, provided that the water is still and clear. By removing the sunlight reaching the bottom, the underwater pond weed will be inhibited. This can remove fish, not only by removing food, but also because the dying plants are fed on by bacteria that depletes the oxygen levels in a process called 'eutrophication". The trails of many animals can be seen in the water's surface, but I don't think any of those are water fowl. Likely turtles.

The turtles seek out warmth to move, and digest their food. In the chilly mornings that often means the water is warmer than the air, so they stay as submerged as possible. This snapping turtle has just the nostrils and eyes above water while he keeps an eye on my picture taking efforts.

Crayfish are incredibly adaptable and have soft gills under that hard carapace behind the eyes. They can survive out of water as long as their gills stay wet. They walk forwards, but swim backwards. They cut up food with their pincers, but also their mouthparts and one of their two stomachs. If you ever get a chance to do a crayfish dissection, it's worth it. There is almost nothing a crayfish will not eat.

This fungi was identified as a oyster mushroom. I was kind of hesitant about posting it because it looked so beautiful and someone is out there who would like to harvest it. Ultimately, I'm pretty sure it isn't going to be around for very long, it's sheen is just so...lustrous. I would definitely not try to eat it based on anything I have said in this blog though, you have been warned...