green

 The weather is already warming up and many signs of spring are around for those who look. We still suffer from very dry and windy conditions. The perfect conditions for a forest blaze, so everyone needs to be extra vigilant walking in the bosque.

 

 The Heron is also looking around. The blaze of white feathers on the chest is usually easy to spot. Now that nesting season is beginning, many smaller birds will begin to harass these risks.  A heron will possibly eat nestlings, so is often targeted by medium sized bird pairs. Crows can be observed harassing hawks along treelines on Loma Larga now. The worst offenders are the kingbirds later in the spring. Then the hummingbirds make life difficult for the larger birds in the summer.

The heron are usually seen being stationary, so I thought I should prove they do sometimes move. This one is in the shallows hunting mosquito fish. Those fish are active as the water warms and are feeding on the plants and animals in the shallows. They in turn are preyed on by bass, and herons.

 

 

Beaver have become more active. Of course this has to be inferred from their activities as they remain very shy. The most iconic signs of their activity is their gnawings on trees. Medium sized trees like this are felled so that the beaver can reach the upper branches. Although it really does seem like the beavers like to fell the largest trees just for the sheer hell of it.Cottonwoods are preferred over Russian olives, but both appear to be felled for building materials, as well as food. The color of the cut wood changes from orange, yellow, white, and then weathers to a grey/black. This trunk was felled about a six months ago.

 

Beavers build dams on small tributaries to create marshes. Humans do not like to live in a marsh, so beavers were turned into hats. Obviously, the story is more complicated than that, but that was the result.

 There are still plenty of beaver and muskrats around, though. Just look in the backflow at the river's edges for the telltale white sticks with "V" shaped ends. The flash of white is known as a blaze, from the days when trails would be marked by bending green sticks, or cutting into tree bark to indicate a trail

 

Most of the shrubs have flowing sap and have become pliable. The white heartwood is surrounded by oranges and greens of moist sapwood. The delicate parts are coated in the the grey and browns of the outer bark. This is the food of many mammals in the bosque.

Looking up in this tree, you can see the tell-tale signs of the porcupine. When chewing on the sticks they leave a white "blaze" of the heartwood in sections. (The ball of the sleeping beaver is to the right side of the picture, more camouflaged in the "Y" of the tree trunk).

 

Another clear give away is the pellets of sawdust beneath the trees where they are snoozing during the day. They look like little cigars to me. Others say they look like Russian olive berries, or elk scat.

 

 Porcupine prefer young trees in thick cover for food, moving to the bigger trees with good forks in the trunk to sleep in. The next generation of cottonwoods do exist in the willows, but are far fewer than they used to be because of the changes in river flow. The actual story is pretty complex, and not well understood. It is pretty clear to me that young cottonwoods need to grow in coyote willow swales to survive, for whatever reason.

Cattails have begun shedding their white puffy seed coats into the wind. Bizarrely, I have found cottonwood seed drifts as well, but have no idea when they could have come from. Plants still have their secrets.

West facing ditch slopes are icy for much longer periods of time. Everything is still dormant from the lower temperatures. But the ice means they should be moister for better growth during the summer.

Where moisture isn't an issue, in the mud, the green growth of plants is already well underway. Grasses and forbes are sprouting from soil seed banks and taking advantage of abundant sunlight and relatively little herbivory from insects and birds.

 

This white blaze shows where a bird likely investigated a pre-existing burrow for insects, or maybe is planning a nest for itself. The puddle of water in the den means this is not likely to be a mammal's den. Often bullfrogs are found here taking advantage of the extra warmth in the sun.

Dense undergrowth favors the smallest birds who can navigate the three dimensional trails and hide from predators at the same time. This sparrow is stopping for a drink as it hedgehops down the ditch looking for all sorts of types of food. I have watched them eat hamburger meat from the vultures at the zoo. Others can drink blood. Suddenly they don't seen so tame, huh?

 

The world of birds is well know to this species; a birder in his natural habitat and cradling a lens the size of a large salmon under his arm.

 

 Those lenses are not just for show, either. This picture shows a blur that was my first sighting of a great horned owl this year. They say the best camera is the one you have with you. I had my cellphone...praeparetur. The skunks are out one of the prey items this owl is looking for, but I have only smelled them so far. The first of the crickets are chirping in the evenings. the horned owls will be nesting very soon, if not already.

My resident boxelder bug is still wandering around the kitchen, luckily it appears to be alone. I hope it stays that way, but they are not really the pest the bug control companies would suggest.

Most people think they know about spiders, but do they know about those that fish at the edges of streams in the dense grasses? A several species of wolf spider can dart out into the water to snag unwary insects that are flushed out by creatures patrolling the edges, such as dogs, raccoons, and people. The spiders occur in surprisingly large numbers in marshy edges of slow streams.

This fly appears to be a Hydrophorinae species, but the internet did not provide much helpful information on it. Bare silty mud banks are ideal locations to breed for many winged insects.

 

Here is a tiny field cricket. The young have just hatched and trying to survive in the wild. By the fall most specimens will be pretty large and tough. This one appears to be trying to swim, crickets have a well known aptitude for drowning, which at least one parasite takes advantage of.

Another huge risk is smoking. I'm not taking about the lungs, even though that is so well known it's not even worth arguing about. This white stick shows someone in the bosque though a lighted match was a good idea to carry around. I honest can't believe we have not had more fires than we have. The Corrales bosque is great for birds precisely because it is heavily overgrown. We have had record setting dry conditions for several years now. The whole bosque in our section is a tinderbox, just like Cedar Crest is in the mountains. I wonder everyday how much longer the people of Corrales can keep being this lucky. It won't be much longer if there are people walking around in the firewood with actual lit coals under their noses... After the 2003 fire in Albuquerque, a massive tree thinning program reduced the future risk of fire, but also removed most of the birds that lived south of Alameda bridge as well. Another form of blaze that is very uncomfortably close to home right now.