Lights

 "Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but not so interesting as looking"

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The bosque is getting a lot of attention right now, and not just from the fire department. There are many bird species in the riparian zone. They are all looking for different things, which allows different animals to co-exist in a limited space.

Cedar waxwings are all around, and focus on the large seeds such as the olive drupes. They are breathtakingly beautiful birds, but very messy eaters.

House finches are interested in small insets and seeds and found in grass gardens everywhere around Corrales. They clearly prefer to forage on the ground.

The crows are in the outer zone of the riparian habitat and like the open pastures, where they focus on worms, insects, anything basically. They are roadkill specialists and have recently begun migrating out to the country roads.

Down in the ditches, the mallards feed in relative safety because not many other animals can hunt them in the water. Raptors can't swim and bobcats and coyotes are too noisy in water.

Mallards are experts at living hear humans, but the ditches give enough seclusion that other migrants can also be seen, like this cinnamon teal. It is a type of shoveller duck and has an extra large beak for ploughing the ditch mud.

This is a violet green swallow. They specialize in catching insects on the wing. They seem to have very large breasts because their feet are placed very far back on the body on short legs. The beak is tweezer-like to snap the mosquitos out of the air.

This is a blue bird and it's beak is much more robust because they often poke the ground looking for grubs and exposed roots after a field has been plowed.

People have love/hate relationships with trees and never seem satisfied with the ones they have. Just about everyone like Ponderosa pines, however.

Terms like invasive, or weed are thrown about, but not easy to understand. An invasive tree is usually one that was appreciated by a previous generation for different properties. A tree that was revered for its ability to be a good windbreak in the 1950's is now reviled for dropping lots of seeds. This is a picture of a "weed". It sounds edible as a salsify, but no-one will touch it with it's alternate name of "Mediterranean serpent root". It's still the same plant. Name calling can hurt.

Female cottonwoods are not allowed to be sold in Albuquerque to avoid the cottony fluffs that come in the summer. This does not always happen, however. Its odd that people feel they can regulate trees in the same way they would domestic pets.

This is the male catkin, or flower of the cottonwoods. Other trees that cannot be sold are those that produce high pollen, such as mulberries. The female trees drop staining fruit, so are also banned. These trees could be pollarded and control this problem, but given that few people bother to learn about their trees it was seen as easier to just ban everything.There are lists for invasive trees and banned trees in Albuquerque, but reading them will really just add to the confusion.

 

Most fruits and vegetables have odd histories. Potato was found in the high Andres and thrived in Ireland before being harvested for McFries in the US. 1/2 of all potatoes harvested in the US are a single species (an almost 14 billion dollar retail business). This picture shows an unusual apple blossom on the border of what was once an apple orchard. The bloom is from a feral grafted stock. America grows about 2,500 species of apple, about 100 are sold in stores. Every state is the US grows and sells apples. The wild ancestor of apples still grows wild in the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan.

Corrales is filled with wild, tall trees. Mostly these are Siberian elms and cottonwoods. The shorter trees are preferred by gardeners, and often are the ones that bloom well in spring. These blooms in this photo are from the western redbud. A very popular tree, not least of which is because it grows fast, but short, more of a shrub, really.

The bosque is host to what seems like more and more evergreen plants each year. This one looks like one seed juniper.

This sawfly can be a problem for individual trees in an isolated garden without a complex ecosystem, but don't get to high enough numbers to damage a forest of trees. This is one reason gardeners often have to use excessive amounts of insecticide to protect a single tree. While this is a wasp species, it has no stinger

Up on the west mesa I found this little character hibernating under some rock landscaping. It is a backswimmer. In the desert they show up very soon after a flooding event by flying to areas that reflect the moonlight strongly.

Flying insects have a special place in the hearts of humans who hate summers. This mosquito is part of the reason why. Mosquitos need moisture and no wind to survive, which is not the conditions we have right now.

This is a mosquito, but a different genus; a Culiseta. Both mosquito types are predated on by the backswimmer when they are aquatic larvae. This mosquito type is more likely to feed on birds than humans.

While I am not too sure, I think these insect eggs are laid by a katydid. Several are hatched, but not all of them have. Katydids are out in the late summer, where their big, green bodies blend in very well with the tree foliage.

These insects are known as march flies and have distinctive short antennae, and thick black bodies. They disappear again very quickly after mating and then seem to be gone until next year.

Velvet ants are a type of wasp that have stiff hairs to ward off ant bites. This is because they lay eggs in ant nests. They are found in the bosque in large numbers during the summer, but are just beginning to appear now. The winged males appear in late summer.

This is one of the shield bugs, New Mexico seems to have a lot of different types. This is Chlorochroa ligata. A common bug that does not seem to attract much attention to itself.

Cottonwood leaf borer found on the UNM main campus. The latin species name "scripta" described the pattern on the elytra. A pretty beetle in spite of the fear it brings to urban gardeners because of it's leaf digesting habits.

This is a pretty common cellar spider. They dominate during the cool nights until the huntsman and jumping spiders of the summer begin to come out. There seems to be a pretty little smiling cartoon face on the thorax. The pale blue abdomen also appears to be a puppet's head facing the opposite way.

At the Montano bridge trailhead in Albuquerque is a small park with the remains of cottonwoods that have been burned. This wood has been carved into statues and colonized by many forms of wildlife. The most interesting is the large carpenter bees, but this common lizard was worth a stop on a recent visit there

 

 This muskrat is moving into new locations that have a beaver dam and pond. This one was not hiding nearly as well as it was hoping to.

 A very common location to find porcupine in the summer is inside culvert pipes and drainage channels. They tend to come down from the trees and forage for fallen apples, that abound in Corrales. The partly naked tail show where this individual had to make it's "point" with some local predator, likely a dog, in the recent past.

It is hard to grow exotic trees in New Mexico, but a place that does it well is the arboretum at UNM campus. There is an example of a classic maple shape leaf

Mesquites are in the legume family and produce these weird beans. This is the fruit of a honey locust

I don't know what plant this is, exactly, but the form of the fruits says it is one of the alder species. One advantage of city trees is that the young leaves are usually unblemished because there are not enough specialized pests to find and attack these plants.

These are birch fruits. A rare tree for New Mexico, but it wouldn't be too odd to find near permanent water like at the duck pond. Tree care is complex, but the basic rules are not too hard to learn. The devil is in the nuances, and the weird interactions that happen when people do too much knowing and not enough looking.