Travel

 Spring means many things to many different people. To some, it represents flowers, others a chance to travel and see new places. In spite of the drought and fires, the plants are flowering and the animals are migrating. The mild to moderate monsoon will come next month and punish those vertical places that have not remediated the burn scars in the north with landslides and mud. Down in the bosque, these worries seem a million miles away, however.

Daisies and dandelions are common right now, just about all flowers are asters. Soon the summer will bring sunflowers, too. This is a a four nerved daisy, one of the sneezeweeds. Sounds like casting for "Snow White"

Many of us have seen horsetail ferns. However, only during this short part of the year do the spore producing stalks come out, so most people will not have noticed them. This amazing structure is a living fossil and has been around for 100 million years. The horse tail fern is now the only genus left of a group that used to be 30ft tall and are basically the coal deposits we have today.

If you do not regularly watch hummingbirds in the wild, you might think they are cute and docile. But when you watch them you can see where that sugar goes. They are a bunch of nervous energy, very twitchy and always chasing something. This one has a favorite patch of wildflowers and sat on a roost above them, chasing off all the other hummingbirds. It was not feeding on flowers, but appeared to be picking off insects.

 

The grass is growing around the driveways in Corrales, and this is attracting the rabbits. In the summer they stay out as long as they can before the human activities force them into hiding.

On the bare earth, there are many insects. Many are wasps, but this winged insect is an adult ant-lion. The larva eat ants and have huge jaws and ambush from the bottom of a pit of loose sand. The adults look very different and act a lot like damselflies, except they feed on nectar.

The lights at night attract many insects, especially moths. Summer is also a big season for wasps. Many people don't know there are more wasp species than any other insect order, including beetles. Most wasps are parasitoids and feed or lay eggs on caterpillars. It makes sense they go where the moths are, but I'm not sure why they are also attracted to lights.

More easy to figure out, is why the spiders have moved in to the neighborhood. Late spring is when there are many arachnids. The ants appear to chase them away by the time summer comes. This is some sort of large grass spider that wove a huge nest next to the lights. It specializes in the larger moths.

A species of cellar spider. These spiders are delicate, but do seem to be very productive in catching small insects. They are the masters of navigating tangled webs. I have heard the venom is pretty potent, but they are absolutely harmless as the fangs are far too short to pierce human skin.

Plenty of spiders do not bother with webs. This running crab spider is well camouflaged but totally striking when looked at closely. It is an ambush specialist.

 

 Jumping spiders have the best vision. In summer there are many bold jumping spiders around ( they have purple glitter fangs and are quite large). This is a closely related species, a white cheeked jumping spider

There are many distinct white patches of funnel webs around in the low vegetation. These belong to large wolf spiders, many of which can predate on tarantulas. They are very shy and reclusive, also not venomous. This is the closest I have ever gotten to getting their picture.

The abundant heat and sun work well for grasses. In the Alameda parking lot by the river these plants will soon be very tall. It is a species of wild barley

Wheat is a very common grass and looks only barely similar to the seven types of wheat grown throughout the upper Midwest and southern Canada.

Field bindweed is the weed people love to hate. These plants grow fast, die young and quickly disappear after shedding their seeds for the next generation. Some cultivars are raised as ornamental plants. Their flowers are quite beautiful. The are impossible to remove because by the time they are noticed by humans, the seeds have already returned to the soil in large numbers, ready to sprout next year.

Seriously, my favorite plant ever. Meet the silverleaf nightshade. A relative of tomatoes, potatoes and tobacco. Slightly poisonous, spiny (can be handled if you're gentle) and will defeat any attempt by humans at their control. They grow on degraded, compacted soil and need no moisture. They grow through mulch, their long taproot cannot be pulled out in one piece. They produce tons of seeds in their little orange fruits. The are great sacrificial plants to lure hornworms away from your tomato plants. Their beautiful bloom produce tons of pollen for the bumblebee visitors that flock to them all summer

 

 A horrific picture . Someone cut the legs off the bullfrog with a knife (notice those sharp edges to the wound) at Liam Knight's pond. I could not begin to guess why, but I would steer clear of this individual and their knife.

Unfortunately, they will be a massacre on the roads as the reptiles and amphibians begin to travel around under the wheels of fast moving cars.

 

This New Mexico Garter snake also was run over by a car. Their presence is usually a sign that the tadpoles are hatching. These snakes move into a good place to catch the toadlets as they emerge from the water six weeks after being laid

These tadpoles are unusually early, but there will soon be huge , wriggling groups of them in warm, shallow waters all over the wetland areas. The garter snakes prey on the tadpoles, and the hognose snakes will be coming out in the next month to catch the newly metamorphosed toadlets on the land.

The large amount of roadkill has attracted the carrion eaters. Corws have trouble seeing small prey, even if it is abundant, and have moved to the roadways up on the mesa, where the clumsy vultures are too slow to deal with cars. Amount the trees, however, these birds and their excellent senses of smell, are superior( notice the large nostrils in this close up)

The fresh ground at the Harvey Jones overflow channel is rapidly being colonized by new plants. Unfortunately those plants best adapted to rapid growth are usually an invasive species. This is a Ravanna grass species, hopefully it doesn't get a good foothold in the area.

Hemp dogbane is another rapidly growing plant species I have only recently begun to see in the area. There doesn't appear to be a consensus yet about whether that is a bad thing. They produce the tiny flowers characteristic of those wetland plants that are trying to attract pollinating midges.

Surprisingly, the water table is high enough at the entrance of the Harvey Jones channel to seep into the clear ditch north of the Romero bosque entrance. This is allowing many wetlands plant species to thrive in small crevices between farmland and pedestrian areas. There should be lots of tadpoles here, protected by the tall plants

the sandy area of Harvey Jones also has elm seedlings growing. The cottonwood seedlings cannot establish as they need wet clay next to the river. So there is no competition yet. The mature cottonwaoods can also grow by suckers, but much less prolifically.

There are many grasses that are growing in the bosque. The ravanna grass is distinctive in having a broad leaf, with a distinctive white stripe down the middle.

This scarlet beeblossom illustrates the classic problem of defining a weed. Some people try to exterminate it, as they thrive on disturbed land and crowd out other plants. This plant grows back from rhizome and annual seeding, so is impossible to eradicate

 

 Here is another example of the classic issues of horticulture getting muddied. This tree is dying, and the mistletoe that once thrived on it is dying, too. Did the mistletoe "cause" or "contribute" to the tree's demise? I would say no, but others (who sell expensive mistletoe removal services) would say yes. parasites are in indication of a well integrated ecosystem and often should not be attacked by well meaning gardeners.

Some people may have noticed the occasional flashes of orange in the tree branches. Here is the summer tanager, a common summer visitor that is surprisingly difficult to get a good picture of...

I think this is a Say's phoebe, but I am by no means a birding expert. I notice the tiny, insect catching beak, though.

There was a lot of muskrat activity, but they seemed to vanish when the biannual ditch mowing started to control the cattails. These mammals are responsible for a lot of ditch bank erosion because of their burrows. The beavers, (much larger) will almost never come out during the, and are very shy even then.

The Super flower blood moon eclipse happened a few days ago and was well photographed, here is my submission. The lunar eclipse was threatened by clouds, but cleared at just the right time. While the name seemed hyperbolic, is was a nice chance to get out and see the stars.

Down in the actual bosque forest, the cottonwoods shade the grassy acres and the plants tend to be more woody and short. The diversity can be large. This is false indigo, on the edge of a forested area.

This is a wood rose. These bushes form dense stands further north and have distinctive rose hips during the winter.

As summer continues, there will be many more fish seen. This is the first largemouth bass I have seen. It is protecting a shallow nest from lurking trout, who are interested in eating the eggs. The eggs also have to be constantly aerated by the fins to become viable.

These huge fish are carp, They have mostly spawned now and are dispersed up and down the ditches. They are vegetarian and strong swimmers. They often muddy waters with their thrashing and keep ditch channels open in drought years.

In the trees above us, there is a constant rain of honeydew from aphids sucking plant juices. While some ants farm these, there are many more species that carry the aphids back to feed the colony. Here, an acrobat ant has a small grub it found in the canopy.

Where the sap falls, it leaves a goopy mix of sap, sugar and dust. Eventually it dries and blows away, but flies can be seen mopping up the juice. Here, a picture winged fly is signalling with its wings that it is seeking a mate for a romantic sugar dinner, with a dance.

This is a soldier fly, and lives a very different life. The grubs live in wet, moldy leaves and the adult is usually near by. The adults often don't have functional mouthparts, so often die soon after emerging.

 

There are other predators around, too. This is the larva of the ladybug, a well known aphid hunter. The problem is these insects prefer the cool and often fly away if they are too hot. This is a  problem often overlooked by rose growers who buy and release these beneficial insects in the middle of the hot day.

The fruit season has begun. This is the first of the mulberries. The currants are just appearing , too. The bosque is preparing to start the next plant cycle. The cottonwood seeds will appear in the wind right before the summer rain.

This group of people are flying a drone in the bosque to capture some video of the bosque for a commercial audience. For people who can't travel, this might be the closest they can get to seeing the unique forest that is the Corrales bosque. There are many users of this accessible forest and it is amazing the ecosystem has survived as intact as it has. This is not an accident; and as well as luck, it relies of the hard work of many people with a vested interest in our environment, as well as working together.