cotton

The world is a complex place full of doom and gloom always threatening to overwhelm the beauty and secrets of nature. It has always been like this. Small hope and obvious threats seem to go together. Hope is certainly not a great solution, but every solution must start with it.

"Hope is being able to see the light despite all of the darkness"

Desmond Tutu

 

Birds are highly evolved and come in many different sizes. This hummingbird is tiny, but so fierce.  Everything about it from the heart to the bill is specifically adapted to it's lifestyle.

This horned owl feather is several times longer that the tiny hummingbird. Apart from the distinctive stripes, the trailing edge of the feather is also fuzzy, reducing noise from turbulence when flapping. This feature is very specific to this type of owl, other owls have stiffened leading edges to achieve the same effect.

This turkey feather has a different pattern, and the feather is much more symmetrical along the spine without a trailing edge fuzzy border. Turkeys are neither silent fliers, nor build for speedy flight. They are very fast to get off the ground however, with powerful wing strokes lifting much heavier bodies into the air quickly. This type of feather is much larger, designed for maximum lifting power. The form you see in the feather has a specific function, a key biological idea.

An ecosystem is not pretty in the way a gardener would see pretty, because it has a different function than a garden. These old cottonwood trees in the bosque are gnarled, broken, infested, and untidy. Just the way this tanager likes it. Look closely and see the insect in the bill that it just plucked from the furrows in the damaged wood.

The wood itself tells the story. This elm log is dry and grey. Wood shrinks a lot when it dries out after dying, creating cracks and voids. Wood is naturally very resistant to decay, provided it stays dry. The only part of the tree that is actually alive is the thin ring just under the outer part, the cambien. Most of the tree's weight is made up of organic "cement" called lignin that provides strength. The fibers of cellulose in that cement gives wood it's toughness. Because lignin repels water, it is important in preventing the spread of rot.

The yellow seen here in a cottonwood tree is from cellulose, the most abundant polymer in wood and it is a water absorber. Sponges are often made out of cellulose. Cottonwood is a type of populus species and a very soft hardwood, but is unsuitable for most carpentry projects.

Just below the dark orange bark is a band of coarse water absorbant fibers. This is the reason all cottonwoods have not been cut down to make houses. The wood is soft, and fibrous. Cottonwood is named by sawyers who looked at the wood, not gardeners looking at the seeds. Trees are called wood once they are cut down, just like bullocks (not cows) are called beef once they are...."cut down". Cows are kept to make more beef. Mature bulls are also not eaten as they taste "gamey". Humans eat "steers", specifically young castrated males.

Why all that detail? Cottonwoods are designed to survive as a weak, hollow tube. They tolerate massive fungal invasion. Then animals further hollow out the tree. This limb was cut by an arborist to prevent the limb falling on a car. Eventually water got past the lignin barrier and into the cellulose sponge. If the branch is less that 3" diameter the tree can usually seal it up with living material. Then fungus softened the wood with enzymes and water until a woodpecker, insects or a squirrel enlarged the hole. The living tree is still there, protected by that tough mat of coarse "cotton" fibers that so annoyed those earlier fellers.

A fungus is neither a plant nor an animal and is a bunch of fibers underground that have wormed their way into co-existence with many organisms. All plants grow by using fungus byproducts (soil) but some have symbiotic relationships with their parasitic overlords. This is a fungal fruit that helps spread spores to create more threads underground.

This dead beetle will be returned to the soil eventually by the action of fungus. A fungal infection might even have killed it. Humans are obsessed by fungal infections, but their pathogenicity is pretty low (compared to other humans driving cars).

Plants and animals often just try to get along with each other to everyone's advantage. This solitary bee sleeps next to it's food source. The flower then gets a built in guardian. They get along, notice the large amount of pollen in the pollen baskets on the insect's lower legs.

Many plants like to get noticed, of course. These (out of focus) aster type plants advertise they have a little nectar, but it's easy to get to.

This sulfur butterfly would be more noticeable, but blends in well with those wing veins on a background of dried leaves. When the wings are folded up, the bright colors disappear.

Many plants use both these visual systems, they blend in until they want to attract attention. This alkaline swainsonpea is a legume that uses bacteria nodules in the roots to produce usable nitrogen in areas like sand or heavy clay which don't have any. The pale green is pretty generic until its time to attract insects with bright red.

White is a popular color of plants that are hoping for moths AND other species. Most flowers come in several colors, depending on local insects. As a general rule, pinks or reds are for flies/beetles/bees. Pale colors like white work better for beetles and moths. Some flowers open in the heat, others in the cool. Plants are flexible critters, they use whatever works.

These flowers set up a little runway for busy pollinators to guide them in. Bigger insects like bumble bees in particular appreciate this. Then their weight causes the stamens to drop down and bop them on the back, increasing the efficiency of pollen transfer and pick up.

A variegated meadow-hawk. A female I think because the colors are more muted. Unlike the archetypal dragonfly taught to high school kids, meadowshawks are poor fliers and often found hiding in the tall grass. They tolerate much colder temperatures that the common red, green, and blue ones we usually see. Plants grew later this year due to lower temperatures in the spring and no rainfall, I think this gives this cold weather species an advantage.

One of the many species of sand wasps. These are amazing insects that are currently looking for nests to mate. The edges of the ditches are perfect for them as the passage of much human foot traffic grinds the earth into a fine clay dust that is easy to dig into and (relatively) free of predators such as spiders and ants.

The ditches that make up the Corrales character are being erased slowly. The argument that the interior drains "no longer functions as intended when it was excavated in the 1930s" is stupid and short sighted on many levels. Ignore the fact that these drains still do their intended job. Instead, look at these new cottonwood sapling (2 years old) growing in the only place they can get close to the existing water table. This is at the end of target road behind the elementary school. It is a native tree nursery. There are plans to fill in this wasted space.

These ditches house many surprises that I don't even know about (and I have been looking, hard, for a few years now). These turtles are now on the move through the dirt beside the ditches. They are less mobile this year compared to the last, but only because they are now more nocturnal, for several reasons.

Two parallel tracks run across this road, which show where a turtle crossed at night to reach a warm , dry spot to dig a nest. They cannot wait anymore for the rains that would erase the tracks from the gaze of a patrolling raccoon so they have to take a risk. Plenty of eggs will survive, but not those of the rarer sliders and snapping turtles.

Tracks show up excellently in the dust. and the story is clear for those who study them often. Between the wide footprints in this track the dust is smooth as the turtle shell dragged over the sand. There is also rabbits, dog and human tracks in this picture. Everything tells a story if you listen, sometimes you do not have a whole story and have to fill in the gaps from other stories. This is called experience.

I have no idea why ants form clusters like this, This picture shows a dense heaving mass of small ants. Typically for science, we know exactly what chemicals induce this aggregation (as opposed to trail pheromones), but we have no idea why they release this pheromone in the first place.

I get humbled and fooled often by many things in the bosque. This is the remains of a leopard print dog's chew toy. It looks remarkably like a snake, doesn't it? It certainly fooled me.

This is a young coach-whip. The back was broken about four inches behind the head with a blow from a stick, probably, that broke the skin. Coach-whips are fast and scary but not even venomous. The series of loops in the body and the gaping mouth show the death rolls of its agony. It took a while for this snake to die after the blow that paralyzed it.

Coach-whips mostly prey on lizards like this juvenile whip-tail. Humans are nothing like the natural prey for these snakes, so are not in any danger unless they do something really stupid.

Killdeer usually appear in Corrales about the time we start to see tadpoles. They raise quite a ruckus when they see people getting close to their hidden nests

Cormorants are odd birds that get their feathers wet, which is quite a strange thing for a water bird to actually do. Most other birds use oil or powder to keep the water away from their skin and feathers with a layer of air. This allows birds such as ducks to tolerate cold weather better, but as you can often see, ducks are not good at reaching deep below the water surface. Cormorants are great at diving for hidden fish, but have to dry out their feathers afterwards. Their feathers are black because melanin pigment (black) helps toughen feathers after this rough treatment.

Cottonwood seeds drift on the breeze, but their design can do far more than that. Here, you can see the river is slowly receding because those seeds show the high water mark. They land on water and the small air currents from the miniature equivalent of a sea breeze push the fluff onto the shore. Then they stick due to electric charges found in clay particles. Then the taproots form from the initial collet hair roots. The cottonwood pods release this mass of unruly fibers according to temperature and humidity levels, basically, when a thunderstorm is approaching

These cottonwoods are very adaptable, but are also in trouble. They are not likely to become endangered, but the landscape in Corrales is clearly changing for many reasons. It is completely inevitable that if things continue, cottonwoods will cease to be the dominate trees in the area. Worse, Corrales could lose all it's trees as it continues to urbanize. It has already lost almost all of it's natural wetland, and that is not coming back (people do not like to live in "swamps"). This last picture of a field next to Wagner's apple orchard full of cottonwood seeds may one day be just another plot of a McMansion next to a channelized river kept alive with diesel pumps solely to provide water to Texas. The cottonwood seedlings show the light, covering the darkness of the soil all around, as Bishop Desmond Tutu predicted.