Flower

To everything there is a season,
A time for every purpose under heaven:
A time to be born, And a time to die;
A time to plant, And a time to pluck what is planted

Biology teaches many things to those who listen. Everything is connected and all things need other things. The flowers and the pollinators are intimately connected. It can be harder to see the point of the other insects, such as spiders and wasps, but they all clearly work together. For instance, a decrease in birds leads to an increase in spiders. Seeds are spread by coyotes. The number of links between systems creates endless combinations of unexpected effects.

 

Biology is also very good at humbling people. This butterfly is not a monarch, but is a viceroy, a mimic species. The caterpillars use the bitter tasting chemicals from the willow and cottonwood leaves to repel birds. The monarchs use cardiac glycosides from milkweed plants to repel predators such as birds . The caterpillars and chrysalis of the viceroy butterfly stages also look like bird droppings

      

The morning cloak butterfly , like most butterflies are attracted to wet places like this damp sand, to "puddle". This is a way for butterflies to eat, and mate and is often rather gross.

This is the chrysalis of a mourning cloak. It will just and hop if disturbed, look for them in dark and cool areas of the forest. The fierce looking spines are actually harmless.

The things creative people can do with moths in quite eye-popping. Butterflies are usually just mounted in rows with a small card, but moths are cultured for silk, their dropping are made into tea, studying moths helped people understand natural selection, and the caterpillars can be eaten. This moth in particular; a meal moth, has adapted to living with humans. It can eat our clothes, or cardboard containers and most of our food (grease, flour, and vegetables). It also benefits from travel by humans and protection from predators such as mice and birds.

 

 Another fascinating creature is the army cutworm. Also known as a miller's moth because of the fine scales that cover the wings. This moth often sprays an acidic, but harmless liquid when disturbed. They sometimes occur in huge swarms, but so far this year are staying scarce. The caterpillar has the highest fat content of any animal known (3/4 of total body weight) and is eaten by bears in large numbers in the mountains.

 

 It takes ten years to grow a cherry tree from a seed and they also do not grow "true" so no fruit may even come from the tree. Not only that, but they often fail to fruit because they bloom during late frosts that can kill all the nascent crop. That means this pair of ripe cherries growing beside the bocce ball field at the parks and rec. center is a little miracle in my hand. If you pick some, please leave as much as possible for others (and the birds, too). Cherry trees cannot self fertilize, can need domestic honeybees to carry pollen from another tree nearby. So cherry trees with fruit are almost never found singly.

It can be easy to forget that most pollinators are not honeybees, or even wild bees. There are 4,000 native bee species and most are tiny and solitary, like this 2mm long sweat bee. Beetles, bats, mice, birds, flies and even elephants have been identified as pollinators. There are 200,000 species of animal pollinators, but the vast majority are insects

This is a furrow bee. If people really liked bees as much as they say, they would research and plant cactus flowers. I watched a continuous procession of different bees land on this cactus stigma, and literally dive into the pollen around them. Cactuses have to attract bees from a far distance, so use all of the flower's tricks of color, smell, and sugar.

Something happened to this hairy footed Scolid wasp and the ants were waiting for it to die so they could scavenge it. This wasp hunts June beetle grubs and helps control the numbers of root eating grubs around farms and orchards.

This stout spider is in the genus trachelid, basically a "wandering" spider that doesn't build webs and come out at night usually attracted to the insects that are attracted to porch lights. Web building spiders have complicated interactions with birds, but wandering spiders tend to be more common in early summer before the ant armies have managed to dominate the night.

This fearsome looking ambush spider is a species of grass lynx spider. While not dangerous in anyway, the venom from this genus seems to be studied often as an interesting molecular library of novel effects from venoms. This one is most likely Peucetia viridans. This genus is odd in that they can smell specific insects and move to sites where this smell would be strongest.

This is a pretty large weevil I found on some plants. Weevils are often a pest, but many are also pollinators as adults. This one is in the Lixus genus, so is likely feeding on ragweed roots, but that is just a guess. Many weevil species are only found on certain plants and very few are actually damaging to plants. Weevils are pretty famous for an ancient symbiotic relationship to a bacteria that produces the tough exoskeleton weevils are famous for: Nardonella

The woodhouse toads are growing in the shallows at a ferocious pace, feeding on the algae and trying to stick to the shallowest water possible to avoid the large fish waiting in slightly deeper water (>1/2") for a quick snack. Bullfrog tadpoles overwinter below the mud in deeper, still water and are big enough to avoid some fish, but not the large bass, catfish and trout species.

The larger fence lizards have come out and showing off is a big deal now, with males showing off their blue throat patches and wooing females by rubbing their flanks.

Flowers are everywhere right now and fragrances are easy to smell. Here is honeysuckle, it is a European import pollinated by night hawk moths that use specialized long tongues to reach down the trumpet to find the nectar deep in the flower. They produce a significant amount of nectar and can taste sweet to humans if the outer septals are removed. Jasmine has a very characteristic smell in the late summer and the ones in Corrales seem to be evergreen. They are pretty hardy plants that are in the olive family. The source of the smell; jasmonic acid, is an important plant stress hormone that stimulates all plants to increase plant defenses against insect damage but increases changes of plant virus attack

 

Alfalfa plants are important in Corrales as a common crop for feeding horses during the winter. It can be harvested 4-6 times each year with .6 acres being enough to feed three horses. The western United states were introduced to this crop after the 1860's and the North and South Americas now produced the majority of the world's crop. The flowers use a special trick to hit a bee on on the head to more efficiently transfer pollen and apparently European honey bees learn to avoid the trap and do not pollinate the flowers while taking nectar.

The bright orange flowers of the buffalo gourd are very noticeable, as is basically the whole plant except the huge underground taproot. Everyone seems to claim this plant is useful, yet those same people also say it is fetid, and poisonous. Oddly, both statements are true. These gourds are pollinated by squash bees which are more specialized to the task than honeybees.

The trumpet vine flowers come out in summer and are attractive to bumblebees, hummingbirds and also wasps. Ants and bees are also attracted to the flowers because of the aphids and mealybugs that secrete sugars outside the plant

Flowers also occur on bromus species and are easily overlooked because this type of grass has high silica and is not good for grazing. Plants that are neither harmful or helpful are usually ignored by most. This fact explains why just about everyone underestimates the variety of species in our world. chequered skippers are often found on these plants in the summer.

This plant is well known for the fact that no one calls it by the correct scientific name. The velvetweed is called Gaura parviflora even though it should be Oenothera curtiflora or even Gaura mollis. This seems to be a publication oversight from 1823 that no-one ever saw the need to correct. The stellate hairs that give the plant it's name help control moisture so that frost doesn't damage living cells, wind doesn't dry the stems, and full sun doesn't desiccate the cells below the waxy cuticle.

Grasses are common and well used by humans. We grow food from them, building materials, animals feed on them and they are everywhere people meet in large groups, like parks and sporting events

Still, it is rather odd why grasses have to be keep the depth of a carpet when they could be so much more. The benefits of grass for cooling and moisture are almost completely ruined when the blades are kept dense and short. Grass has evolved to survive heavy grazing, heavy water and heavy fertilizer but it doesn't seem like this would be desirable.

Gregor Mendel used pea plants to prove basics of biology, and then the research was promptly lost until educators began looking around for a simple introductory story. Pea plants use one gene to produce one visible trait, but most of biology is much more messy that that.

Many of the weeds produce the best flowers naturally. However, this flower is not a field bindweed, but is a "pink lady" one of the evening primrose family and is another common grassland flower. In the southern range, the blooms are pinker and open in the morning for butterflies, while in the northern part of their range they are whiter and the blooms open at night for moths

Hands down, this is the best flower ever. The silverleaf nightshade, the bane of prim and proper gardeners everywhere. They are not poisonous, trouble to remove, or fast spreading. They will not, however, be pushed out from where they want to grow. They are beautiful, strong and great pollinators. The fact that they humble almost every gardener who tangles with them is merely a bonus.

A poppy, made infamous by the juice of their immature seed pod, and by a simple poem after world war one. The poppies in Flanders field of Belgium are actually disappearing as urban encroachment, invasive species, and climate change pressure the remaining fragmented populations. Grasslands are a very complex ecosystem that cannot be managed on a small scale, except as a pale imitation on the front lawn.

Roses are selectively bred to be beautiful, bountiful and fragrant, but they offer nothing to pollinators except a chemical whiff of pesticide sprayed on to remove aphids and ants. They have thorns and are used as indicator plants on the end of grape trellis because they are so delicate. I have no idea why they are preferred to nightshades.

The natural bounty of the ground is coming out, as seeds, fruits and drupes begin to appear. This is a common golden currant, seen all through the bosque again after nearly being wiped out in the last decade.

This is just one of the many species of broom. I think it is Spanish broom, but honestly does it matter? French, Portuguese, and Scotch broom have a different leaf arrangements but the botany arguments still rage as to whether this plant is good, or bad. The problem is that both answers are correct, as usual. They were once imported to help gardeners and now are vilified as invasive.

These odd "warts" are from a psyllid species that uses hormones to turn the plant into a nursery for the insect larvae. A neat trick for a small insect. The galls on this hack-berry tree are harmless and ever present.

The yerba mansa is a small plant common in patches in the bosque where ther is moisture close to the surface and deep shade. The actual flower is really a bunch of little flowers with petals stuck on the bottom. No one is sure where the name comes from but the botanist who named it in 1837 have been codified by Wikipedia and the new definition is likely to become the dogma

 

The Englemanns prickly pear can be common in areas, even in the bosque. The flowers are finally here as the days heat up and those are powerhouses of nectar and pollen for bees, beetles and other insects of all sorts. Most are short lived, but visited constantly all day by mostly bees that are tough enough to bust down into the base of the flower where the sugary rewards are.

 

 The problem with seeing the same things again and again is that you can often not look more closely at what there is. I often assume that the blue birds are....bluebirds. but this is not always the case. This blue bird turned out to be a grosbeak, a very different species in the cardinal family and has no relationship...other than color.

Turkeys are large birds that have to have their wits about them to survive in the bosque surrounded by bobcats and mountain lion, large owls and red tailed hawks, domestic dogs and feral cats. Notice I did not include coyotes in that list. This feather shows where some sort of tussle occurred, because a turkey does not lose it's primary flight feathers easily. There was no blood or carcass, so I suspect the result was a draw.

The coyotes are much less visible right now, but they still leave their evidence about. Their scat used to be mostly apples in the winter and spring, but now they have moved to mulberries. Their poop continues to be mostly fruit, and they are easily baited with sugary treats (don't do this). Not exactly the fiendish, pet killing devil dogs I read about on the next-door app. The scat is usually placed in prominent spots on trails as a signpost for other coyotes in the area. Many domestic dogs like to eat it and can pick up the coyote's parasites (another reason to leash your dogs).