Fluff

 Change in the bosque is constant, and it comes in many different forms. Sometimes change is good, sometimes, expected. Other times change is devastating. On a related subject, the special meeting of the Interior drain committee is TOMORROW. Full disclosure; I'm critical, but reserving judgement. An earlier Corrales comment article stated the goal is to recreate the Alameda drain trail on Albuquerque's second street. Those who drive along that public works debacle hopefully see what I see.

"April 23, 2023 2:00 pm

Corrales Community Center - 4324 Corrales Road (building in the northeast corner of the parking lot)

Come see the presentation of ideas for the Corrales Interior Drain Preserve project."

 

Anyways,

It is irrigation season finally for the Sandoval lateral drain and this means old flooded fields, people gathering at acequias again, and a lot of confusion for the wildlife.

 

 This pocket gopher has been flooded from its burrow by the irrigation drainage from the Sandoval lateral. While its formidable defensive teeth are effective at chewing through thick clay for 9 hours a day, it is vulnerable at becoming lunch meat for most predators in the bosque.

Flood control in Corrales has documented a weird and long history since World War I. It doesn't help that the goals of the authorities has changed drastically over those years, the needs of the population have changed rapidly, or that so many different agendas and agencies have been involved. While the Corrales system of flood management has many people scratching their heads, or grinding their teeth, it is worth noting that the authorities have a storied history of managing floods on our behalf. This is not from incompetence, or any such thing. Mostly because it's difficult, the many different communities of Corrales have needs that can change in a flash, and every one of these groups has a right to be heard. All compromise is local, as the saying almost goes.

The weather and water leads to flowers and blooms. The gardening community of the continental US is awesome and at times seems like a juggernaut industry relying on the labor and finances of untold billions of dedicated serfs who pursue a confused dream. Fruit and ornamental trees are carefully managed by pruning, frost tables evaluated, and tractors warmed up. Seed pouches are inspected, masters consulted, and dreams are hatched. The orchestrated effort is impressively enormous across this fruited plain.

Its wild to think that the efforts of gardeners are also directed at suppressing an entire ecosystem.This effort of defoliation, land management, chemical application and services is also failing. Wild flowers such as dandelions and bindweed are adapting to the new niches gardeners carve out for them. This plant is an aster, probably Scorzonera laciniata. Because it is not native, it has only received negative attention from gardeners. It thrives on "disturbed ground", which the best I can tell means where people tread.

It can be mind boggling how wide the range of human reactions to wild life can be. This bullet casing was found on the middle ditch of Corrales. It was reported, collected, and then I moved on. Speculation about how it got here, or why is fruitless.

Other speculation is far more interesting. As soon as the ditches fill, the raccoons begin their nightly patrols of the puddles left behind. Occasionally, some unlucky raccoons, skunks, and other critters are flushed out of their burrows in the culverts and siphons that make up parts of some acequias. Other critters benefit from the puddles left when the ditches drain. In the summer and fall, these puddles will fill with fish, tadpoles, and crayfish that migrate out of the river.

Sphinx moths are very hard to capture on film, bu they are big fans of mercury vapor lamps on warm stucco walls near to potted plants. I usually see these big moths in the fall, but this year they switched things around a bit.

 

 This newly hatched caterpillar is likely to be a geometer moth, but is a little too young to tell yet. This one. along with a whole army of others (currently the size of a comma) are going to be doing a lot of munching over the next few months.

 

 Bibio, or white winged march flies are very common right now. Most are flying in tandem pair to maximize mating success. Their grubs are hard at work right now digesting all the dead, moist, vegetation that has been accumulating in the rapidly filling ditches.

The first of the season's grasshoppers have begun to make an appearance. They come into the world with excellent camouflage and escape strategies. If hopping doesn't work, they often jettison one of their legs to escape capture. They often swim across streams to avoid lizards. They are full of tricks.

 

This acequia is choked full of debris that will have to be pulled out by hand. Ditch maintenance is constant and hard work, but easy to do with only a few people and very little mechanization. Sadly, each year it is not hard to spot the places where communities give up on this vital work to government entities with big machines and little interest.

As the debris flushes into the clear ditch and downstream to the river, the snowy egret visitors get first dibs on any critters who were caught in the flood. Often these birds prefer to catch the fish who are attracted to the outflow pipes  by the flush of new insects. 

Community is important and like most things, if it is not supported, it does not grow. These egrets form a community to exploit an opportunity. Can we as humans form communities that help our world be a little better? Not a simple question, really.

Spread

 The funny thing about the Bosque is there are a great many people who think they know our ecosystem, simply because they have been living in it for a long time. In this case, familiarity can only breed contempt if there is not an effort to value what they have and try to look deeper. What people want from this community varies by individual and also over time. But we all have to live with those consequences.

Woodpeckers have a quite sophisticated form of communication, as do all birds. Woodpeckers will also use drumming which is a complex skill that they have specific brain neurons for.  They choose special resonating dead tree limbs that must be dry and hard. Time spent advertising is also time spent not looking for food. So the signals carry a lot of subtle information to each other.

Muskrats also call, but tend to be much quieter because they are preyed on by everything. While they focus mostly on eating cattails, they actually omnivores. There is a low density of muskrats currently in Corrales, but that is likely to change as the cattails continue to fill up our irrigation ditches. At a certain critical level, as population becomes high and the food becomes scarce, they will clear great swathes of aquatic plants and drive away other forms of wetland creatures. This likely will be seen at the Via Oreana ditch within a few years.

The shape of turtles is unique, in that it is a good design to warm up their internal organs in the sun. Sliders like this one are becoming far more numerous as the water temperature rises. I think this is a big bend slider, as there is no distinctive "red ear" on the side of the head.

We start to see egrets as the fields are flooded for the growing season. The cattle egrets tend to prefer open fields and insects. The snowy egrets, like this pair, prefer to hunt fish in shallow water. These are elegant birds, until you spot their ridiculous big yellow feet.

Bluebirds are often seen flying, but they spend a large amount of time of the ground as well. Picking insects from the ground is easier than catching them on the fly, so to speak.

The belted kingfisher is devilishly hard to photograph. They appear with the first of the mosquito fish, but they spend the majority of their time creating alarm calls,, and chasing other birds away.

This bird looks a lot like a pigeon, until you notice the hooked, raptor bill. The Swainson's hawk has a strange expression for a hawk because its eyes are more protruding than the more common coopers and red tailed species. These birds will breed and rest in the bosque until August, then migrates back to South America.

For some reason, this female wood duck is not paired off with a male, and now has at least three suitors hanging around performing head bobbing.

The warmer weather is bringing out the grass species, and the early seeding ones are already getting ready to seed the next generation.

The variety of plants in the bosque can often seem limited compared to a rain forest. But the seasons mean that different species will appear at different times. This is the cryptically named touristplant.

 

 This ant is considerably bigger than it looks. It is a carpenter ant but does not destroy houses like a termite or anything like that. They feed on insects, seeds, carrion, and aphid secretions.

 This newly emerged carpenter bee was found in Albuquerque by my wife. These big insects look distinctively different that the fuzzy bumblebees we see later in the year.

There are many small rabbits appearing now as the fresh young grass attracts them into people's backyards. This species is pretty ubiquitous throughout the warm seasons on well watered lawns.

Water is life, and the control of canals is a way of life that is under threat, principally because it needs everyone to work together for it to work. Now, the process is left up to the Mid Rio Grande Conservancy District funded by property taxes.

Small water projects are notoriously difficult to keep going for long periods of time, because circumstances change. At the Corrales Elementary school, the interior drain is viewed as defunct by the Village of Corrales. Just inside the school grounds is an area of about an acre that used to be a thriving wetlands that was abandoned at the start of the pandemic as the school converted to a wastewater system. Given that the school needs land to possibly enlarge to include new middle school, I think it is unlikely that this area will ever be revitalized to live up to this fine sign ever again.

Hummingbirds do not need these feeders to survive, if there are plenty of flowers they can use. The feeders help make their numbers visible. This is a black chinned hummingbird. There is something odd about using a plastic flower to entice a hummingbird to be see by humans.

 

 The river is just below its crest and the willows slow and hold the backwaters, allowing silt to settle, and creating breeding sites for many species of insects and animals. Crucially, humans also stay away from flooded areas, allowing animals some respite from the normal heavy use of recreational users in the bosque.

The lateral ditch has filled up fully for the first time on April 18. Every drop is now pumped up from the Rio grande with huge electric pumps. The gravity fed system from the Cochiti dam is not going to be operational for at least another year. In the flat Corrales Flood plain, water head elevation of a few inches means the water can travel by gravity over hundreds of feet. This is why this lateral pipe drain is so far above the clear ditch, and why it is loaded with sediment. This sediment was removed by the Cochiti dam and broke the Corrales siphon. This same sediment is slowly filling the interior drain and will likely lead to it being removed all together unless the Corrales community is able to (quickly) find a value for wet land that it has not thought of before. The clear ditch was dredged by MRGCD last year, but the interior drain it is connected to is slated for development. So, like the elementary school's constructed wetland, will not be maintained. This will have a devastating impact to almost the last example of wetlands left in the Corrales region.

The interior drain Committee is having a special meeting to present new ideas for its development at the Corrales Community Center. You should attend.
 

Heat

 As the weather warms up, the size and diversity of insects is increasing. The reptiles are finally able to come out of their hibernation. The leaves are finally coming out on the trees. The mammals are also traveling around taking care of their business. Unfortunately some will end up under the wheels of fast moving cars on the Corrales main road.

 

 High up in the trees, the buds, seeds, flowers, and leaves are developing. Many animals are dependent on these new food sources. This porcupine is enjoying a taste of sugar and sap after a long winter of eating dry bark layers and mistletoe.

 

Most people think of bees in terms of the European honeybee hives which the US produces and ships at a rate of 100,000 to 200,000 per year, mostly from California. Most native bees are about the size of a grain of sand, and there are 4,000 species of them. Most are stingless, and cute as fuzzy heck.

This cold stunned native bee is coated in pollen from the early blooming ornamental trees. Honey bees produce honey to last the winter and survive in colonies. They are essentially a farmed species, exactly like cows.

Many moths have a thick coat and fat reserves to survive in the cold. They shiver their muscles to raise internal body heat, which goes against everything we know about insects. However, fish, snakes and even plants can do this same trick

 

 Mayflies do, indeed come out in May, but their calendars are a little mixed up. Small numbers have begun to come out now the threat of frost has passed.

 Lacewings are a carnivorous insect, like ladybugs. Their presence is a sure sign that aphids are reproducing nearby.

 

 Butterflies are very hard to photograph properly, or maybe I just don't have the patience for it. This is a mourning cloak butterfly, and is out, along with the cabbage whites and sulphurs to take advantage of flowers such as dandelion or New Mexico olive.

The flowers that dominate now are mostly purple or yellow and pretty small. Humans have bred many types of plants just for their flowers, and artificial selection has produced a lot of novelty, which humans like, especially when buying flowers. This is the flower of the golden currant.

There are many different insects called stink beetles. However, there are 30 different Eleodes beetle species found in New Mexico and they all look very similar. This one is probably Eleodes obscura.

 

 Some of the first lizards to appear in the spring are the western fence lizards, they bask in the sunlight to quickly come up to working temperature.

Their common name is "blue-belly" and April is the beginning of their breeding season. The males sport this awesome blue throat, but keep to hiding places until the competition of others forces them to become more daring.

 

 Holes and animal homes are connected. These woodpecker holes in dead wood are often enlarged and turn into homes for other species. Especially those holes that are protected from sun and rain.

 Ants appear just as the elm seeds begin to fall. The harvester ants quickly collect these. Other ants begin to milk aphids, or scavenge animal carcasses. When it has sprinkled rain, the ant holes have little cones to prevent flooding. The ant-lions also lay out their traps for any unwary ants on patrol, but have to rebuild each time it rains.

I haven't tried to separate the different birds. This is a phoebe on a common perch. It was getting hassled by the tyrant flycatchers that were nesting nearby. I have trouble telling them apart. They both feed on insects. This is made easier by the habit of insects to stay coupled for extended periods and mating in swarms.

the coopers hawks seem to be stooping on small mammals on the ditch bank, probably voles and mice. Some of the ground impacts can be fierce and the bird is often stunned for a few moments. This one has feathers in disarray as it assesses the near miss.

 

 The Jemez is still flooded as the hot temperatures partially melted the record snow pack in the mountains. Recent rescues on the Sandia mountains reinforces that message that there is still quite a bit of snow around at elevation.

I have no idea what killed this mouse and only ate the brain. I suspect it was a skunk, because I see tooth marks on the head. A domestic cat is also a likely suspect. Many people complain about the safety of small domestic pets here, even though it is the small local wildlife like mice and lizards that suffers most.

Leaves bring out the cottonwood leaf beetles. The adults are busy eating quickly as they start mating and laying eggs in time for the leafing out of the forest. they will start appearing in large numbers.

Physella acuta freshwater snails are very common and feed on decaying vegetation. They in turn are fed on by ducks, turtles, and fish. This snail is very robust and can survive punishing conditions as long as they don't last for a long time.

These snail eggs are laid in huge numbers on submerged vegetation. They dry out quickly in the sunlight but survive by being laid in mind boggling numbers.

Hummingbirds have learnt to be attracted to feeders. They catch insects and collect spider webs for their nests. They appreciate the feeders as a source of energy, and engage in fierce aerial duels to keep others away.

Whenever there is any hint of moisture in the air, the rolly-pollies start to leave their characteristic tank track markings in the dust and sand.

Muskrats and beavers have survived a lot of human assaults. They thrive despite polluted habitat, little livable space, introduced predators like dogs and cats, and vehicles. They don't have a choice, of course, but their perseverance is fascinating to watch. Other species are less lucky. Globally, 60,000 species are estimated to go extinct each year.