Data

"If you really look closely, most anything is worth the trouble." - Julia Child

Living next to the Corrales bosque needs an odd mix of of relaxing contemplation, and keen eyed vigilance. As the last of the insects retreat from the cold, the birds and their riot of colors becomes more prominent. Of course, there are still the oddballs; some flowers have begun to bloom. There are plants that are only now beginning to grow, There is a paradox here that needs to be looked at. Just like the "French Paradox" noted by Julia Child; looking closely can lead to illuminating questions and open surprising ideas.

 

 The Western Pygmy blue is a small butterfly seen more during the colder months. It is odd how a change in a sense of scale can help thinking about the big things in life. There is a row of small black hearts along the wing margins. There must be a reason for that, but what the heck could it be?

  Sooner or later the public will forget you, the memory of you will fade. What's important is the individuals you've influenced along the way.- Julia Child 

Buck-eyes are very noticeable butterflies seen in the bosque on sunny days where they open their wings to warm up in the sun's rays. These butterflies prefer plants that produce iridiod glycosides. A hormone that encourages caterpillars to eat more, but which also deters predators of those caterpillars. The bright colors help predators remember the bad taste associated with eating these insects.

Buckeyes are also know for their habit of resting with their wings upright, their undersides are a plain brown and very hard to spot against a blanket of leaves.

Some of the most sought after birds are the iconic, majestic sandhill cranes. Most cultures see them as the epitomy of grace and poise. They spend a lot of time communicating with each other. They are courting, after all. That small cap of red feathers becomes brighter as the bird becomes more adult, and also reflects their social status.

The heron is another stately bird that is sometimes confused with the crane. These birds are more likely to be solitary, found in trees and they keep their neck short most of the timer. They don't have the red cap of feathers and they tend to be more "sulky"

 

"It's so beautifully arranged on the plate, you know someone's fingers have been all over it." - Julia Child

Mallards have a secret life. While these ducks are so common they are the archetype of a duck, it it often forgotten that they have an incredibly complex social life away from the bread handouts and squabbles. During private times on the Rio Grande, each female is followed by a jealous male who is never far away. Without his protection, the female would be constantly harassed by unpaired males and lose time feeding that she needs to build up egg laying fat reserves.

 " And if the food is truly vile, as my ersatz eggs Florentine surely were, then the cook must simply grit her teeth and bear it with a smile -- and learn from her mistakes."" - Julia Child

 

This beautiful male wood duck should be paired up, but in spite of it's clear finery, it is alone. It has plenty of time to try and woo a female away from another duck, but is likely this individual will not have real progeny this year.

"I don't believe in bottled salad dressing… why should you have it bottled? It's so easy to make. And they never use very good oil." - Julia Child

Duckweed is a one of the smallest vascular plants in the world, yet it covers vast areas of water. It has adapted well to human irrigation practices and thrives in areas with high nutrient levels (ahem, leach field run-off). Fish and ducks feed on it directly. Turtles and frogs hide beneath it. Clams and crayfish live in the clear water the anoxic conditions these plants create beneath them.

The loveliest thing you can cook for someone who's close to you is about as nice a Valentine as you can give." - Julia Child

Widgeons are much calmer and quieter than mallards. Their courtships are more reliant on aerial displays. The male also mirrors the female's movements in a sort of dance that appears to have no other reason than to show attention.

 

 “It’s hard to imagine a civilization without onions; in one form or another their flavor blends into almost everything in the meal except the desert.” - Julia Child

Doves are so common we can often forget these birds where one of the first animals humans ever domesticated around 10,000 years ago. They have been used for everything from war, food, religion, farming. Each fall there is a population of around 400 million birds in the US, even though 70 million birds are shot by hunters each year.

"The only time to eat diet food is while you're waiting for the steak to cook." - Julia Child

The colder weather seems to have brought the smaller birds out of the trees to glean seeds from the ground in larger numbers. While seeds provide a food source, most birds seem to prefer insects if they can get them. Seeds take more work, and their longer extractions means the flocks on the ground are more vulnerable to predators.

“The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you've got to have a what-the-hell attitude.” - Julia Child

Predators have quite a tenuos life because they work hard for their food. However, once acquired, food is quickly consumed and allows time for other activities, such as protecting territory. Individuality is more beneficial compared to community, at least for parts of the year,  for these animals.

"People are so fearful of what they eat, they are no longer enjoying food the way they once did, and the dinner table is becoming a trap rather than a pleasure.'' - Julia Child

For other organisms, like honey bees, their survival depends on collecting food for the winter. Individuals are sacrificed for the benefit of the hive, a queen especially. The drones are even less important during the winter than the workers and often ejected when the temperatures get lower.

"Don't for the love of heaven let anybody rush you into anything" - Julia Child

Worker bees get worn out by their constant activity and those who are foragers work the hardest. . This means many die before the hive needs to eject many workers for the winter. The oldest and most experienced bees are usually those that forage for new sources of nectar.

Carpenter ants change their foraging depending on the weather. They gather seeds, or insects. Forage more or less depending on the seasons. They don't consume wood, but can often be found in or near old wood. Oddly, there is far less issues with ant infestations in a rural area than in a city, where they have no other place to forage.

“You should look at your food intake over the week, leaving room for two or three binges.” - Julia Child

I find crickets  hard to raise in captivity. Not because they are hard to feed, but because they are hard to keep clean. They are famous for being able to eat anything. Recently, a group in the bosque marked a path using a white substance that then attracted many woodland crickets. Whether it was chalk, cornmeal, some other starch, or even a protein, the crickets were able to make a meal of it all.

 

 “You don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces - just good food from fresh ingredients.”

― Julia Child

The process of leaves turning into soil is both amazingly simple and eye poppingly complex. But the breakdown of cellulose into soil begins with fungus. One of the most common species is sooty fungus that is innoculated from the honeydew of aphids in the summer months. Of course, there are many species and most are not studeied or known. Our lack of biological knowledge is some areas is really quite shocking.

“If you're afraid of butter, use cream.” ― Julia Child

One of the reasons gardeners like certain non native plants so much is that they give the right behaviours for the gardener. Even if this is completely wrong for the environment. Honeysuckle is know to flower into the fall, and varietals that flower for as late as possible are selected for. Walking along Andrews lane you can often catch a whiff of what smells like artificial home fragrance, but it is actually artifical selection  at work.

“...no one is born a great cook, one learns by doing.”― Julia Child

This picture is trying to show a brown cottonwood sapling against other brown trees. The cottonwoods are losing in a decades long race to adapt to changing conditions. They are adapted to a short growing season by using light and temperature cues to know when to grow quickly and when to shut down. In the current environment, they stop growing too soon, and the russian olives, salt cedars and elms are still shading them out with new growth.

 

Cottonwoods are trees that have evolved to take advantage of a very specific series of environmental changes. They use runners, hydrophilic seeds, and resprouting branches to take advantage of moist areas with receding flood waters. The young trees then grow very fast both downwards and upwards with all the other pioneer species. The large trees then prevent the next generation from growing by heavy canopy cover, until the next river scouring event from high water levels.

the saplings need a moist and heavily vegetated environment to get the stimulus to grow fast. Cottonwood is one of the softest of the "hardwoods" because of this initially fast rate of growth. Trees tower over the grasses on river plains so can usually afford to go into dormancy relatively quickly and so be more cold hardy and drought tolerant.

Other trees have a different approach to climatic conditions. Russian olives have a very long growing season. As the weather gets colder they tend to quickly grow low sprouting shoots. These are called epicormic shoots, and are often found in trees prone to fire damage. Any stress can cause this effect.

 

 Forest dieback is a term for when a forest dies without any clear cause. in the 80's this happen to vast swathes in North America and Germany with no clear cause ever discovered, but plenty of speculation about a tipping point reached that causes cascading effects throughout the ecosystem. As the cottonwoods disappear in the bosque, another slow growing species is appearing. Junipers normally are too specialzed for arid grasslands to compete, but they have begun appearing in increasing numbers.

All trees are keystone species used by animals for food, shelter, or something else. This is coyote scat that contains digersted remains of Russian olives that can be transported long distances and maybe resprout in a new location. The official term for this is zoochory.

Coyotes eat a large amount of things that they should not be able to digest. Along with seeds, they often snack on human discarded trash and a surprising amount of vegetable matter.

 

Everything can have drama if it's done right. Even a pancake.” - Julia Child

To some of us a coyote is a daily occurance, to others it can be a declaration of war. This dog walker clearly has no idea there is a coyote behind him. The unleashed dog either doesn't know or doesn't care. My personal theory is the coyote is hoping the noisy people will scare out a small mammal, or that he will drop some trash. 

In the evenings the coyotes work in a group to flush rabbits, gophers, or mice from tall grasses towards the river's edge. They use loud howling to both co-ordinate and scare the rabbits. It can be pretty scary to the owners of livestock and domestic pets as well to hear those sreeches howls and cacklings this close to Halloween.

“Once you have mastered a technique, you barely have to look at a recipe again”― Julia Child

I like learning to ask the right questions about what I see in nature and I have noticed my predictions of natural events get more accurate each year. I also like that I am far from knowing everything and the mysteries left can be fascinating. It can be refreshing to not know an answer, but a focus on actually asking the right questions brings its own clarity.

For example, everal people other than me saw this object in the sky just before Halloween. It moved in the sky like nothing I've seen before. I'm sure the story with either become more conflated with repeat telling, or it will be explained away by someone else with more knowledge. I can say the initial sight inspired a new sense of awe, similiar to what I feel when a new concept in introduced to me that opens a new vista of the imagination. Maybe more of us need a sense of awe in seeing the unknown. Far too many of us feel the need to explain things for our own satisfaction without knowing what we talk about. Or maybe more of us should.

“I was 32 when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate.” - Juila Child

Adage

 "Nature is not a place to visit. It is home." - Gary Snyder

As summer moves into fall, the creatures that live in the bosque change. The prevalence of scales and chitin has changed into fur and feathers. Leaves disintegrate and are replaced by blades of grass across the ground.

 

 Cranes are rather odd birds in that their ideal landscape is one created by farmers. These birds prefer a half harvested field with corn that has been knocked over by winds. They like wide open spaces full of corn kernels and churned up earth that exposes roots and cold stunned insects.

 

Right now the cranes are heading further south to the fields of Bosque Del Apache that have the wide open spaces, and custom field management designed to their unique way of life. Mostly this involves room to be cranes away from the weird noises, sights and sounds of humans. However, they do migrate up and down the river valley, and Corrales fields tempt them with things such as apple pomace, open grass fields, and corn handouts. These are still wild birds however, so it takes a few weeks for them to acclimatize to the sheer density of human activity found here.

 

This flock of crows do a very similar thing. For them the attraction is the local landfill, and the shopping mall roof tops and dumpsters that provide food for a large number of birds. The city also is a reliable source of heat in the cold winter. Right now the flocks of crows are small and transitory, but in a few months there will be flocks that number in the hundreds of individuals close to the Alameda bridge each evening just after sunset.

 

 Far more solitary in nature are the red shafted flickers. Like most birds, they have a strict schedule starting at dawn where they preen in the upper branches of trees as they let the first sun's rays warm them up. They use this time to survey the social landscape by listening to birdsong and then take off for a period of foraging and exploration according to what they learn, their whim, or experience.

 

 The actual process of molting is apparently quite complicated. This is the tail feather of a red shafted flicker juvenile in second molt. The vane is asymmetrical with a tufted base. While the pigment color comes from their diet, how that color is expressed in the feather is modified by metabolism and that is specifically why the feather color is correlated to breeding success.

 

 This is a red breasted nuthatch. Corrales mostly has the more widespread white breasted variety, which is easily found at the less busy bird feeders. They have small bills, but they use these well by wedging seeds into wood cracks to hammer them open.

 

    A very different feeding strategy is used by the towhee. This noisy, brash bird rummages loudly through leaf litter to uncover insect larva hiding in the undergrowth.

 

 Euxoa genus. Moths do not get nearly the proper props for the benefits they bring to an ecosystem. Its not even that they are particularly ugly or boring. Butterflies just have the better PR campaign system, obviously.

 

Tiger swallowtails are a big butterfly we can sometimes see in the Bosque, but no one is ever going to put a moth on a balloon. Why an insect has to look like a flower to be appreciated is something I probably will never understand.

 

Of course, with the number of insects that live with us on Earth, it's no surprise that most of them will go unnoticed. This moth rolls its wings up like the sail on a sailing ship, but no one seems sure why.

Sadly, most people know the silverfish from a cameo appearance on the video game "Minecraft". These impressive insects were a much worse pest back  in the days when they would feed on the starchy glues found in wallpaper, books, and even the gypsum of the walls themselves. If water is available they can live for years without eating. They can shed their skin at will, so they can slip out of any spider web. There isn't much they can't digest, such as cardboard. They can probably feed on human dander, but that appears to never have been looked into.

Oak trees are famous in Europe for being large, and tough. In the southwest, they tend to be much smaller and found at high altitudes. Burr oaks are actually amazingly well adapted to dry climates, but only thrive where their slow growth is not a handicap to becoming shaded but trees adapted to human destruction, like elms. The study of Quercus trees is pretty complex especially at the DNA level. Humans once relied on this species a lot, back when they were much more common.

People sure have a strange idea of recreation. The clear ditch is Corrales is now dry due a combination of events related to maintenance backlogs. Someone drove down into it in their off road recreation vehicle. The problem is that the water table is just below the surface and they became stuck at a low spot in thick mud and had to be winched out by a partner vehicle. Incidentally, theses vehicles are not allowed in the bosque, let alone the ditch.

The cooler months are not supposed to be a time to find lizards. There are plenty of them, and they are often much easier to catch in the early mornings and evenings as they become more sluggish. This common fence lizard was simply picked up when it got caught under a cold hosepipe stream.

 

 Bottas pocket gopher are active at the surface of their burrows. Apparently collecting leaves, they also seem to be digging more surface tunnels and gorging on plant roots (usually treasured garden plants) because these are rich in nutrients in preparation for the winter.

Coyotes feed on many things, and try as I might, no one seems to believe they have a largely vegetarian diet based on their scat marks. They seem very interested in the arriving cranes, but that is also their usual curious natures, along with their appetites changing with the seasons as fruits become harder to find.

Plants kill off their leaves by the process of abscission. The cooler temperatures reduce the production of a growth hormone called auxin. This causes leaves to break off at special abscission zones and the whole process is amazingly complex and carefully orchestrated.

 

 Of course, not all plants follow the same script in the winter. There are many plants, like this domestic gourd that choose to bloom in the fall. This yellow is not from the destruction of green leaves, but the flowers looking for pollination. Flies are insects that are active long into the fall and serve as pollinators for many cool weather plants.

The way we look at the world can be very important. This is a view of the eclipse though a sun filter. It was an awesome sight (honest)

The moon is still the same size, but seems a lot bigger with not being compared to the sun. Of course, the moon is only visible because of the sun. Conversely, no one looks at the sun unless the moon (or earth) is in the way. What we pay attention to, and why, is important. Deep ecology is a philosophy espoused (sort of) by Gary Synder. It is in contrast to the utilitarian philosophy most people have when considering nature. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea that something should have a useful purpose, but it also doesn't have much to recommend it.

However, history of the 1960's showed humans the fragility of earth once they had a view of it from the moon. Dubbed the famous "Earthrise" photograph, it drove home the idea that this planet is fragile and small. While climate change is a new clarion call, the ecological issues sound familiar to some of us who can learn from recent history. Hopefully we can learn how to be stewards to our home before it is changed for the worse.