Blast

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."   Thoreau

What is danger? Is Nature dangerous? Maybe just unknown? What is safety, and what is that price? This snake sunning itself on a path is not dangerous. In fact it is stunningly beautiful. Being ignorant of snakes doesn't increase safety. But experience is necessary.

I'm not sure quite what this young rabbit was doing out of the safety of a burrow in the middle of the day but it seemed quite fearless. To a rabbit, there must be a lot more danger in the Bosque, but it doesn't seem to deter the rabbits, apparently. When the plants along the ditch are mowed, we often will see nests of small mammals disturbed. This often attracts coyotes and other predators.

This tussock moth is avoided because to people it could be venomous, but probably isn't. The fuzz is more likely to be a camouflage to look like the head of a grass stalk.

A Mississippi kite is more likely to munch on insects than rabbits and they are attracted to the cicadas in the area at the moment. They seems to appear by magic when circumstances are just right. the numerous grasshoppers are quite a banquet to small raptors that can fly close to the ground.

Snowy egrets fill the same niche as herons and I notice they appear when the trout are stocked. Many fish eating birds like to be around when the water levels expose the best spots of feeding. They are very fond of fish that are in new surroundings and don't know the best places to hide yet. Some pictures are very blurry, but the old saying is right "the best camera to take a picture is the one you have with you"

Normally double breasted cormorants prefer to dive for their food. This avoids the competition from those birds that ambush fish from the shore or shallow water. However, they are not adverse to making things easy for themselves on occasion and wait for the food to swim to them when the water level is low.

Spiders come in all shapes and sizes with many different niches to fill. During the hottest parts of the year the most active spiders seem to predominate. While this picture is too poor to show what species, this is a typical spider, with opposing fangs. The bold jumping spiders are more usually seen round about now.

Lizards like this Chihuahuan Spotted whip tail are constantly patrolling the leaf litter for insects. This one has found a recently died cicada. The lizard is transporting it to a safer location for consuming. The tough exoskeleton will likely need a bit of work to dismember.

The flame skimmer dragonfly. The adults are winged, but the juveniles are aquatic. This concept is used in nature to prevent competition and allows more animals to share a space. Ironically, the juveniles will feed on each other, so the mother has to lay the eggs as spread out as she can.

Competition for a sparse resource underlies many concepts in biology. Insect specialization is also part of this. This beautiful insect is the dog-bane beetle and not only feeds only on the dog-bane plant, but also sequestered those normally toxic alkaloids to prevent predation by other animals. By exploiting a specific niche, an ecosystem can become more diverse and resilient to change, at the cost of yoking together different species and losing individual autonomy.

The summer in Corrales produces many large and strange insects like this longhorn flower beetle. This huge specimen sniffs out odors from distressed plants to feed on. There are many carcasses of beetle about, as they fall prey to stress and diseases themselves.

as well as dragonflies, there re many other predators such as bee assassins and robber flies. These flies are much more muscular that the dragonflies and often catch insects as large as themselves.

In our dry and desiccated environment it can be hard to appreciate the variety of fungi that exists in the bosque. Most of these are not palatable or that impressive. It is worth a pause to remember that humans and fungi are closer in evolution that humans and plants. This species, Battarrea. It is really a sort of puffball, but looks nothing like one.

This also looks nothing like a mushroom, but is a type of slime mold, but so little is known about this type of life form, that few are experts on them.

This is the New Mexico state insect, a tarantula hawk wasp. While many know these wasps hunt spiders, few know that they also pollinate flowers.

This snake was a Eastern yellow bellied racer. A rather rare snake for Corrales, someone had killed it on the side of the path. Interestingly, a coyote came and ate the remains, then it marked the territory with scat before leaving.

Web-worms are a caterpillar who work as a community for their mutual benefit. The webs prevent attacks from wasps and ants who often investigate slow moving insects.

Mantis actually exist in many forms, but this one is probably released by gardeners to prevent insect attacks to expensive rose plants.

Katydids are large insects that feed on the leaves of the large trees. They blend in perfectly among the large leaves. But when you change the background they can stand out.

In many parts of the Loma Larga road in Corrales you can see yellow spaghetti on the weeds. This is a parasitic plant called Dodder that is transported about in agricultural seeds. It is studied by biologists trying to understand how plants sense their environments.

There are many red ants and red ant species in Corrales. They are all hunting for ground nesting bumblebees to parasitize, They are armed with formidable bristles that stave off attacks from harvester ants whose domain they interact with frequently.

The bosque has not had many ducks this season compared with past ones. This likely has something to do with the low water levels making ducklings easier to see. Young birds face high mortality from a variety of dangers, including avian flu. Even thought ducks visit often but never stay, they only visit because they are not harassed. Much like the people who live here.

The Corrales bosque had many hidden wonders lurking in these weeds. Not all are beatiful. The variety of the expected and the unexpected is truly amazing. This turtle has just returned from laying eggs. Past years most nests were destroyed by raccoons and skunks. This year there are noticeably fewer mammals, allowing these reptiles to thrive once again. What this environment has to teach will be diferent for all of us, but no doubt the lessons are worth learning.

oak

"I came into England with Oak, Ash and Thorn, and when Oak, Ash and Thorn are gone I shall go too. ..." Rudyard Kipling

There is a lot of angst in our world about what species are invasive and what is native. This seems to have something to do with deciding if a species is worthy of veneration, or destruction. This a weird reductionist argument that trivializes the point of an integrated ecosystem of which we are a human part. 

    We can't help this behavior or course, because we all reinforce it. This is likely part of our shared cultural heritage as gardeners and migrants. Figuring out what belongs is important to our collective sense of worth, no matter how odd the results may eventually become.

 

Beardtongues are from America, and found mostly in the western states. Sparse in the wild, they are popular garden flowers. They get their name from this single infertile stamen called a staminode. This weird vestigial structure was left over when the flower evolved into a tube shape and appears to improve pollination rates. In New Mexico they are often found at higher, cooler elevations.

 

Rhagium inquisitor. This is a ribbed longhorn pine borer beetle found at the crest of the Sandias mountains. This species is not really a pest, it just feeds on dead or dying pine trees. Annoying to commercial timber farms probably, but even then only those trees that are already highly stressed from bad weather conditions or poor management practices.

 

This is a very young bird locust. Some species of this type become monsters almost 3 inches long. The term locust only applies to a migratory form controlled by hormones which we rarely see in the United States.

 

Birds live complex lives and exhibit crazy behaviors that have allowed them to dominate most parts of the world. Here is the remains of a nest of phoebes once it had attracted the attention of a raiding coopers hawk. That ate the fledglings of the second brood of the summer. While this nest attempt was unsuccessful, she had already raised four youngsters and once raided, she simply began laying more eggs. Persistence pays and the coopers hawk has to move on until the eggs hatch.

 

The deer fly, like mosquitos, needs mammal proteins to produce eggs. Unlike mosquitos their bite is pretty brutal, like a bee sting. Flies in general usually feed on pollen, nectar or salts. A few have adapted to humans by switching to garbage or the feces of domestic animals. 

 

Many of our birds are only visitors, like this summer tanager. Others are year around visitors like the Cooper's hawks. Others can be escaped pets, or simply lost. Our bosque is used by many different birds for lots of reasons. The old trees and free standing water are strong draws for avians of all stripes. The tanagers come here to breed and nest, but are not as common as further south in the range.

 

Cottonwoods are a good nesting tree for many birds like tanagers. However, there are obviously problems with old trees that use shedding branches as a way to propagate. Most trees in Corrales are older so the wind will often bring down branches in the spring. Even though cottonwoods often show signs of disease they also cope well with this disease burden. People who trim or remove altogether them regret it later, ask them.

 

This is an odd picture of an egg/nest underground. Notice how the egg is longer and skinnier than a normal bird's egg. This is a snake's nest, probably bullsnake. The dark brown is the amniotic fluid from the other baby snakes that have already climbed out and left to explore the brave new world around them. Snake eggs don't form a hard shell, the egg shape is from the pressure of the fluid inside and feels leathery.

 

Many raptors visit New Mexico because we are at a crossroads between North-South and East-West flyways. Both along the continental divide and beside the gulf of Mexico. This is the Mississippi kite, it mostly eats small animals or large insects and is kind of rare in this state.

 

Prionus heroicus is a beetle feeding on dead wood usually found at night. They place eggs underground via this absurdly long ovipositor, which can take many minutes to set up and retract. The pupae feed on small roots and dead wood, preferring softer, rotted woods. 

 

Japanese beetles (or figeater beetles) appear around about the time the sunflowers appear. This one was caught just before it disrupted the Corrales parade by stampeding small children. Their loud buzzing flight does seem to panic people not used to seeing them, but they are completely harmless.

 

Many insects specialize in appearing something other than an insect. The plumate moth does this by furling the wings up like the sails on a boat. The unfurled wings are more feather-like than wing shaped. The extra spikes help make the outline look even less moth-like. 

 

The common house combfoot is found in most houses and has adapted well to the flora found in a normal house, which means small, sparse, fruit fly meals with cool, constant temperatures year around but most importantly little competition and no predators. Their webs are tangled and chaotic and they use their namesake combs to manipulate the many threads that sense and trap small, weakly flying insects.

 

This moth is relatively unknown, but lives in the family that contains several famous members, such as the British pepper moths. All of the caterpillars in this family are known as inchworms because of the weird way they loop and extend like they are measuring distance. 

 

The unusual hayworm moth has caterpillars that feed on dried plant material, such as hay. Their wide bodies are not well designed for flight, but they can flit between small spaces easily. Only one of the moths in this family do much damage to hay, but they all get painted by the same brush.

 

There are many insects that will ruin a farmer's day, but there is some help, like this wolf spider. Spiders are not known for their hunting of caterpillars, but they certainly do. They also will hunt them when the caterpillars are most active, at night. Birds are not helpful with night active insects, and farmers also shield the plants away from the birds anyway.

 

Cutworms do minor damage to plants themselves but cause some unsightly damage to crops like tomatoes and cucumbers. Most tomatoes are damaged by a virus such as curly top, or a plant parasite such as broomrape. There is a world of difference in advice between commercial farming and backyard farming when it comes to pest control, so I always wonder how the two become co-mingled and always leads to an excuse for maximum chemical extermination.

 

The stink bug is often confused with the squash bugs and operate the same way. While this is not a commercially damaging insect, they tend to infect a single plant and will destroyed a higher percentage of the crop of hobby farmers. 

The Corrales bosque has an abundance of small lizards, with quite small diversity. This is due to the large number of ground insects and abundant hiding spots which specialist reptiles like these can take advantage of. The variety of habitats are also great for a species that moves about to thermoregulate. Roadrunners occasionally visit, but many are predated on by the raptors that roost in the many cottonwoods, so these lizards have the place to themselves. 

    As Rudyard Kipling quoted though, if the vegetation changes, so will the fauna. Old trees are removed and few are replaced. Close cropped, heavily managed lawns replace tall growth fields, and as open acequias are replaced with more predictable groundwater wells the landscape will be changed, and not likely for the better.

    We are quite fortunate to have these lizards, as they are one of the first animals to vanish when a house is renovated and landscaping applied. They don't do well with heavy human presence because of the disruption to their daily active lifestyle, which involved much active displaying, defending territory, and basking. We likely will lose these cool creatures to progress because of property tax revenue which we will never see. In the end these animals will leave anyway and we won't have chosen if they are invasive or native. I guess we aren't as in  control as we thought.

Meat

 "Just as the sun knows when to set and rise, the birds know when to migrate and return. There's a rhythm to life, and everything has its place." - Maya Angelou 

 The weather has its own reasons and follows its own feedback loops. It is odd to see a weak monsoon system set up gain this summer in New Mexico.

The monsoon is important to New Mexico as a source of groundwater for both humans and wildlife. The long term trends affect whole ecosystems. The rain that fall this today can effects seen several years later as plants and animals thrive or move according to the moisture and conditions.

More specifically, the conditions that allow a rainbow to form are set down very precisely.

So, the main ingredients to see a rainbow are the following:

• You need to be standing with the sun to your back and the rain in front of you.
• The sun needs to be less than 42^o above the horizon.
• The sun's rays must be hitting the raindrops to create the rainbow

Nature also follows specific laws, but there are many more of them, and they both overlap and have different priorities, producing a bewildering and complex tapestry of life and death.

Humans have a very negative view of death. Mostly we try to ignore it. In nature death seems to be much more visible. This wasp is a male that is dying due to its very short lifespan. Males are very disposable in most reproductive cycles, especially social insects. If they don't contribute much to social life, they don't seem to live as long.

Male scolid wasps do not actively fight each other, but they do prioritize detection of females over aggression with each other. They are much slimmer and slight because they don't need to subdue large beetles like the females do. Their slings are also very slight.

 

Male blue winged scoliid wasps are also short lived. They have clearly longer antennae due to their needing increased sensitivity to pheromones. Sometimes they can be found flight each other in small swarms trying to be the first to successfully mate with an emerging female. But they will usually just wear themselves out hunting for females. These wasps are much more spread out, mostly because their prey, metallic June bugs, are also spread out in lawn turf.

 

Raspberries are a common sight in Corrales, or rather used to be when Heidi's had a community raspberry and blackberry patch open during the summer just south of La Entrada Road and the interior drain. the area is a fantastic wildlife preserve currently, but the area is always at risk of housing development. Fruits from trees, fields and bushes are impressive along this road, and the several farms in the area keep the area vibrant for both humans and wildlife.

 

 Scarab beetles live most of their lives eating roots, but they occasionally come up to the soil surface to breed and risk predation by the several species of large wasps that parasitize them.

The large datura plants have an evil reputation which seems to be quite at odds to the beautiful blooms. The blooms close during the day and open at night in a process called anthesis. The process is probably promoted by the relative increase in humidity in the atmosphere as the sun disappears. The reason the flowers close during the day is likely to prevent desiccation of the nectar, allowing an increased "pop" in nectar fragrance in the early evening. Anecdotally, I have also noticed bees try to force their way in but stop once daylight has gone. Data and research on floral opening mechanisms seems to have waned since 1950, but recently been revived by the growth of intensive cannabis farming.

The blossoms of the silver leaf nightshade are very different, in spite of being a plant in the same nightshade family as the datura (along with potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco, etc) these prominent anthers are often pollinated by bumblebees using a method of pollination called "Buzz pollination" the nectar reward is small but the pollen is more nutritious and indeed, commercial greenhouses of tomatoes use bumblebees to pollinate the flowers instead of honeybees, that don't buzz pollinate. If there aren't any bumblebees, growers have to resort to electric toothbrushes.

Convolvulus arvensis also known as field bindweed is a plant that also has a mutulistic relationship with bees. In this case a type of sweat bee that also roosts inside the petals after anthesis. Usually the males use these flowers to attract females to breed. They will also chase away other bees from foraging. These specialized bees have pollen collecting hairs over the abdomen instead of the simple pollen baskets found on the legs. Interestingly, this flower stays open longer in urban settings and this seems to be related to the lack of pollinators, especially anything that isn't a bee or wasp.

 

morning glory is just another name for a flower that includes the convolvulus genus, but can refer to any of over 1,000 species, many of which are not even closely related. This bloom seems to be in the Ipomoea genus, also called bindweed, of course.

North America is very lax in its naming conventions. This is seen in the naming of robins to a particular type of thrush species not at all related to robins. This butterfly is named a sulphur in America (applied generically to most Colias species), and a clouded yellow everywhere else. The system of weights and measures is not the only confusing in North America.

The four toothed mason wasp is one of the many hymenoptera species in the world and is notible for the fact that the males can sting, (but have no venom) and they copulate for far longer than other species. This species feeds on caterpillars, pollens and nectar.

This Euodynerus species is another type of potter wasp often found on plants in wetter weather. So many wasp species exist but they are all single minded on reproduction right now and have almost no chance of stinging anyone.

Jumping spiders are often found in the summer, They are very acrobatic, smart, and those huge eyes seems to miss nothing. They seem to act very differently than those other sedate and cautious spiders.

Velvet ants will become more common as they scurry around, These are actually a wasp species, but the females are wingless. Their stiff hairs deter the ants they share their habitat with. These wasps actually parasitize other wasps such as cicada killers and bumblebees but this particular species, Klug's velvet ant has not been specifically studied.

 This wasp looking insect is actually a rough harvester ant. These drones are the unsuccessful suitors of the solitary queen. Hot, humid mornings are ideal conditions for a swarming as new ant colonies bud off from existing groups.

 Cattle egrets travel around tall grasses hopefully spotting and catching fleeing insects. Their name comes from their habit of using large animals such as cows and horses to scare insects into the open.

A major problem of nesting birds is the danger and vulnerability of fledglings. This nest of Say's phoebes was raided by a cooper's hawk. Luckily, this female had already raised one brood this season. Phoebes are in no danger of extinction and have learned to nest as close to humans as possible to reduce their exposure to predators.
 

Humans are very likely to keep predators of all sorts away from this sacred temples (homes). Because of this, many animals have learned to stay close, literally under our very floorboards and roofs. Mice, cockroaches, wasps, and phoebes all rely on us for protection. Coyotes and bull snakes are kept away by various efforts, even by those of us who like these fine animals. 

Everything has its place, indeed.