A New Year's Eve "Write your own book of Ecclesiastes" challenge!

I apologize for the lack of blog entries these last two months, but from Thanksgiving, right up until this day, New Years Eve, life has been too happily full, to find time to write anything.  For that matter, it still is and this particular New Years Eve blog has been pirated from my Christmas letter.  Consequently, it will be one of those "personal history" rather than "natural history" blogs.  With a good dash of Godness within it. I am looking back "Solomon style" to see what wisdom I have garnered while "toiling under the sun".

I believe I am a visual learner, for I often conjure up mental images to cement a concept in my mind.  For a long time, I have had this image of "Life as a conveyor belt".  Picture the newborn babies just getting on and the rest of the generations spread out at further points.  So here I am, on the cusp of 65 and realizing I have been chugging along for some time and am now getting to the far side of the belt.  And I humbly submit that from where I stand, I can claim to have picked up a few insights along the way.  We all have.  Why not share them then, our own book of Ecclesiastes, with apologies to Solomon!

 ~ To my friends who are of a similar age, let us admit we ARE lucky to have made it this far.  Watch any newscast, any day and you will see how tragically short some peoples conveyor belt ride is.  “You do not know the day or the hour” rings true every day when the news presents us with the harshness of life that is the daily reality for so many people on this planet.  Things I can’t imagine living through.  If our lives aren’t the leading story of a newscast, let us be exceedingly thankful.

 ~EVERYBODY needs his or her peer group through every stage of life.  Young moms need young moms, teen parents need teen parents, anyone suffering from any illness could use the advice of those who have walked that road before them, and naturalists need other crazy naturalists who get just as excited about scat as they do.  Took me a while to find them here in Texas but I did and I thank God for them!

 ~  We are ALL crazy!  And it is simply amazing how many forms of “crazy” there are.  You know yours and I know mine and a standard prayer of mine is,  “God give me grace for other peoples “crazy” as I pray they will give me grace for mine.”

 ~We ALL have talent.  In my book, it is God given talent, and he keeps trying to teach me that my OWN talent will do and I need not envy other people who are so graced with some talent that I have zero of.  That’s OK Pat, if we ALL had artistic talent how would we even realize it in others?  My lack of skills makes yours shine and I am happy to do so.

 ~We ALL have an affinity for certain topography.  Most of my life has been spent in the temperate zone: a life of deciduous and pine, moss and ferns and, for many years, oceans and marshes.  I was always amazed that so many military people from the South LOVED the South, heat, humidity and all.  ALL Texans LOVE Texas because it is the landscape set down in their youth.  God Bless them.  I, however, am not adapted to thrive in caliche soil but need a marshier ground under my feet.  And how I pray I can someday get back to that life “between the tides”.

 ~ And finally, God loves EVERYBODY.  That realization has been with me for a long time thanks to a great talk I heard years ago by John Maxwell.  I think it was called “The Five Things I Know About People”; so funny, so moving, so right on, and the way he expressed GOD LOVES EVERYBODY just sunk in and stayed with me.  Some people think Christians hate everyone that isn’t Christian.  That couldn’t be further from what Jesus told us to do.  He loves everybody and we are to do the same.  That’s how they will know we love him; by the way we love each other.  So how is that going? Not so well.  We are such flawed creatures, but it doesn't change who God really is.  He isn't flawed at all and loves with a love you just can't get anywhere else.  I always joked that the two sources of unconditional love were G-O-D and D-O-G.  But, love my dog as I do, I realize God has slightly more to offer.

So please, all of you out there with a tainted view of God, it comes, dare I say, from the flawed actions of we flawed followers.  Condemn us for our hypocrisy but don't ever get the idea that God is like that.  I always say, look at Jesus, not US and find something not to like about him.  Too much love maybe, too much forgiveness, too generous, too much creative genius?  Try to ask yourself what you don't like about God himself: not us, not religion, but God himself.  It may be worth your time to consider the question.

OK Pat, step away from the pulpit and wish everyone out there in blog-land the best of whatever this new year will have to offer.  I have been thrilled to be in ME with my grandchildren, thrilled to have it snow, thrilled by the unidentified, as of yet, tracks in the snow.  When I have caught up with my piled up work in Texas I hope to come and share some of these northern finds with you all. 

Meanwhile, look back with wisdom on the time gone by and look ahead with hope for the unknown of what is to come.  Happy New Year to you all!

The Roller Coaster Weather of Texas

 On any given day, when I open the door to let the dog out in the morning, I can be greeted either with humidity worthy of a day in the rain forest or, now that it is fall,  “a day when I might NOT be sweating”! Yeah!  Ah, but the very next day can be one where you might swear there should be Toucans in the trees.  

 Not that this takes a meteorological expert to figure out.  If the weather is coming from the south, tropical air it will be, and if from the north, well, at least cooler than tropical. The hope is, that as we get deeper into late fall or early winter, the chance of "hot and humid" will be less likely than "cool and lovely".

Precipitation has followed the same pendulum swing.  The floods that made the news this spring had me naively thinking it would be a green summer, which it was not.  

 Plants drooped dramatically for most of the summer, refusing to be cheered by my attempts at watering them. Now the rains have returned with a vengeance and I am out there rescuing the potted ones from root rot! Job security I suppose.

These last rains have greened up the world like spring again.  The rain lilies that leap out enthusiastically after every rain are carpeting the grass.  And my firecracker fern, which had only a paltry few “firecrackers” when the hummingbirds were here, is now loaded with tubular flowers.  Ironically, it comes at a time when the hummingbirds have exited, stage left.  I know I have pointed this out before, but it certainly was a good plan to have animals be cued by the shortening of the days rather than the change in temperatures to know when to shove off for other climes. 

And, as I have confessed before, Texas keeps me stumped in truly knowing the signs of the seasons.  Hummingbirds have gone, check, that happens, it seems in late Oct, in my yard anyways. 

Mockingbirds are singing up a competitive storm, but this I have grown to realize is the territorial dispute over who winters in which yard, not a nesting squabble.  I hear less from Bewick’s wrens than Carolina Wrens but they are both year round residents so, not sure what that portends.  A sad demise of the Bewicks?  Captured by feral cats?  Moved to the neighbors?  Just not singing?  I have no idea.

The hordes of harvestmen are nowhere to be found, although legs were floating in some of my rain buckets lately.  Were they all eaten? Left in the night?  Hiding under the rocks? Or perhaps they do disappear each fall.  I should pay more attention.

But in one weeks time I shall be bundled up and headed north.  Although I will have missed the glory that was autumn, I thrill to the thought of walking in the woods with my grandchildren and recognizing familiar sights of fall.  Nuts and pinecones chewed in a way that gives away the one who has done the chewing. 

 Chipmunks probably will have sealed up their homes but, if not, then the woods will resound with their constant chips warning you to back off.  Don’t even think about taking any of their hard won stash.  The bogs should be crimson and bittersweet, that omnipresent invasive that drapes the trees in Halloween orange should be, well, omnipresent.  I can’t wait, signs of a season that I can recognize!    And, should any free time present itself, I will share them all with you.

Changes in Latitude Changes in Gratitude

 
 

I am not proud of this, not one bit, but I haven’t written any blogs lately, partly for fear that all that would tumble forth on the paper would be a homesick lament from yours truly.  Fall has always been my favorite of favorite seasons. Here in Texas, fall is truly both a continuation of summer (it is still well into the 90’s) and, if it rains, a return to spring.  Many plants that have convincingly played dead all summer get a second wind and produce a new batch of flowers, lovely but disorienting.  But Fall; with pumpkins in the field, apples in an orchard or a Technicolor blaze of color in the trees-not so much. 

However, I do realize that seasonal memories spring from whatever your native area produced so, I wonder, what fall means to many of you who live not surrounded by deciduous trees but by cactus?  We just drove to New Mexico over the Columbus Day weekend to meet up with two of my daughters at the Balloon fiesta.  We had lived in New Mexico for a few years when they were young and here we were, 25 years later, seeing it again.   

 I remember how a New Mexican Fall was the smell of Hatch chilies tumbling in large roasters by the side of the road.  Plus for two weeks in October, the Albuquerque sky looks like a Jules Verne scene, full of vibrant colored balloons some with impossible shapes that don’t look terribly aerodynamic. Fall in Albuquerque.

The drive there took us through West Texas where for certain stretches you would have to say, Fall must mean white cotton balls coating the side of the roads.  It is harvest time and with nothing to break the wind you end up with cotton-coated highways. Further along was a stretch of rabbit brush with its yellow bloom contrasted against red-rimmed rocks. Fall in West Texas.

Or perhaps it is the monarch migration that means fall to the people here.  Here they come, heading to Mexico and although I only counted 15 as we crossed West Texas perhaps, back in the day, a sky streaming with monarchs meant it was time to stock up on Halloween candy. 

 Or it must be Fall if robins showed up in your stream bed as they did last week at our nature center, red breasts versus red leaves.  They are only passing through, so now I know to enjoy the chirrup while it lasts.  It is not the omnipresent bird here that it is in the North.   

Perhaps to a South Texan this season is marked by kettles of hawks soaring over the Texas coast to make their leap to Central America or the season is changing when hummingbirds take extra long drinks of nectar in an attempt to pack on the weight before their Gulf Coast crossing.  It probably just depends on what you grew up with.  

So I will buy apples at the grocery store to can applesauce and pretend they are from an orchard and exult in any day that might be under 80. My cedar elms are turning yellow from drought, but they would also turn yellow now even with rain.  So, Happy autumn to me, Happy autumn to you, however you picture it.

"Crime Scene" Season is Upon Us

I am finding more exploded puffs of birds these days, on my walks and in the yard.  I jokingly call them "crime scenes",  which gets children to pay attention.  But what it tells me is that it is the time of year that the hawks are coming through.   

Here in the Hill Country of Texas we are at the edge of the spectacular hawk migration that funnels thousands of hawks from their northern summer haunts, along the coast, to end up in their Central and South American wintering sites.  I know there are places near Corpus Christi that are THE place for spotting this “river of raptors” on their way south.  Huge collections of hawks spiraling in the sky like that are called a “kettle of hawks” and I really must get more organized next fall and get down there to see it. 

We are north of Corpus Christi and inland enough that one still can count mostly on vultures filling the skies but I had a beautiful broad winged hawk perched in the tree out my window a few days ago. Close enough for a positive ID. 

 (that's an Audubon picture but that is how close it was)

 Plus, over the last few weeks I have been hearing, not the impresario blue jay convincing me it is a red tailed hawk, but the real thing.  A common sight in most of the country, they are a treat where we live, as are the few Merlins and Sharp Shinned hawks that have been through the yard lately. 

You can sense when they are about; everything goes still. “Nobody moves, nobody dies” is the motto of many a feeder bird.  However, a puff of white winged dove feathers on the lawn the next morning, lets me know this predator didn’t go hungry yesterday. 

I never can truly sense what month it is here in Texas.  Everyone is exalting the “cool front” that came through, lowering the temps to the 80’s but that still spells summer to me.  In the North though, many of the southward migrants would have left by now.  However, the most densely packed “crime scenes” I have ever seen in my life were found in a winter juniper forest on the Cape. Some 80,000 northern robins hailing from Canada decided to make our densely packed juniper forest their winter roosting spot.  

 To arrive at dusk would be to hear all the raptors claiming their part of this fast food forest.  Walking the trails there in the daylight the next day would show that not all 80,000 robins made it down for breakfast; a poof of feathers at every turn.  Still, one has to be happy for the top of the food chain when it is able to meet its nutritional requirements so it was more amazing than disturbing.  I doubt I will ever see anything like it again.

If you happen to live along this raptor flyway then I bet you too might be coming across these obvious piles of feathers, too many to be molted, that lets you know the raptors are passing by and one was lucky enough to procure a meal.  Scientists calculate these broad winged hawks may travel more than 4,000 miles to their winter destination.  By all means, lets not begrudge them a snack on the way!

Behind the Scenes with a Black and Yellow Garden Spider (Argiope aurantia)

Watering the plants on the front porch the other day, I turned to see the most beautiful and HUGE black and yellow garden spider in the midst of her HUGE orb web. She was busily reinforcing the center part of it with the customary zig-zag lines that make these webs so easy to spot.  She was most assuredly a “she” because in the world of these spiders, the female is easily twice as big as the male.  Her body is only a little over an inch but her leg span is almost 3.5” so she will definitely catch your eye. 

Unless you live in the Rockies, you have a good chance of seeing one of these beauties, for they are fond of making their webs, as their name suggests, in your garden, or in your bushes probably just a few feet off the ground.  

 They belong to the genus of Orb weavers; think classic spider web with concentric circles, then think of Charlotte and her clever “writing” in the middle of the web. Ergo many people call this spider the writing spider. 

 

The zig-zag lines provide her with a hiding spot in the center of her web and also helps the birds to see it and avoid it.  Here is your word for the day; the proper name for those lines is stabilimentum,  perhaps because they also help stabilize the web.  This lovely web may take hours to build, and yet, each evening, the spider will eat the center concentric part, which is the sticky part and build it anew.  Perhaps that is akin to a fisherman cleaning his nets. 

 

I titled this “Behind the scenes” for the morning I found her she was doing just that, rebuilding the center web.  We had just had a windy rainstorm so perhaps this was an emergency repair, or she simply didn’t get the memo that these repairs were supposed to take place at night.  I stood there watching as she lifted her abdomen and using that third claw that these spiders have on every foot, deftly attached the new web strand to the old one.  In the lower part of the web was a large red paper wasp, trussed lightly in silk for a meal later on.   Being large spiders they can dine on larger insects, grasshoppers and the like, and some have been said to snare lizards. Small ones I would presume.

Luckily , we aren’t on their menu, and if for some reason you did get bit it would be no worse than a bee sting.  Nothing deadly.  A man once brought us a garden spider in a peanut butter jar, wrapped with layers of duct tape to keep this “deadly” spider contained.  He thought he had caught a tarantula! Not likely on the Cape, but then, maybe better safe than sorry.  And as these are great spiders to have in your garden, we happily gave it a home in ours.

If you are a male spider, with an eye on a female, then that’s another story.  Who knows to what advantage this is, but for the males, finding that perfect someone is bound to end in disaster.  Plucky little guy will make his smaller web on a corner of her larger one and then “pluck” at the strings of her web to get her attention.  However, like the hapless black widow male, or the male praying mantis that can’t count on any bragging rights, he mates and then dies immediately.  The female, as we all know from Charlottes Web will also die when the weather turns cold but not until she has made 3-6, light brown, pear shaped, egg sacs which hold the customary 1,000’s of little spiderlings. 

 They may hatch in the winter, but will stay within the sac waiting for spring when, the coolest of cool sights, will be to see them all “ballooning “ on the wind, drifting away from all their hungry siblings!

Sadly, the last few days, when I checked on her, the web was empty.  No prey caught  in it, but no spider either.  No signs of a struggle. They don’t go on a “walk-about” but tend to stay on or near the web so I fear something untoward may have happened to her. So many lizards patrol this same spot that perhaps she has become part of their energy cycle.  It’s the way of the world.  But I will keep an eye out, and keep you posted, for I would have loved to find those egg sacs suspended from the nearby bush. 

I think I will just feel fortunate to have seen her at all, and with such a close up of her spinnerets turning out the silk.  Let us rejoice always!  It surely felt like a peek into the “unseen” I often ask God for.  May your day include the same, the “unseen” seen.

The Mystery of the Pile of Legs

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I hope that title caught your attention. It WAS a mystery, and it WAS a pile of legs.  Spindly black legs all piled up on the ground beneath a part of the stucco wall that is often covered with legions of harvestmen, (some people call them daddy longlegs).  I find them congregating in various parts of the deck; sometimes they cluster on the stucco wall, other days I may find them all packed into the corners of the ceiling or hiding behind the water tank.  

 

Harvestmen are nocturnal so their roaming about and hunting for food is something I don’t get to witness, although, a night on the deck with a flashlight might be interesting. The gregarious clumps I see are the way they spend the day. Safety in numbers I suppose but they seem awfully conspicuous and I often wondered if the birds ever found them to be a tasty treat.  This pile of legs seemed to be the answer to that.  I had just recently read a nature article about the Hill Country where the author mentioned that he could tell his wrens had had 4 harvestmen for breakfast by the number of legs strewn about his patio!     

Aha! I have several pairs of wrens in the yard, both Carolina and Bewick’s wrens and for the last month a pair of recently fledged Bewick’s wrens have made the back deck their number one hang out.  They have been endlessly entertaining as they land on the clothesline never expecting it to swing, flapping to keep their balance. They also find sleeping in a straw angel hanging on the post not only the best place for them to hunker down but a proven way to startle me each morning when they fly out.  And most recently, they have found underwear on the line to be the perfect cradle for a nap by day.  Discretion kept me from taking a picture of that!  So, it seems to me that they may be the likely suspects.  Not that that would hold up in court.

Of course, the only really edible part of this creature is its one body part.  In Harvestmen, as in mites or ticks, their head and thorax are fused together and called a cephalothorax. Insects have three body parts and spiders have two.  Although they are included in the Arachnid class, that one, not two, body parts earn them their own Order, Opilliones.  (I love the way that word rolls off the tongue, so very Italian sounding)  It’s hard to imagine getting your fill on this one small body part but I suppose if you eat enough of them it must count for something, for it was a substantial pile of legs.

As a defensive gesture they do have the ability to jettison a leg when trying to evade a predator. And that leg will continue to twitch around for a while distracting the would-be-assailant, but this pile had too many legs to have been caused by that.  I am still putting my money on the wrens.

The harvestmen’s other defense is a pair of scent glands located next to their eye that gives off a foul odor, ostensibly to discourage anything making a meal of them.  “Giving someone the stink eye” could take on a new meaning in this context! For that matter, some people think their mass groupings are for the purpose of really putting out a substantial stench when threatened.  I can’t say I have ever noticed an odor, but then I have never seen them being threatened.  When I get to close to them, they all start gyrating and do an impressive amount of push-ups but that’s all.

Once again, where was the camera?  Not with me, and when I went back the next day the wind had blown all those delicate legs away; the crime scene had vanished.   Now I check daily to look for other signs of feasting but so far, no luck.  Which is why I always say, if you see something out of the ordinary in nature, get excited about it now, for you may never see it again.

By the way, the name harvestmen comes from the fact that, in cooler climes, like the Cape, they are most often seen at harvest time.  Here in Texas, they are my year round companions.  Remember, they are not true spiders ergo; no fangs, no venom and no danger to you.  Plus, they have this amazingly wide diet including aphids that you would be happy to be rid of, decaying vegetation and (no accounting for taste) bird poop, so welcome them if they come, your deck may be cleaner for it!