Traveling the "Snout Route"

I love the sound of that, a “Snout Route”, and last week, as I drove back from the Wildlife Rescue and Rehab facility, that is exactly what I was on, a road that was being shared, with hundreds, maybe thousands of “Snouts”, American snout butterflies  (Libytheana bachmanii) that clearly had all recently emerged from their pupas and were heading in the same southwesterly direction I was.  

Let me not claim credit for knowing a “snout” when I see one. For that matter, I had to find a straight part of this twisty road to hop out of the car and scoop one up, for sadly they weren’t all able to avoid the windshields that were coming at them.  It was a small butterfly about 1 ½” wide and with orange and white spots on its wings.  But the clincher for the ID is the Jimmy Durante size snout, or what entomologists would call its “labial palpi” that extends way out in front of it.  It turns out it is wonderfully camouflaged to look like a dead leaf when hanging upside down from a branch and the snout makes a perfect leaf stem.  I saw one do this in my own yard and would give it an Oscar for its portrayal of a leaf.

And why so many this late in the season?  Well of course, with my lack of real sense of the “seasons” here in Texas, Oct might as well be as good a time as any other.  Although it turns out that what sparks explosions of these small butterflies is a dry period, or drought followed by rain.  The larvae dine on the omnipresent Hackberry tree and yet they really only like new tender leaves.  Who wouldn’t like a tender leaf over a tough one anyways?  So, when rain comes and the leaves begin to put out new growth the females can lay their eggs and in 12-15 short days you have larva that have gone through their whole metamorphosis and are ready to go.  And often, hackberry trees that have been stripped of their leaves as many in my yard seem to be.

Now, I saw a lot of butterflies, but here is the staggering statistic on them. These few thousand, or who knows how many really, were nothing compared to the Snout Explosion of 1921.  Surely you have heard of it.  In late Sept of that year, 25 million snouts per minute passed over a 250-mile area from San Marcos to the Rio Grande, and that rate kept up for 18 days!!!  In the end, they estimated 6 billion butterflies had passed by!  Yikes!  And what led to that incredible number?  Another year of drought, but then the heaviest rain ever recorded fell, 36.4” in 18 hours and we can assume all the plants, including the hackberry trees went berserk putting out new leaves.  And incredibly, there were the snouts ready to “get at it” and commence multiplying. 

But something else was at work here; they do have a predator, a “checks and balances” thing that nature is so good at. There is a wasp, that lays its eggs in the pupa of the snout. However, this particular species of wasp just couldn’t hack the drought.  So when the rains came and the pupa came off the assembly line, as it were, their parasite was nowhere to be found and the end result was 6 billion butterflies!  Isn’t that wild!  And it has been repeated over the years for drought is surely not uncommon here and neither are the much needed rains that finally fall.  I do believe that that 1921 episode still holds some kind of Texas record, and indeed, even though I thought I was being inundated with butterflies swirling around the car, I guess that was nothing. 

And, one week later, I don’t see any, so they obviously were headed somewhere else.  If you live out west, perhaps they were headed to your neighborhood.  They do winter over as adults though, so perhaps our chances of seeing the skies darkened by mass migrations are waning.  There is always next year, and now you will know what you are seeing.  Of course, I am the new one here; you probably already DID know what you were seeing!  Either way, wishing you a trip along a “Snout Route” sometime in your future. 

Fall is Spring Again

I can’t say enough how the seasons in Texas throw me.  When my internal clock says leaves should be changing colors and falling off, and flowers other than asters and goldenrods should be coming to an end, Texas sends out a carpet of new flowers as though Spring has just returned to the land.

 Fields are full of the delicate flowers of Praire Broomweed, a shrubby herb plant from the aster family with those impossibly slender leaves of desert plants and covered with an array of small yellow flowers. Clearly it spreads quickly as fields are full of it, and of course many consider it a weed, but back in the day it was used as a poultice to cure eczema and skin rashes so I am sure some folks appreciated it-teenage Indians maybe. 

Often along the borders of these fields and filling a section of the prairie where our Nature center is located are huge areas of Maximilion Sunflowers that can be anywhere from 3-10’ tall.  I assumed they were called maximillion  because they had so many flowers on each stalk but they are actually named for a Prince Maximilion from Germany who led an expedition out west in the 1830’s.   Either way, they are towering plants that provide a feast for birds, bees and butterflies.  You may have them in your area too for I see they are found in many states throughout the country.  They spread by rhizomes so that must account for why they are found in such large colonies. 

In my own yard the native Black foot daisies and Zexmenia’s that had all taken a break during the heat of summer have come charging back tempting me to not cut the grass in that area and once again providing, perhaps, a haven for chiggers.  We had a few rains that accompanied the cooler weather and it is amazing what water does for a plant, water from above seeming so superior to water from my hose.  Then the Lantanas all bloomed again, and the roses that I had given up for dead resurged.  So fall is spring, or is it summer?  No, I suppose it is just fall, Texas style. And next year, perhaps it won’t come as such a surprise.

Down the Rabbit Hole

I think it has easily been 6 weeks since I made any entries into this blog and perhaps that demands an explanation.   It appears I had far TOO good a time on my trip back to the Northeast this summer; the Cape felt like I had never left, the friends were wonderful to see, my daughters home in Maine seemed lovely, I was delighted to be with my grandchildren and well, I guess just heading my car back west caused a little more sadness than I expected.

Maybe it was the triple digit temperatures I returned too, or the many mosquito bites that each could contain Equine Encephalitis but for what ever reason I seemed to slip each day back into a depression that I thought I had shaken the year before when just the thought of leaving the Cape had thrown me for a mental loop.  

It is frightening how we can turn our mind from a traditionally joyful spirit to one of much more doom and gloom and do that all by ourselves.  I was clearly my own worst enemy here. But now the temperatures are receding to the 80’s or so and although it seems nothing like fall, it is time for me to get on with it and try and recapture the joy that always led me in the past.  To that end I had better try opening my eyes again to what is around me and getting it down on paper.  Bear with me then, as this will be an exercise in, with God’s help, “restoring my soul”. 

The flora and fauna are changing here again, I do feel the statement is so true that “the more you know the more you know you don’t know”.  That is the reality I am living in in Texas.  The rhythm of the year is still foreign to me, what to expect of plant life and animal life in any given season is a mystery, but I should try to pay attention so with each year, my expectation of what is to come can delight as it did on the Cape. So please Lord, may the healing begin, and may your world around me be a source of “restoring my soul”.  Amen, for this is truly a prayer.