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!

Frogs in the Flowerpots

Yesterday, while watering the potted plants, I had not one, not two, but three “make-me-jump” encounters with fully-grown Southern Leopard Frogs.   

The pots need watering every day due to the heat so it would seem I have made a nice amphibian hideout under the lantana leaves. Leopard frogs are great leapers whether they are the northern or southern species so it even freaked out the dog that was looking to get a drink from the hose.  There was practically a mid-air collision between Tuck’s nose and the flying frog!  They aren’t small frogs either, probably 8-9” when in full leap mode.  Neither Tuck nor I achieved the 3’ long leap they are capable of making either.  The gold clearly went to the frog.

I believe I have mentioned in many of these Texas blogs that there seems to be a lot of variation in the animal life that appears in summer and it all seems to hinge on the winter and spring rains.    

In the previous three years, cute, tiny, gray tree frogs often would ride along on top of my watering can.  Toads on the steps in the morning weren’t uncommon either, but these large frogs took me by surprise.  With my New England centric mind frogs belong on the ponds edge, or in the reeds along a marsh but not in a dry Texas yard.  Well, live and learn. 

Leopard frogs, both species, lay their eggs in shallow water but when   There, they are mostly nocturnal, staying cool and moist under a rock by day.  Well, it is bone dry under the rocks here, so any yard sporting flowerpots must be a good destination. 

summer comes, many of them head for the hills, the woods, or the fields where insect life is plentiful.

This past spring we had almost Biblical proportions of rain and I remember the night serenades of many a frog and toad.  Leopard frogs take 60- 90 days to go from egg to tadpole to frog so, amazingly, the creeks must have kept enough water to see them through their metamorphosis.  They lay their eggs in shallow water so I guess the rain fed creek must have been good enough.   Congratulations to these survivors though for when the rain stopped, it really stopped.

For that matter, we had our first rain in over 5 weeks just the other day.  When I walked the dog the next morning there was a sad amount of carnage on the road.   Unfortunately  rain draws many frogs and toads out to party on the cool roadways.  We are a small development with little traffic so I was surprised to see such a spattering of splatterings   Poor dears, good sized frogs too, “goin’ out a courtin’ “frogs.  I believe in these warm climates, any rainy time is a good time for some lovin’! 

This “On a dark and stormy night” sort of death is common all over the world and some places are kindly trying to alert drivers.  Not that there is much chance you will be able to see and then swerve to miss them, but still, it is the thought that counts.

Leopard frogs are fairly widespread throughout the eastern side of the US so it is likely you know them.  Some of the identifying characteristics of leopard frogs are a light spot in the middle of their tympanum (eardrum) the round spot you see to the side of their eye.  They come in variations of green or brown and they have these lovely two lines on either side of the body that look rather golden and have really impressive names-dorsolateral folds. 

 Also if you are of a certain age, and took any biology, this frog is probably the one you dissected: the one that reeked of formaldehyde that would often ruin your lunch if you, like me, happened to have said biology lab right before lunch.  Perhaps now they do virtual dissections.  I am sure the frogs would be happy if that were true.

Generally, leopard frogs will return to their water at the end of the summer.  If the El Nino comes through, maybe they will be able to do just that.  Otherwise, I had better treasure the year it was wet enough to rain frogs down on my flowerpots.

By the way, the picture of the frog in the flowerpot isn’t mine, they leapt away too fast for a picture, and although I have checked several times today, they have not chosen to return to the same pots.  Maybe the near collision with Tuck was too traumatic. The one of the frog in the flowerpot was from seabrookeleckie.com.  Thank you seabrooke, wherever you are, for helping me to illustrate a point.

I hope your summer has also provided you with close encounters of the amphibian kind.  It just wouldn’t seem like summer without them. 

Animals That Don't Break A Sweat

I was out watering plants that look like toast after our week absence.  Sweat was rolling into my eyes when a butterfly flitted by looking totally at home with the 102 degrees it was.  

 

A black beetle scooted by my feet, also looking nonplussed by the weather.  Well, of course they weren’t, not being warm blooded (homeothermic) as mammals and birds are, they literally don’t sweat the small stuff!  Cold blooded animals (poikilothermic ) as many of us know, must use their environment to cool down or warm up. I am sure that beetle would soon be heading under the mulch, where I must say it still must be 100 but that is within their range of tolerance.  These are Texas beetles after all, they wouldn’t be here if they couldn’t take it.

But how about those other mammals around you, most of them are using other methods than sweat to do the cool down trick.   If your body is covered in fur, than sweating under that would only make matters worse.  We all know our dogs pant to shed their heat to some degree, but they also sweat between the pads of their feet.  Cats have them too between their pads. Note the little wet cat or dog prints that are in the house when there is no rain without.  But here is something new I learned.  When your dog or cat is licking, licking and licking their legs, and you think, “Enough already, you’re clean!” they are really  just doing what your sweat glands do.  Putting moisture on top of their fur that then will cool down as it evaporates.  I never knew that.  I thought my dog had arthritis or some ache he was trying to ease.  Kangaroos lick their fore paws too. Should you find yourself in Australia in the presence of a licking kangaroo you will be well informed!

My squirrels are always sprawling on the railing of the deck, cooling off that underbelly, but they also claim that a curled tail over their back helps too.  The under part of the tail is light colored and so absorbs less heat than when the dark side is showing.  Which is why you will always see me dressed in beige and white the whole summer through, the equivalent of a squirrel with its tail turned up.

Being long and skinny as lizards and snakes are helps them with a more rapid heat exchange.  The shape allows them to cool down faster or warm up more quickly so it works for both extremes.  Cold blooded animals need far less input of energy to keep their cooler fires burning so no need to dash about all day capturing fly after fly, just lay low and chill out and you will indeed chill out. 

 

Birds have higher internal temperatures than you or I, more like 105 to our 98, so this weather must mean they feel the same on the inside as the out.  But they also have a higher rate of metabolism so you will see them doing their own form of panting on hot days, rapid respiration that dispels some of the heat.  Bare patches on their face, their legs etc. allow the heat to transfer more quickly and then, of course, how grateful they are when you provide a birdbath and shade trees. 

African elephants have huge veins in those large ears so all the flapping is to cool their blood down.  Jackrabbits with those long, almost transparent ears, are using a similar technique with the veins close to the surface shedding the excess heat.  Even whales living in a cool ocean have to overcome the insulating blubber when a fast paced swim has them heating up.  Their blood is shunted to large veins in the fluke where close contact with the water will work as their AC.

No end of diversity then in this manner of cooling off.  Shall we not mention that the vultures around here will urinate on their legs to get relief from the heat? No feathers there and you don’t see them at your birdbaths so, a birds gotta do what a birds gotta do. 

 It does seem, however, that I will be the only one out there mopping my brow unless, of course, I come in to write about it as I just have and ahhh, I am much more comfortable now.