Archive for the 'Nature Study' Category
June 9, 2010 @ 10:53 am | Filed under: Nature Study,Photos
He was gone before I could get a non-blurry photo. A pity—he was posing so nicely!
June 5, 2010 @ 6:37 am | Filed under: Nature Study,Photos
May 28, 2010 @ 3:07 pm | Filed under: Butterflies,Nature Study,Photos
(We’re pretty sure.)
I love those blue dots.
butterflies, mourning cloak butterfly
April 27, 2010 @ 3:16 pm | Filed under: Nature Study,Photos
But what the heck IS it??
It flew over the fence, stopped for a brief sip, and zoomed off again. In this picture it has a kind of preying mantis shape, doesn’t it? Except for those copper-colored wings. Could those curly antennae be any cuter?
UPDATE: Dude!!! Tracy identified this beastie in the comments. It seems we have ourselves a (gulp) tarantula hawk wasp.
Tarantula hawk wasps are so named because they utilize live tarantulas as food for their growing young. Adult tarantula hawks are not carnivorous, but drink nectar just as honey bees do. But when a female tarantula hawk is ready to lay an egg, she must find a tarantula, sting it (with one of the most potent stings of any North American insect) and drag the paralyzed spider to its burrow, as shown in this photograph. The wasp will then lay a single egg on the spider, which will soon hatch into a maggot-like larva. The larva will feed on the still-living, but paralyzed tarantula for about a month. The adult wasp will emerge from the burrow the following season. Tarantula hawks may look intimidating, but are generally mild-mannered towards humans. Nonetheless, one should never attempt to pick up or molest a tarantula hawk as the sting is extraordinarily painful!
From the San Dieguito River Park website; thanks for that very helpful link, Tracy!
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go shudder.
April 27, 2010 @ 10:48 am | Filed under: Nature Study,Photos
…all my photos look the same.
Same salvia, same bees, same blur.
Can’t be helped. I am powerless to resist those blues, those greens, those coppery wings, this pointed face buried in blossom.
You understand, don’t you?
(You’re just lucky I’m not into spiders.)
April 18, 2010 @ 7:16 am | Filed under: Family Adventures,Nature Study,Photos
Last Monday we drove ninety miles east to the Desert View Tower. I’d been meaning to take the kids there for months. Amazing view and irresistible climbing-rocks, that’s what everyone says about the place.
We’ll have to take their word for it.
Jane and I thought the sign alone—”blight or famine”?—made the trip worthwhile, but some members of the back seat brigade opined otherwise.
We all loved seeing the wind farm, though.
A ballet of giants: breathtaking.
The desert was spread with a threadbare quilt of tiny yellow flowers. Any of you know what these are called?
And as long as I’m asking for IDs, how about this skipper I spotted in the backyard? Anyone? Bueller?
Not a great picture, so I don’t know if you can see the markings well enough to identify it. Can you see what a curious at-rest position its wings have? The top wings are perpendicular to the bottom wings. I’ve never seen that before.
Jane and I had had hopes of finding new-to-us butterflies in the desert, but sometimes you have to rely on your own backyard.
Photos by Jane, except the butterfly.
April 13, 2010 @ 7:56 pm | Filed under: Crows,Gardening,Nature Study
It has been troubling me in a quiet way that I’ve not seen many bees in the garden this spring: an occasional lone native bee, one carpenter bee, and that’s it. But just now I checked my archives and I see I was worried about the same thing in late April last year. The carpenter bee appeared in early May, and it wasn’t until mid-May that the honeybees began to dominate my posts and pictures.
Whew, then.
I did have sunflowers blooming last April, but the birds had planted those in February: overspill from the feeder. This year the feeder is in a different spot, shadier, unwatered, and I had to plant the sunflowers myself. They’re coming up nicely, taller now than Wonderboy, not as tall as Beanie.
The Monarchs arrived in late May, not long after I planted my anniversary milkweed. The milkweed is blooming nicely now, despite hordes of yellow aphids, but we’ve seen no trace of caterpillar nor butterfly yet.
Also in bloom: pincushion flower (just barely), nasturtiums galore, enough sweet alyssum to supply Rilla with endless bridal bouquets for her daily weddings, geraniums in red and pink, cornflowers, bougainvillea, ice plants in red and white and magenta, snapdragons, brown-eyed susans, thyme (whoops), cilantro (whoops), the cooking sage (whoops), and the other kind of salvia, loads of it, waiting for the bees.
Goldfinches, bushtits, purple finches, sparrows, hummingbirds, a phoebe, and the marvelous crows: our April birds. We saw a scrub jay on the sidewalk today, a block from home. I love jays, the cheeky, arrogant things. I wish they’d visit our yard more often.
April 11, 2010 @ 5:46 pm | Filed under: Nature Study,Photos
The San Diego alligator lizard, who has been known to scare the pants off certain members of my family.
April 5, 2010 @ 6:59 pm | Filed under: Books,Butterflies,Nature Study
Another tidbit from The Dangerous World of Butterflies:
[Elliot Malkin of Brooklyn, NY] worries that migrating Monarch butterflies, in search of their plant food milkweed, will find a dearth of the needed vegetation in the urban reaches of New York City. Intent to do what he can to help, he placed potted milkweed plants on the balcony of his apartment. Concerned that it might be difficult for the butterflies to locate his few plants in the asphalt jungle, two ideas came to him: paint giant pictures of milkweed adjacent to the real plants to alert the flying Monarchs, and then paint them with sunblock.
“Milkweed flowers,” says Malkin, “have natural ultraviolet patterns that are recognizable to Monarch butterflies. These patterns are invisible to us because we can’t see light in the ultraviolet spectrum. So Graffiti for Butterflies uses sunblock to pain the graffiti in a way that mimics these natural ultraviolet properties.” Sunblock is a perfect medium, he says, because it reflects ultraviolet light. Malkin considers his work “the equivalent of a fast-food sign on a highway, advertising rest stops to Monarchs.”
Malkin can’t say conclusively whether his sunblocked paintings are responsible for attracting the butterflies to his rooftop garden, but they are indeed visiting his milkweed plants. Here’s Malkin’s website.
In other news, our milkweed is blooming.
(Photo of last year’s crop.)
April 3, 2010 @ 4:31 pm | Filed under: Books,Butterflies,Nature Study
The Dangerous World of Butterflies: The Startling Subculture of Criminals, Collectors, and Conservationists by Peter Laufer. Lyons Press, 2009.
We heard about it from our friend Sarah (this Sarah), who correctly supposed it might be interesting to Jane and me. Jane read it first and loved it. Of course, her fascination with butterflies goes way back. I’m about a third of the way through the book and had to stop and jot down some notes. It’s that kind of read. (My favorite kind.)
Peter Laufer is a journalist and the author of several books about serious, even grim topics: Americans in overseas prisons, immigration, the Iraq War. During a Q-and-A period following the publication of his book on the latter, someone asked him what topic he was going to tackle next. Joking, Laufer suggested he might take a break with something less weighty: “butterflies and flowers,” perhaps.
An American ex-pat in Nicaragua saw the exchange on CSPAN and emailed Laufer an invitation to visit her butterfly reserve; she thought it might be a peaceful respite for him. And thus it came about that Laufer’s lighthearted remark became reality: he became interested in butterflies and the lively subcultures they have inspired—the collectors, the breeders, the “butterfly huggers,” even butterfly smugglers.
A few quotes:
Heading down the mountain [after a butterfly-spotting hike] I realize I’ve gone native to a certain extent. It was exactly what Glassberg suggested it would be: a Zen-like moment in the now. Nothing else was going on for me while I was searching for the Golden Hairstreak and spotting the California Sister. There was something pure about not chasing them with a net, just searching and observing. It reminded me of the license plate game my sister and I played while driving with my family across America. Look! There’s one from North Dakota! Rare is valuable, but not vital. If you’re in North Dakota, there’s another and another. But the sightings still can amuse those of us lucky enough to be in touch with the childlike parts of our minds.
The excitement was real. It was impossible not to be seduced by the focus of the moment, the pristine beauty of the rushing Cedar Creek with its towering pines and the burly oaks. The satisfaction of seeing the fluttering rare Golden Hairstreak and the glamorous common California Sister was real. I was an observer in this odd subculture but at the same time an active player delighting in the moment, not just observing as a news reporter.
Another passage quotes a Robert Graves poem:
The erratic-looking flight of the common Cabbage White butterfly can be attributed in part to buffeting from the wind. However, Professor Dudley [of Berkeley] says when researchers fly Cabbage Whites in still air, the erratic patterns do not disappear and are used for defense. “If you swing a net at them and miss, they’ll start doing it faster. That’s an intriguing feature that distinguishes butterflies essentially from all other flying insects, the high degree of erratic, seemingly unpredictable flight.”
That lack of predictable pattern adds to their aesthetic appeal to us, he and I agree, and inspired Robert Graves when he wrote his ode to the Cabbage White, the poem “Flying Crooked…”
And here’s that:
Flying Crooked
by Robert GravesThe butterfly, a cabbage-white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has—who knows so well as I?—
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the acrobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.
Here’s something I did not know:
Inside the hard chrysalis the transformation is in progress. “All of their body parts, every cell, liquefies.” It is, as [biologist Rachel Diaz-Bastin] said before, science fiction. “This is weird stuff. All of their cells differentiate and begin forming the adult butterfly. It’s basically this big butterfly soup inside.”
Were you to cut the chrysalis at this stage, you would find nothing resembling a caterpillar and nothing resembling a butterfly: only liquid…What exactly goes on in the soup to make the change remains an unknown to scientists…
Only LIQUID, seriously? Who knew! I think I’d always supposed it was more of a tadpole-to-frog gradual transformation.
That’s as far as I’ve gotten. More to come, I’m sure.
Related posts:
Butterflies, or: the benefits of strewing
“A little egg lay on a leaf”
Our backyard gave us a going-away present
The tragic tale of Homer the Caterpillar, parts one and two
