Pacarina puella Little Mesquite cicada
This is a much better picture than the one from June 8, 2013, when it was nearly dark and lightening the image was by histogram adjustment, not “one stop photo fix” as above:
I’d like to find this little cicada on something other than manmade material–although there are a few mesquite trees around (and a “mesquite flat” east of town) we don’t have many on our place, and none in the back yard. So what else does this cicada inhabit and what use does it make of it? I have no idea, but if I see it on a tree (we have three species of oak in the yard, two species of maple, native ash, pecan, soapberry, redbud, roughleaf dogwood and smaller woody plants including non-native Rose of Sharon) I’ll try to get a picture and then figure out if that’s just a resting place or…whatever.
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And when I forgot that it’s a bot, and sent a thank you note to the account, I got another moth, this one named for the entire thank you tweet, but I’ve shortened it to the WOW moth, the first word of the thank-you. It fits.
Since these are imaginary moths, I can give them imaginary scientific names, right? Right. Both moths are in the same genus, since they are related through the Bot-father of both. The genus name is Pseudoktizo (which means roughly “false-created,” not “created” like natural things.) Not the only word I could’ve used but I like the look of it more than “poieo” which also means simply “make.” Probably got the right person/tense wrong, but since I’m the maker of the name, first person singular works for me, even though I wasn’t the machine that generated the moth images. You can overthink these things.
So, species names. The 80 acres moth: “chloros-epiblema” (green shawl) or “epiblemachloros”….I’ll think about that. The Wow! moth just has to be “exclamans.”
Let me introduce to the world, therefore, two hitherto unknown, uncollected, unphotographed moth species: Pseudoktizo chloros-epiblema and Pseudoktizo exclamans. You may find them turning up in my books at some point. In fact, I might decide to go back and create scientific names for every imaginary critter in every single book or story…and then put them all into a pseudo-taxonomic tome. That could be…a remarkably erudite way to procrastinate, right? Much more fun than almost anything I’m *supposed* to be doing.
(Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week, don’t forget to tip the waitstaff.)
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So what have we had this spring in any of the categories? First, a planthopper that hasn’t been IDed yet…it’s been photographed, but not as well as I’d like. It was on the kitchen windowscreen one late afternoon, and the next day (when the light might’ve been better) it wasn’t.
May 22, I had an hour outside after a stormy night and found two new-to-us species, both now IDed thanks to BugGuide.net.
Ichneumon Wasp Trogomorpha arrogans
New snake for the lily pond, though not for the place.
Likely either Natrix erythrogaster transversa or N. erythrogaster flavigaster, the Blotched Water Snake or the Yellow-Bellied Water Snake. The snake didn’t roll over to show me the critical underside.
This view clearly shows the faint transverse bands on most of its length.
We have a lot fewer frogs and tadpoles in the backyard water system than we used to, and I think this snake is responsible. It’s much bigger than the red-lined ribbon snake we’ve had most years, and since it can grow much larger than this, it’s out of scale for the pond-and-stream. Eventually it will have eaten everything it can find here and will go somewhere else to reach its full size.
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This morning the cut end in the pitcher had soaked up even more water, and twisted its spike round to point at the window of the back door. Many of the flowers had dropped, but it looks like more may open further up the spike. I set it outside on a stump and took some more pictures, first of the entire plant, then the flowers, then the leaves. I measured the leaves on the original stem, now very limp, as well.
Leaves are lanceolate, toothed, slightly rough. Down the stem they’re 3.25 inches long plus a 0.5 inch petiole. One leaf (lower right) clearly shows the petiole.
Need a solid ID to put this plant on the 80-Acres list. And of course I’d like to know how close I came to the right ID.
I took that picture sitting on one of the little lawn tractors at the bottom end of the bowl, the much wetter end (just dry enough to drive on now.) In the foreground are large flowering sedges mixed with meadow dropseed. Under them are small flowers, such as meadow pink (Sabatia campestris) and coreopsis and prairie bluets (ranging from white to light lavender.) You can’t really see the scattered taller Texas bluebell (actually a gentian, Eustoma exaltatum (prev. grandiflorum) in this image (there were two, but too far away to show.) It was very bright, hot, and breezy, which made photographing individual flowers…tricky.
We have four gentian-family wildflowers in wet years like this, but I don’t usually find three of the four in the same general area. Sabatia campestis, the meadow pink, likes wet soil and is found only in wet years in the lower to mid-Bowl, peaking in late May. Texas bluebells (not bluebell, but since there aren’t any real bluebells here, that’s what pioneers called the gorgeous big gentian, Eustoma exultatum, was E. grandiflorum) likes areas that have been wet, or are moist, but I’ve seen it flowering in the worst soil in a dry August. I was told by several “grandmother” age women, when we moved here, that these used to be so common that girls cut them to make wreaths for their hair and used them for table decoration. And the tiny Centaureums (two species, one “clumpy” and one “straggly”) grow on various thin, unpromising, well-drained and even dry soils when they feel like it, any time from late April into July. But today I found all three in bloom in the Bowl in mid-June. In fact, in one “corner” of the bowl, I found the wet-loving Sabatia within two feet of the dry-ground Centaury.
From the bottom of the Bowl, I turned up its east side, and from there followed the mowed track around the dry woods. The seepage-watered “dry-woods swale” is now filled with Coreopsis instead of Goldthread. But now I need to resize and crop more of the images I took this morning, so that part of the day will be in a different post. EDIT (which was delayed much longer, so there’s one in the middle now.)
It has slowly spread over the years since we introduced it–faster in wet years, of course. Right here it’s growing with wild onion (at the end of its flowering) and is overlapping other flower types the bees enjoy. Bees were too busy toward late afternoon to let me catch them on anything but the obedient plant.
Although I didn’t photograph bees on anything but this, I did see quite a few butterflies and caught this one on Queen Anne’s Lace. It’s a Common Buckeye, with the sun coming through one wing.
The two together in a glass of water. The Brazoria, the larger, is almost scentless; the tiny one, which has rosy-pink flowers that are darker red inside, grows thickly on damp areas of the east grass, is intensely aromatic. Some year I mean to collect leaves and try them in the kitchen–but they are tiny leaves. The whole plant grows only 4-6 inches tall. EDITED 5-8-2016. R- found an online photo reference. The small one is Slender Hedeoma, Hedeoma acinoides. It’s the 333rd plant IDed on the place.
Upstream from the obedient plants and tallgrass clumps, the old ditch is full of wild onions with other plants mixed in, and the field itself has Queen Anne’s Lace, gaillardia, and gold thread, with Brazoria under the grass in the damper spots. The gaillardias have not peaked yet, and the rudbeckias and other coneflowers haven’t started.
Gaillardia getting started–many more to come.
Earth Day 2016
So the work began. Water management–to prevent erosion, to hold rainfall and runoff on the land longer, so it can soak in and maintain soil moisture and replenish groundwater, to allow revegetation to take hold and provide protection both from intense rain and from moving water–was the first priority. And this–smaller then, and built against the old fence you can see lurking behind the new one was the first, rocks laid across the old gate between our place the the one to the south:
Top: 4-18-16: after very heavy rain, water flows almost clear; Bottom: after another smaller rain that week, on 4-22-16 it’s flowing completely clear. Instead of digging a trench on old cattle trails, the flow is now wide, shallow, and much slower. Native grasses and forbs now fill this drainage.
Here’s the back side of the #3 gabion with water and a lot more vegetation than it had when we started, when it was across a bare scoured place, and the water clarity in one of its associated upstream pools.
These pools provide habitat for aquatic life, such as crayfish (note burrow sign in R image), amphibians, odonate larvae, and others. Crayfish did not survive the years’ long drought but returned this winter after rain restored soil moisture. These pools provide water for other wildlife much longer than the previous fast-moving and fast-disappearing runoff, and they have supported revegetation. They are shallow, however, and thus subject to relatively fast evaporative loss, compared to deeper ones. It would be ideal to dig out the main gabion pool (esp. at the low end) but we don’t have the time or strength. There are many other chores to do, from finishing the rebuilding of the north fence, rebuilding the east fence on the highway, maintaining checkdams after floods, mowing. maintaining the rain barns, pumps, and guzzlers that provide wildlife water when the natural features are dry, replanting native vegetation (still ongoing), and documentingwhat use wildlife is making of which parts of the place.
Here’s a failure that must be dealt with this year:
Left: natural drainage, series of shallow rock-bottomed pools, clear water. Right: old ditch, once bare, now heavily vegetated, with both linear pools and water running through solid vegetative cover. In distance of right image, dark line reveals the original natural drainage channel; these channels converge upstream of #3 gabion, where cattle had broken through the old ditch structure. We built a large check-dam there, and smaller ones between the pools above the gabion itself…and then more checkdams upstream on the natural drainagin to slow drainage from a large seepy area. These began holding soil quickly, and transplants of switchgrass where then successful–and now contribute to the filtration and soil holding.
On Earth Day, these small pools were being visited by both dragonflies and damselflies, including damselflies mating and ovipositing:
“Manage the water, and the land (and wildlife) will take care of itself.”
Four grasses form the foundation of the tallgrass prairie biome in the US: Big Bluestem, Switchgrass, Indiangrass, and Eastern Gama. Before this land was broken to the plow, fingers of tallgrass prairie existed here in the wetter lower spots, with midgrass (Little Bluestem, Sideoats Grama, Vine Mesquite, etc) prairie on dryer slopes and shortgrass on the rockiest areas. This is not quite the southernmost bit of tallgrass country, but it’s getting there. When we bought the place, it had been farmed for cotton, corn, sorghum, and then “improved” pasture with non-native grass, and then overgrazed almost to the bare ground–was bare ground in places. One of our goals was to restore native grasses, including the big four. There were patches of Little Bluestem here and there. Larger patches of Indiangrass across the creek. One or two Switchgrass clumps. But no Eastern Gama and no Big Bluestem. We would see patches of it along some county roads, occasionally one in a field, usually a field left fallow for years awaiting development. Twelve years earlier, when we first bought the house and its few acres, we’d established a “grass garden” for native grasses that we began to salvage from construction sites and where narrow country roads were about to be scraped and widened, destroying the plants alongside anyway.
Big Blue is one of those grasses. Each of the stands growing on our place now began as one spade’s worth of root division brought in and planted in the grass garden. One by one, after we bought the 80 acres, 9×9 inch square root divisions were individually planted here and there, seeking those places where they might thrive. Some did well initially; others are still a small clump.
The tallest, above, is in on four feet of black soil over white caliche/rock mix over rock. (We know, from digging fence post holes and the foundation holes for the rain barn nearby.) This area was not farmed as intensively as the rest of the land east of the creek. The rain barn’s 5000 gallon storage capacity means that even in the 5 drought years we could give it a little water every other week or so. It was never heavily watered, but it had some help. It also had a top dressing of aged horse manure last year, in anticipation of a possible El Nino winter. Plenty of rain fell this spring and early summer. Here’s another:
Two similar stands are in former plowed land & pasture; again, pole is 6 feet
This big open field was badly overgrazed, with less than 20# grass coverage when we took it on. It’s suffered erosion, and the soil type and depth vary widely from one side to the other. At the high end, it’s a reddish-brown soil not more than a foot or so deep. Along both the north and south fencelines, where it wasn’t plowed, the black soil I suspect was original is still there in varying depths–deeper to the west, toward the creek, and thinner to the east. It had been terraced, more or less, some time in the past, and then planted with King Ranch Bluestem (non-native grass) as “improved pasture,” but had been overgrazed and badly invaded with nonnative forbs and Ashe juniper. We took hundreds of junipers off the big field, and it’s still a chore to whack the babies that come up from seed.
This stand of Big Blue is a ragged oval about 10 feet by 8 feet now and no longer needs the market stick we had with it for its first years. It suffered badly in the drought (got no supplemental water) but came back strong this year. Last year, before the rains began, it had fewer than ten flowering stalks; now they’re abundant (and not yet open, unlike those of the first picture. Since not all the original root divisions were sourced from the same site (I think we started with four, within a 15 mile radius of here) the difference in flowering times could result from genetic differences in the original sources, or soil conditions.
The other stand in the west grass is a little more robust; it was planted at one side of a stand of vine mesquite (a lower grass that likes more soil moisture) perhaps 50-60 yards from the tallest one and another 50-60 yards from this one.
Of all the things we’ve accomplished, I think I’m happiest to have Big Bluestem back on this land, thriving, coming through the drought, and standing tall. When we moved here, a very old man told me about working as a cowboy in his youth, driving cattle from water to water (the San Gabriel River to the Lampasas, west of here–just west, he said, of present-day US 183), and riding through grass so wall that the seedheads were almost as tall as he was, while in the saddle. This is the grass he remembered seeing one moonlight night, bending in the wind so it looked like waves, he said.
]]>A cool sunny day after some rain: grass is green, fall flowers are in bloom–including some non-fall flowers, like a pear tree. Monarchs are migrating through, and this afternoon were busy among the Maximilian sunflowers. Most of those are short this year (dry previous winter and spring) but loaded with flowers. In this patch alone (a few yards across) I saw five or six monarchs at a time.
Some butterflies were so active I couldn’t get a picture of them, but one of my favorites showed up halfway around the long walk, in the “gully system.”
This Gulf Fritillary was also nectaring on Maximilian Sunflower. This is a worn individual, with a hole in the right wing and a lot of scales rubbed off, but still a beautiful insect.
The next butterfly I was able to photograph was a little dark Skipper of some kind.
And finally, the last butterfly that held still for me was a very faded and worn Hackberry Emperor
As I was coming across the front of the dry woods, I saw a tiny white-and-dark something flit up and then down to land on a blade of grass. I looked closer–it was either, I thought at first, a leafhopper or a tiny moth. It didn’t hang around long for its photograph (which made me think leafhopper.) Once I saw the image in the computer, though, it was clearly a moth.
It’s one of the Acantia species, I’m fairly sure, but I’m not sure which. I’ve looked in BugGuide.net, and it looks more like A. behrii, but the range given for that species is much farther west. And there are lots more species, but BugGuide doesn’t have them all illustrated.
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The bluebonnets may be only 4-5 inches tall, instead of knee-high, but they’re there–in a few places–and should be able to make seed for another year. We had more through most of the dry winter, but many finally just died–or were eaten, since they were the only green thing out there.
Fence-building is a constant chore–we bought the place with a lot of very old, raggedy 4-wire barb-wire fence with a few other bits patched in, and have been repairing and then replacing, bit by bit. This year we’re hoping to finish the west end fence (the south end of it was done a couple of years ago, but paused when illness took down the fence-builder for awhile. Then he set to on taking the south fence all the way to, and across, the creekbed while it was dry, last year.)
This was in an earlier phase of working on the west fence, south of the tributary creek crossing.
Here’s what the tributary crossing framing looks like today, plus Chief Fencebuilder hammering in a staple with the pickaxe:
Meanwhile, I went off to check the water at Owl Pavilion (the rain barn we built on the SW corner of the place, that collects rainwater for the wildlife waterer there. Pedaling along on my new vehicle is faster than walking, and the back basket lets me carry quite a few things–though today it was the camera, binoculars, and a denim overshirt…started out cool.
We planted several native flowering plants in the area–firecracker bush, mealy blue sage, and–spectacular in this drought spring–a Texas columbine in the pool below the artificial spring that runs when the solar panel has enough light.
While I was waiting for the system to refill from the big tanks, I spotted a male black-chinned hummingbird on one of the old juniper branches sticking out the top of a brushpile.
He kept coming back to that perch repeatedly while I was there. Then it was back to the house, a little less than a mile ride away.
You can see how dry and not green the grass is here; there’s some low green grass under it, but nothing like April should be. Still, we had some rain last week, so I expect more flowers will try to come out and set seed before it gets hotter.
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