{"id":1044,"date":"2010-05-10T08:37:17","date_gmt":"2010-05-10T14:37:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/?p=1044"},"modified":"2010-05-10T08:37:17","modified_gmt":"2010-05-10T14:37:17","slug":"its-all-wildlife","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/?p=1044","title":{"rendered":"It’s All Wildlife…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Because of time constraints (working on copy edits for new book) and weather, the brief walk on the land Saturday didn’t produce any usable bird pictures and I didn’t see any snakes or lizards, but I did see wildlife, large and small:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Two deer spooked from the angle of the dry woods and north fenceline when I came around the southwest end of the dry woods; this one stopped for a moment after the first two leaps.\u00a0\u00a0 The other was already halfway to the creek, and this one took off as well.\u00a0\u00a0 I discovered later that they’d eaten the flower stalks off the one Hesperaloe that flowered this year.\u00a0 Would be more annoyed, but we plant native plants for the wildlife, not just for us.<\/p>\n

Before I got that far, I’d already found two other wildlife species, one new to me:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Tetraopes texanus<\/em> on\u00a0 Green Antelope Horns milkweed, Asclepias viridis<\/em>; this little milkweed beetle looks a lot like T. femoratus<\/em>, but has those feathery setae (like feathers or hairs) coming out of the joints of its antennae and the tips are flattened and pointed.<\/p>\n

On the same milkweed plant,\u00a0 I found this snail snuggled into the fold of a leaf:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Up in the dry woods, where the prickly pear are coming into bloom, all lemon yellow at this point, I spotted something tiny and green in a cactus flower.\u00a0\u00a0 I photograph anything in a cactus flower\u00a0 I haven’t seen before, because these flowers attract many insects after the abundant pollen.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

From a distance, I’d thought it might be an early Green Lynx spider, but closer I could tell it was an insect, not an arachnid.\u00a0 But what?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s a katydid nymph (thanks once more, BugGuide.net!\u00a0 This picture<\/a> nailed the ID for me.)<\/p>\n

Another dry woods find:\u00a0 a female crane-fly on greenbrier.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>I believe this is the same as the smaller one I photographed before.<\/p>\n

And finally, for the sheer beauty, a fresh Black Swallowtail nectaring on what I think is Prairie Brazoria–a mint-family plant, anyway, that grows in abundance along the margins of the west dry woods if there’s been enough rain.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Although in the past people might think the whitetail deer as the only real wildlife in these pictures, they’re all wildlife, and they all sustain the ecosystem that supports the deer (top-level herbivores.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Our project is aimed at supporting wildlife in the broad sense–native “critters” of every size and shape.\u00a0 The wigglies and the creepy-crawlies included.<\/p>\n

Prairie restoration and restoration of native plant species in the creek woods and dry woods rebuild the vegetation that supports the wildlife, and the wildlife eat and are eaten in a complex web that strengthens as it multiplies.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A rough count of the species added since the last totting up shows that we’re close to, or above, 500\u00a0 species of critters seen on the place now.\u00a0 And I know there are invertebrates we haven’t found yet…and more will likely move in as long as we keep improving habitat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Because of time constraints (working on copy edits for new book) and weather, the brief walk on the land Saturday didn’t produce any usable bird pictures and I didn’t see any snakes or lizards, but I did see wildlife, large and small:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,21,7,4],"tags":[71,17,13,36,43,38,32,41,70,30],"class_list":["post-1044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activities","category-photography","category-plantlife","category-wildlife","tag-activities","tag-animal-behavior","tag-beauty","tag-butterflies","tag-identification","tag-insect","tag-native-plants","tag-new-species","tag-photography","tag-wildlife-management"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1044"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1044"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1044\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1052,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1044\/revisions\/1052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}