They Flee From the Sun

 I was one of those kids who carried every creeping thing home and made a cage for it. I don't mean bunnies and baby birds, I mean black widows and six-foot long snakes. Kids like that, I have observed, always seemed to have a wonderfully understanding and tolerant mother, although in my case there was also an older sister terrified of everything with scales or eight legs. I don't know how many times I stepped out the door on my way to school and whispered to my mother: My pet snakes (that the sister had never been told about) have escaped and are crawling around somewhere in the upstairs bedrooms. Bye.

Well, my other observation is that those little kids never grow out of it. Take my own case. I am eighty-five years old and still love the creepie-crawlies, in fact the more sinister the better. Luckily I have a wife as understanding as my mother was. More than that: She loves the little creatures too. But in the past year we have left the relatively tame MidWest (where I kept Black Widows and Brown Recluses),and moved to Tucson and the opportunity to come into contact with exponentially creepier creatures, seriously venomous Bark Scorpions, for instance, going beyond even what my wife will accept as a house pet. Her justification is that our four-year-old grandson gets into everything when he comes to  our house and I guess he does.

Luckily, there are still a number of other wonderful creepy creatures remaining for me to keep, creatures with names like Tailless Whipscorpion, for instance, or Vinegaroon, and the strangest of all, and the one I want to write about here, the solifuge. Our cat found the first one of these we had ever seen, chasing it out of a dusty back corner of our house. I quickly popped it it into an open wide-mouth jar so we could look down on it and make our first examination.

What we saw (going from back to front) was a segmented abdomen in shape like a limp half-full vacuum cleaner bag with the skin and  texture of a cadaver. Then there were eight legs (showing its kinship with spiders) and in front of those was one more pair of legs, twice as long as the regular legs, and three times as thick, and everything still with the same bloated corpse coloring.

Next forward was what we assumed must be the head, though it was only a little bit closer to the front, and looked otherwise like another segment. But on its leading edge the two tiny black dots so close to each other they were virtually touching were evidently the eyes, and since they were in the middle of the back they could only be pointing directly upward rather than forward at something.

At any rate, it was certainly bizarre enough to satisfy my morbid tastes.

I set it up in a small aquarium, with about an inch of sand on the bottom. It was a nocturnal creature (the name solifugid suggests something that flees from the sun) that plowed around in the sand all night, and by morning had pushed most of the sand to one side, so it could crouch down all day in the hole left on the other side.

We knew it was carnivorous, and we determined it was just the size to eat meal worms. Here is where we discovered its true weirdness: We realized we couldn't figure out what it did. A scorpion has pincers in front with which it can catch its prey and a long tail with a venomous tip to bring over its back to kill its prey. All very sensible. You can see just by looking at it what it does to catch and eat its food. 

Spiders have venomous fangs in front with which the can kill their prey and at the same time inject digestive enzymes (since they don't have jaws to chew them up) to turn the innards of their prey into liquid easy to suck into their stomachs.

But the solifugid doesn't reveal anything you can work out, it's just a pallid body, a bunch of legs, no mouth, no weaponry, and two brainless eyes not pointing anywhere.

We dropped in a meal worm which it ignored, but next morning there was the worm dead, the body a little bit mashed up, and apparently not eaten. 

Then I got Jillian Cowles' big handsome book Amazing Arachnids (Princeton, 2018) and all was made clear. It seems that everything is hidden underneath its body. The bifurcated front half of the head, which is to say, everything coming in front of the tiny eyes, consisted of the enormous muscles which worked a combination of scissors and saw blades with the most powerful crushing jaws of any creature its size.

We put in another worm and saw what it did. We watched from directly in front and saw that it used the pair of enormous legs in front to gather together the prey and position it cross its jaws to begin eating it like an ear of corn, starting at one end and chewing it all the way to the other, the powerful jaws crunching through the thick skin until it was all crushed with all the juices oozing to the surface and it is these juices it sucks into its tiny toothless mouth, leaving the crumpled but intact body behind.

Among their various names, solifugids are called "wind spiders," a reference to the tremendous speed at which they dart around in search of their prey. Our species here is about an inch-and-a-half long. During the Gulf War when our soldiers first began setting up their camp in the Arabian desert one of the disconcerting things they met up with were "Camel Spiders," solifugids closer to six inches long! If someone offered me one I think even I might mumble something about being concerned about my grandson's safety.

Hummingbirds (3)

The third of the hummingbirds I am discussing, the Anna's Hummingbird, is on the move, spreading north and east. It's a West-Coast bird, common in California when I was a little boy growing up in Berkeley, a scarce bird when I lived in Northern Washington in the 60s (it has now pushed all the way to Vancouver, British Columbia), a stray in winter in Arkansas (but increasing), where I lived before coming here to Tucson, where it it seems to be an abundant resident. 

The female has a mottling of red and bronze on the gorget. The short, straight, black bill on both sexes is distinctive, and through all the color changes, remains a good identification mark. The throat and crown, in the adult male, are brilliant red. Anna's tend to be sedentary so if you have a few individuals in your yard that you can identify, it's fun to watch the male gradually acquire, first on the throat and neck and crown, spots that expand into an entirely red head. Here is an adult female.

The immature male begins by getting a spot on either side of the neck. In this picture it is showing up as a black spot, but that's because it's not reflecting from this angle, and it  is actually bright red. Note the straight short black bill.

 

Here you can see the red spot, and of course there  is another on the other side, and the two will begin moving to the center to join the red gorget you can see developing, plus there is now some red beginning on the crown.

 

Hummingbirds (2)

There is a rule-of-thumb ornithologists follow: If you see a pair of birds, robins, say, and they look so  much like each other you can't tell which is male, which female, you can guess that they are more or less faithful to each other and share in the raising of the young. If the female is dull and drab, and the male has brightly colored dramatic plumage, peacocks, say, you can bet the male struts around looking pretty until he attracts a female, mates with her, and never looks at her again, but goes off looking for another female, while she raises the family.

Hummingbirds are in this second group. Here's how it works with Costa's Hummingbird. The female looks perfectly ordinary. The male, as a juvenile, looks more or less like the female. He has not got his equipment ready yet to fight for a female and mate with her, so by resembling a female, he stays out of the fray till he is prepared. The sign that he is ready is when he changes into his nuptial plumage, which in a hummer usually means slowly developing brilliant colors around his face and gorget.

The Costa's Hummingbird is a popular bird, mainly on account of his nuptial finery. The female, as we have already said, is very ordinary, a green back, whitish underparts, faded reddish wavy lines under the throat, a slightly decurved bill.

 

 

The adult male has crown and gorget a brilliant violet, an almost impossible color to catch in a photograph. To top that off, great long  extensions (in the same brilliant color) sweep back from his mouth. here is a picture of an immature male just beginning the long extensions.

And here is an adult.

 

Notice here, though I have promised brilliant violet color, it just looks black. What is happening is, the light is a reflecting light, and if you are not at exactly the right angle the color will come back black. In life, if you were looking at this one right now, the bird might make the slightest move and suddenly dazzle you. Let's see if I can get one at the right angle.

That gives you the idea. Here's a couple more pictures, mostly half black and half violet.

Hummingbirds (1)

 

On these blogs I have been introducing the reader to the wildlife we live amongst, which give us so much pleasure.  Though it was not  by design, I seem to have started with the largest (the black-tailed, or mule deer) and begun working my way down to smaller (Bewick's Wren), and now the smallest of all: the hummingbirds.

Most places where I have lived in this country there has only been one common species of hummingbird, which obviously makes identification easy, so there was no need to scrutinize each one we saw. But here in our yard we have four species to sort out: Broad-billed; Costa's; Anna's; and Black-chinned.  Things are further complicated by the fact that each species comes in male and female forms, and in immature and mature forms. Let me start by describing the Broad-billed Hummingbird. All of the hummingbirds are handsome, but this one is the most gorgeous of all. I will start with the female, as they are generally the plainer, and work my way up to the almost impossibly beautiful adult male.

 This female is green on the back, gray on the underside, and has a long, curving bill, which is partly red. The red shows this is a Broad-bill, it being the only species here with red on the bill. A black stripe with a white stripe on either side of it comes down from the eye.

 

The immature male looks rather like the female, but as he matures his underparts begin changing from dull gray to bright golden green, and as this happens dollops of iridescent blue begin to appear on his throat and upper breast.

As he continues maturing (i.e. moving towards the nuptial plumage with which he will attract a female for his one date with her before he goes off to attract the next female) his bill changes to bright red, his entire underparts change to bronze green and the blue moves up and coalesces on his throat.

 

Let's look at some more pictures of him.

On the next blog I'll discuss Costa's Hummingbird.

Some Special Birds

 

 

We like all our animals that come to the porch for meal worms (well, maybe not house sparrows) but some are special. Let's see if I can explain why.

Well, our Roadrunner is an example. First of all, it's a very dramatic bird, one you wouldn't expect to see every day if you didn't have something to draw him in. And, more than that, we have a sort of personal relationship with him. He knows us and is tame around us, or rather, is very greedy around us, but it's more than that: he was tame around us immediately, the first time he saw us, as if someone had already trained him how to act towards humans carrying meal worms. The first time we saw him, he came right up to us, rather than running away. The other creatures we feed first needed to be shown that we weren't going to hurt them.

 

 I'm thinking of two more species that fit this description.

Farther down the yard from our porch we have some big saucers which we keep full of water for the birds to drink. One day Cheryl, who has much better eyes than I do, looked down at the small birds that were foraging around the saucers and said "We've got a Yellow-breasted Chat down there."

I looked with my binoculars and sure enough there was a bird with a yellow breast and eyes with white outlines. Formerly this bird was considered to be a warbler. Warblers are small, brightly-colored, often sweet-singing birds, and this bird is a great clunking bird with an unending song of often harsh noises, or imitations of mechanical sounds. In the latest bird guides I notice they no longer consider it a warbler, but no one has yet decided what it should be instead. But whatever it is, it is fun to see. It has all the bright colors of warblers and it skulks around often in wetlands and is impossible to get a glimpse of, then suddenly gets up on a cattail and does its crazy song in plain sight.

We hadn't expected ever to see one here in the open desert instead of some riparian gulch of heavy vegetation. I was dying to find some way to get close to it so I could try to take some pictures of it. Well the next day it was up close to the house, and then it was on the porch tamely taking meal worms and posing for any pictures I wanted.

Here are some pictures of it wandering around under our feet.

This rather spectacular bird stayed with us for several weeks, then the season changed and one day it was gone. We still miss it.

But a second bird has arrived to take its place. This bird is very tiny (almost too small to swallow the meal worms), its colors are muted, but it  is a real character anyway. One day we spotted it on a little scrappy piece of land by the porch. As we do whenever we see a new bird, we poured a handful of worms on the patch of land, and it instantly began picking them up. The next day when we got up in the morning and came out and looked at the patch of land, it was already there waiting for us. It has been coming every day since. The bird is a Bewick's Wren, a tiny brown bird with a very expressive tail which it often carries cocked up at about 45 degrees. It looks like it's planning to stay with us, at least for a while. Here are a few pictures.

On the Porch 3

 On the blog I just sent I sent a bunch of pictures of Gila Monsters and stated that you could tell individual specimens apart by the pattern of their skins, and a few of you wrote, in an aggrieved tone, that I had sent all the same specimens. Well let me atone by sending three different specimens this time.

These I think are sufficiently different that you should be able to tell them apart.

The Backyard Porch (2)

 

In the last post I described our back porch and how we lured the Road Runners, medium-sized carnivorous birds, to come to the porch and feed tamely out of our hands by offering them meal worms, which they could not resist. In this  post I want to describe some of the smaller animals that decided to show up for the feast as well. One of the first to come was a Cactus Wren, a common, rather attractive bird famous for its wild sewing-machine song heard often in the desert.

But in fact it wasn't birds that came most often, it was lizards. After all, what other kinds of animals are more characteristic in a desert? When it began to warm up in our first spring here, we began seeing lizards in the distance, burly creatures running to challenge every other lizard that came too close to their territories, pumping up their big chests and doing their rapid pushups. With their sharp eyes they quickly discovered the porch and the meal worms, so that when we got up in the morning and went out they were already lined up side-be-side only half concealed in the rosemary plant on the edge of the porch trying to be the first one out each time a worm hit the ground.

The lizards, as well as we can make out, are, first of all, Desert Spiny Lizards. They come in every color. The males often have a purple area along the back.

 

 

Here is one taking a meal worm from my fingers.

 

Next, Whiptail Lizards.

 While we are feeding the Spinytail lizards two Whiptail Lizards will suddenly appear and go running at full-speed through the other lizards, slipping breakneck on the slippery porch surface, at top speed rising up slightly on two legs. This lizard is unusual because most species of whiptails (not our species, however) consist only of females, and the young are born by parthenogenisis. In the wild they are alert and shy, but ours quickly tame down, and will sit in Cheryl's hand while she feeds them meal worms. 

At the end of the porch there is a rather flimsy gate, at the inside of the which is the cement slab. Outside the gate the slab ends, making a sort of curbstone, down to the dirt of the field outside the enclosed area. There is an open space of about four inches under the gate where the Road Runner and other small animals can squeeze through (but which is too narrow to let the Javelinas in, which is its purpose). There is another species of lizard that is too shy to actually live inside the gate, but do all their foraging about thirty feet away across the field . If they are chased by a predator they can run like the wind. These are called Zebra-tailed Lizards. When they are running all-out from, say, a hawk flying close overhead, they carry their two-colored tail up in the air, wriggling it like a worm, so a predator will aim at it, and at worse break off its tail while the lizard escapes with the rest of himself.

 

 

 Why we enjoy them so much is that from their twenty feet or so distance outside the gate they are watching everything that is going on in our side of the gate, and from time to time they can't stand it anymore and they come galloping over, jump under the gate, grab the closest meal worm they see, and then go galloping back out through the gate, their bandit raid a success!

There are two more lizards we don't feed (because we don't quite know how to)  but we certainly need to mention.

The first is a nocturnal species with suction-cup toes, that lives inside the house rather than outside. My guess is that they live in almost every house in Tucson. It's the Mediterranean House Gecko, a non-native species that takes up residence in houses.

You'll find them in showers or unused fireplaces. People often notice they have them in their house for the first time on a hot  evening when they see them clinging to the screen on an open window.

I was talking about their "suction-cup toes" out of laziness but their toes that allow them to walk upside-down on the ceiling are much more complicated than that. (Don't expect me to explain it.)

The last of the lizards I want to discuss is one of the most exciting: the Gila Monster, Arizona's celebrated poisonous lizard. The former owner of our house told us they occurred here, but we wondered how we would ever find one since they only came out after dusk, and spent almost their entire life underground. But in fact we saw one wandering up a ditch, and from then on for several weeks they kept appearing everywhere. They were more or less tame, or at least, totally ignored us. Their bite is evidently very painful though not particularly serious, but we knew better than to try to pick one up. We tried to feed them eggs or meat but they never paid any attention. Each had its own unique markings and we thought if we photographed every one we saw we could check their patterns and work out how many we had, but it wasn't all that easy, and besides it was fun just getting to see them.

 The Back Porch (1)

There is an open porch running along the back (south) wall of our house, somewhat raised, giving a view of the full extent (about two side-by-side acres) of our land, down to where it ends in a wash.  On the right (in this picture), our house; on the left, the Sonoran Desert. The porch is where they come together. This is our closest direct daily connection to nature.

For example, in the top picture you see Yours Truly and at my feet a calm and relaxed Road Runner mother feeding her child. and in the second picture that same mother Road Runner sitting in my lap. It's not because I am a bird whisperer. It's because I have in my hand a magic charm that makes all things possible.

 

 

These are meal worms. The pet trade raises them by the ton as food for your more exotic pets, and people like us buy them by the ton. You feed the worms oat flakes or any kind of meal or occasional slices of  fruit (for moisture) and if you kept the worms long enough they would eventually make a pupa and then hatch out as a nondescript beetle. But the birds and other animals (who don't particularly like the beetles) won't let you keep them long enough to transform. They prefer them as juicy round worms that crawl along just fast enough to make them fun to catch, and the birds and other animals are so wild about them that they quickly tame down enough so they will take them out of our fingers. 

The birds, early in the year, swallow them all for themselves, but as spring arrives, they suddenly have to take them all to their baby birds waiting in the nest. They start picking up a load of as many as they can carry (to save on the number of trips they have to make). They pick up a row of three or for on one side of their bill, then a row on the other side of their bill, and we keep saying "That's enough! That's as many as you can carry!" but  they don't listen to us, but pick up one more, and that makes them drop two, and they try to pick up those two, and the whole load falls out of their mouth, and they have to start over again. By that time the ground squirrels have learned what's going on, and when the birds get halfway to their nest and drop the load again, the ground squirrels are there to waylay them, and grab the worms for themselves. 

(Here's a Round-tailed Ground Squirrel, just so you see what they look like, little ratty things, sort of cute but usually a nuisance. They are  one of the prey animals, so the hawks and coyotes help keep their population in check.)

 The Road Runner is one of our favorites visitors. When we first moved in here, it came running by our window one day. We'd never seen it before or it us, but I said "Cheryl, try it ," and she opened the front door and threw out a handful of meal worms and the Road Runner turned in its tracks and bolted them down, and since then comes by two or three times a day and tosses the worms off like they were free which they aren't. If we don't come straight out when it arrives it gets up on our window frames and stares in at us. If it's the third or fourth time that day and we are short of worms we move to another room, pretending we don't see it, but then it moves to a window outside that room, and keeps it up until we feel guilty and go out and give it the rest of the worms that we were saving for some different creature.

But even if it can be annoying a times, it is still our most impressive big, comical, charismatic animal that comes to our hand, the most entertaining for our guests to see.

Here (just because I like them) is an album of close-up Road Runner pictures. A portrait of an adult, a young bird with its "fluttering wing" begging posture, an adult carrying as many worms as it can, an adult feeding a young bird .