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.