Coyotes

I expect most people know that wolves and coyotes have bushy tails that hang straight down, whereas by the time dogs were domesticated, they had acquired a gene that made their tales curve up at the end. Every few days from one to three coyotes (often, what looks like a pair with a younger one) come trotting up from the wash at the bottom of our land, crossing through the back yard at a wide front so only one would be visible at a time. A rabbit, seeing it, might be tricked into fleeing to the side and running straight into the others.  Invariably they come just as we are not expecting them, traveling so fast they are gone before I can find my camera, so I have never managed to record them but get only a quick sense of surprise at how large they look ("Like wolves!" I can't help shouting to Cheryl), and a sense of admiration for the wild look of their plump hanging tails. They have wonderful coats at this time of year.

Well, the other day I got my chance. It was that day late in February when the round-tailed ground-squirrels came up from their burrows for their first day out of hibernation, and while they were still possibly confused by the sudden sun-brightness a family of coyotes was frantically trying to dig them out. While they were occupied with that I was close-up beside them with my camera clicking away trying to make their tails the center of my pictures.

A Puzzle that May (or May Not) be Solved

Not long after we moved to Tucson (June, 2018) we were sitting at the breakfast table having breakfast and looking out the window over our extensive back yard, when Cheryl with her sharp eyes suddenly said "There's a tarantula and a tarantula hawk fighting." 

This, of course, is one of the nature-photographer's Grails. We grabbed our cameras and ran down there. (I paced it off later, and she had spotted them when they were seventy-five feet away).

They were racing around each other in an area dug-over by ground-squirrels. One move I recall the spider making was to get up on its tiptoes and make a sort of floating run across the bank. Then everything stopped and stayed frozen, and we realized we might have been interfering with the action and so we backed off. When we cautiously returned a few minutes later, nobody was there. So that was frustrating. We didn't know if we had seen everything, or missed everything.

It stayed like that until recently, when I read something that surprised, and sort of disillusioned, me. The desert blond tarantula (Aphonopelma chalcodes) with a leg span of four inches, is a major predator capable of capturing mice and other small vertebrates; the tarantula hawk (Pepsis mexicanus) has a sting that can put a person to bed for a couple of days with a fever. I imagined the two of them would fight head to head, kicking and scratching, rolling over and over. But what I read was, the wasp, being careful not to get too close, stings the spider on the tip of its leg, then gets out of the way while the spider falls over paralyzed from the venom. 

Did we see it, but just not recognize what we were seeing? I got out the photographs we took then and looked at them newly to see what I could make of them.

Here is the wasp.

Here is the wasp in a position from which it might have stung the tarantula in its second leg.

Here is the tarantula in a position in which it is apparently no longer moving. It has withdrawn its second leg.

We have not witnessed a spider/wasp conflict since.