Our Porch at Night (part two)

In the previous blog (Our Porch at Night [part one]) I was talking about our bats, and how we entertained dinner guests and ourselves sitting in the window that gave onto our porch with the outside light on, watching the bats streaking by emptying our hummingbird feeders.  It looked like a close-in bombing raid, in a sinister way rather like the attack on Pearl Harbor, especially with the distant thunder rumbling. I had always wanted to get a good photo of these bats in flight, though it seemed impossible, but I made some progress this time, and I will make another try tonight.

But what I'm writing about here is that once we came outside in the dark to try to photo the bats, we were quite astonished at the variety of life we found on the porch. We took our big flashlight and flashed it against the back of the porch, in other words, the outer wall of our house, and the first thing we saw was a red-spotted toad, unexpected so far from any water. And right next to it, not unexpected, but certainly

 making us take notice, was a Bark Scorpion, the most venomous  of the scorpions. It's true I  kept one briefly as a pet, but that was contained within an aquarium, not wandering free to climb into our shoes before we put them on in the morning.

Next was a Mediterranean Gecko, not a surprise, as they must be in everybody's home in Tucson, but usually this introduced species is found inside the house. These exotic creatures are always welcome.

Most fun was to find the porch was teeming with Pocket Mice. These tiny creatures resemble miniature Kangaroo Rats. In fact I believe they also, at least occasionally. walk upright on their hind legs.

And finally, and most dramatic, an enormous jet-black tarantula.

During the day the porch is generally inhabited by more "normal" creatures, round-tailed ground squirrels, three or four species of lizards, two or three dozen species of birds, an unending line of harvester ants, an occasional rattlesnake, most of these attracted by the meal worms we throw out, and the hummingbird feeders we refill after the bats have emptied them.

And at the very moment I wrote these words about the daytime inhabitants of the porch, a brand new species appeared there for the first time. We saw what we thought was a large swallowtail butterfly out the window, and, looking to identify which swallowtail it was, we could see it was dark with almost no visible markings. We grabbed our cameras and rushed outside and saw it wasn't a butterfly at all, it was an enormous moth: a Black Witch. In our experience, these big day-flying moths appear out of nowhere, can be seen in the yard for a few days usually flying at tree-height, than go on their way, enwrapped in the mystery their name suggests.

Our Porch at Night (part one)

 At this time of year Mexican Long-tongued Bats come up from Mexico into southern Arizona where they feed on nectar from flowers and on sugar water from hummingbird feeders. Bird lovers often get annoyed to find all their hummingbird feeders drained dry every night, but if you have an outside light on so that you can see them it is worth it just to to see the waves of bats sweeping through your yard. I decided I would attempt to get some pictures of them. It turned out to be more complicated than I thought it would be. You see, they move very fast, and they don't have wings shaped to make an air foil which would give them lift, so they are unable to hover in front of a flower or hummingbird feeder; they have to keep traveling forward or they will simply fall out of the sky. So when they get in front of a hummingbird feeder, they can only pause for a second to get a quick slurp. That means, first of all, you only get that one second to click the shutter. And next, it is  dark night, very difficult visibility to aim the camera and focus it, in that one second.

We have a porch along the side of our house overlooking the backyard, and that porch has a number of hummingbird feeders on it, so that is the area the bats are attracted to. I thought the solution would be to use our light- and movement-sensitive game camera, which would be automatically tripped by the bats. We tied the camera to a post pointed to a feeder, and went to bed assured that by the next morning we would have dozens of images.

Well, the bats were so fast they came and went before the camera had a chance to see them and so no  pictures were taken.

All right: I decided I would have to sit out there, and trip the camera myself. But it turned out the porch light produced so little light I couldn't see to aim or focus the camera any better than the automatic camera could. So I thought I would make one more try before giving up. First of all, the next morning,  I put the camera on a tripod so I could point the camera at a feeder and focus it by daylight, and then I left it out there pre-aimed and pre-focused. That night (which was last night) once the bats started circling the porch at high speed I sat next to the camera and every time a bat made its one-second pause in front of the feeder I clicked the shutter, and I could see when the flash revealed the bat's brown color and I would know I had timed it right.

The first picture shows a bat from behind, the underside of its head reaching down to drink some sugar-water. The second picture shows a bat from the side.

So this showed the bats, which was our intention, but in the act of going out on the porch in the darkness, something evidently we had not done before, we learned that the porch at night is teeming with totally unexpected life. In part two part of this blog I will show the life we discovered.

Pack Rat (part two)

 

 

 

Here is a typical pack rat nest such as I described in my last blog, the mess of fallen and rotting cacti that in some cases can preserve its original material from nearly forty-thousand years ago. Because of the cooler and hotter periods such an ancient nest went through in all that time, scientists think it will give us useful clues for how the vegetation will change during the warmer periods we expect in the future.

 

 

 The pack rat compulsively cares for the nest, constantly trimming off pieces of cholla and leaving them lying around, a sure sign that the nest is active. 

Well, I started getting these little calling cards in the garage. Instead of fresh green bits of cholla, these were old dry ones, the best he could find in the garage, but I knew exactly what it meant. It meant a pack rat was living out of sight in the garage. And my car was only a few steps away. I opened the hood and here's what I found in the engine compartment. I've seen too many pictures of cars left parked and undriven for a couple of months with engines that were totally covered with bits of cacti, engines that had virtually become nests.

 That's when I brought out the HAVAHART trap, spent about an hour trying to figure how it worked,  and after a few trials and errors, caught the angelic looking creature you saw in the first picture in this blog on pack rats. It would need to be taken at least a mile away or it would return. We drove for at least a mile, and began looking for a spot to release it. 

It's not as easy as it sounds; a mile from our house is another house, and a mile from that house is still another house. As good neighbors, we wouldn't want to leave it by somebody else's garage, especially knowing if we got caught they would come after us with a posse. We finally parked by a place that was at least a few feet more than a mile beyond the closest house, and I tried to look like I was examining a tire while car after car drove suspiciously by. Finally there was a gap, I pitched the rat out and we raced for home.

We're still waiting for it to return. 

Pack Rat

 Over the past couple of years, with these posts, I have been introducing you to the animals that share their land with us here. Naturally I started with the largest, the most dramatic, the most beautiful, the bobcats, the coyotes, the Javelinas, the black-tailed deer, the Cooper's hawks, the Harris's hawks, the western diamond-backed rattlesnakes, the gila monsters, the Mexican long-tongued bats, the desert blond tarantulas, the solifuge, the Costa's hummingbirds, the Anna's hummingbirds, the broad-billed hummingbirds. After a list like that it might seem like I am now down to  the dregs, but in fact maybe I am down to the most extraordinary of them all. I am talking about the pack rat (Neotoma albigula).

 He's really quite handsome, nice rounded ears, shiny black eye, furry tail, no narrow ratty face. And if you see him move, he has a wonderful agility and can go anywhere, climb anything. But notice that this photo is taken while he is imprisoned, which he richly deserves. You see, he can't resist setting up his lodging in your garage, and once he is in your garage he can't resist moving into the engine  compartment of your car. What he does then is get into the spaghetti of crucial wires behind the dashboard and cut and trim and rearrange them to make a comfortable nest, in the act costing you several thousand dollars to get them back the way they are supposed to be. Just say the word pack rat to anyone in Tucson and you immediately get stories of the horrors they have caused, and the revenges that are planned.

When we were moving in, and the previous owner was moving out, he gave me some tips about the pack rats. First of all he told me he was leaving me a HAVAHART trap, which he had used to catch the pack rats. Originally he would take them a mile away and release them. But almost immediately, its place in the garage would be taken by a new one. So finally he wised up and brushed some blue paint onto the back of the next one, and sure enough they were all returning to the garage almost before he could get back himself. It turns out pack rats have a fanatic loyalty to their home, and a sure sense of geography, so he learned to take them much farther away.

Garages usually have enough junk piled in them to give the pack rat lots of room to hide under, but out in the desert where they make their natural homes you see an area four or five feet wide made up of dozens of pads of cacti gathered together with tunnels running under them. The owner of the nest keeps it up, refurbishing it when it needs more bits of cacti (usually cholla) , and if something happens to the owner, another pack rat comes in and takes over. And it is here that you learn what an amazing creature this is. Scientists have carefully examined the disintegrating material at the lowest level of the nest and have found, in some cases, traces of pollen of plants that no longer grow where the nest is, plants that grew there when the climate was very different, material that can be traced back as much as forty-thousand years, which is how long that particular nest has been continuously occupied!

(End of part one of "Pack Rats")

 

Harris's Hawk

When we first moved here (a couple of years ago, now), Cooper's Hawks were very common. Scarcely a day would go by that we didn't see one. We frequently saw them catch their prey, mantle it for  few moments, then carry it to a broad horizontal branch in the middle of the back yard and pluck most of its feathers before eating it. They caught mainly Gambel's Quail, less often White-winged Doves (perhaps because those were faster flyers), and an occasional Cooper's would specialize in the Round-tailed
Ground Squirrels, which are very common here. The hawks paid almost no attention to us, so we got to watch them from close up for a good insight into their lives.

Sometimes we would see a dark hawk sitting near the top of a tree. This was the Harris's Hawk. It's quite a handsome bird, black and chocolate brown, with a black band on the tip of the tail, and white all the way around the base of the tail. There's a house across the street from us, and from our angle we could see into its backyard which had some big mesquite trees in it, and a pair of Harris's that may have been nesting in them. The birds never seemed to do anything, so we decided that it was a pretty mild bird compared to the Cooper's. Here's where we were wrong. We had a pair of half-tame Roadrunners  in a tree in our front yard with a nest-full of babies almost ready to fledge. The Harris's had a clear but distant view of the Roadrunners constantly flying in to feed them, and one day ripped through the nest and stole them all.

We suddenly had a good deal more respect for them as predators

 

Recently a Harris's visited us, landing in some trees in our backyard close to our house, and we had our closest view ever. Cheryl got this really nice picture. Look at those long legs and oversized talons, look at that meat-cleaver beak. This bird is built on the plan of a small eagle.

This is when I began patching together a theory. For months now we had scarcely seen a Cooper's Hawk. The horizontal branch on the "plucking" tree no longer seemed to be in use. When a panic suddenly cleared birds out of the bird feeders, if we looked at the top of a tall pine tree on the edge of our lot it was always the Harris's sitting there. I wondered if the Harris's had chased the Cooper's out of our yard. In a  fight, if these fierce birds ever fight with each other, I don't think the Cooper's would stand a chance.

The Harris's doesn't live as openly in front of us as the Cooper's, so we don't know as much about them. For instance with the exception of them robbing the Roadrunner's nest, we have never seen them with prey so we don't know what it is most likely to be. In one source, we read that they prey on small mammals, but have never witnessed that ourselves. We know that Cooper's favor quail, a sumptuous meal worth chasing down, but we have also seen a Cooper's catch a half-grown quail out of the line following its parents.

There is another development. Lately we have seen two Harris's together in our backyard. Are they thinking of nesting here now?

This is probably stretching my theory that the Harris's has driven the Cooper's  out of our yard, but if Harris's indeed prefer mammals, and Cooper's quail, it could be the Harrris's are in a sense preserving quail in our yard, and this year we have noticed that we seem to have more quail than ever, with the young that follow behind them preserving their numbers exceptionally well.

We will watch how this develops.