The Porch at Night

On these perfect evenings we like to sit out on the porch in the darkness and listen for whatever life might be present, crickets mostly, or a neighbor's dog barking (we like to imagine it's responding to the scent or sound of a creeping mountain lion). There's a weak light bulb on the porch that we turn on so we won't miss a big spider or some other such creature coming out into the open. It was how we discovered last year that we had a little colony of pocket mice on the porch. But last night the dim lighting turned up the most dramatic creature we had seen.

Something about the proportions of a smallish mouse slipped by virtually between our feet. I shouted for Cheryl to keep sight of it while I raced into the house and came out again with a glass jar to plop over it and put a note-card under it to close up the top. Cheryl turned the jar up level again and we looked inside. A creature was leaping about inside, most impressively crashing its impressive jaws at us so that we were glad they were inside the glass.

 

  

We examined it in the light. The colors cadaverous, it  looked rather like a dead maggot, but its eight legs showed relationship to spiders. It also had an extra, thicker pair of legs in front, which were not for walking, but for sensing things that it touches. Note the fat round head. Near the top of it is a tiny, touching-together, almost imbecilic pair of eyes looking straight up in the air. No wonder it needs sensitive forelegs. The front half of the head is divided into two bulging lumps which are in fact massive muscles for clamping down with their jaws which are, for their size, the most powerful jaws of almost any creature.

 

This is a Wind Spider, a Solifugid (the name means that it "runs from the sun"), and indeed they can run so fast they are difficult to see. There are about 200 species in North America, though not much is known about them. A couple of years ago I kept one as a pet  (a different species) for about a year, which is about as long as they live. Anything I put into its aquarium it tore to pieces and devoured. I haven't got this one to feed yet, but I hope I can eventually, so I can keep it for a while.

 

 

 

The Monster's Return

 When we bought our house here in Tucson a few years go we could tell by looking at it it would be wonderful for wildlife, and it has lived up to our expectations, bobcats, wolf-sized coyotes, Javelinas, rattlesnakes, huge tarantulas hunted by huge wasps. There was one creature we hoped we would get to see, but didn't think there was much chance of it: the Gila Monster, the brightly-colored slow-moving poisonous lizard. They stay underground most of the year only coming out for  few months in the summer to do all their feeding (they eat small mammals) and mating. Most people in Tucson, we are told, have never seen one. So we were delighted in our first year here when we began to see them crawling around the backyard. 

We guessed we probably had five or six living here. We took careful photographs of every one we saw, because it appeared that each one had an individual pattern, so all we would have to do is count how many different patterns we had, and that would tell us our population. Well, we looked as carefully as we could, and could only find two patterns, meaning we only had that many.

And now they appear every year, usually around the end of April, and each time it is those two. 

Well, we rearranged parts of our backyard last year, doing a lot of digging, and we were a little afraid we might have disturbed them while they were in their underground phase, and we wouldn't see them anymore.  But at the very last minute this year, April 30th, one appeared. We got out all our past years' photos, and we could tell it was one we had seen regularly since 2019.

Below is a picture from 2019.

Here is a picture from 2022. Notice on the 2019 the lower-case letter "g" on top towards the back and the same mark on the 2022 photo. (Their patterns are so complex the easiest thing to do is to look for something very distinct in the pattern.)

Below is a picture from 2019 from the other side showing, around the middle,  a "3."

 Here is a picture from 2022 showing the same "3".

Now we are waiting for the second monster to show up, or, even more interesting, a completely different, third individual.