Nicocles pictus and Schistocerca damnifica

The other night a large beautiful orange ichneumon came to the light of our kitchen window. According to our Kaufman Field Guide to Insects of North America by Kaufman and Eric Eaton it was an Ophion species, a parasite on large caterpillars. It was the same as or similar to one we had dealings with a few years ago. We had brought three Black Swallowtail caterpillars in from the garden and raised them, and when they made chrysalises we hung them on the wall of a back room. One morning in spring about the time we expected the butterflies to emerge I came in and saw a hole in the side of each chrysalis, and three of these ichneumons were at the window asking to be let out, which I did after I had shown them to Cheryl. We were a bit annoyed, but also intrigued to learn this little piece of the life history of these insects.

Anyway, the one this night, and a few moths also attracted to the lights, were signs of improving weather. So the next morning we checked the forecast and it was for a cloudless day (heavy winds still) and low sixties. We packed a lunch and for a second time made our 64-mile trip to Village Creek SP. This is the time of year skunks are on the move; we counted seven or eight road kills on the way down. All the flags we passed were straight out heading east. It was the third day this week of steady west winds, seemingly off the desert. Our yard had been water-logged all winter, but now was quickly drying out. The year it seemed was still trying to figure out whether it would be floods or drought, and I had a feeling drought was going to win.

When we got to the park we drove straight up to the high ridge trail and walked out to the best area for finding Nicocles pictus. Robber Flies aren't popular enough to have popular names, but I sort of enjoy learning all the Latin names, and the names help you keep the taxonomy straight, instead of confusing you as popular names often do. We spotted a Nicocles almost at once, about a yard up from the ground on the bud tip of a new young Sweetgum. It was much smaller, maybe 15 mm long, than we remembered the species being, though it was a male, and the males are always smaller. It flew up and came down again with a tiny bee it had just caught.

And then it performed its own special mate-finding trick. The last two segments of the abdomen from the right angle shine up like silver mirrors. This is usually concealed under their folded wings, but when they are at their twig-end post, they repeatedly drop their abdomen down, and the silver tip flashes a come-on to any female in the neighborhood. We spent some time trying to photograph them, but we were awkward I think from not having taken many pictures over the winter, and the beating wind made it almost impossible to hold them in focus and still their motion. But here are some shots that will give you an idea of what we saw.

As we stood back a little bit from the scene, we realized we were in the middle of a lek: There were three Nicocles all within a few feet of each other, all flashing away. Then they did something we had never seen before. One or another would fly out into the open pathway and hang suspended in mid air, hovering, the wings wide apart, and the spots on the dangling abdomen shining for whoever was there to see them.

That was one of our missions for coming down here accomplished.

We also were looking for a particular early grasshopper called the Mischievous Bird Grasshopper, with the Latin name Schistocerca damnifica. It sounded like the first describer of this species had had quite a time with it. That was hard for us to imagine. It was one of the Bird grasshoppers, but instead of being large and dramatically patterned, it was relatively small and drab. We were walking down the trail and had just flushed an American Bird Grasshopper which took off in its powerful flight and landed twenty feet up in a tree. Now this much smaller grasshopper hopped clumsily about two feet and hid under a leaf. That made it easy for me to pick it up so we could examine it more closely.

About the only obvious connection with the larger, gaudier Birds is the eye with its vertical bands. Nevertheless, it had a curious behavior which served to set it apart from the others. We had seen a Mischievous Bird almost in this same place at this time last year. Instead of flying or hopping away from us when we approached, it lined itself up with the bare twig it was perched on, and stuck its hind legs out to each side as if these were small twigs coming off the main twig. Here is a picture we took of it then.

It seemed clever, but a little bit amateurish. As if we should try to hide by standing next to a tree and holding our arms out and arching upwards in the shape of branches. Anyway, coming back to the present day, I let the grasshopper go, and it flew about twenty feet away and landed on a fallen log. I didn't have a nice portrait of the species for my grasshopper album, so I walked over to it to see what I could do. I took this picture of him which I thought would be quite attractive, fitting him in with the undulant grain pattern of the wood, etc., but he had been annoyed enough at me handling him that he had drooled tobacco all over his face, which spoiled the effect.

He waited patiently through all that, then, to my surprise, he began slowly spreading his hind legs out to do his twigs-off-the-branch imitation. Coming off a fallen log, it didn't seem very successful.

We had come particularly to see these two species, so we felt our trip was a success. But we also noted other signs of progress. Several butterflies were out, a Mourning Cloak, a number of "orange jobs" (either Question Mark or Eastern Comma; you can only separate them if they land and give you a look, but most of these kept flying). One finally stopped, and it was an Eastern Comma. We saw another sulphur, probably Orange Sulphur, but after all, it was almost March (I'm writing this on the 27th, but we made the trip on the 26th). And we had seen two Spring Azures, a tiny blue butterfly, famous for coming out early, even flying over snow up north. These had eclosed from their chrysalis probably that day, so they were the first butterflies brand new for the season that we had seen.

We had a final nice sighting just before we pulled out, a tiny beetle with the gory name The Twice Stabbed Lady Beetle, landed on the door of the car.

The Camberwell Beauty

Insects living in the Temperate Zone need to find some method of surviving winter. A few strong fliers among the butterflies (e.g. Monarchs, Painted Ladies) or dragonflies (e.g. Common Green Darners, Wandering Gliders) can migrate, but these are exceptions. Bernd Heinrich with his famous "rectal thermometers for bumble bees" has demonstrated that a number of insects are warm-blooded (they use muscle-flexing to keep their internal temperature well above the ambient temperature), but these insects run into the problem that there is no food available in winter. As a kind of exception to prove the rule, I have often seen Blue-bottle Flies out and active in midwinter in sub-freezing temperature (down to 28 degrees). But these are carrion feeders, and carrion is if anything even more available in winter.

But in general insects survive winter through some form of diapause, a period of dormancy, and different insects have different strategies. In the case of insects with full metamorphosis, like butterflies, some spend the winter as eggs, some hibernate as partially grown larvae, some as chrysalises, and some as adults.

The last class is by far the smallest, fewer than a dozen in Arkansas. They are the ones you sometimes see out briefly on a warm day in midwinter, and of course they are the first ones out in spring.

Yesterday we went to Hatchie Coon Island in southeastern Craighead County, in the St. Francis Sunken Lands, a large area that sank twenty or so feet below ground level during the New Madrid earthquakes. The forecast was for the warmest day so far this year, and it was. There were high winds from the south changing to the west, intermittent clouds, and a temperature that reached 78. We noticed numbers of small crane flies out with lots of courtship in progress. Here's a photo of a pair. Note the extraordinarily long hind legs on the male.

Twice we saw adult pygmy grasshoppers, which we were particularly interested in, since the very early species might be ones we haven't seen before. But they disappeared before we could get good photos of them. Otherwise not much was going on. About 1:00 we stopped for lunch and while we were eating a Mourning Cloak landed on the dirt road in front of us. When this handsome butterfly is fresh (which was last summer) the cloak is a rich sable with a row of blue gems, and then trimmed with ermine. It is the mourning cloak of royalty. The species is found all over this country and throughout Eurasia, where it very occasionally makes it across the channel to England. There it is known as the Camberwell Beauty and is considered a prime rarity.  Cheryl's brother in England is a keen naturalist, but he has never seen one. I love sending him pictures and saying  "more of our backyard trash."

Here is the screwy life history: The species emerges from the chrysalis in the summer and if you are lucky you can catch a glimpse of it then in its fresh perfection. It tanks up on nectar or on sap dripping from injuries in trees. Then it more or less disappears from sight, estivating in the heat of summer, spending the winter behind loose bark or in a hollow tree. It reappears in the first warm days of spring, by that time so scratched and faded and tattered you hardly recognize it. Here is a summer picture followed by a picture of one of the ones we saw yesterday.

It is in that sorry state, seemingly at the end of their rope, that the males court the females. Though the roads had been empty when we arrived, now when we drove slowly down the same roads it seemed like there was a Mourning Cloak every fifty or hundred feet. These were all males, sitting on their territories. When we came up close to them we could see their tongues were out, and they were drinking up different salts from the mud of the road. These would go into the semen they gave the female, to help nourish the developing eggs. The other thing they were doing on the road was making themselves easy to see from a distance, to attract whatever females were around. Stop and think: If we are, say, a million times larger than an insect, then the insect lives in a world that is a million times larger than ours, and therefore a million times chancier for a male to find a female. This area where we were is very flat, and the bare roads make the males very visible. They further improved their odds by all appearing at a particular time: the afternoon. Another place we will begin finding butterflies right now is on hilltops. Lots of butterflies (and other insects) narrow down the odds of finding a friendly single by heading for the top of a hill. The hilltop draws up butterflies from all around to a single central spot. In the next week or so we will check some hilltops. On this particular day down on the flats we saw almost all Mourning Cloaks, but we also saw a handful of Question Marks, another butterfly that overwinters as an adult.

The surprise was, we also saw a small sulphur butterfly. In appearance (though we only saw it in flight) it was like either an Orange Sulphur or a Clouded Sulphur. Both species are quite yellow in color early in the year, and very difficult to tell apart. The Orange Sulphur is the commoner species here, but this one, with its smallish size, and pale yellow color, made me think it might be a Clouded. But the problem is, both of these go into diapause as half-grown caterpillars. That means when it begins to warm up in spring they must find an appropriate plant already leafed out so they can feed on it and complete their development as a caterpillar, then make a chrysalis, develop into a butterfly, and only then come out as an adult.

So where in the world did this one come from?

The battered and faded naturalist, after enduring a long winter, can be seen out on the very first warm days.

I knew this would happen

I've just started this blog and I'm already way behind. The reason I'm way behind is, not a whole lot is  happening.

At the top of the page I have put, as a hopeful sign, a Spring Beauty out with a tiny Sweat Bee (Lasioglossum sp.) on it, but it has mainly been wet and gloomy weather.

A week ago, we had some actual wintry weather. In the middle of the day it started snowing. It was about 34 or 35 degrees, so it didn't seem like there was much chance of it sticking. In the next hour it got harder and harder. Now you could see sleet mixed in, the snowflakes still circling, but the sleet falling straight. Snow was beginning to stay on the ground and along the tops of branches, maybe a quarter of an inch. The temperature was still above freezing. I went outside and looked closely, and it wasn't sleet exactly, it was more like icy pellets. And then it began raining.

For most of you, seeing this might be mildly interesting, but I personally was getting panicky. I've mentioned before that I belong to CoCoRaHS, part of a nationwide network that reports precipitation with close accuracy using rigid procedures. I can't just say snow is falling, I have to give the depth for a twenty-four hour period, and the water content (I have to melt a sample size of snow and see how much water remains). I have to say how much the snow has settled the next day, and how much new snow is added to it, and the new water content measure, and keep doing this every day until the snow is gone. For people in the high plains and the upper MidWest where snow is piled up all winter there is nothing to it, they are used to it, they know the whole routine and just what box to record each part in. But for us down in the MidSouth, where we only get a couple of snows a year, we can't remember any of that stuff, and we have to keep retaking our on-line training course. It doesn't say a word about icy pellets. The director of the project, in his monthly reports back to us, is very witty at our expense discussing how we non-snowbelt people panic and get everything wrong.

We heard it raining all night. That was a terrific relief, it would melt off all the snow in a minute and we would only have to report how much rain was in the gauge. When I woke up next morning, I checked the thermometer first thing, and it was still above freezing. But when I looked out the window there was snow on the ground. How could that possibly be? I went outside and checked. It wasn't snow, it was all the pellets frozen together. Now how the hell do you report that?

A couple of days ago there was the promise of sun ("some cloudiness") and at least temperatures in the fifties. It was time for a real expedition. Cheryl packed a lunch and we took off for Village Creek State Park. It's the largest state park, about an hour south of us on Crowley's Ridge near Wynne. We had a goal: the first robber fly of the season, Nicocles pictus, comes out in the second week of February, at least a month before any other robber fly. Village Creek is the best place to find them. Robber Flies are my main insect obsession. They are big hairy predatory flies that operate like falcons. That is to say, they pick a spot (the end of a twig, the top of a bush, an open area of ground with clear sky around it) to wait, and when an insect flies over, they sweep up faster than the eye can follow, grasp the insect in their muscular spiky legs, stab it with their beaks loaded with neurotoxins and digestive enzymes, carry it back to their post, and suck its juices out. They often favor wasps and bees and other robber flies as prey, all dangerous things which they attack fearlessly. How can you not love them!

Here is a picture of Nicocles, which I have downloaded from my website (which you may click on over to the right here, if you want to learn more about this very special family of insects). Admittedly Nicocles is not one of the larger members of the group (the different species run in size from about 4 mm to about 50 mm, and Nicocles is probably about 15) but it has many interesting features about it, especially the fact that you can see one in February after not having seen a robber fly since last year.

When we set out from Jonesboro it was overcast, but the promise was for sun. Sun and at least some warmth would bring Nicocles out. Now Village Creek SP is a long drive down, and when you get there it has a bad habit of building up clouds in the afternoon. I recalled reading an article by a man who was studying the behavior of a certain species of robber fly which required him to sit and watch one throughout the day. He was out during a partially cloudy day and when it was sunny the robber went about its business, but whenever a cloud covered the sun, the fly dove headfirst into the leaf litter, and didn't come out until the cloud passed.

However as we drove, the clouds broke up then disappeared. The sun shone down and the thermometer on the car went up, low fifties and climbing. Then as we entered the park the clouds came from nowhere and enclosed the sky. There were still a few breaks, so we went quickly up to a high ridge trail on the south side that was usually a dependable place for Nicocles. We walked the trail hurriedly, watching the tips of twigs, but it was cold, and the sun was going quickly. There were loud buzzing sounds all around, often the first sign of robbers, but they were all a dark species of Flower Fly (Family Syrphidae), a species which we always see early in the year. They were on the path everywhere, but it was too dark and cold to see a robber.

In fact the day was steadily getting darker and colder, so we decided to return home. The round trip would be 125 miles. Here is where you discover if you have a genuine obsession for insects. We had driven all the way down here for the purpose of seeing a 15 mm-long fly. Not a new one; one we had seen many times before. If we had seen it, the day would have been a great success. Now that we hadn't seen it, we were guiltily aware of this extension of our carbon footprint, of this quarter tank of gas expended.

To get a little gain from our trip, we decided to do some exploring. The park is huge, and terrific for insects. After years of going there we were still discovering new paths. On this day we drove clear to the northern side of the park and found a bridle path we had never taken before and walked some way along it. It was a completely different habitat, and looked very promising for later in the summer. We would be back.

More signs

We were staying with our friends in Hot Springs Village, and spent one day driving the Forest Service roads north of the Village in the Winona WMA. In summer it's a terrific place to find uncommon insects, but this day in mid-winter it was cold and darkly overcast, and nothing was stirring, save for numerous flocks of juncos. We decided to spend most of the day driving roads new to us, noting promising looking locations we might visit again later in the year when things warmed up. Last thing in the day we stopped at Iron Springs Campground on Highway 7. A stream runs through it, and sometimes even on cold days there will be some signs of life under water. We walked along the edge of the stream in an area where during past summers we had seen darters courting, the tiny male sidling up to the female and suddenly flaring his huge brightly colored dorsal fin. But today not a fish in sight, no aquatic beetle trundling along the bottom, nothing.

But then we saw something we would normally have missed. In the past we had gone up to the water's edge to look in, but paid no attention to the shrubby vegetation we were walking through. Today, all the leaves were gone, and the bare sticks of the tall bushes around us revealed that they were in full bloom.

First we saw the alders, which of course would be expected here along the streamside, but what we had now were the tiny red female flowers, and then, hanging below them, the long dangling catkins of the male flowers. (The name "catkin," I just learned, comes from their resemblance to a cat's tail.)

The other thing that was there we didn't see for a few moments. Then we noticed a small flower, and it was as if a light turned on and we saw the bush in front of us was in full bloom, covered with small flowers, and then we saw that, except for the few alders which were on the edge of the water, all the bushes around us with their waxy aromatic space-alien flowers were this other thing: It was Vernal Witch-hazel. Here is a picture of it showing some flowers, and some buds not yet unfurled.

In this second picture you can see a seed pod from last summer. When these pods snap open, they can hurl a seed up to thirty feet. This area here had dozens of large bushes. At the right moment in summer it must have been like a war zone.

Along with these early blooming flowers, there was also the promise of a flower that wouldn't be out until summer. At our feet we could see the leaves of Cranefly Orchids (one turned over to show the purple underside). Months from now, when these leaves are long gone, the tiny insect-like flower will appear. It is so inconspicuous without the leaves to point it out, that some people put a little stake by the leaf so they will be able to locate the flower later.

Have you noticed how often very early leaves are purple underneath? One theory I have heard is that the purple is an indication of a lot of sugar in the leaf, which apparently can act as an antifreeze.

Mystery solved by new book

We were exploring some new (to us) trails in Scatter Creek WMA in Cross County. The dirt road went through alternating woodland and grassy flats. We began noticing that the branches of young saplings we were walking past were split on the underside and partially ripped open. At first we wondered if it might be damage from browsing deer, but when we looked more closely we could see the regularity of the scarring and our speculation went to some sort of orthopter. Could a katydid do something like that? We thought that some kinds might use their ovipositors to make slits in bark to deposit their eggs. They would have to be large (the branch in the picture is perhaps an inch and a half in diameter), but some katydids are very large. But the more we looked, the more widespread the damage was. In fact it was on almost every small branch we saw over a large area. It would have to be an awful lot of katydids. It would have to be a plague of katydids. We began dropping that theory.

But what could it be? It was a mystery of nature. It was evidently a sign left by something done by a large insect on an incredibly large scale. We both realized at the same moment that the answer was waiting for us in a book we had just purchased, and the moment we got home we took the book out. It would be its first test.

The book is Tracks & Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates, by Charley Eiseman and Noah Charney, a field guide to all the tiny footprints, burrow openings, carved hieroglyphics under the bark of dead trees and other residua left behind by insects who are no longer there. We looked in the index and found the entry "oviposition scars: cicadas" and there was the answer, the largeish superabundant insects we were looking for. We had completely forgotten the great event of last summer, the biggest, most widespread emergence we had ever seen of Thirteen-Year Periodic Cicadas. Early last summer we couldn't visit woods anywhere in the state that didn't have their persistent calling in the background. We all know the story, the broad blunt larvae with their powerful digging forelegs burrowing under the trees sucking on the juices in their roots for thirteen years before rising to the surface at a synchronized moment in all their millions to shed into adulthood for their brief moment in the sun, spending it as we hope we would, singing and mating. We have heard that they have no fright or evasion reflex, whatever wants to can walk up and gorge on them. There are so many of them all at once that their predators are quickly sated and there are still millions left to insert their eggs into slits on the underside of branches and twigs so hatching larvae can drop to the ground and dig down to the roots.

If you are an inquiring sort of person you might wonder how these insects and their Seventeen-Year cousins got started on this rather bizarre life plan. The best theory I have heard is that originally they were one-year cicadas like the other species but they were beset by a parasite which fed on their tissues. When the cicada larva crawled with the last of its strength up to the surface to try to become an adult, the parasite timed things to also be ready to emerge as an adult. Well, there is always a bit of variability, and a few cicada larvae didn't come up after the first year, but stayed underground for a second year, and when the parasite matured after one year, it was stuck underground and perished. But of course there was variability in the parasite too, and some of them waited until the second year to transform into adults and so survived. But then some cicada larvae waited until the third year, and so on, until some populations reached thirteen years, and some seventeen years, before the poor parasite gave up. This theory can't be proved, naturally, since the losing parasite no longer exists.

Signs are taken for wonders

Our bedroom window faces east, and we have, across the fields, an unobstructed view of the sunrise. The technicolor ones with all the clouds are wonderful, but my favorite is simply the red ball of the sun rising into a blue sky. From years of watching I can almost tell you the date by the position of the sun. On the darkest day, December 21st, it is all the way to the right (south), and in my line of sight it comes up through the trees of my right-side neighbor's backyard. Then as the days go on it works its way to the left (north) so that I am looking through my own backyard towards the point where it rises. Then the sunrise point goes out of sight behind my outbuilding, reemerging weeks later to the left of the building and now in my left-side neighbor's land, going behind his small outbuilding, and finally becomes visible to the left of that by the summer solstice. I hear people in Alaska have a moment of depression on that first day of summer, because it means the sun will turn around and the days will begin shortening again towards winter darkness.

I'm the opposite. From the time of the winter solstice, I begin watching for signs of spring, and obviously a first sign is the days getting longer. You think that would mean every morning the sun would come up, say, a minute earlier, and the sun would set a minute later in the evening, but it doesn't work that way. The rotation of the earth is skewed. Yes, the sun goes down later every evening, but for another several weeks after the solstice, the sun is still rising later every morning. For instance, around the solstice it was rising at 7:00. When I looked at it a week ago, it was rising at 7:08. But now a couple of days ago I checked, and it came up at 7:05. It was finally going in the right direction, an important mile post. A funny thing is, the sun has already worked its way so far north that it is almost going out of sight behind our outbuilding.

Yesterday it was sunny and a little warmer, the higher 50s, and we went up to Crowley's Ridge State Park in Greene County for a walk and a search for signs of spring. We walked up a dirt trail flushing big American Bird Grasshoppers from time to time, but they don't count as a sign of spring. They are the most winter-active large insects that I know of. The beech trees, however, were beginning to push out their long pointed buds. So were the buds on the red buckeyes beginning to move. I like the whole process of the red buckeyes coming out. The bud itself is beautiful, and it slowly opens into exquisite brightly colored leaves, then finishes up with its spray of red flowers that are synchronized to open just as the hummingbirds arrive. Every year I mean to photograph each step, but always forget.

Cheryl looked down at her feet and saw a white oak acorn had split open and was sending its root down into the forest litter.

A few flowers were actually blooming. The tiny white flowers of hairy bitter cress were showing. They are always one of the first things out, the flowers rising up from their basal rosette of leaves.  Also out was a single frost-nipped dandelion with a flower fly landed on it. Flower flies are among the earliest spring insects. There are dozens of kinds of of them, frequently bee or wasp mimics (though they are quite harmless themselves). They are important pollinators, and the larvae of many kinds are carnivorous, feeding on aphids.

We saw a movement in the dead leaves; a tiny thing had hopped. That was grasshopperly behavior, so we scoured the leaves and finally spotted a tiny nymph. Grasshoppers are among those insects that don't have full metamorphosis. A butterfly, for instance goes from egg to caterpillar, molts several times growing steadily larger, then forms a pupa, at last emerging as the adult butterfly, totally different from the larval form. A grasshopper goes from egg to small grasshopper, molts half a dozen times becoming a larger grasshopper with gradually developing wings, and finally in its last molt becomes a fully mature grasshopper, with fully developed wings and genitalia. In this case there has not been a dramatic change between immature and mature forms. Now I shouldn't exaggerate this. The young grasshoppers change enough in shape from molt to molt that it is often very difficult to identify what adult a tiny nymph will end up becoming. I normally ignore nymphs. But this particular nymph was immediately identifiable by the high arching keel on its pronotum (the cover over its thorax). It was an Autumn Yellow-winged Grasshopper. As the name suggests, the adult form suddenly appears later in the summer and then is active until late in the fall. In fact they were still common in mid-November last year, and probably would have been out until December except there was a spate of bad weather after which I didn't see them. The eggs can barely have lain in the soil for two months, before the little ones emerged. So with good luck this little one might live actively for ten months, a very long time for an insect to live without diapause. At any rate this little creature neatly closes the circle of the year: One of the last grasshoppers seen is the same species as nearly the first one seen. I'll put its picture here next to a picture of a last year's adult.

Almost nothing, but always something

After a couple of days of rain, sunny with wispy clouds, and low 50s.

We walk around Craighead Forest Lake, as always wearing our binoculars. But there is very little in the way of birdlife (a flock of 35 white-fronted geese flies over), and virtually no sign of insect life. Well, there is one sign of life: In the bare branches of a small birch tree on the edge of the lake we easily pick out four walnut-sized cocoons of the polyphemus moth, a spectacular big silk moth. Cheryl takes a picture of one of the cocoons. It reminds us of the pair we saw mating in our back yard last year.

We get back home and eat our lunch looking out the dining room window at one of our bird feeders. A southern bog lemming darts out from under the leaves from time to time to grab a spilled sunflower seed then darts back into hiding again. I snap a blurry picture of it through the glass.

Three days ago our downy woodpecker started  drumming, and now he is tolerating a female in the yard. This is a sure sign of spring approaching.

The Beauty of Rarity, or, the Commonness of Beauty?

Cheryl and I were walking around Craighead Forest Lake yesterday. Out on the water were the usual big white barnyard-like geese, the fake mallards, the fake muscovy ducks, and especially, the flocks of "non-migratory" Canadas which are such a nuisance these days. Three in a line swam by close to us and we noticed a half-sized Canada manfully paddling along behind, trying to keep up. Normally we wouldn't glance at a park Canada, but suddenly we were all attention.

We scrutinized the round head, the tiny bill, the short neck, the dark breast: It was a Cackling that had flown in and joined the tame birds. It was something of a rarity, and we noticed how handsome the plumage was, the shape, the pattern. And only as an afterthought realized how handsome the virtually identical big Canadas were.

This morning it was sunny and clear, and we set out looking for a snowy owl. We drove country roads in western Craighead and eastern Jackson counties between the Cache and Black Rivers, open wet fields full of raptors in winter, suggesting abundant prey is available. Almost immediately we came to a huge field completely covered with snow geese, some unimaginable number of tens of thousands. They were close to the road and I stopped carefully to avoid setting them off, and we scanned the flock quickly. Lined up along one side were a number of Ross's geese, getting commoner these days but still a little bit special. Down at one end were a few white-fronted geese, keeping to themselves. Otherwise there was nothing but endless snow geese, so we drove on.

There were the usual shrikes, kestrels, harriers (virtually all males this day), and one redtail after another, in all their different plumages. We tuned them out, concentrating instead on every white bleach bottle or white plastic bag on the far sides of the fields.

Of course I knew what the odds were. There very possibly were two or three snowy owls in the state at the moment, but most likely they were coming down the Arkansas River Valley from Oklahoma. They wouldn't be up here.

We were passing by flooded fields, one chock-a-block with shovelers, the next with pintails. We were scrutinizing little white chimneys perched on top of distant farm machines. In the morning we had gone first to the southern part of our area, now we were returning along a northern route, and pulled up overlooking empty fields to eat our lunch. Miles to the south of us must have been that spot where we had seen all the snow geese. Either someone had stopped his car and walked out to them, or perhaps an eagle had flown low over them, anyway there was a sudden dark cloud of them, too far away to see individuals, but it was the entire mass. It gained elevation, then spread out in a long line across the horizon like dissipating smoke.

We chewed on our sandwiches, and when we looked again they must have turned because now they were coming towards us. When they got close enough to see as individuals, we looked with our binoculars and they had already set their wings in a glide. They were going to land right in front of us. It was a very gradual lengthy process. First they continued rising higher and higher, then they began circling like the world's biggest wash basin beginning to drain. Out of the bottom of the vortex individual geese began spilling out, corkscrewing crazily towards the ground. The bravest (or most foolhardy) geese had already hovered and then dropped the last few feet to the ground while the wariest were still rising into the clouds.

The solid tide of white spread across the ground towards us and took shape, all the white-fronts in rows closest to us, the snows behind them in family groups with the grayish youngsters. All necks were raised stiffly, then one by one they dropped their heads to graze.

We finished our lunch and I drove off as carefully as I could, but even so those massed nearest us leaped into the air with a concussive sound. Cheryl snapped some pictures out the window as we drove through them. I could see them in the mirror circling back and landing.



Now all owls are beautiful, and snowys perhaps even more so with their huge yellow eyes and trusting childlike expression, and here they have the special value of being supreme rarities. But I'm thinking back to when we lived in Washington state before moving here, and a few snowys showed up every winter, and in a big year you could stand in one place and count a hundred. When I drove to work in the morning I would notice them on their various fence posts, but I didn't bother to stop and put the binoculars on them. What I'm trying to say is, a flock of tens of thousands of snow geese circling into a rice field from a great height, or starting up in a brief panic, must be the greatest and most beautiful avian spectacle in Arkansas, but we would turn our backs on it in a second if, say, a dull winter-plumaged golden-crowned sparrow turned up.

"Cheryl," I said. "Do you know what I've just realized: the redtail is the most beautiful hawk in North America!"

Or am I just saying all this because we didn't find a snowy owl?

Is there life without bugs?

The cold dark has closed in again.

When I opened my eyes about seven, my weather station said 33 degrees, 99 percent humidity. The famous lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov (he was also a novelist) as a little boy in Russia would wake up in the morning and look to see if the sun was shining through the curtains. If it was, it meant it would be a good day for butterflying, if it wasn't, he went back to bed. I'm one of thousands of citizen scientists across the country who checks his official CoCoRaHS (Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network) rain gauge at seven every morning and reports how much rain has fallen in the past twenty-four hours, so I had to get up.

No rain had fallen, but I could feel a mist on my face, and fog obscured the bare row-crop fields behind the house. When I got back in the house, Cheryl had already gone online and checked the Arkansas bird reports, and it seems some non-birdwatcher had taken a picture of a snowy owl down by Hot Springs in the center of the state and it was printed in a local newspaper. It's a snowy owl invasion year, and they have been seen as far south as Missouri and Oklahoma, and the Arkansas birders were dying to get one in their own state. But by the time the word got around, the bird hadn't been seen for a week.

Since this is a Sunday, I imagine every birder in the state is going to be driving the roads around where the bird was last seen. I thought: Cheryl and I will just drive the roads in northeast Arkansas and find our own snowy. We got everything ready to go, and then I went outside and realized the fog was now so thick I couldn't see across the front yard.

So I'm sitting here at my computer thinking, Well, that's a reminder that in winter (at least when it's not foggy) there are other things than insects around, birds and mammals, for instance. The acre lot our house is built on has been planted and managed entirely to attract wildlife, which means a pond in the back and the rest mostly native stuff allowed to run wild. Our guiding moral principle comes from the great British landscape authority Oliver Rackham ("The Illustrated History of the Countryside"): "You must learn to despise the word 'tidiness.'"

So in the 35 years we have lived here we have recorded twenty or so species of mammals on the property, undoubtedly missing some of the smaller ones. We try to practice ahimsa, reverence for life, which means everything is welcome, at least until it begins to cause trouble. At first we were charmed when the opossums moved in with us. One day we looked out the back window and an opossum gathered up a pile of dead leaves and wrapped his prehensile tail around them to carry them under the house. After that when we took our bath we could hear him in his nest under the bathtub scratching and snoring. Then the ticks and fleas began invading the bathroom, then he began ripping the insulation off our central-heating ducts to line his nest, so one night when he was out on his rounds I sealed off all the openings to under the house.

That was not the worst. When the fields behind the house are harvested, all the small rodents move to our back yard. One year it was brown ('Norway") rats. These are filthy scary things in cities, but out in the country they are more like regular animals, and are actually rather handsome. I learned that they are technically considered to be burrowing animals. They came to the compost pile we have in the back back yard, where we put all our soft garbage, and sure enough they dug burrows with runs between them and it was fun to watch them sitting at the mouths of their burrows, or racing down their runs, like a miniature prairie dog town. Then one night we had four inches of snow. When I checked back there I saw their little footprints where they had all deserted the compost beds, run along the side of our outbuilding (where we have our garage and my study), crossed the driveway, and made a bee-line to one of the vents leading under the house, burrowed under the screen blocking the vent, and entered the house.

They were a disaster. They sounded like ponies galloping up and down in the attic. I woke in the middle of the night, my stomach tensed, as I heard them gnawing on what were undoubtedly live wires. When something was in the way, like the floor, they simply chewed a three-inch-in-diameter hole straight through it. I set traps everywhere and they avoided them with contempt. One night we heard one in the kitchen. We went out there and the sounds were coming from the electric stove. I had come naked from the bed, but feeling a little vulnerable, had put on heavy boots.

We've got him, I said. I pulled the stove out into the middle of the room. We could see where he was hidden inside one of the legs. I got between him and his escape hole where the plug came out of the wall, turned on every burner to full, the oven on to cleaning-temperature heat, and waited holding a broom handle cocked over my head. Instead of backing me up, Cheryl kept threatening to take photographs of the scene. We were sweating from the heat in the room, but the rat patiently waited us out, and we gave up and went back to bed.

I finally did trap them out, and we no longer keep a compost bed, and for the most part we enjoy our mammals. When we have our bird feeders going in winter a hispid cotton rat (a well behaved outside rat) sits on his haunches eating sunflower seeds with the sparrows, a couple of squirrels sitting on either side of him like big brothers. The dead leaves ripple as the voles and bog lemmings race along out of sight underneath, occasionally sticking their heads out to pick up seeds dropped by the birds from the tube feeders.

Our feeders are hotting up at the moment. Up to now this winter we had had our usual local birds, our usual few dozen white-throated sparrows, juncos, and scattering of other sparrow species, and so far about a dozen goldfinches in their rather drab winter plumage. Suddenly in the last few days the goldfinch numbers have increased to 40 or more, and they have been joined by half a dozen beautiful purple finches, and, even more special since West Nile Virus devastated them, half a dozen house finches. We are of course watching now for some really special finch to show up. An evening grosbeak would be nice.

But sunshine, warmth, the chance for a bug, and we'd leave all this in a minute.

Beginning (with some trepidation) an insect blog

If the writer should at all appear to have induced any of his readers to pay more ready attention to the wonders of the Creation, too frequently overlooked as common occurrences . . . his purpose will be fully answered. But if he should not have been successful in any of these his intentions, yet there remains this consolation behind, that these his pursuits, by keeping the body and mind employed, have . . . contributed to much health and cheerfulness of spirits, even to old age. Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selbourne

Here in the northeast corner of Arkansas, along Crowley's Ridge, winter is seldom severe. Still, for an insect lover, the middle of winter (when most insects are in diapause) can be a depressing time. You can only devote so much of your attention to planning the coming season's campaign, or trying to memorize field marks from the insect field guides, or checking endlessly over your photos from past years. At last you find yourself dozing off and nearly crashing into the keyboard. But I'm spoiled living here in the MidSouth. By the end of February Spring will already be a sort of damp smell in the air, and by March the major groups of insects will be in full swing. We can even push the season a little bit right now. A couple of days ago we had a sunny day with a temperature approaching 60 and went to an old quarry north of here. Quarries are always good in cool weather, sheltered, and sort of focusing what warmth from the sun there is. We were looking for grasshoppers. Last summer you see we decided to learn something about grasshoppers, that we had never paid much attention to before. I can only learn things by total immersion, so I more or less spent all day every day working on this, and by the end of the summer had found and photographed about fifty species (I'm guessing Arkansas has about 75 species). Some of my IDs are a bit dodgy, but it's a start. Part of my strategy was, that I had often seen grasshoppers in mid winter, and when in December or January I was desperate to see a living insect, they would be my escape valve. Sure enough at the quarry we turned up a few American Bird Grasshoppers, plus a Scudder's Short-winged Grasshopper. I'm sure both species are out every month of the year. Cheryl with her sharp eyes also noticed the mud puddles at our feet seemed to have little rafts of dark seeds or dust, but when we looked close, they were Podura aquatica, the very common springtails that look like the Michelin Tire Man. Then she turned over a bit of wood and there was the slenderest millipede I have ever seen, very different from any other millipede species I know of. Today we had another sunny day, though not so warm, low fifties. We went to the prairie at the Jonesboro Nature Center, which last summer was terrific for grasshoppers, and easily found 8-10 American Bird Grasshoppers. They kept flying away from us time after time, but I finally got one to pose. At close to four inches long it is one of our most spectacular insects. And there it is, the first grasshopper picture of the year. I plan to complete my grasshopper project this year, and the season has now officially begun.