Miscellaneous

First some updates on things we have been following:

The Falcate Orangetip we have been following has moved up into a later, much more colorful, instar.

Our butterfly weeds have half-grown Monarch caterpillars, or new eggs (or, as in this case, both), hidden in the budding flower clusters at their tops.  What it means is, all the pretty orange flowers won't appear, because they'll be eaten to the nub. But it's not a complete disaster. For one thing, we'll be creating new Monarchs; for another, we have learned that if the flower clusters are eaten down now, they will simply make new flower clusters that will bloom later in the summer.

The handsome paper wasp Polistes exclamans which made a nest on the kitchen window has hatched its eggs and now has a small beginner nest full of larvae, which, if all goes well,  shortly will become workers.

Here is one I had been following, but hadn't mentioned before in this blog. We found this funny shiny little capsule under a blade of grass, and brought it home, and looked it up in our very useful guide to Tracks & Sign of Insects (Eiseman and Charney), where we learned that it was a deer fly egg case.

After we learned what it was, we spotted another one out in the woods in the act of hatching.

Meantime, the one I had brought home I stuck in a plastic container, and when I checked on it some days later, it had hatched, and the bottom of the container was wriggling with hundreds and hundreds of potential deer flies.

Cheryl said I absolutely was not allowed to raise them, so after I had examined them I washed them down the sink. Now, we live outside the city, and down the sink means into our septic tank system. If it turns out these maggots are detritus feeders, our backyard might be unlivable this summer.

Otherwise we have been seeing lots of new things. We spent a weekend up at Lake Norfork staying with our friends Jeff and Sue. We had gone together to a nearby very clear small river that emptied into the lake and were looking at bugs and wildflowers and whatever things were about, when one of us spotted a big snake on a rock out on a small island in the river. We trained our binoculars on it and speculated on whether, with its orange coloring, it was a copperhead, but eventually satisfied ourselves that it was a Midland Water Snake. Sue, who is not as fond of snakes as we are, said "Am I hallucinating? It looks like the whole island is covered with snakes." We looked more carefully, and she was right. There was a large female on the rock on the right and otherwise the island was covered with males all trying to be part of a mass orgy.

Looking down into the clear water closer at hand, we saw more courtship behavior. Two male Northern Studfish were facing off, occasionally nipping at each other. With their bright breeding colors and exotic finnage they were as flashy as any of the tropical fish I kept as a kid.

On this same outing Cheryl took this really nice photo of a Hayhurst's Scallopwing, a skipper about the size of half of a postage stamp.

I'll finish this blog with two reptile closeups from our neighborhood: A young Hognosed Snake doing his hooded cobra act. And a male Broadhead Skink. The snake is harmless; the lizard bites pretty hard.

At this time of year you can't go out the front door without seeing something good.

Orangetip update

Many insects have subdued coloring, meant to blend with the background at least to some degree. The Falcate Orangetips mean to stand out, the male with his orange wingtips on a white field, the female, when she arrives a couple of weeks later, with her pure white. In the very early spring the woods are still the dark brown of the trunks and leafless undergrowth. These delicate butterflies are like lights, that catch your eye from any distance. They are the perfect signs of spring. All the while that they are flying, the leaves are unfolding and turning the landscape into the fresh green that characterizes the season. Long before mature leaves harden into the green of summer the Orangetips will be gone.

When I wrote about the Orangetips earlier I included pictures of a female egg-laying, and a picture of an egg. I'll repeat those pictures here, as a reminder.

These are tiny butterflies with very tiny eggs, which I had a hard time keeping track of, but Cheryl with her sharp eyes kept checking, and yesterday found some action. Here is one so recently hatched it is still carrying the egg on the tip of its tail.

 And here is one that has reached its second instar, and has some marking and color. It is still only a few mm. long.

Now, if I am remembering correctly, here is their life history: These caterpillars will go on munching for a short time, and then, only half grown, they will go into diapause and not appear again until early next spring, when they will complete their metamorphosis and have their day in the sun (when they are mating, the pair remains joined for twenty-four hours). Appropriately, these avatars of spring will experience spring twice, and miss the other three seasons of the year completely.

In the meantime, and this will be much easier to see and keep track of, the milkweed plants in our yard are slowly becoming encrusted with Monarch eggs.

Beautiful Polistes and Ichneumons

The advantage of being obsessed by insects is that you can scarcely go outside the house without seeing some new creature or some new bit of behavior you have never seen before. There is so much diversity (and so little time) you can't possibly exhaust it.

Here are a few things we have seen recently, just in our garden.

To begin with, a few weeks ago the holly hedge in our front yard was blooming, attracting numbers of bees, flower flies, and, particularly, the big Polistes paper wasps, the ones that hang their pizza-shaped nests under your eaves (if you allow them to). I confess I haven't paid a lot of attention to this group of insects, so when I started photographing them at the holly, I was surprised we had such a variety of species. In fact I could do the first six letters of the alphabet with their Latin names, and still not be done. Here they are:

Polistes annularis

Polistes bellicosus

Polistes carolinus

Polistes dorsalis

Polistes exclamans

Polistes fuscatus

And there's still one more, Polistes metricus

P. metricus, exclamans, and carolinus nest around our house every year. Exclamans seem to be nervous, but not aggressive, and I've never been attacked by one. Metricus are pretty placid and I've only a few times been stung by them, usually my fault. But carolinus, the big red jobs: They are very aggressive, and I can't count the times I have been stung by them. The first time was about thirty-five years ago, when we first moved here. I was walking through a field and inadvertently came near a nest in the top of a bush. One flew out and stung me on the hand, and the next day the skin on that side of my hand peeled off as if I had had a severe sunburn. After that the stings have never bothered me very much (I wonder if you acquire a sort of immunity), and so I tolerated them around the house. But then Cheryl was stung in the eye by one, and her cornea swelled up, very frightening to see, and I took her to emergency. Since then we have been on a war footing. We practice ahimsa, reverence for life, but if we are attacked, all bets are off. The red carolinus get under the eaves of our house and nest inside the walls, and it is impossible to stop them completely.

So here's how it works. At first when they are building up their numbers, they are very quiet and sneak in and out, and are no problem. But about mid summer, when they have built up to about 150 members (this will be in each of two or three nests), then they start to get obstreperous, and I have to take action. I go out in front of the house where I can see the openings they use, and sit in a folding chair in the early evening, with a long-handled net in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. When I see one heading in for the evening, I leap up and try to net him before he makes it into the entrance. That's my adrenalin rush. Then I try to isolate him in one section of the net without getting stung (that's my second rush) then I smack him with my stick. It's my annual courage test. For a while they think of me as a predator, and get sneakier and faster with their entrances. Then they get mad. They start gathering at the mouth of the nest and I shake my net at them to enrage them, I poke the net at them until they charge me, then I frantically whip the net round and round trying to get them before they get me, and hoping Cheryl isn't watching my gyrations through the window (she has a terrible way of taking movies of these things). From time to time my nerve breaks and I run clear out to the road. I can handle the frontal assaults, but they have a deadly one where they shoot in from behind me at top speed, and somehow sting me in the back of the head without even a pause in their flight. Anyway, I try to catch twenty every night, and after five nights I have taken them down far enough they are no further trouble, at least for another month or so.

But that's way ahead of the story. Right now all the Polistes Wasps are single queens sitting on a nest of three or four cells, trying to produce some workers as quickly as possible.

There are other hymenopterans of interest in the yard right now. Last year I took some  6-foot-long cypress sticks and tied them together on the top to make a sort of tripod for morning glories. Cheryl and I were standing by it the other day when a big red ichneumon wasp flew up and landed on one of the sticks.

We looked it up in BugGuide and believe it is Labena grallator, or something close, and it had come to our sticks because they were infested with wood-boring beetle larvae, which some of these big ichneumons specialize in. They listen with their antennae, and when they hear the movement of a grub, they saw their way down to it with their immensely long ovipositors, and deposit an egg on it. I was especially interested in the color pattern of this one. A lot of mimicry goes on in insects, a harmless species putting on the appearance of an insect known for its painful sting or bite, or its bad taste, and that way birds and lizards might hesitate to pick up the harmless one too. When this one first arrived, I thought it was a Polistes Wasp (and I wouldn't have picked it up). Here is how it fooled me.

The Polistes Wasps are a highly advanced group of social insects. Among other high-tech changes they have made, they have converted their long ovipositors into painful stingers hidden inside the tip of their abdomen, and then, having these dangerous defense weapons, they have painted themselves in black and red and yellow warning colors, colors that mean you'd better not touch me. Birds and lizards and people know these colors well. The Ichneumons are a primitive group of wasps, with no stings, instead still using their ovipositors to deliver eggs. A great long ovipositor therefore gives away the fact that they are stingless. So note first of all in the picture above that this ichneumon's ovipositor is yellow on the basal half, then black. So from many angles it doesn't look like a long ovipositor. The yellow part just looks like one of its yellow legs, the black part disappears in shadow. Now note the colors: They are the black and yellow and red warning colors of a Polistes. Look at the next picture, of P. dorsalis: Not a bad match at all.

Here is this ichneumon in action, drilling down to the beetle grubs. The yellow part is the sheath that carries the ovipositor. The black thing is the ovipositor itself. It looks a lot like a well-drilling rig.

At the same time, another beautiful ichneumon, also a wood-boring beetle specialist, Dolichomitus irritator, was busy on another part of the tripod.

From time to time I might be able to write more about ichneumons. After all, there are roughly 4000 species north of Mexico.

How do you keep up?

A run of beautiful weather, so the last three days we have gone somewhere every day, and so many new things are coming out there's no time to write them down, or keep them straight. Plus there are interesting things going on around the house. For instance, a very handsome paper wasp, Polistes exclamans, has started a nest on the kitchen window frame. So far its just three or four wispy cells, but they already have eggs in them. It will be fun to watch it develop over the summer. Here's a picture of a nest made by this species last year. They are so trim and alert they make me think of armed F-16's waiting on the flight deck.

Here is the new nest.

We have in the back yard a little patch of spring cress for the Falcate Orangetips, and this year they are laying lots of eggs on the flower heads. If the eggs don't all get predated, I will try to follow the progress of the caterpillars.

On the 24th of March (last Saturday) we went to one of our favorite places, the W. E. Brewer Scatter Creek WMA. It's in the middle of Crowley's Ridge about 30 miles north of us in Greene County. The WMA is divided into four or five separate parts, each with different habitat, topography, vegetation, and all of it terrific for insects. When we first discovered it, we went to one part that we entered from highway 141 just north of Beech Grove.  It had high ridge trails and wide creek valleys and so many special robber flies and butterflies that we kept going there, and it was years before it occurred to us to try another part of the WMA. That part was on the south side of highway 34, and it was totally different, much more open with abandoned quarries and highly eroded loess soil giving a miniature Grand Canyon landscape. We found a whole new set of special robber flies and dragonflies, and, in the quarries, some very nice tiger beetles. Last year when we started studying the grasshoppers, we found a low wetland area there that teemed with grasshoppers in great variety. Then at the end of last season we tried a third area, farther up 141 from the first area, and it again was quite different, a high valley of mixed meadow and woodlands which looked very promising (we wrote about it in an earlier blog where we talked about finding the egg scars of periodic cicadas). We were looking forward to exploring it further this year, so that in fact is where we went this past Saturday.

It had really come to life since the last visit. There were many new-for-the-season butterflies, Pearl Crescent, Common Buckeye, Sleepy Duskywing, Wild Indigo Duskywing, Pepper and Salt Skipper. There were a lot of dragonflies out, some new for the season like Blue Corporal, with the lovely Latin name of Ladona deplanata (I imagine her as a spy on the Orient Express), and Common Whitetail, along with those that had already been out for a while like Variegated Meadowhawk, Slender Baskettail, and Common Green Darner (we managed to get a shot of the latter mating).

We're thinking that at some distant time we might try to learn the bees (there are so many hundreds of species it is pretty daunting), so we are tentatively beginning to photograph a few. This time we saw some very neat long-horned bees.

Green-striped Grasshoppers were everywhere, and I am getting pretty tired of finding them. Surely it is time for some new species to come along.

We looked up from our concentration and noticed the sky in the northwest had grown black. It was quite pretty against the newly green fields. But this area of the Ridge is such a tornado and straight-line-wind catcher that when the weather threatens we get out quick.

Sunday we went to another new (to us) part of Scatter Creek WMA, on the east side of the Ridge near the town of Gainseville, which featured a raised bog and some interesting plants. It had the usual dozens of Green-striped Grasshoppers. A new dragonfly was out, a teneral Ashy Clubtail, the first of the clubtails we have seen this year. It was so fresh it had not opened its wings all the way out yet. Cheryl picked up a stick that had some mushrooms growing on it, and when she turned them over to see the underside she could see some tiny rough-textured things walking around on them. We tried to make them into diminutive fungus beetles, but when she took a picture of them, and blew the picture up, we saw they were actually enormous (relatively speaking) Springtails, perhaps Pogonognathellus flavescens, which gets up to a quarter of an inch (most springtails are 1-3 mm).

We then drove over to the southern area of Scatter Creek WMA and down to the wetland and the abandoned quarry at the end of the dirt road. When we walked across the creek at the bottom we noticed on the muddy edges Pepper and Salt Skippers, a kind of Roadside Skipper, were in numbers such as we had never seen before, probably forty on a small beach, when usually five or six in a day would be a good total.  The hundred-yard-or-so walk between the creek and the quarry is deeply rutted with four-wheeler tracks, which at this time are filled with water. The more normal sized Water Springtails covered the water for the whole distance in incalculable numbers, driven by slight winds into deep wind-rows.

At one time the quarry had an enormous colony of Horse Guard wasps (Stictia carolina) which provision their burrows with horse flies to feed their young. The colony had been diminishing the last few years under the onslaught of kudzu from one side, and four-wheelers from all sides. It was also a good site for some special robber flies, and some very nice tiger beetles. Strong rains from winter and spring had washed out the soft loess soil and virtually sluiced out the quarry, so it was now a clean slate. It will be interesting to see if the wasps come back, and the robber flies. We didn't need to worry about the tiger beetles, because they were already back. We saw the pretty little metallic green and coppery Festive Tiger Beetles, and one or two Big Sand Tiger Beetles, and already a few Cow Path Tiger Beetles.

Monday the weather was still clear with 80 degrees forecast, so we left early for the Ozarks, namely to our favorite Harold Alexander WMA, for our second visit of the year. Since the trees were still mainly leafless, the dazzling white of dogwoods, the best show for years, could be seen deep into the woods. There was much hilltopping of butterflies, all common species, but we did see the absolutely last Mourning Cloak of the spring still hanging onto a territory, though probably there wasn't a female left in the world.

And just as Pepper and Salt Skippers were having their best year ever, so was Mournful Thyris, a tiny day-flying moth covered with large white spots. They were landing on the damp roads in numbers we had never seen before. We went to the power-line cut where we had seen the Brown Winter and Mischievous Bird grasshoppers before, and both species were gone without a trace, perhaps their winter season over with. They were of course replaced by dozens of Green-striped Grasshoppers, till I thought about bringing a flyswatter with me next time we took this path. We did however spot a nice Pickerel Frog along the way.

We drove down to the Spring River but the spot we go to with a path along the river was inaccessible because of the high water. We then went to another spot, a boat launch, and walked down the boat ramp seeing much larger than usual numbers of Twelve-spotted Tiger Beetles. At the very bottom, Cheryl spotted a Lesser Sand Cricket (she had found one in this area last year, these two now being the only ones we have ever seen). Though called a sand cricket, or sometimes a pygmy mole cricket, it is actually a grasshopper, and at around 4 mm, must be the smallest grasshopper there is.

So, we didn't see a lot for the day, but it was very pretty, and the day pleasant. Yellow-throated Warbler, Louisiana Waterthrush and Blue-gray Gnatcatcher were new birds for the year. Cheryl pointed out and photographed lots of nice wildflowers. Here is Orange Puccoon with Rose Vervain, and Virginia Bluebells.

On the drive home I stopped in the middle of the road so Cheryl could get out and carry a snapping turtle out of harm's way. It was very comical watching it snapping at her, and I'm sorry I didn't take a film of it (as she unfairly did of me on another occasion when I was jumping out of the way of a big snapper). And the final story: When we got home, we found that our box turtles in the back yard had  been quite busy, in their own rather lazy way.

Scales, feathers, fur, chitin

A few days ago, Cheryl noticed the milkweed was coming up. We looked at each other significantly: That meant the Monarchs would arrive any day.

Sunday the 18th the forecast was for partly cloudy and up near eighty. We packed a lunch and went east into Mississippi County to Big Lake National Wildlife Refuge. We started by walking parts of the ring path around the Moist Soils Unit. It's a neat place where rare birds often turn up. It has interesting grasshoppers and dragonflies and special butterflies like Bronze Copper and Broad-winged Skipper. It was too early for most of those, but it was just right to watch spawning Bowfin. We stood on the bank and looked straight down on a number of these "living fossils" rising to the top and gulping air in their big jaws, taking it down into the air bladder that serves as a primitive lung, their long continuous dorsal fin breaking the surface of the water and undulating with a snake's motion. When the eggs hatch in April you can sometimes see the young in a tight group, looking rather like a school of black tadpoles, foraging in shallow overflow water. If you look closely, you can make out the two-foot-long male bowfin just behind them, obscured by being in slightly deeper water, guarding them till they are old enough to take care of themselves.

They must make very effective guards. I once found the dried-out head of one by a fishing pier and took it home and soaked off the skin and took the skull, which had now come apart into hundreds of pieces, and spent hours gluing it back together. I remember the big sharp teeth went on forever, rows of teeth, teeth on the tongue, teeth on the palate.

We continued on down the path. There were a few ducks on the far side, shovelers, gadwall, blue-winged teal, ring-billed ducks, a single wigeon. We made sure to check its head color; a European wigeon had been seen in the state recently. There was a lot of emergent vegetation in the central pond we were walking around, and it had dozens of coot in it in two or three big groups, the individuals in each group swimming so close together they were touching each other. When we got close to one group it sped away, feet dragging in the water, wings beating, splashing and making a great fuss. They finally merged into one big flock, where they went along, heads beside heads, like a creche of enormous baby birds, or, inescapably, like black flamingos doing their mass mating dance.

Clouds towered around us, but there was still plenty of sun. However there was not much in the way of insects. A few ordinary butterflies, some Common Green Darner dragon flies (all males, with fresh bright blue abdomens), in one area tiny Orangewing Moths insisted on landing on us and staying with us.

And then Cheryl looked out across the lake: Here it comes, she said, and there was the first Monarch of the year flapping and gliding towards us.

We drove into the reserve past Mallard Lake, keeping to the right and drove to where the road ended at a bridge closed to passage. There was a boat launch there and a big gravel parking lot. We took out our lunch and ate it walking around to see what was there. We were up on the raised road with a stream behind us and a wetland in front of us. While we stood in the middle of the parking lot a tiny mouse came running up the bank towards us, falling all over itself in haste, got right between my boots and cowered down there, refusing to move.

We walked over to the bank it had just scampered up and saw why it was running. There was a very big rat snake there that looked like it had already swallowed all the other rodents in the area. Here it is, just departing when I got too close to it. As far as the mouse was concerned, it was a Florida python, and he was going to stay by us.

In fact when we looked back, he was still sitting in the middle of the parking lot with no intention of moving.

If we are correct in our identification, this is a Fulvous Harvest Mouse, a new species for us. We knew fishermen would soon be coming with their pickups and boat trailers, so we gently nudged the mouse off into the grass.

We drove back by Mallard Lake. The lake is being drawn down for some reason, and there is a wide muddy beach such as we had never seen before, and a single Black-necked Stilt (also unusual there) was feeding along the edge.

We drove back to the main road and parked by the dam spillway, a place we had discovered last year with a little sort of nature trail along the edge, a place with sycamore trees infested with really interesting caterpillars, and shrubbery full of interesting grasshoppers. None of that was there now. We did however find another nice snake, a half-grown Broad-banded Water Snake.

We were again on a gravel parking lot, this one unused and rather overgrown with grass. It was here we found our first and only grasshoppers of the day. They were all Northern Green-striped Grasshoppers, a very common species, nearly the first out in spring, the last to disappear in the late fall.  They were already quite numerous, jumping and flying away from us at practically every step. I was checking each one for anything unusual, and that's when I saw it, the high point of my day: the males of this species often come in a brown phase, and the females are almost entirely green. But suddenly here was a female that had all of its green coloring replaced by a deep red. This seemed very special, and it even sat still and posed for pictures.

I'm surprised I was able to write this much, and show this many pictures, when, taken all in all, it was a pretty quiet day.