A mystery solved

Last year when we began making a concerted effort to learn the spiders of Arkansas, I spent several nights in my backyard with my headlamp on looking for and photographing the Arboreal Orbweaver, Neoscona crucifera, the commonest of the big orbweb-spinning spiders, and a good representative to study the behavior of this group of spiders. The Latin species name, crucifera, means 'cross-bearing,' referring to the cross-like marking on the abdomen.

The general procedure for these spiders is for the big females to come out at dusk and build a large orb-shaped web stretched out between  two trees. (When they are fairly close to the ground it is quite easy to run into them if you are walking around without a light.) They spend the night catching whatever blunders into their web (they are formidable hunters and can catch prey much bigger and heavier than they are), then when it begins to get light in the morning, they take the web down strand by strand, generally eating it to get back all the protein they had put into it. During the day they get in under the eaves or in some other protected spot, to eat at their leisure whatever they caught the night before. Typically they have sturdy legs, a small carapace, and a fat round abdomen.

As is often the case with spiders, the males are quite different.

They are small compared to the female. Proportionally, their legs are longer and slenderer, their carapace is broad, and their abdomen is tiny. On the female the palps are like a pair of miniature legs, thin and threadlike, on either side of her mouth, and are used to manipulate the food she is eating. The male's palps are like big boxing gloves and are full of complicated apparatus for carrying his sperm and inserting it into the female's reproductive opening. If you see a male at all, you will find him living off to the side of the female's web, where possibly he scrounges some food from her leavings, or possibly he eats nothing at all.

Now this was part of my general knowledge of the orb-web spinning spiders before I began, so when I went out one evening and saw what I am going to show you now, I was flummoxed, I didn't know what to think (you have no idea how emotional the study of spiders can be can be).

Here was a large Neoscona crucifera with the cross pattern and fat abdomen of a female, which had a big professional-looking web spread between trees, which was catching and wrapping up and feeding on big game such as this big strong beetle, and yet which had very obvious swollen male palps.

I was putting together an album of photographs of Arkansas spiders which I hoped would be helpful to people who were trying to identify them in the field, and which might show little interesting bits of behavior, if I were lucky enough to discover any. But this was inexplicable. Somewhat guiltily I hid these photos away in a file, and decided not to mention them.

The one thing I noticed about this spider was, it was a subadult, it was in its last instar before molting into adulthood. I could tell that by the fact that the palps were swollen and beginning to mature, but did not yet have their complex sexual machinery, which would only come with full maturity.

I took those pictures July 25th last year, and that's where things stood until now, nearly a year later. What happened is, I received as one of my birthday presents from Cheryl Bernd Heinrich's latest book, The Homing Instinct. He's my favorite naturalist/writer, and here is part of the reason why: With his constant close and dogged and trained observation of every living thing around him, he sees things no one else sees.

In this case he had an orb-web spinning spider living in the rafters of his Maine woods cabin. When he sat at his desk working, he could look up and observe the spider. He began throwing insects to it and learning different things about it. He thought it might be a male, except that it was big, and everyone said males, relative to females, were small. It had a big web, and everyone said, the males don't make a web. Anyway, one day it stopped feeding; no matter what he offered it, it wouldn't take any more. Its fat belly began to shrink. Then, it shed its skin, and when it came out its shrunken belly was even smaller than before. On the other hand, its legs were a third longer. And its palps had turned complicated. It never made another web. One day it took off running, presumably searching for a female to move in with.

Geolycosa and Geometer

Back in 2011 we were on the prairie portion of the Jonesboro Nature Center when Cheryl discovered a Geolycosa missouriensis, and took this very nice photo of it:

Here it looks more like a gopher or some other small burrowing animal. In fact it is a handsome and very interesting spider. Geolycosa, 'earth wolf,' is the genus name for the Burrowing Wolf Spiders. We were especially delighted with it because Peggy Dorris in the 60's and 70's published, in several papers, her wide-ranging survey of the spiders of Arkansas, and she had not found this species, nor any other burrowing wolf spiders, among the 435 she recorded. So, in addition to being handsome, it was rather uncommon, not very well known, and quite interesting in its behavior. But we were concentrating on grasshoppers that year, and didn't follow up on it.

This year, the beginning of our second year on spiders, we went back, and checked out the prairie with burrowing wolf spiders in mind. Here is what we discovered. We had often in the past noted, when we were in this sort of terrain (namely a rather flat area with sandy soil and lots of bare ground), that there were round holes in the ground often with bright orange fresh sand from recent digging scattered around them. There were also lots of solitary hunting wasps around, and we assumed these were wasp holes, dug to deposit an egg in along with a paralyzed caterpillar or whatever host animal they specialized in. This year we examined these holes more critically. If you look carefully at the picture above you will see that the sand right around the mouth of the spider burrow has been tied together with spider silk. Well, we noticed that was true of most of these holes we were examining, holes that in size went from a diameter too small to stick a pencil in, to one that would require a quarter to cover it. Some even had dried plant material sewn into the sand, to make a little turret around the entrance.

When we saw these holes in the past, they were always empty, and so were they this day. But I decided to sit down and wait quietly by one, and see what happened. I'm not a particularly patient person, but I thought I would give it a full minute, counting out sixty seconds, one one-thousand, two one-thousand....

And as you can see in the picture above, before I reached sixty, legs began appearing down inside the tube and slowly rising to the surface. I very quietly raised my camera and aimed it at the top of the hole.

I made the tiniest movement, and it disappeared in a flash.

You see the pattern of this spider: a black body with gray hairs over the top, two-tone black and orange legs, and the chelicerae, the sort of mustache in front of the face, covered with yellow hairs.

I've described the habitat. Sandy soil, because sand is easy to dig in. The land mainly flat, but with some areas raised a few feet in elevation from the rest, or places with gradual hillsides, and those were the places where we found all the holes (often half a dozen in view at a time). Obviously a design to avoid flooding in heavy rains. The holes always appeared empty to us because the spiders are so sensitive to the least vibration in the ground, and have such sharp eyesight, that before we got close enough to see into the hole, they had already dived to the bottom. The one-minute rule, however, appeared to be standard for all of them.

To the north of Jonesboro in Greene County is Scatter Creek WMA. There is an area there of abandoned quarries which had all the proper ingredients, and when we checked it, it was similarly full of holes in appropriate locations. Here are pictures of one spider I waited by, keeping very still so that I didn't disturb it before it was fully out.

After the sixty-second count it was up just below the top. There was a cautious wait there, and then it moved up so it could see over the top. Another wait. When it felt completely secure, it moved its second pair of legs straight out in front, and that was its final comfortable position for surveying the landscape in front of it for prey. I didn't catch it in the act myself, but Cheryl was watching another spider on the side of a hill when she saw a small beetle trundling down the slope towards it. When it was four or five inches away the spider noticeably tensed, the beetle suddenly froze, then the spider rushed out and grabbed it and carried it back down into the burrow.

If you are a follower of this blog you might remember that I showed some pictures of another large wolf spider, Hogna carolinensis, which had a burrow with a similar turret, but otherwise their behavior is different. Many of the Hognas make burrows that they conceal themselves in during the day, then at night they come out and wander around looking for prey. Geolycosa comes out by day, sitting at the top of its burrow waiting for prey. I don't know this for sure, but I suspect they go back down into their burrows to rest during the night. There are other parts of their behavior I will try to learn more about this summer while I have these two big populations to monitor. My understanding is that at this time of year both males and females live in their burrows, but in late summer and fall, the fully grown males leave their burrows and go looking for females.

Now, on a different subject, look at this picture and tell me what you see.

Geometers make up a large family of moths. Geo, 'earth,' meter, 'measurer.' Its the family whose caterpillars are the familiar "inchworms," or "measuring worms," that progress by arching up their long bodies and sending the front of their body as far forward as it will go, then arching up their body again to pull the back half up to catch up with the front. But some of the caterpillars in the geometer group have a much more remarkable ability. They can hold their long bodies absolutely straight, and keep them stiff and rigid for hours at a time. To go along with this ability, often their markings precisely mimic the wood and bark and complicated joints of twigs. Birds feeding on caterpillars use the shape of a caterpillar as a search image, and caterpillars go to extraordinary lengths to break up that pattern and look instead like something inedible.

Last week we found (droppings underneath it provided a clue) what must be the world champion in this type is dissimulation. The caterpillar (that's what you were looking at) is on the trunk of a small bald cypress in our front yard. Several new cypress shoots are growing on the trunk at just that angle, in just that color and texture. Since we discovered it, we have been keeping an eye on it, and it holds that position all day long. It's been doing it for at least the week we have been watching it (a bird with a good memory might note that it is in a slightly different place each day.) Last night we finally remembered to go out and check on it at night.

Sure enough, that was when the caterpillar (we still are unsure of its identity) climbed up into the cypress tree foliage to feed.

The last days of the bird feeder

When winter closed in last year, and there were fewer and fewer insects and spiders around, we gave in to the inevitable and set up bird feeders. We  hung up a tube feeder of sunflowers seeds, a white sock of niger seeds, hung up some suet cages and scattered finch seeds and sunflower seeds on the ground outside our dining room window, and down our second, largely unused, driveway outside the kitchen window.

Of course you argue that you are saving the birds from starving during the bleak cold winter, but the truth is in most winters the birds can shift for themselves as they did for the thousands of years before our arrival. No, the feeders are set up so you have the pleasure of drawing the birds to your yard so you can watch them from close up. And you especially hope the gabble of feeding birds will be a magnet for any rarities that happen to be in the neighborhood.

Well, we did have all those pleasures this winter, more so than usual. You see, I used to be a keen bird watcher, but over the last fifteen or so years I have become enamored of insects, and more recently of spiders, and what I like most of all is recording them on camera, especially their behavior. I'm not primarily a "photographer," which is to say, I am not interested in the technical aspects of my equipment, nor do I know much about it. The camera is just a means to an end. I have an SLR with a 100mm Macro lens which I usually use with extension tubes so I can take pictures from only a few inches away. Cheryl has a very small camera which she carries in her pocket, with which she can focus on objects from less than an inch away. I can get large reasonably sharp images of shyer creatures from a few inches back; she can get up tight on extremely small subjects, especially ones in awkward corners my bigger camera can't get into.

Anyway, it happened that all the guys decided it was better to photograph insects from a distance with a 300mm telephoto lens, usually mounted on a tripod for steadiness. This produced perfect pictures of, for instance, dragonflies. Well, I wanted to be one of the guys, so I got one of these big lenses, and while it produced some nice pictures of dragonflies, I found it cumbersome and not very useful for pictures of smaller, more active, insects. I stuck the lens in a drawer and tried to forget how much it had cost.

But this winter when the birds started coming to our feeder, one day I attached the big lens to my camera, idly pointed it out the window and snapped a picture of a bird. To my amazement, even hand-held and through double panes it produced a sharp picture, even showing those neat barbs in all the feathers that are the vogue with professional bird photographers these days.

I was quickly hooked, and spent a lot of otherwise boring insectless winter days taking pictures of birds. The long-lens more than paid for itself with the fun I had. At first I couldn't believe how good my pictures were. Then after about a month I looked back at them, and realized they weren't all that good, and the new ones I was taking were much better. I went through this cycle periodically over the winter, at first thinking I was taking prize-winners, then later realizing they weren't even keepers compared to the pictures I was THEN taking. What it meant was, I was learning a new skill.

The other part of the fun was, we were drawing in some special birds. Rusty Blackbirds, for instance are a species of concern, their numbers going down rapidly. We are asked to keep track of them here in the south where they spend the winter. Well, that was easy for us: in the coldest part of the winter a small flock moved in with us and stayed. They are a kind of blackbird, all black in their nesting territory on wetlands in the upper mid-west, but here in their winter plumage they are every possible pattern of rustiness.

And we got another nice bird, an American Tree Sparrow. This is a rather scarce pretty little sparrow that normally we would see once or twice during the winter, just a glimpse of it out in the country mixed in with a flock of commoner sparrows. But this bird appeared at our feeder and stayed all winter. We got to know it, something we had never been able to do with all our brief glimpses in the past.

But just as in summer the days rushed on to autumn, the days shortening and darkening, the insects reaching their maximum numbers, then quickly declining, so suddenly (now that we were having fun) just before we left on our trip to Arizona in April we noticed the big flock of American Goldfinches that spent the winter at our feeder were changing. Goldfinches often seem to disappear for the winter. They don't. They just put on their dull gray winter plumage and you no longer recognize them. But now our big gray flock was coming out in yellow spots.

By the time we got back from Arizona their transformation into summer plumage was virtually complete.

Here was hard irrefutable evidence that winter was over, and instead of cheering I felt a sense of regret.

But at just that moment, we had the highlight of the year, a real rarity. The White-winged Dove is a western bird that is beginning to invade Arkansas from the west, but many good Arkansas birders still have never seen one in the state. Here we are in the eastern side of the state, and one morning when we went outside, we were quite sure we could hear one calling in the woods across the road. Sure enough, the next morning there it was at our feeder. It looks rather like our common Mourning Dove, but has a big white patch in the wing that you can see even when the wing is closed.

He stayed around for a few days, eating our seeds, singing from our trees, cruising some of the female Mourning Doves till their husbands expressed disapproval. Then he moved on.


The time for the bird feeder was over. I was nearly out of birdseed and wasn't going to buy any more. What we suspected was a raccoon had come in the night and stolen our suet feeders. Most of the birds had deserted us and headed north anyway. And then a funny thing happened: Mammals began to take over.

I have already told you about the voles that came from underground to share the seeds with the birds, and the Gray Squirrels had been vacuuming up stuff we put out all winter. Now a Hispid Cotton Rat appeared (hispid refers to his rough shaggy fur) and began feeding on the leftovers.

Then, only slightly bigger, a tiny smooth baby rabbit appeared, using its nose to find buried seeds the birds had missed.

Then a big gangling cottontail that looked halfway to being a jack rabbit.

The final finisher came minutes before darkness (I took this picture at 3200 ISO), looking off into space while using his deft hands to scrape up hidden seeds under the mud, and using the puddle from a recent rain to wash them in.

So that's it.  Bring on the bugs and spiders!

When is a desert not a desert?

Our son Gawain and his girlfriend Heather recently moved from San Francisco out to Tucson, which is an easy two-and-a-half-day drive from our home in NE Arkansas. That means we have the pleasure of visiting them more often, plus the added perk that their new city is surrounded by my favorite Sonoran Desert.

We left here for Tucson 29 March. I like driving across country, seeing the gradual changes in land forms and vegetation, stopping at rest areas and walking around the edges looking for unfamiliar insects and birds. For the first part of the trip we don't have much choice but to go on I-40, flat and at this time of year mostly drab, not leafing out yet. But not without surprises. For instance, in some parts of the Texas panhandle you seem to see the 19th-century changing directly into the 21st-century.



Windmill farms stretch in all directions as far as the eye can see (quite a way in the flat prairie). I have heard that conservative oil state Texas is going for 30 percent renewable energy.

Anyway, as you approach the border into New Mexico the land abruptly changes into mesas and canyons and high juniper forests. Before you reach Albuquerque you can finally get off the interstate and begin following two-lane roads southwest through increasingly spectacular scenery, rock formations in every imaginable color.

We reached Tucson at a nice time of year. There had been recent rain, and the desert was blooming. And here the terminology needs to be cleared up. The colorful boulders and rimrocks and bajadas and arroyos we had been driving through were partly so visible because often there was no vegetation obscuring them. It really was desert, often the only growing things being dried and stinted yellow grass. That all changed on approaching Tucson. There are still spectacular mountains and so on, but what steals the scene is the rich vegetation. One by one cacti of every shape and form begin to join the setting, from the tall saguaros and ocotillos to the various chollas and prickly pears of the understory. It's like a planted and well weeded garden, a specimen plant, then well tamped sand around it, and then the next specimen plant. Here's an example of the ensemble:

                                                             

And here are some of the big waxy cactus flowers:

In fact technically this desert, the Sonoran Desert, is not a desert. Real desert does not have all this vegetation and the monsoonal rains that support it. This is thorn scrub or thorn forest, a very different thing.

We spent most of our week in Tucson walking the trails through Saguaro West National Park and Saguaro East and Sabino Canyon and all the other wonderful parks which surround the city. We followed dry washes up, and that was the best way to see wildlife.

 Nesting Cooper's Hawks were common, as indeed they seemed to be in the city itself.

Our very gentle and sweet Brown Thrasher was replaced in Arizona by several thrasher species, but the commonest was the Curve-billed Thrasher. This one coming up to check us out seemed to have a rather ferocious eye, but I expect everything has to be tough to survive in this beautiful but thorny place.

We were hoping to see some of the area's famous rattlesnakes but didn't find a one. We did however see one very nice serpent species. Cheryl and I arrived at a place part way up Mt. Lemmon (on the edge of Tucson) one morning about nine, and I looked down at our feet and there was a four-foot-long snake that was an unripe-banana yellow in color. We were so surprised by the unlikely color that we missed our chance to take a picture. We looked it up later, and it was a Green Rat Snake, fairly special, I think, with not much known about it, except that it's nocturnal, but can be seen around twilight, and then again in the morning until about nine o'clock (which is exactly when we watched it disappear).

One snake we did get a picture of was the Sonoran Gopher Snake, the attractive local race of the common western gopher or bull snake.

Lizards of many species were abundant and easier to find than the snakes. Here is a Zebra-tailed Lizard.

When we or some other dangerous animal come too close it suddenly curls up the last quarter of its tail like someone pulling on a Christmas-parcel ribbon, revealing the black-and-white banded underside, and takes off running full speed. A predator giving chase focuses on the curling-and-uncurling black and white tail tip, and ends up with that in its mouth while the lizard disappears under a rock.

The  Desert Spiny lizard, on the other hand, looks fierce enough that it doesn't even need to run.

We saw the endangered Arizona Pupfish, the little extremophiles that live in scalding hot thermal pools. But this was cheating, we saw them in an artificial pool of normal temperature set up in one of the parks. Still, here they were living happily and in the midst of courtship, the bright males after the drabber females.

One special day Gawain and Heather took us out into the desert after dark. We wore our head lamps, and they had given us little black-light flashlights. It had been discovered by scientists that when you shine ultraviolet light on scorpions they fluoresce, so that you can spot them from a distance in the darkest desert night. Well, we looked very hard for scorpions but it was still rather cool, in the 60's, and no scorpions were out, but we were seeing other things with our head lamps. First it was small rodents racing around at our feet. They were numerous, and not very afraid of us, but moved so fast it was hard to get more than half of them in the picture at a time. But we could see that they ran around on their hind legs, balancing on their long tails. They were Ord's Kangaroo Rats.

Then Cheryl called out that she had seen a big spider, but before we could get over and see it, it had taken two steps and disappeared down its burrow. But we soon found another, and then several more walking across the floor of the desert. No, we didn't scream in horror and run for the car. This was the spider I was most interested in finding: Hogna carolinensis, the largest species of my favorite group, the wolf spiders. This species is instantly recognizable by its brown "mustache." It seemed to me it also had a pleasant grin on its face.

I might have ended my post with this smiley face, but there is one more thing I want to add. Our friends Pat and Dennis Braddy now live in Tucson, and one night we went to their place for dinner. Pat had found a drowned scorpion in their pool and saved it in a bucket because she knew I would be interested in it. She brought it out in its bucket and almost jumped out of her skin when we all realized at once the scorpion had made a total recovery and was facing us with his tail and pincers raised.

We responded just as you would have: We whipped out our black-light flashlights to see if he would really fluoresce. And he did.

It wasn't the seriously venomous Bark Scorpion (which we very much wanted to see) but the commoner and milder Striped-tail Scorpion, and I decided on the spot to keep it as a pet. I brought it home and set it up in an aquarium and it is getting along fine on a diet of beetle larvae. It has, I think, quite elegant table manners.
 

Trying to catch the moment spring arrives

You're going to think I am obsessed with changing seasons. Well, but you see, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Region, a place that doesn't have change or seasons. It's always about the same temperature there, not very hot and not very cold. There isn't even weather there. It rains a bit in the winter, but there's almost never thunder and lightning, or huge winds, or, for that matter, even clouds, unless you count fog. I virtually never saw a season until, in my beginning twenties, I was in the army and went to Korea, which was dead and brown in winter when I arrived. And then spring came, wildfires running across the land, and suddenly hillsides pink with wild azaleas and rhododendrons. I was hooked on seasons ever since. Spring was so wonderful you almost didn't mind having to pay for it with winter.

But the idea of change was part of it. When we were first married we used to spend summer vacations at Cheryl's family home in Porthcawl, South Wales, on the Bristol Channel. We were only a block or two from the beach. Living there meant you always knew what stage the tide was at, and you can't believe what tides there were in that narrow channel! A forty-foot drop in elevation between high and low. You could walk on the beach at low tide, then deep-sea fish at the same spot at high tide.

Arkansas for all my complaints is really quite good. Autumn extends to late November. The cold part of winter usually doesn't hit until January, and by the end of February you can smell the freshening in the air. Perfect: You get all four seasons, but not very much winter. And the change from season to season is like watching the changes in the tides, and the very lowest low tide (with so many new things uncovered), or the highest high tide, are special pleasures, like spring.

Every year now as I watch the change towards spring, I try to see the MOMENT of spring's arrival, and every year I am looking away at just that time, and I've missed it again. I start way before spring by noting late winter occurrences. I've already mentioned the snow geese staging in huge numbers then flying off north, or the red-winged blackbirds leaving the massive winter roosts and setting up territories along the edges of the row-crop fields.  There was a new one this year: When we start our bird feeders in the fall of each year we discover there is a complex highway system of Woodland Vole tunnels beneath the surface of our yard. Where we throw out the most birdseed, the highways converge, and the voles are constantly darting out for a mouthful, then carrying it to their underground stockpiles.

So this year when the solid ice-sheet came, and stayed, they were kept underground, living off their preserves. When the ice of our mini ice age finally retreated, suddenly they were back.

That was one sign. Here's another, more complex end-of-winter sign: Our holly bushes are covered with berries in late summer, and berries are designed to be eaten by birds, which will then distribute the seeds around the neighborhood with their droppings. But I think the holly berries don't want to be planted until nearly spring, and so they remain inedible throughout the winter, but suddenly ripen in spring. That's my theory. Anyway, no one eats them during the winter. However each bush or collection of bushes is owned by a mockingbird. They guard them all winter long, so they will be sure to have a cache of berries to eat in the spring when they are preparing for nesting season. Here's one keeping a sharp eye out.

The problem is, all the berry-eating birds around are covertly watching the berries waiting to invade them en masse when they are ready. So that was another sign. Suddenly the robins came from all over to start gorging on berries.

The mockingbird went mad, sweeping in and bashing them violently off his berries and chasing them across the yard. But as he did so, another flock of robins came to the berries from the other side. He swept back and scattered them, but by then the first group of robins had returned to the berries. When he finally got them all off (his berries sadly diminished) he was exhausted. And that's when the cedar waxwings snuck in.

These are quiet soft-looking things, their feathers so silky they look like fine fur. But when a flock comes (there might be 10 or 100), they are unstoppable, and they clean out berries faster than anyone. Here is what the poor mockingbird was faced with.

Well, this is mean to the poor mockingbird, but it's good fun to watch. Now, those are end-of-winter signs. Here is a start-of-spring sign I especially enjoy: The red buckeyes budding and opening up and flowering. It seems to happen almost overnight. Suddenly there is a big swollen leaf bud, almost immediately the leaves break out, and instantly, it seems, there is a flower bud.

When those flower buds open into a bright red spray of flowers, with uncanny accuracy the first ruby-throated hummingbird of the year appears in our yard. Now that could be the actual moment of spring.

Except I'm exaggerating, and probably the appearance isn't exact, or varies from year to year, as perhaps the flowering does too. And if you time the coming of spring to the birds' nesting seasons,  as I sometimes try to do, well, birds don't all nest at the same time. In our yard right now the wrens and mourning doves and cardinals and tufted titmice are already nesting, and probably so are killdeer on the railroad tracks across the road. Mockingbirds and thrashers and towhees are just beginning to sing, looking for mates, and some birds, like goldfinches, won't nest until much later in the year. And I have also tried linking the arrival of spring with when the leaves come out on the trees, but those arrival times are staggered among trees of different species, and even among trees of the same species, sitting side by side. It's complicated.

What I am leading up to is, this year I spotted the exact moment. Here's how it happened. One of my obsessions is to stand up first thing in the morning in our bedroom window (which faces east) and watch where the sun comes up. Let me explain. If I look out the bedroom window one way, here is what I see:

My study is in that outbuilding. If you look at the biggish tree on the right, behind that is where the sun comes up at the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, the sun as far south as it will go before it turns around and starts coming back. Now look at this view from the bedroom window from a slightly different angle:

I have swung around to the left so you can see farther to the north. At the summer solstice, when the sun has gone as far north as it is going to go, it comes up just to the left of that small red building. Now notice that you can see into the open garage door (it's always open because I am too lazy to close it). What you see is the window on the left-side wall. Now, the official beginning of spring is on the vernal equinox, which is exactly between the two solstices. If you look at these last two pictures together, you will note that the window is exactly midway between the two solstices. This year I wasn't looking away: I caught it just in time, the exact moment that spring began!