Tag Archives: Spiders

September 18, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , , , , , ,

One or two individuals of a broad array of birds decorate The Stockpond, all nicely plumaged: Wilson’s Warbler; Black-headed Grosbeak; Bell’s Vireo; Brown-headed Cowbird; McGillivray’s Warbler; Vermillion Flycatcher; young Western Kingbird; Blue Grosbeak; a female Lazuli Bunting (though plain, still pretty with that blue tail of hers); and Gray Flycatcher–the first returning individual that I’ve seen, pumping its tail down in that distinctive way of theirs that is a godsend of a diagnostic “mark” for this species in a crazy-making genus. The more-greenish-than-grayish little flycatcher jumps off a branch time and again, drops and splashes in miniature belly flops into the pond, and is up then on the wing quickly enough to avoid sinking.

Blue Grosbeaks out in the pastures, who seem still to be unaware their endless Summer will indeed have an end, cavort on the wheel lines, bathe at the tops of the wheels in water that stays collected in the grooves with the constant passing around of the arcs of spray. The shining, sapphire birds stand and let themselves be hit by the waterdrops thrown over them, shake themselves off, then slide down the incline of the wheel to land in another puddle when they want even more fun!

Atop one of the plastic (insulated) electric line posts a large Apache Jumping Spider hangs out, waiting for some bug to land haplessly. It jumps inside the hollows of the post where the wires pass through when I come close for a better look at this most beautiful of Southwestern spiders, and then it comes back out and stares at me through all those eyes as if trying to remember where it knows me from. It is all black velvet and red velvet, most elegantly patterned.

Harvester Ants are cranky after the irrigation leaves their big, bare circle drenched, they swarm all over the place and I know they’d find me trying if I came any closer, but there is a very large, pale brown Swallowtail butterfly who keeps flitting around them. It’s a female Pipevine Swallowtail, the only one I’ve seen this year–and usually males are everywhere through Summer but they were scarce this year. She has cream spots striped between with blue on her underwings, and flashes amythyst on her upper surfaces–a very different color than that indescribably tropical blue of the males. She lands all over that circle, throws out a proboscis to the mud but is only relaxed for a second or two before she has to hot-foot it as ants try to latch on to her tiny feet. She seems to know just how much she can get away with before she’s got to take wing and try another spot.

August 13, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

The Devil’s Claws continue to grow and spread their branches, there are even more flowers now than a couple weeks ago. As I noticed before, only some individuals have the Paulownia-like fragrance and that only slight–one plant’s flowers are nearly raspberry red in color, look like Pansy (Miltonia) Orchids. Wild Tomatillo are at the height of bloom, rather a weedy plant but rather showy, too. After a night of 80% humidity, the dew is drenching everything and as I walk I am wet through from the top of the so-called knee boots to well above the knees. (Knee boots only come now up to about half way between the calf and the knee, which is reminiscent of what happened with two-by-four lumber. They seem no longer to be built to fit well, too, and are too floppy and open to keep out raspy grass seeds, sharp and impaling foxtail awns that can find their way all the way to the toes before becoming a splinter in your hide, or the marbles of White Horsenettle fruits. The “rubber” lasts all of about two months before its seams fracture. What do I want for $30? something that lasts??) More and more grasshoppers are flushed on such a walk through the deep pasture, today there’s a new straw-colored one with a black stripe, and large emerald katydids with a white stripe, trailing legs far behind them when they take off and buzz on ahead of me. A small black wasp is now very active, has a brightly contrasting red abdomen, connected to its forward parts by a thorax as thin as a hair.

I get back to the truck after closing down the riser valves just after lunch, slip off the rubber boots and shake them upside down before putting on regular cowboy boots, and out of them onto the ground falls a spider of astonishing color and shape: apple green, striped with a lighter fluorescent green, and the legs are feathered and ornate like those of deep sea crabs. How this Green Lynx Spider didn’t get crushed as it was jostled around in my boot is a question–it must be very nimble. I read that they can give a venomous bite, but that they have to be harassed into doing that. I should think that a ride with my foot far from home would constitute harassment. I do empty other critters out of those boots from time to time after I have finished crossing those pastures, and have always been happy not to know what alarming thing I was carrying around with me at the time.

Clear sky, temperature 104 degrees in the afternoon … the convection oven of the land bouncing back great heat into the air is setting up all for a big blow, it feels–but not today.

July 5, 2013

Nature Jottings, , , , ,

What thick air, 81 degrees, 3:45 am, coffee in hand as can so be enjoyed in a treasured Cascabel Clayworks mug. Dark, but there’s the thinnest of Crescent Moon giving the tiny glow of a nightlight behind the clouds. At zenith a few stars but only one house light shows across the canyons, overhead a covering of martins calling down from so great a height that it could be imagined their quarky notes are broadcast from the stars themselves. The birds seem if anything even more numerous than when the nights are bright and clear but perhaps the clouds change the acoustics. This will be the first day of the season I won’t be closing the windows early to keep in the cool, because the house never got cool to begin with, so the windows will be open to let in any tiny movement of air. Bed sheets and pillows toasted to the high 90s are now to be lived with.

When dawn comes, tanagers and grosbeaks are singing at The Stockpond and many nighthawks come for an on-the-wing drink but–no toads! The Sonoran Desert Toads have just … vanished, the water surface left now unruffled, the air above it quiet. The gigantic amphibians have come and gone, like that.

Yellow-headed Blackbirds are decorating a wheel line tractor, as they love to do. Two much younger ones are among them today, which seems to be evidence the species is breeding nearby though I must remember that years ago when I contacted the Audubon Society in Tucson to report a rancher telling me the birds were nesting in the edge of his pond across the River, I was told that was an impossibility. One of the pretty males has a neat white–rather than black–mask.

Pairs of round mesquite cotyledons have popped above their cow poop peat pots, assuring us a future of hard work of tree removal for many years to come. Two Brown-headed Cowbirds are sitting on a cow; I can count the number of times I’ve seen them actually do this, but I imagine it was their habit with their buffalo friends as well.

Sue and a friend come in the evening in hopes the bird show might still have some thrill to it, but only one nighthawk appears. We do see an impressive black tarantula with blond body come past in its measured, giant spider-ly fashion as we sip wine, a male according to what I can read. Suddenly from the gallery forest of willows, cottonwoods, hackberry and of course mesquite along the River bed behind us comes the sounds of large critters crashing through, breaking large branches and sticks in a panic we can’t think what the cause of can be. We never see the animals, but we can tell they’ve topped out over the steep banks where they could at last make a passage and escape something they feared mightily–then comes what sounds like a rush of wind through those cottonwoods. It’s not wind; I realize it’s a flood, and a big one, and that the deer or the javelina or whatever they were, were running madly ahead of a wave coming down that narrow and deep sandy channel that’s been dry for many months. The water arrives in wild fury, stretches immediately bank to bank, and down its course bounces and tumbles and rolls and then flies past me large branches, logs, whole railroad ties that had been H-braces on a pasture edge somewhere between here and Mexico, bobbing styrofoam coolers, a tennis ball … I jump back, fearing that the overhanging bank would collapse under my feet and add me to the number of bodies that have been swept away and gone over the years, some found, some ground up and never found, left buried under quicksand miles downstream.

July 4, 2013

Nature Jottings, , ,

The Fourth of July, or, Gringo Monsoon.

After turning off the irrigation at 5:00 am and letting the pipes drain, I start the engine on the line, throw the joystick forward and get the whole long train of sprinkler sections wheeling their way north sixty feet so they’ll be in place for the next watering to start at just about sunset. At one whole revolution (it takes four to move to the next spot) I catch a large, dark, out-of-place spot in a corner of my right vision and just in the last moment realize that the broad horizontal axle of the irrigator unit is going to bash a mass of bees hanging delicately from a small mesquite branch, on one of those trees that have sprouted from seeds sewn in bovine Jiffy Plops. A ship’s alarm whoop goes off loudly inside my head and I hear a mental order yelled, “Dead stop! Dead stop! Reverse!” It isn’t too late, though was only a hair-breadth of an escape; I shut down the engine, and back away very carefully, one step at a time. Africanized Honey Bees? It’s best always now to assume so, anyway it is widely believed and told around that there are no “pure” honey bees left in Arizona and all bees in a mass should be feared, a truly twisted case of an alien species being at one time wholly acceptable to people in the landscape, and that alien species being made monstrous with the arrival of yet a different one that interbred with it. I have to find other things to do through the day, and keep coming back to have a look from a safe distance with binoculars to see if that swarm in transit to a new home had gone its way. If I’m really lucky it won’t find the hollow pipe axles of the wheels on the line-tractor an irresistible place to get into and start constructing a comb immediately. The hanging ball of bees is visible from far off and eventually I decide I’ll work on pruning the large “Picnic Mesquite” on the edge of that pasture far enough away that I’d feel safe, which chore would allow the cows to stand comfortably in the tree’s wonderful shade, allow the spray of the irrigators to reach far under its far-spreading boughs and get the bermuda lush and deep, and allow us to make our lunches in that soft green carpet of grass beneath while we enjoy the splendid views of hills and mountains all around the edges of these wide pastures.

While I’m shaping the mesquite tree with aim to please the eye, the cows, the grass, and our skin, a Yellow-billed Cuckoo sings out from the River bosque’s countless many more of the trees. A large, spectacularly beautiful red-and-black Velvet Ant (if such a sized insect can be considered spectacular, at least other than in its sting–and this one reportedly has one of the world’s worst) in a fever searches the ground under the tree, I guess for pupae of another wasp or bee to parasitize, but then it does something I’ve never seen one do: she heads to the base of the trunk of the large mesquite, and races up and up, out onto a mid-level branch and doesn’t stop until she gets to the tips of the outmost leaves. There she makes a tour of every leaflet, going very nimbly around the outside edges of those compound leaves, searching, searching, but for what? She’s uninterested in getting nectar from the blossoms elsewhere–is there a honeydew exuded from such leaflets that she might find a treat? She checks out methodically every last leaf cluster out to the ends of the whole big branch. While I watch her through binoculars (and take glances again to see what the bees in that swarm are up to), I nearly step on another one of the dozens of Arizona species of these always arresting if alarming insects, a Thistle Down Velvet Ant–a large one, too, and very showy, with a furry white head, velvety black middle and wide golden abdomen. These wasps might be worse than “regular” ants to have at one’s picnic, considering the sting, but they mind their own business and are uninterested in burritos.

In late afternoon I finally give up on the big ball of bees leaving today, and I go back to Ridge House for a supper, return in enough time that if the swarm is gone, that line can still be moved in time to get water up soon after seven o’clock. And–they are gone! They’re happy, the bermuda will be happy, I’m happy.

A black Tarantula I can appropriately call spectacular crosses the road in the headlights as I wend my way back home in the dark. Back in the mid 1990s, great armadas of them used to be on the Cascabel Road, going in one direction from one side to the other. These spider parades would about have to be waited out as one waits out a flash flood crossing at an arroyo or canyon unless one wanted to hear the squishes of their fat bodies as tires crushed a path through them. Has drought put an end to this wonder we just don’t see any more but that everyone remembers? Too many vehicles on this now much more used deep country road? Or are we simply not catching them on their grand walk-about nights?