Nature Observations – Page 81 – Nature Along the El Camino Real

Cool Caterpillar

June 22, 2020 Sue Ann (Suna) KendallLeave a comment

by Donna Lewis

This Pandora Sphinx was a very interesting caterpillar I found one day while walking around our place.

It’s rust colored, very fat with bright yellow almost tear-drop eye patches. I had never seen one before or since then. I was excited to find it.

It was eating leaves on a Virginia Creeper vine, a vine with five leaves.

Here’s a picture of Virginia creeper taken by Ann Collins from iNaturalist (Creative Commons copyright).

The Virginia Creeper is a great native vine to have around. It tolerates most soil conditions and climates It has many uses for wildlife, and can be used as a vine in gardens.

Many birds such as Bluebirds, Titmice, Cedar Waxwings, Robins, Chickadees, and more love its berries. Several species of Moths and Butterflies use it as a host plant.

This is also the vine that created the saying we were taught as children.

Leaves of 3 leave it be, leaves of 5 let it thrive….

Poison ivy near Cameron, by Sue Ann Kendall from iNaturalist. Creative Commons copyright.

This vine is often mistaken for our favorite vine, Poison Ivy, but Poison Ivy has three leaves.

Right now you can find both vines just about everywhere in the country especially around wooded areas with part shade, so be careful to identify which one you just touched..

I have personally found that an over-the-counter product called “Tecnu” Poison Ivy Scrub. If used within 8 hours, it can really help get rid of the oil that causes the itching.

I should buy it by the case! I never learn.

The Passion Vine and the Butterflies and Other Creatures That Love It

June 16, 2020June 15, 2020 Sue Ann (Suna) Kendall1 Comment

by Donna Lewis

Most of us have these beautiful vines that come up on the ground, fences, and trellises. So besides being magnificent, who else appreciates them? Butterflies and birds, that’s who.

The vines only show up when it’s hot. Pretty lucky for us, because it’s hot here.

The Latin name for the passion vine is Passiflora incarnata. What you may not know is that many of the vines we have here are actually naturalized, not native. You can tell by the number of leaves on them which one they are.

If they have five leaves, they originally came from Asia and naturalized here. If vines have only three leaves, they are true natives. Both work well here and are host plants for the Gulf Coast and Variegated Fritillary butterfly. The vine also provides cover for other insects.

Fritillaries

The Gulf Coast species is orange and black with silver under parts.

They use the passion vine as a host plant. They love hot weather, so only appear when the vine emerges. Pretty smart of them.

The second species of Fritillary is the Variegated variety.

Variegated Frittilary. Photo by Sue Ann Kendall.

Variegated Frittilary caterpillar. Photo by @susanmco on iNaturalist.

They also use the passion vine as a host plant to deposit their eggs on.

The Vairegated Frittilary does not have the silvery underwings of the Gulg Coast. It looks more like a dried leaf when it has its wings up. Both Fritillaries appear in the summertime, and will leave when the weather turns cooler.

The passion vine is a great way to cover a large area in your garden. [Suna points out that the fruit is also edible and makes a lovely jelly.]

This vine has five-leaf clusters, so it’s naturalized.

Beautiful and practical! Perfect.

Quail Release

June 12, 2020June 15, 2020 Sue Ann (Suna) Kendall1 Comment

by Ann Collins and Catherine Johnson

Catherine Johnson and I had a spectacularly rare treat this week. We were visiting the Bird and Bee Farm, where Catherine has created a marvelous wildflower garden. If you haven’t seen it, you really must go. It is full of color, texture, and scents. Guinea fowl and chickens roam free, gobbling up grasshoppers and other noxious critters. Catherine even shares the overflow (flowers, not grasshoppers!).

Bobwhite quail. Image by *@JBL via Twenty20*

Gene and Cindy Rek have turned their hundred-acre property into a prairie paradise. You may already know they sell laying hens of every description. They also sell Rio Grande turkeys, guinea fowl, and Peking ducks.* This week they added another member of the feather family: Bobwhite Quail.

After an early morning trip to Bastrop, they came back with two flax boxes with breathing holed punched in them. Inside were thirty pairs of breedign quail. Gene carried the boxes out in some tall grass and gently set them down. He cut the strings on box #1 and carefully lifted the lid, revealing an almost-solid carpet of mottled brown feathers.

Just as we were taking in the scene, it suddenly erupted and flew away. Not at all what I was expecting!

Here’s what we saw:

The next box we were somewhat prepared for, but it was just as exciting when it was opened and thirty quail breathed a sigh of ecstasy and got their first taste of prairie freedom.

While we stood, adjusting to this miracle of Nature, the birds immediately started calling to one another with their signature whistle of, “Bob White!”

Later we saw several of them on the pond margins, trying to make sense of this incredible gift they had been given. Hopefully, most will survive to repopulate an area that was once their native habitat before every scrap of nature was cleared away for cattle, monocultures, and civilization, before pesticides, GMOs, and chemicals.

This is supposedly quail. Photo by *@Tereza via Twenty20*

These birds were all full grown, but future plans include day-old chicks to be raised in the barn and released later this summer.

There will be a coming out party when they are old enough, and all of you are invited to the celebration. Cindy will let us know when it is. It will be fun: a step back in time and a step forward toward restoration of a native prairie, right here in Milam County.

Mark your calendars!

*The farm is open only by appointment, and they are booked many weeks ahead. Please call them at (512) 808-8533 to reserve an opening! You can drop by and look at the gardens at any time.

Nebulatettix subgracilis, Blackland Baby?

June 6, 2020 Sue Ann (Suna) KendallLeave a comment

by Eric Neubauer

This grasshopper wins the award for best Texas Blackland camouflage. It is so good that it could well have evolved here. Nymphs are especially difficult to see.

Unlike some other grasshopper species, its appearance is fairly consistent from individual to individual. It is also relatively common, at least in my neighborhood. Observations at iNaturalist suggest a range from just over the border in Mexico, north up through the center of Texas, and just into Oklahoma.

This was my first big ID challenge. I started noticing these last fall soon after I joined iNaturalist. There wasn’t much help on iNaturalist with less than 24 observations, most misidentified, and few if any research grade. How can this happen with an everyday species? Well, first this species was named Encoptolophus subgracilis until recently. A recent genetic study of the Chortophagini resulted in a new genus and realignment of several species. The second is that grasshoppers don’t have a lot of fans and people tend to concentrate on the easy ones.

Eventually I found the published article on line which provided some guidance. While a lot of the focus was on genitalia, which are rarely visible in live photographs, there were also details of the cranial ridges between the eyes for this and a half dozen related species. From that point on, all that was necessary to confirm an ID was a sharp, overhead photograph (at right).

The cranial ridges look like a bottle with slightly curved sides an a short neck to me. Another characteristic is the bright blue tibia which stands out against the salt and pepper body when the hind legs are flicked out during mating displays (see photo below).

This species can probably be found throughout Milam County from at least May through October.

Fun times for the dusky grasshoppers – blue area visible.

Texas Terrors

June 5, 2020 Sue Ann (Suna) KendallLeave a comment

by Eric Neubauer

The owlfly (Ululodes macleayanus) isn’t really that scary to humans. It’s just an insect whose lineage goes way back to when dragonflies ruled the skies. It hunts at night and is closely related to antlions. Antlion larva dig pits in sand and hide at the bottom waiting from prey to slide down the sloping sides. I knew about antlions and encountered pits dug by larva, but never heard anything about owlflies.

This becomes the first iNaturalist observation of the Ululodes for Milam County (there are 800 in Texas, so they’re pretty obscure. I only got a single photo and was lucky to get that since it was perched on a grass stalk in the wind. It was taken with the macro lens I just bought.

You may recall the Anthrax pluto fly specimen I observed a while back. It turns out that the next week, Sue Ann Kendall saw another one, Anthrax larrea. I saw the same kind the next day! Between the two of us, we had most of the verified iNat observations in the whole United States.

I went through the Anthrax observations for Texas and found four as yet to be identified ones. So now there are seven. That the neat thing about this kind of research. Eventually there can be a lot of positive fallout.

It does appear to be one of the rarer species though since that’s only 7 out of 121 Anthrax observations in Texas.