I assumed that this was the dark form of the female Eastern Tiger Swallowtail that I mentioned earlier. But there was too much white in the tail, and I’m pretty sure it’s Papilio troilus, Spicebush Swallowtail. (And for a great look at the larval form, see Swampthing’s photos of the caterpillar!) I’m particularly taken with the hidden orange spotting just under the forewings on top of the hindwings, and the multiple orange spots on the ventral surfaces of the wings, but the snowy spangles of silvery-white blazoned across the dorsal side of the hindwings are breathtaking.




Right now the swallowtails are everywhere, extraordinarily graceful and interactive. But they particularly like the Mexican Sunflower (Tithonia rotundifolia) and Purple Giant Hyssop (Agastache scrophulariifoliae, and try saying that three times fast!). Here’s a couple of evening pics of these two plants. I’ve mentioned Tithonia recently, but not Hyssop at all. The photo doesn’t do its big purple spikes justice I’m afraid. It’s a mint, but one of the nicest mints I know, very well-behaved. And when I harvest the deadheads for seeds, there are usually thousands of insects mixed in - it’s clearly a favorite of a huge number of species of nectar seekers.

As Karen at Rurality pointed out a few weeks ago, the four weeks of near-constant rain and cloudy skies were a bit too much water for gardens here in the north Georgia area. Nonetheless I planted a LOT of tomatoes, for testing purposes, and did a good harvest yesterday, although I doubt if they’re going to continue to put out.


The tomatoes, left to right, are Rutger, Roma, and Pink Brandywine. The Rutger and Roma tomatoes did the best by far - I spent yesterday running these and more through the grinder and freezer them away for winter (saving a few for nachos, of course!). We got a few Pink Brandywines, but the tomatoes mostly deliquisced on the vine. Old Virginias probably ran a far second to the best two. Virtually nothing came from the Cherokee Purple tomatos.

The blueberries in the bowl at the upper right represent 5 cups of the 21 so far harvested, and they look to be about halfway through. I’m ecstatic over this, since I planted them more or less as a lark about 5 years ago. For whatever reason, this year they decided to produce extravagantly. I wish I’d kept better records of the varieties, but I do recall Tif Blue and Rabbiteye cultivar names. These are both Vaccinium asheyi, unhybridized. The species is particularly suited for our stressful summers and matures its fruits gradually rather than all at once. They love our acid soil, require virtually no care, seem to be disease and insect resistant, and ask for nothing more than that we never never never give them lime. Truly a user-friendly plant!

And there is still corn, three kinds of beans, squash (just a little yellow-crook, not TOO much please), watermelons (Georgia rattlesnake), and a couple of canteloupe types to come.

Over the last few months I’ve been thinking about an entry that encompasses my signature and el dorado organisms. The signature ones are the ones I view as perhaps earliest and most influential; the el dorados are the ones that I cherish and have slaved for the most. This is not that post, but the eastern tiger swallowtail Papilio glaucus is probably our signature butterfly. Ordinarily I wouldn’t post this many jpgs but this fellow was SO cooperative that I felt I had to do him justice.

Bug Guide has a lot of pics of these common butterflies. As you can see if you look, there’s apparently only one way to appreciate a butterfly - wings spread. Here he sits, in the approved form for butterflies, wings spread.


Most people zero in on the wings. But just look at that fashionably matching body coloration!


This specimen didn’t quite match the pics in my guide, but there’s a lot of variation in the species and I don’t think I’m wrong. According to the USGS Butterflies page, the female also has a dark form that resembles somewhat the red-spotted admiral. This explains why two yellows and one blue were cavorting together. The page also lists these plants as caterpillar food, and we certainly have the wild cherry and tulip poplars:

Wild cherry (Prunus), sweetbay (Magnolia), basswood (Tilia), tulip tree (Liriodendron), birch (Betula), ash (Fraxinus), cottonwood (Populus), mountain ash (Sorbus), and willow (Salix).

The flower is of Mexican Sunflower, Tithonia rotundifolia. It’s not a Georgia native; rather it comes from Mexico and South America. But it is so vivid with its deep orange ray petals and bright yellow disk flowers, and such a favorite of butterflies and hymenopterans that I just have to keep it around. In Georgia it’s an annual that reseeds easily, but it also easy to pull up as young plants if it ends up in undesirable places. In our clay soil the roots don’t penetrate deeply and the 6-8' tall plant blows over fairly easily. Even half up-rooted it continues to flower vigorously until well into October.

OK, 'fess up, how many of you have Martha Stewart plant hangers in the dining room, festooned with snakeskins? We had a July 4 party and I’m proud to say not a one of our guests looked askance at a snakeskin joining the festivities. Since then though we’ve acquired TWO snakeskins.

You might remember our discovery of a 4.5' long perfect snakeskin June 30. That one was found IN the Bufo Pond. Well, 27 days later, Glenn found another very nearly perfect snakeskin, apparently of the same snake, this time just outside the pond cast off amongst the veronicas. This shedding actually seemed slightly smaller than the previous one, perhaps insignificantly so.

That brought up a good question from Glenn: Do snakes shed periodically regardless of size increase or do they shed only after growing a certain amount?

A 5-gallon paint bucket of microstegium holds 4000 plants (yes, I counted them, yesterday). They weigh 1.2 kg. They represent 4 million potential seed. Over the last 12 days, I’ve collected 33 buckets - that’s about 130,000 plants and 130 million potential seed. It’s taken 40 hours, starting when the day gets bright enough at 7am and going until 11am or noon or whenever the 90+ temps or boredom gets to me.

Today though, for various reasons, I had to start the spraying effort in those areas too dense to pick. Six mixings of glyphosate in a 4-gallon backpack sprayer and I covered at least half the area in four hours that I have covered manually picking in 40 hours. Fortunately the area sprayed consists of mainly three species: microstegium of course, Carolina Buckthorn, which doesn’t even sneeze at the concentrations of glyphosate I use, and Wild Senna, which I miss whenever possible since it’s a favorite caterpillar food plant for sulfur butterflies.

I did get to the Big Gully handpicking though, and it will be interesting starting at the bottom and handpicking to the top, 12 feet down!

I never knew either of my grandfathers. Both died when my parents were in their teens (my parents were each the youngest of three siblings spanning a very broad range of ages). And up until a couple of years ago I knew virtually nothing about my father’s dad; as a kid I just never asked anything about him and nothing much was ever said. Then my parents and my father’s sister, my Aunt Nita, visited us. We took in the usual tour and my father and Nita did an amazing job identifying all the plants we passed, and for the most part by scientific name. Nita laughed and said that when they were growing up knowing plants and animals was an essential part of family tradition; that they hardly knew the common names of things but could spout off Quercus alba and Callicarpa americana with ease. My father added that their father would roam the area around their home in Birmingham, Alabama and bring home plants he’d found in the woods and along the roadsides and plant them. They both agreed that although he couldn’t pursue his greatest desires because of work (I seem to recall that he was a typesetter), that what Glenn and I are working toward pretty much constituted those desires. I was flummoxed. Here across three generations were at least two individuals, my grandfather and myself, who were essentially only genetically connected and had the same intense interests.

When I was in the ninth grade at South Hall High School in Gainesville, Georgia, my biology teacher, Jerry Lee Jackson, was a very peculiar man. Well, my guess is he was very peculiar all the time, but that’s the only year I knew him, and that year he had us do a fall collection of leaves and a spring collection of flowers. There were to be 100 specimens, pressed and identified, in each collection. The ruffians in the class, and in Gainesville, Georgia most of the class consisted of ruffians, male and female, pretty much sloughed off the assignments, but I completed both sets.

My father’s mother, MamMa (actually Myrtle Lincoln Hughes), was instrumental in helping me collect and identify. My parents were very family oriented and every month or two we’d pack up for the weekend and drive the 200 miles to Troy Alabama where MamMa and Nita and her two kids lived. And that year my grandmother and I would wander around collecting leaves and flowers.

When I presented my spring collection of flowers to Jerry Lee Jackson, he looked through them and said they were wonderful and then he smiled conspiratorially and said: “But 'fess up, Wayne, you used your father’s special pressing equipment and driers, didn’t you?” (My father was in the US Forest Service; I guess Jerry Lee Jackson thought he pressed plants for a living.) I looked at Jerry Lee Jackson and said, “Mr Jackson, I think I’m going to throw up”; and indeed I didn’t quite make it to the bathroom before hurling onto the hall floor. THAT was entirely coincidental; I really hadn’t been feeling good that day. But it was also true that I had pressed my plants in a completely unapproved way - under a half-dozen World Book Encyclopedias for a week or two.

So there’s my connection with my grandparents. Since then, in every botany class I’ve taught at UGA I’ve run across students who tell me of how it was their grandmothers' gardens and knowledge of plants that made them interested in taking botany. Sometimes it was their mothers, never was it their grandfathers, but grandmothers won the distinction hands down of being the kids' connection to nature.

There are still kids who have that connection through their grandparents; I run across them occasionally and all are nature lovers. Their grandparents grew up on farms, or lived in a rural environment and had gardens often providing a substantial amount of food for their families. But it strikes me in my more pessimistic moments that with the massive influx of the population into the cities, and the loss of family farms to ag companies, and the lure of easily digestible American pablum, that in a few more years there won’t be so many grandmothers who have that unusual knowledge of plants and gardens and farms. Their special knowledge will consist of the Art of Shopping, and the Ins-and-Outs of Reality TV, and the Gory Details of Celibrity Shennanigans.

Maybe that’s too pessimistic. After all, people do develop hobbies and passions, especially later in life after the pernicious influence of American entertainment and fashion palls. And some of those passions certainly include gardening and birdwatching and conservation and does it matter that it’s a developed interest and not a way of life?

So all you grannies and grandpas, and I know you’re out there, what do you think?

Small Addendum: My recollection from my mother is that HER father was a groundskeeper in Fairhope, Alabama. I’ll have to check up on this.

Yet Another Fly. For some reason a lot of interesting insects like to perch on the kitchen counter. I’m grooving though on the observation of all these flies that are not mosquitos, houseflies, or Drosophila, bless its little hemocoels. Here’s a fine little page that summarizes the families (130) of flies (Order Diptera) according to their lifestyles.

This one is probably a robber fly, family Asilidae, but Bugguide appears to be having problems so I can’t confirm it. However it does have the “beard” and the bristles characteristic of that family, and LOOK at those bristles, every one in its genetically predetermined place! There’s a fairly close match to Diogmites here, here, and especially here. This one looks like he wears his organs on the outside, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Like the Mydas fly, robber flies are predaceous throughout their lives. Eggs are laid in soil, larvae eat beetle and other insect larvae, and the adults pounce on other insects and suck them dry. I see some of them go after horse flies and deer flies, so we like these guys a lot!

A few weeks ago I posted about finding a clutch of snake eggs in a pile of wood chips. One of those eggs accidently made it down with us and I placed it in a thin foam rubber cooler in the middle of a foot or so of wood chips.

Today it hatched - baby snake hissing at me, and diving back down into the chips. He’s a lovely gray and brown patterned thing about a foot long and apparently able to take care of himself, striking at me a couple of times before disappearing. I’ll try to get some pics before letting him go.

UPDATE: And here are the pics. The little bugger sticks his tail down and vibrates it loudly when I upset him. I realize that baby snakes may change coloration as they mature, but still... any ideas? (I’m going to guess rat snake.)

UPDATE 2: Swampy does it again. Baby Black Racer. Pic found here. Could life get any better?

And finally, UPDATE 3, 0726 EDT Jul 26: We let him go this morning. I was foolish to imagine any concerns about his ability to bite, although he went to all sorts of effort to convince me otherwise. One he had a few lunges in, he was quite comfortable being handled. Then I put him down and he got all wild again. But he’ll be content in the fairy ring, now freed of microstegium and likely to produce a good crop of grasses in a few weeks.

So what have I learned? I was worried about carbon dioxide buildup, and humidity and heat, either the lack or the excess, in that little container. I imagined fungus, bacteria, and endogenous insects devouring that little egg. I’m sure the conditions weren’t perfect, and nonetheless in the end it didn’t matter; even three weeks after setting up the incubator, everything turned out ok.

Here’s a large, about 2", common millipede trundling around in the shady moist detritus a lot these days: probably a Sigmoria species, red-sided or almond millipede. Millipedes can be distinguished from centipedes by their two pairs of legs per segment, as opposed to the one pair in the latter. Centipedes are also fast-moving, carnivorous, and have a strong venom-assisted pair of jaws that can give a good bite. Millipedes are slower-moving, herbivorous, and don’t bite.


Unfortunately I can’t find the identity of this insect. He visited us one evening. His mouthparts remind me of a grasshopper on the one hand, but he had a more predatory look to him. The mouthparts also reminded me of a mantid of some sort. About an inch long. He flew. He looks rather wise. What is he?

UPDATE (7.26.05): Thanks to Brian’s suggestion I think this is probably a black pine sawyer. Definitely not a good witch, if so. The thing that sticks in my mind is that if you put your ear up to an infested pine tree you can hear the larvae chewing their way out.


Finally, a large fly of some sort, and again I couldn’t find more specific identification. Also rather predatory in movements and explorations. He had orange feet and a bright orange pigmentation on the anterior portion of his abdomen. He coyly kept this pigmentation covered with his right membraneous wing while resting (you can see just a hint of it in the left pic). A bit longer than 1".

UPDATE: Success! Audubon has a bad habit of including pics of bee-like flies in the section with the bees and wasps. Anyway, he’s a Mydas Fly, Mydas clavatus. Predatory all his life: as a larva he lives in soil and eats beetle larvae, as an adult he goes after caterpillars, other flies, bees and bugs. It’s a hard world.

Those who have been here awhile know that I have a long-term project, almost an obsession really, to control the infestations of Microstegium vimineum that over a number of years have become serious on much of our 40 acres. I’ve written about it here and here. What has resulted since the project began two years ago has come to resemble an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) strategy. My particular strategy has boiled down to two summers of foliar spraying with Roundup, followed by mechanical picking of isolated patches. And yes, this second phase is tedious and backbreaking, I can say this with the greatest authority one week into it, but it doesn’t carry nearly the baggage that the roundup guilt trip loads on me.

Here’s a map of the property, with the State of the Microstegium coded in various shades of green:



And here’s the evil weed, Microstegium vimineum. This is a mature plant, and on the right you can see how it gets one of its common names, Japanese Stilt Grass. As the plant grows it begins to put down legs each of which develops its own roots. Insidious!



It’s also known as Nepalese Browntop and Chinese Packing Grass. It’s easy to see how it could be used as packing material when dried, and that presumably is how it got here, as seeds contaminating the dried plant material. Best guess is that it probably arrived sometime around 1920, in Tennessee, and has since become a huge problem.

And here’s an extensive infestation of Microstegium that I haven’t begun to get rid of yet. It’s beautiful, it’s lush, and I’m sure many tourists to the Great Smoky Mountains imagine it to be the epitome of a healthy ecosystem. It’s not. It’s a monocultural stand that spreads rapidly and chokes out nearly all other plant species. On the right is the line of demarcation between the untreated area, and the area that has been sprayed for the past two years.


To begin this project I learned that Microstegium is an annual grass that prefers shady, moist conditions. It flowers in late August to early September and can produce a thousand seed per plant; these seed have long viability - five to seven years in the soil. One of the important things I discovered is that it is sensitive to very low concentrations of glyphosate (marketed as “Roundup”, and less expensive knockoffs). I’ve been using 0.1-0.5% glyphosate on stands such as the ones above, beginning spraying in late July and moving about our 40 acres until I get it all. The low concentration combined with a fine spray only onto the tops of the dense stand helps to prevent damage to any underlying plants. It’s a further advantage that by the end of a hot summer many other plants have become dormant.

I began to spray this area two years ago, when there was nothing but Microstegium as far as you could see; it was hip high and very dense. Last summer the density was less, but the stand was still extensive and it received its second spraying. On the left is a pic of the area this year, and on the right you get an idea of the density of the Microstegium that is still present after two consecutive summers of spraying. In this third year, the sudden decline in Microstegium has been exponential, a very encouraging result.


As you look at the above left pic, you might wonder why everything is brown. That’s the leftovers from a native cool season grass that sprouted up in profusion for the first time this past spring, mingling in a lovely way with Krigia which I blogged about before. Glenn identified the grass as Vulpia octoflora, Six Weeks Fescue. It’s a thin native grass that dies back in April or May, when the tops turn a very nice reddish color before the plant collapses. It was our first indication that restoration was taking effect in this area, along with Krigia virginica and other spring ephemerals in abundance.

By late spring it was clear that the Microstegium in this area was vastly reduced. This is where the second phase of the IPM plan comes into play. The above density is too low to spray without possibly compromising the increasing number of native plants coming back under and around the patches of Microstegium. These must now be handpicked, and I began this last week. So far I’ve worked about 20 hours and have removed all the Microstegium from about 2 acres. One of the unanticipated problems was that with our exceptionally cool and wet early summer there appears to have been another flush of germination resulting in many tiny seedlings. All must be pulled up!

If there’s something good about the mechanical picking it is that you get face to face with the ground. So far, in this area, I’ve identified at least four new species we’d never seen before. From left to right we have a new orchid, probably Malaxis uniflora or Adder’s Mouth Orchid; we have probably Spotted Hypericum, Hypericum punctatum; below left is a lovely little bedstraw, possibly coastal bedstraw Galium hispidulum (and yes, Brian, I know what the two hanging fruits look like), and a native hawkweed probably Hieraceum paniculatum or Panicled Hawkweed. At the very bottom is a delicate little vine whose identity I do not know.






In addition to the new species, I’ve found at least one trillium in an area I’d never seen them before, a shade-loving Desmodium (a favorite of bobwhite quail), and very healthy populations of climbing milkweed, Matelea caroliniana, and Matelea gonocarpa.

So how do I feel about this, into its third year? There will be many who won’t fathom this, but I’m going to put it up as a real life “moral value”, for those who don’t know what real life moral values are. I’d say it ranks as one of the top half-dozen best things I’ve done with my life. There’s no tangibles associated with this, quite the reverse: hours and hours in the summer heat spraying and pulling, $150 per year average in glyphosate purchase and who knows how much spent on aspirin, anaprox, insect repellent, and beer. It’s not going to raise our property value, and there’s no government incentive to encourage this maintenance (an aspect I’ll write about in more detail later). Yet I vowed that if we were going to own 40 acres of forested land, we were going to take care of it in sickness and in health, and therein lies the reward. Nursing our sick piece of land back to health makes me feel good in a way that few things do, and to see previously unknown plants coming up in the place of this horrible pest makes me giddy.

Maxwell cools off in the dayflowers while Urchin prefers to radiate his excess heat.


It appears that we’re now in the sustained heat of summer. After four weeks of relatively cool (low to mid 80s) and wet (90% humidity; daily showers) June and July weather, the daily highs have been low to mid 90s for the past week. On July 4 we discovered upon trying it for the first time that the air conditioning was in need of repair, and it still is. I’ve been reluctant to get it fixed, for one reason or another but mostly to do with acclimatization.

In the past week I’ve begun my annual Microstegium eradication project (more on that later). This involves hours of hot sweaty fun on a daily basis for the next month, and I’m concerned about the power of the lure of ac interfering with this “must do” project.

So no ac. And the heat isn’t really so bad. Indeed yesterday afternoon we were surprised by some of the most intense series of thunderstorms we’ve experienced. The temperatures dropped 25 degrees in 15 minutes, and over the next hour we had 3.0" rain with near-constant crashes of thunder and three major strikes within a hundred feet of the house. Had we been cooped up in the air conditioned house, we wouldn’t have had nearly so much fun.

Here’s our forecast for the weekend:

... High heat indices for central and northern Georgia this weekend
and Monday...

High temperatures combined with high relative humidities in the
afternoons will produce heat index values in the 102 to 110 range
from Saturday through Monday over much of central and northern
Georgia. Daily high temperatures will be increasing gradually from
Saturday through Monday. By mid-week... however... temperatures will
begin to moderate... with highs remaining in the lower 90s and heat
indices falling to near 100 or lower.

When the heat indices are above 105... the risk of experiencing
sunstroke... heat cramps... and heat exhaustion exists. With
increasing heat indices... the risk also increases.

Those planning outdoor activities should take proper precautions such
as resting frequently... wearing light clothing... drinking plenty of
fluids... and avoiding long exposure to the heat and sun. Check on
the elderly and be sure pets have plenty of fresh water.

Here’s an idyllic little pastoral scene. Patient shepherds tending their flocks, pausing occasionally to lick the honeydew off their backs. Do you hear panpipes in the distance?


This is one of the types of symbiosis, a mutualism where both parties benefit, that a lot of people are familiar with. I found this one prospering on a stem of New York Ironweed, Vernonia noveboracensis, near the growing tips. There are a great many aphid species, and I have no idea what these are. The little winged jobs are the adults, and will fly off to another plant. The fat little pear-shaped ones are probably females reproducing parthenogenetically - dropping baby pregnant females who themselves are often dropping smaller baby pregnant females, sometimes a line of increasingly smaller grandmothers, mothers, and daughters.

Aphids are plant suckers, and they have the stylet to prove it. They insert this mouthpart directly into the phloem of a favored plant. They don’t even have to suck - the pressure of the sugar water in the phloem pumps the plants hard earnings directly into the aphid. Under the right caresses, the aphid will produce a drop of “honeydew”, which the ants will suck up and then transport back to the colony.

There are a huge number of species of ants, and quite a number in several genera that practice this symbiosis between ants and aphids. Not being a myrmecologist, I will have to remain unenlighted about the identity of these. The caste that is guarding and harvesting the honeydew will rush back to the nest and regurgitate their stash into another caste, the repletes, that hang from the ceilings of the nests. These will then act as reservoirs for all the ants in the colony to tap for this marvelous treat which has been secreted, consumed, regurgitated, and dripped. YUM!

There’s a great little story about botanists who study the liquid in the plant phloem. The products of photosynthesis run through this plumbing to all parts of the plant. Investigators would place an aphid on a plant, let it sink its stylet into the phloem, and then snip the hapless insect away from its stylet. This left a natural pipe tapped directly into the phloem, which dripped the fluid which could then be collected for analysis. Of course it also left a sad little aphid with no mouthparts, but hey, it’s all for science.

Here’s a great site on aphids, and another one for ants.

Today is the first anniversary of the first post on this blog.

The most common search keyword that brings people here is “niches”. Not only have I never once used the word “niches” in text, but I can’t imagine the search skills of someone typing into the engine “What are niches?”. Some other odd search terms in the past year: “metal munching plants”, "cat/human hybrid", “baby gender prediction v2.3”, "exterminating green frogs", “trilobites/pine shoot beetle”, "only nylon sex from female", and “лещен”.

Probably like anyone who starts a blog, I wasn’t certain I’d stick to it - the statistics on blogs started versus blogs maintained were daunting. But in the end, this is the 246th post on a blog which has averaged about two posts every three days. Early on this average was much lower as I battled with “finding my voice”, a process which to me is all too incomplete even now. In the last few months I’ve seldom skipped more than one day a week and often Glenn has contributed too, and I for one would like to hear more from him. Ultimately I think the key is that it has to become a part of the day-to-day routine; pathetically or not, you have to be constantly asking the question, “hmmmmm, is this blog material?”. At least it works for me.

The mission has not been compromised, but it has assumed a life of its own. My original idea was to use this as a journal of record for my own purposes, a sort of augmentation of the jottings that go onto the kitchen calendar. This was a reflection of a lifetime passion involving the protection and maintenance of our forty acres. But it turns out that there’s a lot more going on inside and out that I at least find worthy of comment and so the blog has become something a little more than just record-keeping. There’s my obsession with climate and lovely plots that depict it. There’s the occasional Science report that I feel moved to comment upon. And then there’s personal events that I didn’t really think I would ever comment upon, but which occasionally scream for recognition.

It was my initial feeling that politics would not be a part of this blog. Political blogs are a dime a dozen (everyone has an opinion, and it need not be supportable). But both Glenn and I are political junkies; Glenn listens to CSPAN when he’s in the lab, and I’m tuned in to politically charged writings, especially with regard to environment and social issues. Nonetheless politics has only very infrequently raised its ugly head here - only when one of us has been sufficiently outraged - well, we’re always outraged, but the bar for the blog is very high.

There are things that I haven’t gotten around to. One of my mislaid interests, temporarily I think, is amateur astronomy and satellite watching. Several years ago I purchased a 12.5" dobsonian reflector and spent a happy year covering the sky and observing extremely dim and distant satellites. Increasingly I feel the urge to get back into this little hobby; you can read some of my earlier observations at the now defunct Astronomy in Athens, GA webpage.

One of the curious things about a blog is that your earlier friends and relatives never comment. At least one explanation is that they seldom read the blog, but even among those who do, there seems to be a reluctance to comment, even when specifically invited. Since these are people who by my observation seem compulsively motivated to comment on everything, I conclude that there’s some murky inhibition that a lot of people have against getting involved in written commentary. Perhaps a self-consciousness is also involved here. At any rate it seems like only a particular kind of person comments.

Then there’s the lurkers. I have no idea who they are. They read the blog on a daily basis, but therein ends my knowledge of them. The ones I notice are of course the locals - the ones from Atlanta, from Toccoa, from Commerce, from Augusta. They never comment either, but let us kindly and graciously note their presence among us.

One of the aspects of blogs I keep reading over and over in other people’s online journals is the sense of community that begins to build. I hadn’t anticipated this fully when I started out. Glenn and I have a broad range of interests and one of the enjoyable aspects has been discovering those people who have an equally broad range. Where all our interests overlap is fun, of course, and provides the initial spark but where they DON’T overlap has been equally enjoyable. (I had no real anticipation that I’d be identifying and cataloging the arthropods I see, for instance!) Meeting other people and reading what they have to say has been quite a pleasure; a pleasure that manifests each day and that has a positive bearing on my general well-being. I do like that, knowing there are people out there who are equally pleased by simple things in a society that seems to require increasing complexity and artificiality to please those oh so jaded among us.

My innermost, most intense desire: If I can’t torture them to death myself, then what I’d like is to banish those spammers whose entries I must erase a couple dozen times a day to Gitmo, where they can be tortured to death “legally”.

One of the first plants we identified on our then newly purchased property, back in the days before we were “real” botanists, was this one, Blackberry Lily. It was growing along a partly sunny terrace near the knoll north of what would six years later be the house. It is Belamcanda chinensis, and as you can tell from its specific epithet it’s not native. However it does appear to be a fairly good citizen and just because of its amazing orange and red-spotted flowers it’s a keeper.


It’s not really a lily; it’s an iris and is in the family Iridaceae. The flowers only last a day, and then the petals twist up tightly. In a few weeks the capsules will open to reveal a cluster of lustrous black berries, and hence the name - blackberry lily. They really do look like giant blackberries.

Thanks to everyone for their kind comments regarding Wayne’s Happy Fourth of July post regarding the speach by the Spanish Prime Minister following that country’s adoption of marriage rights for their gay citizens.

I have thought about the Prime Minister’s and Wayne’s comments many times. Those who know me do not describe me as being reflective or passionate, except perhaps in my professional life. However, I will try to make what to me is an obvious sidebar to the so-called debate on gay marriage in this country. And in a subsequent post, perhaps I will contribute some personal stuff that might illuminate how non-recognition by one’s government can infect your life.

I view the gay marriage-hot button issue as being built on a deliberate confusion of Civil and Religious Rights. This is not new to me, obviously, but I state it in its most naked, fundamental form in order to test its validity. The Family Firsters will always regard Marriage as a Civil Right (Civil Duty) and this ‘belief-faith’ contaminates what might otherwise be an interesting discussion if peoples' lives were not at stake. Their notion of Marriage as a State-Supported Civil Right is endogenous to others who, unlike the Family Firsters and their missionaries well-intentioned or corrupt, have a critical mind but are still held hostage by their misunderstanding of American History and Religious thought.

In short, the good intentions of most of us are corrupted and until we wake up, little progress will be made in defining Civil Rights, gay or other.

Civil Unions should be a Civil Right recognized by the government. All State, Federal, employee, inheritance, and other ‘family’ benefits should apply to partners in such unions. How one defines such a union should be the subject of civil discourse, legislation, and court review within the boundaries of the Constitution. It is a civil definition, a civil right, and a civil responsibility. The welfare of children is, at its end, a civil responsibility and I cannot think of any example that demonstrates that it has been a religious responsibility. Do I have to note the powerful baggage that comes with the use of ‘family’ as defined by the Family Firsters? More could be said.

Marriage is really something different. As most understand marriage, it is recognized by the partners who participate in it and also recognized by some religion. It is recognized informally by the community and thereby gets its true legitimacy. The fact that governments also recognize it is not a part of its definition but the result of history that we need not explore to test the argument above.

The difference is too simple and too rational. But names have power. Those who first provide a name to something will control it forever. Goddess, that was discovered in Genesis!

You decide. “orkk orkk orkkk”

(Squit - siamese/tabby hybrid. Very weird.)

A little addition: How weird is Squit? Incredibly blue, crossed eyes. No hunting instinct. Butterflies land on his nose with impunity. Gets along with, no, actually seems to love everyone - all the other cats, although it must be said, most don’t like him. Hates contention. Will wander anxiously around crying if there is yelling going on, whether cat-cat, cat-human, or human-human. Probably brain-damaged, maybe by trauma before he found us. And probably the physically strongest cat I’ve ever seen.

Philalethes at Bouphonia writes in What are Bats Worth? about “placing a dollar value on ecosystem services”. He and I agree that we must come up with some way of assigning a worth to the concept of ecosystem services. Currently, they’re worth nothing, except in an esthetic sense which is judged as valueless by those who wish to make a buck, and any developer may destroy them in order to make that buck. Nonetheless, in his post Phil rightly concludes that there are some real potential and possibly alarming consequences to this idea.

To encapsulate an example (and read his post for the full chain of reasoning - I’m not doing it full justice here): Mexican free-tailed bats save farmers money they’d otherwise have to pay for pesticides. Quite a bit of money. In one county, an estimated $2.5 million.

One important skewer of Phil’s two-pronged thrust, and this is further dealt with in the excellent comments to his post, is that there is something inherently unsatisfactory in the crass assignment of $ to an organism, a population, or an ecosystem that has its own inherent value that simply doesn’t make it into dollar terms. No, let’s come right out and say it: it’s obnoxious that we’d have to assign a dollar value in order to make something seem worthwhile. But as Hedwig-the-Owl says, it may be necessary to play the game for those who lack the sensitivities of a Hun, just to promote those inherent values until a saner, less humanocentric set of values becomes popular. It’s a distasteful compromise, but as long as we have Administrations such as the current one in which even the esthetics of our National Parks and National Forests seem to be valueless, we’re going to have to play the game; we can at least play it shrewdly.

Phil’s second skewer brings up (as one possible example, and surely we can think of others) genetically engineered organisms as encouraged by the stupid short-sighted market system, should a dollar value be placed on ecosystems. Phil points out that if a tangible value is placed on free-tailed bats, then it might also encourage, for example, the genetic engineering of BETTER free-tailed bats that are worth even more money. One of the problems, Phil suggests, is that this potential market would result in an engineered free-tail bat, A Better Bat, that would out-compete and drive extinct the Wild Bats, the non-engineered species. The market economy is ill-equipped to deal with this potential problem since it demands that consequence.

Genetically engineered products are full of examples of products failed for one reason or another: Calgene’s FlavrSavr tomato (gah, MUST we massacre the English language to market things?), Golden Rice, and most infamously Monsanto’s Terminator Gene for preventing farmers from saving their seed. Understand, I’m not knee-jerk against genetic engineering; I’ve worked peripherally in this field. But it’s that perspective that warns me against the respectively gimmicky and premature; potentially misleading, not to mention in legal limbo; and frankly malicious practices of the companies attempting to make a buck on this. (I must at least mention that Ingo Portykus, who developed the first version of Golden Rice, seems, despite the extensive self-promotion, to have his heart in the right place. In contrast, the Terminator Gene has a much darker history and motivation: Martha Crouch has an excellent, balanced, and coherent review of it.)

With that in place, and to elaborate on the Better Bats thing: in the short term I doubt it, but we’re talking long-term here and I don’t see as science-fiction that gene tech improvements will permit the easy and cheap engineering of such organisms someday, despite the above examples. I tend to agree with Phil that there exists a can of worms here that a market economy would love to open. My gut feeling is that ecology will take the place of the lack of market economy mechanisms. For instance, farmers would have to buy these Better Bats, which they might be disinclined to do. My feeling is that ecology will determine what the stupid market system fails to recognize: even IF the Better Bats were successfully marketed, they would as a population do no better job ultimately than the Wild Bats (and consider how poorly the FlavrSavr tomato grows - a hypothetical Better Bat could easily be less selected than a Wild Bat). Even so, there exists only a certain number of predated insects - so what if you need ten Better Bats that can sustain themselves compared to 50 Wild Bats that it takes to do the job? It’s not like you have to pay retirement or medicare for them; you just leave them alone and let them do their job. My hope is that it’s likely that this reality would accomplish the mission of persuading farmers against purchasing Better Bats and that such a genetic engineering venture would not make it past the drawing board.

Unfortunately marketing practices being what they are, grandiose advertising of genetically engineered organisms can make a worthless product seem worth buying, even if it’s a waste of money and a potential danger in the long term.

Unfortunately ecology operates in the long term and marketing in the short term. The damage will be done when the market abandons its little project as cost-ineffective.

Unfortunately short term profits trump long term reality in our insane world.

So I must agree with Phil that this is a valid objection, with the caveat that properly developed regulatory codes, if sufficiently far-sighted, might circumvent such ventures. A sort of “first do no harm” kind of code, combined with a “second, don’t bother if it doesn’t help” amendment. It’s a shame that long-term regulatory codes really don’t exist in the US; they’re primarily focused on whether there’s a direct and immediate harm to humans, foremost, and the environment secondarily, if at all, and above all let the market go where it will no matter how much long-term damage it does. Can anyone imagine in our political climate that reasonable codes might be developed?

Still, the question: “What are Bats Worth?”. In that narrow sense and in the much broader sense I feel emphatically that they are certainly worth something. Whether that worth ends up being expressed in tax breaks, monetary incentives, or subsidies of some kind it seems to me that there surely must be some reward for private landowners who operate in such a way as to encourage and protect plant and animal diversity.

This post has gotten a little long, and I don’t want to confuse things. I have a specific reason for bringing this up, which may further cloud things (!) so I’ll present this more personal scenario later.

Enough of abused dishrags.

Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis) is in the madder family, the Rubiaceae, which includes not only several shrubs but also a number of tiny herbaceous plants like bluets, if you can believe that, Diodea or buttonweed, and of course madders. It continually boggles my mind that Linnaeus, more than two centuries ago, saw the essential unifying characters of such a wide range of tiny plants and shrubs and correctly put them in the same family, family after family. Apparently the important features are the vegetative architecture (opposite leaves arranged in 3D spirals) and the 4 petals. DNA evidence confirms this, and if you’re really REALLY interested, there an American Journal of Botany article that dissects the relationships of plants within this family.

We planted this one a few years ago. It’s just a few feet tall and rather straggly. Under better conditions it might end up 12' tall and 8' around, so it’s a fairly spherical shrub or small tree. It really likes moist soils, and the wetter, the better - it’ll do great as an edge-of-the-pond shrub or small tree. We don’t have a sunny (full or part) wettish area near the house, so we planted it close to the overflow from the ornamental ponds and it’s done pretty well there.

This year it flowered for the first time. The first pic below shows the unopened buds - it makes an inch-diameter inflorescence, hence I guess the name “button”bush. The second pic shows the fully opened flowers, the third the senescing flowers, and the last one is the developing infructescence. Apparently the fruits persist through winter and are a favorite of waterfowl.




The flowers are fragrant and attractive to butterflies and bees, which is great. But the plant itself is caterpillar food for a number of dramatic saturnid and sphinx moths: promethea silkmoth, imperial moth, cecropia moth, ceanothus silkmoth, titan sphinx, and hydrangea sphinx moths.

A nice, all around shrub particularly good for problem wet areas that have at least some sun. Plus, it’s very adaptable to climate occurring naturally throughout the US east of the Rockies.

The debate rages within our household. Do not fear to take one side or another.

Do we need a new dishrag?

For several years we’ve seen this fellow (or others like it) hovering around, a fairly constant companion throughout the summer. It’s large, over an inch long, quite aggressively curious, and with the black and yellow markings and the loud whine as it hovers, looks and sounds pretty ferocious. It’s all a fake though - this is a fly, not a bee or wasp; you can tell by the single pair of wings. I’m guess it to be a Yellowjack Hover Fly, Milesia perhaps virginiensis. It can neither bite nor sting, and is hovering about looking for plants that have aphids on them. That’s where it’ll lay its eggs, and the larvae will consume the aphids. Although I’m clear that it’s a hover fly it could be another species.


Normally I’ll look the other way when I spot one of those nondescript little moths flying around. But this one looked doable. It’s Grape Leaffolder, Desmia funeralis, a pyralid moth family member. Its larvae will pupate over winter in folded-over grape leaves, hence the name. It may be a minor pest, but it still always makes me feel better when I get a handle on one of these fellers.

Here’s a pretty little thing:


At first I thought this was an asparagus beetle, but the spotting pattern was not right. BugGuide pegged it as a Neolema species, most likely N. sexpuncta, Six-Spotted Beetle. There is also useful information on this species (and possible alternatives) at TAMU’s Insect Collection Site.

Leaf Beetles are in the Family Chrysomelidae, and include potato beetles and a lot of agricultural pests.

Interestingly the genus synonym for this one is Crioceris, which is also that for the asparagus beetle I thought it was initially.

More interestingly than that, I had found this nibbling on our native dayflower, Commelina. And the TAMU site says that’s what it specializes on.

TS Cindy, now TD Cindy, moved across our area this morning dumping 1.6" rain in two 30-minute rain bands. A fairly good rain for us, and when these rains from tropical storms come through they always have a different flavor than regular sorts of fronts - a different sort of wind and rain dump.

I suspect Karen at Rurality probably got it much worse as TD Cindy moved through Alabama, and now Swampy is going to get it! Anyone else?

As further evidence of my copious quantities of way too much free time, I present a graphical summary of Atlantic storms 1920-2004. Hopefully the legend explains everything, but just in case, the dots represent the actual number and the connected lines represent a 3-year moving average (the factors that determine hurricane intensity usually last over a period of several years, so this is a valid smoothing selection).

The data used were obtained by year-by-year cherry-picking from Unisys’s graphically excellent Atlantic Storm Tracking website.

It took awhile to figure this one out. My insect books are fairly good but there are SO many insects that you can only go down to family, even in the excellent Peterson Field Guide by DJ Borror. There may be hundreds of species in some families, with a lot of variation in appearance, and neither example under the family Coreidae looked quite like this one.


Fortunately with the help of BugGuide I was able to discover that this is a Leaffooted Bug, probably the genus Acanthocephala. This isn’t quite it but it’s close. Ours have all-red antennae and very broad head shields, almost like a hammerhead shark.

There were a couple dozen of these 1-2" long monsters prowling up and down the trunk of a small white ash. Looks like they’re mating, and there was a lot of competition with as many as four or five trying to get into the action.

These bugs, and true bugs they are, order Hemiptera, have as all true bugs do, piercing mouthparts. They may suck plant juices, like these do, and the one on the right actually seems to be penetrating into the bark of the tree. Other species are predators and suck animal juices; wheelbugs are a good example of this.

If there’s one thing good (actually there are many) about having a bunch of people over it’s that the house and environs gets a good cleaning. The Roomba was working overtime without complaint; the Pleurotus oyster mushrooms were cleaned out of the shower stall; lovely, preserved, once-living tokens of appreciation dragged in by the cats were discovered and removed; the books got put back on the library shelves; and the New Yorkers, Smithsonians, and Science magazines got accumulated, sorted out, and put away for the traditional end-of-year ripouts. Wood chips were brought down to cover the area around the deck and to create a challenging fire hazard during grilling.

It was a great way to celebrate the Fourth, doing exactly what we wanted with old friends. Kabobs and grilling, the latter traditional and the former perhaps a liberal slant, were the main focus. A bewildering array of vegetables, mushrooms, sausage, and venison (the proper end to a marauding deer) were available, preceded by a diversity of munchies of various sort - diversity was the key here! Ultimately the contributions could have fed 50, with enough beer and wine to attract every cop and highway patrol in the area, but we were only 8.

A couple of the cats, Genie-weenie and the selectively deaf Munch, participated, shamelessly staking out the most likely visitor to beg from. The chimney swifts flew in during dusk and the bats flew out. The frogs and toads did their best to drown everyone out. We entertained ourselves with the complex game of “possum or cat?”, a typically bizarre contrivance by Stephen and David. Diane and her husband Ariel brought out a fantastic set of woven tapestries. We had visitations by an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail who amused us all by crashing into a Miller Light beer case, stunning itself briefly. We recognized Eastern Comma, Painted Lady, Red-spotted Admiral, and Pearl Crescent butterflies before it was all over.

We live too far out for the visuals of fireworks, but could hear them going off in the distance. And then, as we finished cleaning up, a fairly intense storm moved in and provided us with a brilliant show of cloud-to-cloud lightning snaking across the sky, perhaps a disappointment elsewhere but a perfect and non-traditional end to our little party.

I interrupt the main misson of this blog to bring you what I consider to be an important message. For those not in the US, apologies. I’ll resume our usual snakes and plants and such in short order.

This is a diatribe in two parts. Skip on down to Part 2 if Part 1 bothers you.

Part the One:

It is right and proper that many Americans will be reflecting on Iraq and the US troops there, and I concur that support of these troops is important. No one will be quicker than I to support our troops, and when they come home I will be much quicker to support them than some of our politicians who want to steal their benefits after they’ve done their job. Some people think that because I have a tally of the $ spent in Iraq that I somehow don’t support the troops. Untrue. These are two separate issues - EVERYONE should be thinking about how much money is being poured into a potential black hole, and the massive mistake that implies, as well as who made it. Our care and concern for American soldiers now in Iraq, and the concocted reasons for our being there, are not related at all. On the contrary, the now well-documented lies and deceit that got those troops there, and the frequently and outrageously updated reasons for keeping them there are important to reflect on too, if for no other reason than that the deaths on both sides in Iraq should never have happened.

The bewildering quick acceptance of lies and deceit must be a part of the consideration of what the birthday of our country means. Our mistake was brought on by willful ignorance and fawning acceptance of the words of an ignorant man; this is a major flaw and a major failure in what citizenship in this country means. And those lies and deceit overlap so many evils foreign to those values Americans pride themselves for that surely celebration of what is good must include a recognition of what has gone wrong.

In the last five years an important sense of compassion and tolerance has been driven from us, from me and my fellow Americans, and replaced by division and hatred. These cruel divisions have been engineered by grasping and manipulating politicians. What has been driven from us is compassion for the homeless, for the sick, for the hopeful in other, less developed countries, and for each other. What has replaced thought and compassion have been meaningless platitudes about liberty and freedom that are senseless without context and hypocritical in the extreme.

Part the Two:

For this Fourth of July I’m going to cut and paste something that made me feel good. It doesn’t make me feel good about our country as it is now, I’m afraid, and in a different (but perhaps related) sense from the ill-advised US involvement in Iraq. I’m sorry that I can’t make you feel good by saying that the United States is at the forefront of human dignity and human rights, because although maybe it was, it isn’t now; however, maybe it can be again: Maybe our country can aspire to achieve the same kindness, tolerance, and acceptance of human dignity that yet another country has just managed to achieve.

Spain, a scant three decades after the end of an intolerant fascist regime that lasted for four decades has extended basic marital rights to its gay and lesbian citizens. And Spain is not the only country that has extended human rights to its own citizens far beyond what the United States seems capable of doing at the moment.

Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero explains why Spain’s recent legislation is everyone’s triumph, why it cannot generate any evil, and how it avoids the senseless suffering of decent human beings. Prime Minister Zapatero’s counterpart in the United States is of course Secretary Rice. Even if you can’t agree with the object, it would be a far reach to imagine any official of our own United States, Secretary Rice included, speaking so eloquently and inclusively, however much they might preen on the subject of freedom and liberty.

So, through Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings translated by Rex Wockner, comments by the Spanish Prime Minister on the recent vote to grant marital privileges to gay people. The bolded passages were emphasized by me, and it was a trial to pick out only a few passages, because this speech is a masterpiece.

"We are not legislating, honorable members, for people far away and not known by us. We are enlarging the opportunity for happiness to our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends and, our families: at the same time we are making a more decent society, because a decent society is one that does not humiliate its members.

"In the poem ‘The Family,’ our [gay] poet Luis Cernuda was sorry because, ‘How does man live in denial in vain/ by giving rules that prohibit and condemn?’ Today, the Spanish society answers to a group of people who, during many years have, been humiliated, whose rights have been ignored, whose dignity has been offended, their identity denied, and their liberty oppressed. Today the Spanish society grants them the respect they deserve, recognizes their rights, restores their dignity, affirms their identity, and restores their liberty.

"It is true that they are only a minority, but their triumph is everyone’s triumph. It is also the triumph of those who oppose this law, even though they do not know this yet: because it is the triumph of Liberty. Their victory makes all of us (even those who oppose the law) better people, it makes our society better. Honorable members, There is no damage to marriage or to the concept of family in allowing two people of the same sex to get married. To the contrary, what happens is this class of Spanish citizens get the potential to organize their lives with the rights and privileges of marriage and family. There is no danger to the institution of marriage, but precisely the opposite: this law enhances and respects marriage.

"Today, conscious that some people and institutions are in a profound disagreement with this change in our civil law, I wish to express that, like other reforms to the marriage code that preceded this one, this law will generate no evil, that its only consequence will be the avoiding of senseless suffering of decent human beings. A society that avoids senseless suffering of decent human beings is a better society.

“With the approval of this Bill, our country takes another step in the path of liberty and tolerance that was begun by the democratic change of government. Our children will look at us incredulously if we tell them that many years ago, our mothers had less rights than our fathers, or if we tell them that people had to stay married against their will even though they were unable to share their lives. Today we can offer them a beautiful lesson: every right gained, each access to liberty has been the result of the struggle and sacrifice of many people that deserve our recognition and praise.”

As is Spain’s Prime Minister, I’m perfectly aware of the arguments that gay marriage is a threat to the institution of marriage, because they’ve been thrown hatefully into my face and the faces of people like me for years now. Like Spain’s Prime Minister, I simply reject them. Argument by assertion is not a valid argument, and neither is imposition by one’s religion sufficient to validate an argument against others.

Glenn and I have been partners for 26 years. There’s no one in either family who has the slightest idea when our anniversary date was selected to be, although in fairness I guess I should point out that most outsiders *don't* know the anniversary dates of another couple. However they all know about this website and are welcome to correct me in the comments if they can. You can’t imagine how delighted I’d be if they did.

It’s only been over the last few years that I’ve been moved to consider marriage MY right too. I’d been content enough doing what Glenn and I had done - joint tenantship, the necessary legal agreements, and so forth, at least to mitigate the lack of assurances that no one could come between our wishes for each other. Of course even then those legal attempts can’t and don’t grant us any of the rights taken for granted by married people - medical insurance and other benefits just to give an example. Last year the citizens of the proud state of Georgia voted for a constitutional amendment that would eliminate even these possibilities, not just for us, but for all domestic partnerships. Perhaps it was this development that caused me to change my mind favoring marriage between same-sex couples.

The last several years under Bush, who uses the spector of gay marriage as a prop of fear, has strongly convinced me that our detractors aren’t just wrong; they only offer the nastiest and most mean-spirited reasons against something that should be any two individuals' right. Even if marriage hadn’t been an issue, I’d have to protest against the jaw-dropping pettiness that has been invoked for the crassest of political reasons. Some of our highest officials have cited the most absurd examples of what could happen if marital rights were legitimized for gay people. It’s bewildering, and sobering, to try to decide whether these people actually hate us this much, or whether they are merely using us to solidify their power.

So rather than merely celebrate what the Fourth of July means in terms of our country’s past, a perennial pastime; or to recognize the concerns for the present wartime situation, an important recognition; I’d like to also point out how much farther we have to go to catch up. We’ve not just failed to progress; we’ve lost a lot of ground. And not to repeat a cliche, but if you think it’s just about gays, just wait. As Prime Minster Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said, it’s about us all.

Tonight (or early Monday morning, depending on where you are), Deep Impact will collide with the Comet Tempel 1. The comet itself is visible only with some magnification, being 83 million miles away, but the impact itself should cause the comet to brighten up considerably and visibly through binoculars if you are west of the Mississippi at 1:49-1:55am Eastern Daylight Time (5:49-5:55 UT) and looking at the right place in the sky.

For a guide to where to look if you are well situated (and you guys on the West Coast had better be watching!), this site.

Unfortunately I will not be able to observe it directly from my vantage point in Athens. For the geographically impaired like me, there are websites that are webcasting their own images through telescopes of various sizes. Through Astroblogger:

Kitt Peak
Mauna Kea
and several other options at Astroblogger.

Here’s The FAQ on Deep Impact.

We’ve gotten into the habit of ordering a couple of big piles of woodchips every year, in the late spring. That’s enough for 160 or so 4 cu ft cartloads, or 18 cu yd total, of chips, and it has helped the weeding and mulching process enormously. The city of Athens does street pickup of yard “trash”, grinding and storing it at the landfill for sale, and in the early days we toted mulch in Glenn’s little truck. But there was never any telling what you might find there, and I’m sure we introduced a lot of undesirable arthropod critters, not to mention weed seeds and horticultural diseases - it just wasn’t very clean. AND we flatted at least two tires in two years from landfill nails. (In the South, “flat” can be a verb. As in, we didn’t like them so we flatted the tires on their suckmobile.) Woodchips, on the other hand are great: clean, free of soil, and much longer-lasting.

So what’s in the woodchips pile today?


Why, baby eggs! A clutch of 14, oval, white, leathery and tough; about 2 cm long. Quite toasty under the chips. Unfortunately the implement of destruction skewered two of them before I knew they were there, but cheer up. What a golden opportunity to see what’s inside!


Baby snakes! Already dead, and not quite fully developed, plenty of yucky yolk to gag your reflexes. These were about 20 cm long. Mom must have been fairly big.


We’ve found young ringneck snakes in the woodchips before, and these are about the same size, but I suspect that’s not what these are. One of them has a definite pattern developing along its length, and that would presumably exclude the two-toned ringneck. Although it doesn’t much matter to me, I know woodchip enthusiasts will be pleased to hear that copperheads, water moccasins, and rattlesnakes, three of North America’s four major groups of venomous snakes, give live birth and so these eggs could not belong to them. (The fourth, coral snakes, do lay eggs, but are limited in range to the Southwest and the extreme Southeast.)

So I covered them back up.

Here’s another pic, a bit gory so you can just click on it if you want to see.

The bottlebrush buckeye flowers are attracting all sorts of critters. Here’s what I take to be an argiope, hoping for a visitor (see, she’s even got her fingers crossed!). It could be A. aurantia, black and yellow argiope. Brian at the Band-Aid has a nice picture of one that’s really black and yellow, and a good discussion of the stabilimentum, the dense part of the web that the orb weaver is sitting on.


There were literally hundreds of these guys all over the flowers, drinking nectar (and none dead on the ground!). With the little short antennae and the single pair of wings, I take it to be a fly, and not a bee. Perhaps a syrphid, or hoverfly, but the wing venation doesn’t look like the diagrams I looked through, and they don’t hover very well. I’m about as good at this as identifying snakes by their snakeskins. I’d love to know what it is.

UPDATE: Glenn agrees - we looked much more closely and these guys have two pairs of wings - they keep them very close together. I really hope they’re not young carpenter bees.


And then there were several eastern swallowtails and a great many sweatbee types stuffing their pockets with salmon-pink pollen. Very festive, but all the pics of these were fuzzy.

I’ve mentioned our ornamental ponds before, and I’ve meant to lay out the construction and setup for these, and what better time than now? The actual construction, and other pictures can be found on our previous more or less defunct website, but which still exist there. Here I’m going to focus on the layout that pertains to biological filtration.

Addendum - I should point out that all these ponds and streams are lined with EPDM plastic. I’ve satisfied myself that the cost-benefit is worth it, not necessarily in terms of $$$ but in terms of water conserved and wildlife encouraged. Others might not agree.

Below is a “map” of the pond setup - it’s an image map so you can get a (400-450kb) picture by clicking on the legends. Pics open in a new window. Note the size - it’s a couple of minutes for dialup download.


These ponds are not formal ponds, with tiles and perfect geometrical shapes centered just so. They’re working ponds. They were conceived and constructed (ok, I’ll admit it was all ad hoc, whatever worked) to collect water for conservation, to grow water-loving plants, to provide an interesting water feature as well as an environment for fish, amphibians and what-not. The what-not moved in unexpectedly - you know - the snapping turtles and snakes. The problem with animals is that they excrete, and what they excrete is exactly what algae and cyanobacteria love to eat.

The ponds are named after frog and toad genera, from top to bottom in alphabetical order: Acris, Bufo, Hyla, and (not pictured here), the Rana ponds. Our first two were the largest ones - the Bufo and Hyla ponds. We circulated water from the bottom of the Hyla to the top of the Bufo, but continued to run into the major problem of dirty green water, a problem faced by all pond enthusiasts.

We fiddled around with mechanical filters, and were awestruck by the number of gimmicks (nitrogen absorbing filters, UV-irradiation, bio-beads) offered by pond companies for keeping the water clear. We weren’t happy with any of these approaches, and never attempted them. It seemed to us they were primarily stop-gap: the problem is to remove animal-produced nutrients from the ponds, not to just kill algae that obscure the water. Remove the nutrients, algae won’t grow, water will be clear. And they weren’t simple: fraught with connection problems, electrical supplies in some cases, and general non-sustainability requiring periodic replacement parts.

So we built the two Acris ponds at the top, to act as biological filtration. These are relatively shallow, only 1-2 feet deep compared to the 2-4 foot depth of the Bufo and Hyla ponds. We put tons of plants into Acris 1 and 2. Thalia dealbata, Elodea, floating hearts, water poppies, yellow flag iris, and more. With scraps of liner left over, we connected the four ponds together with a stream that runs from the top to the bottom, and also allowed various rushes and sedges, and other bog and water-loving plants to be inserted in pots into the stream. The stream crosses the path down to the house in two places, with wobbly stepping stones designed to break the bones of little old ladies. Not really, that’s just a little bon mote for my mother, who loves that kind of thing.

The result is that the two Acris ponds, with their root systems and large plant loads, remove the particulates, nitrogen, and other nutrients from the water pumped from the major ponds. The Bufo and Hyla ponds are utterly clear, why, we could easily see a snapping turtle if she weren’t hiding underneath the Elodea. And a number of the frog species actually prefer the shallower Acris ponds to the larger deeper Bufo and Hyla ponds.

Even if you have an extremely formal pond, this is a system that works. It’s needlessly complicated here - this is just what we wanted. All you really need is one smaller pond filled with plants upstream of the larger (formal) one. The upstream one filled with plants filters and removes nutrients and then empties the water into the larger one. And you have in addition a pond in a natural setting with tons of plants.

At the bottom of the Hyla pond we had a basic hole between the retaining wall and the pond itself, with a large eastern juniper growing in it. The various manipulations had sent the juniper down the road to the end of its life, so we cut it down, leaving the stump. We placed liner in the large hole, fitted around the stump, and filled it with peatmoss and sand. This gave us a bog at the bottom of the whole setup, into which rain overflow goes. And the overflow from this bog itself runs into two long carnivorous plant bogs, here, and here.

All very satisfactory at this point. Now we just have to cover up the liner so you can’t see it, and perhaps replace our old wheezing pump with a solar powered one.