Last night the coyotes were extremely vocal on several occasions during the night, each time with one in particular outvocalizing the others in the running pack. It was probably inevitable that my dreams picked up on this and featured wolves running up the northwest slope and through the yard. These weren’t just your plain old garden variety wolf either, these were enormous. These were dire wolves, a recognition that was made quite clear to me in my dream. Besides, they also stood on two legs sometimes.

This segued into a party, odd in two respects, not the least of which was that we were having a party. Also, I discovered that a mother raccoon had nested in a cabinet in the party room that doesn’t actually exist in real life. Each of her twenty-something progeny was snugly placed in a paper bag (of the long narrow sort you might have a purchased bottle of wine placed in) and stacked neatly on the cabinet shelves. Needless to say *she* wasn’t happy to have been discovered.

I am of course revealing to you the source behind all this scientific naming and stacking of perfectly innocent organisms in long narrow wine bottle bags on shelves.

As a further revelation, there were the usual parking and driving frustrations that I’m prone to in dreams, and that was probably brought on by last night’s training which involved a lot of driving and parking of both the pumper and the tanker. Fortunately this was not one of those dreams where I am naked.

I’m pretty sure that this is a Funnel-Web Spider, probably an Agelenopsis. The patterning on the cephalothorax and abdomen, and especially the long spinnerets, suggest that it’s not any of the running crab or crab spiders of the last few days. There are a great many of them around at this time, and they tend to build extensive web surfaces surrounding their typical funnel. Usually they build on the ground, or take advantage of stacks of pots or rows of potted plants and build in and around these. This one was odd in that it had built within a leaf nest at the tip of the American Germander patch. They’re extremely shy, and retreat into their funnel at the slightest hint of movement, so it was unusual for this one to be so limiting its retreat space.

Still, it wasn’t exactly cooperative at being photographed, but at least it’s more than the vanishing couple of pairs of legs I usually get.


Our patches of Pussytoes (aka Woman’s Tobacco), Antennaria plantaginifolia, have really taken off after a couple of years of pouting. This little area was flowering in earnest on April 19.


In the last week, spectacular little caterpillars have taken to the pussytoes. I probably need to do a little more work with the caterpillars at later stages but in the last couple of days haven’t seen any.

The Host Plants Database only reveals one likely candidate for Antennaria, and that’s Vanessa spp. Of this, the most likely possibility is V. virginiensis, American Lady, and we do have that one.


Notice the nice coating of trichomes on the leaves that give the plant a frosty appearance!

The photographs on bugguide don’t strike me as matching this one so well, and so it could certainly be something else. Hostplants is not necessarily complete in its correlations between leps and host plants.

We seem to have wasted our 80% rain chances yesterday, with little storms moving about but none passing over. The new gauge registered about 0.007 inches, this morning, which is defined as a trace. The front that moved through certainly cooled things down, though, and today is not expected to get above 72 degF. Sandwiched between two days in the upper 80s, that sounds quite pleasant!

I’d been prowling about for this spider for several days. It had been crouched between a couple of leaves in a potted plant, and then when I went looking in earnest yesterday, couldn’t find it. Eventually I noticed a stitched-together set of terminal leaves and gingerly pulled them open. The dead spider fell into a funnelweb’s extended web below.

So I don’t know what happened to it, but here it is. It certainly seems to be a Thomisidae family member, a crab spider, and mostly likely a Xysticus of some kind. There are lots of photos on bugguide that are not identified as to species, and quite a few species of Xysticus that are not formally represented. The matchup with the photograph linked to above isn’t perfect but it’s Real Close Now.


This isn’t the first apparent Xysticus. I caught one inside a Wild Blue Indigo pod last July, but that one looks different from this.

The thumbnails show a different angle emphasizing the eyes, and the nest this one had died inside. Although there’s webbing, I didn’t see any evidence of an egg case.


This is one of those “can’t believe none of the photographs turned out” sort of things. The critter was moving around very rapidly. But at least there’s enough of the very distinctive rear end of this true bug to show off its gaudier character:


It struck me at first as being a nymph in the Pentatomidae, the stinkbug family. Nymphs can look considerably different from the adults, and gradually lose the striking marking and colors as they mature. There are photographs that come close to matching this one, but never precisely.

The other thing of concern is that the antennae in the Pentatomidae are supposed to be 5-segmented. Unless there are very short hidden segments, this one clearly has three.


The stinkbug family is very diverse; Bugguide lists three dozen genera. Some are strictly herbivorous, others carnivorous.

Yesterday was a good hot day for insects. Here are a couple of pretty things.

This very nice black fellow, with all the furriness on the thorax, is a broad-headed bug, an actual true bug. It’s most likely Alydus eurinus, although there’s an outside chance it could be another species. Normally it would be found on leguminous plants, as it is a plant sucker, but this one was found on a coreopsis flower. The immature nymphs are, apparently, ant mimics. Both adults and nymphs release noxious chemicals, especially the smelly butyric acid and hexanoic acid, and esters of those acids, as allomones. And there’s an interesting word - an allomone is a general class of chemicals produced by one organism to modify the behavior of another. Pheromones would be a subset of this class. The chemicals released by injured plants that are attractive to predatory wasps would be another.

Fraid I can’t find any specific mention of the derivation of either the genus (or family) Alydus, although it’s conceivable that it’s a construct of the “a-” part, meaning without, and the -lydus part, perhaps a modification of the similarly sound -laedo, meaning to smash or break or wound. Pretty farfetched. The specific epithet eurinus would seem to be a combination of -eu (true) plus -rinus (no clue), and so truly no clue. UPDATE: found a reference using eurina (fem. for eurinus), meaning “eastern”.

Now here’s one I think I have at least partially figured out, but can find no examples of at bugguide. It was crawling about an extensive spiderweb, seemingly fearless, and of course my first thought was a spider-hunting wasp of some kind. Duh - no obvious membranous wings! And the antennae, head shape, and eye shape and placement seem wrong for a hymenopteran, too. The legs, long and highly ornamented, with broad femurs, don’t strike me as bee or wasplike.


With ten or eleven segments, the antennae deny the possibility of a hemipteran, or true bug, which should only have three or five segments. Though the antennae are longer than usually seen for a coleopteran, beetle, that’s what I think it is.


The thumbnails aren’t all that great but may show some aspects more clearly. The last one in particular seems to show that the yellowjacket-like abdomen top are actually elytra covering the wings, and that would also indicate a beetle. You’d think that something with colors like this, and legs with all those ornaments, would be a common find!

UPDATE: Ha! It was a beetle. Bev pegged it - a flower longhorn, Typocerus probably T. zebra, Zebra Longhorn. Very nice!

Wow. NASA does put on a good show.

I’d started watching the live transmission earlier in the evening, but when things started happening in the last final half hour before landing, they unfolded at a dizzying pace.

Just ten minutes before landing, Phoenix was still 3 minutes away from encountering the atmosphere.


Landing occurred, right on target, at 7:53:44 EDT, preceded by a litany of ever-decreasing numbers of velocity and altitude. Had the landing occurred on earth it would be just about at the center of the red circle:


Everyone seemed to be pretty happy.



Of course, everything we were hearing had actually occurred 15 minutes earlier. The speed of light: it’s not just a good idea, it’s The Law!

I miscalculated in the timing of informing you of the Phoenix landing on Mars and so by now you all know about the “7 minutes of terror” thingy that makes CNN sit up and take notice. Nonetheless, and especially given the difficulty and history of Mars landings, it will be more pins and needles than you can imagine for many this afternoon, since Phoenix was launched at the time of my 999th post last August.

Today’s Tom’s Astronomy Blog has all the links you want for following this as it happens. Phoenix will have a 'chute, but it will not be doing the landing on big balloons thing. It will be doing a retrorockets thing.

Perhaps I should give the Phoenix blog another chance. THere’s a lot more to it than the apparently necessary assertion that no, there were no humans aboard. Jesus wept.

It was a rather windy day a week ago Saturday when I examined the common rue, Ruta graveolens. It’s not a native, but it’s a fairly good citizen and has been the base of operations for a number of larvae of past lepidopterans, as well as spiders. So it’s a common stop on the daily tour.

At any rate the wind interfered with obtaining sharper photos, but this little spider was initially hidden between two leaves, stitched together loosely by webbing. I was able to coax it out.


At first I thought it might be a regular old crab spider of the Thomisidae, perhaps a Xysticus. But the posture of the legs, held to the front rather than the sides, and the shape of the abdomen suggest not.

Its second pair of legs do look a bit longer than the first pair, and so I wonder if it’s a running crab spider of the Philodromidae? Maybe a Philodromus praelustris?

On the left, a side view, of it hugging close to the substrate, and on the right, a front top view. Not good enough to make out much of an eye arrangement which was also occluded by the general hairiness.


I see that the family (and type genus) name, Philodrom-, would refer to a lover of the race, “dromus” referring to race. “Praelustris” is a an actual latin word for magnificent, but sadly it hasn’t survived to become an English word, except as preserved in the binomial nomenclature. Imagine saying: “what a praelustrous sunset”, but it isn’t to be, we must simply say “beautiful” or “magnificent”.

Though this spider is not likely a thomasid, the origins of the family name “Thomisidae” are a little murkier. The natural inclination is to assume that someone named Thomas might have been involved, but the “a" in Thomas isn’t conserved in the root ”Thomis" and that’s a bit too unbelievable - no reason why the family name wouldn’t have been “Thomasidae” if that had been the case (and I see I’ve incorrectly spelled it that way at least once). The International Rules of Zoological Nomenclature are arcane but (as now in plants) the family name must derive from a properly designated “type genus”. In plants, that’s why we don’t use Compositae for the family any more (there’s no Compositus, or other similar genus.) Instead we use Asteraceae, because there’s an Aster type genus.

And so, precedent might have been given to the discovery of the genus of flower spiders Misumena in 1804, demanding that the family be named Misumenidae. But, as outlined by this brief excerpt, (and it’s a JSTOR, so the complete article is not available) it seems that the genus Thomisus, endowed by its discover, the prolific Charles (not Thomas)Walckenaer, 1805, ended up as the type genus, with the family name following automatically.

Now that just begs the question, since now we have to figure out how the genus Thomisus was named, and at this point I’m not finding anything.

One last tidbit - the dreaded phrase “nomen dubium”, or “uncertain name”, which invariably leads to grave disappointment and gnashing of the teeth.

The bullfrogs are making a comeback, from last year, in the ornamental ponds. They radiate smugness, and if I had such fine green bands on my legs, I would too.


The population seemed to have declined toward midsummer of last year, and we suspected the resident red-bellied water snake seen last July 5. Perhaps it’s not around this year, or maybe it’s just waiting for the bullfrogs to reach some perfect stage of tastiness. At any rate, we haven’t seen it.


Meanwhile we’ve had several weeks of numerous craneflies up here toward the house, and maybe that’s why the frogs are so smug.

This one is probably one of the Nephrotoma species, previously observed May 18 2007. I’ve seen that one, presumably Nephrotoma ferruginea this year as well, and in the same places down near Goulding Creek.



Chen Young’s very fine cranefly key suggests (if this is Nephrotoma), that the species may be N. macrocera, or N. tenuis. Both fall in the category of having an opaque mesonotum, as opposed to a polished one (the mesonotum is the platelike structure on the back, just back of the head and between the wings). A dark spot on the wings of N. ferruginea seems to be absent here.

All this also brings up the word “cera”, which appears in at least three forms: macrocera, eucera, megistocera, and trichocera. “Cera” means wax, or waxy, but it also refers to a cell, as in a cell of a hive. And so it could be referring to the cells in the wings as marked off by the veins - the shapes and nature of those wing cells are often key to identification.

And so eucera would suggest true cell, as macrocera would suggest big cell, and megistocera suggests grand cell, but if so it doesn’t appear in the key at the species level. Trichocers, though, as in the family of winter craneflies called Trichoceridae, have, as promised by the word, little hairs on the outer margins of the wings.

None of that gets us anywhere, of course!

These are the flowers of Liriodendron tulipifera, Tulip Poplar, Tuliptree, Yellow-poplar, and any number of other common names. It’s not in the poplar family though, but rather the magnolia family and so shows the typical primitive evolutionary characters of the Magnoliaceae - tepals instead of sepals/petals, lots of stamens, and so forth.

Unless they’ve discovered the fallen flowers on the ground, many will never have seen them. I’m not sure what the age of the tree is before flowering for the first time but they are fast growers and so the flowers are typically way high up and not easily visible. The tree may be named for the shape of the leaves but the gaudy flowers hold up as well.

The flowers are on their way out here, but have been out since about the first of May. The tree is seldom found as a native west of the Mississippi, but does grow as far north as New England and even Ontario where flowering starts around the first of June.


Around here the abundant and generous flowers provide the main honeyflow for honeybees. For the casual beekeeper there’s usually some anxiety lest a late frost kill the flowers during development or presentation.


I hadn’t realized that there were distinct ecotypes of Liriodendron, but Forest Encyclopedia lists a number. The tree is not usually very moisture tolerant but there are populations known that are more tolerant than others, even found in swampy areas. This is a coastal plains ecotype, and its growth rate and ability to grow in sandy soil means it can be found south into Florida. Looks like there are photoperiod dependent ecotypes as well, distributed from the northern limit of the range (long days) to the southern limit (short days).

Hostplants database lists over a dozen species of moths and butterflies whose caterpillars use tulip poplar. These include a couple of swallowtail species, luna month, io moth, cecropia moth, and prometheus moth. There’s an obscure gracillariid, Phyllocnistis liriodendronella, whose name implies a very close relationship with tulip poplar.

This is a very common species around here, and I’ve certainly posted many photos of the gnarly appearance and cavities of our older specimens. They’re probably the same age as many of our other tree species, but have achieved a much greater size, a testament to the growth rate. Their presence is an indication of later succession, but not an indicator of climax, since the seedlings need a lot of light to survive and grow. So eventually the older trees, not being replaced by younger ones in the oldest parts of the forest, will die and the complexion of the forest will change considerably.

Over the last few days it’s gradually struck me that this has been a magnificent spring. Early flowering plants have been spectacular, tree leafing has been generous, the dead leaves and litter have seldom crackled with dryness as I take my walks. Daytime temperatures have not yet achieved any height of discomfort, and nights have been cool, remarkably so, or so it seems.

I looked back through some data and did a little adjusting since we haven’t yet come to the end of May. I’m not sure I can see what the difference is. Our average high in May is only 0.2 degF below the long-term average high for May; our average low 2.2 degF below the long term. Even compared to last May which I remember as sweltering the differences are not great: our high temperatures to date average 78 degF, compared to 81 degF last May. Our average low is no more than 0.1 degF from last May.

Rainfall? Not so much - the year to date is 14.8 inches, compared with 13.4 inches last year. That 1.4 inch (10%) may be significant, but surely not compared to the longterm expectation through May 21: 20.7 inches. By that measure we’re only at 72% normal, and last year were at 65% normal, a trivial-seeming difference from last year when compared to the longterm normals.

Maybe it’s the extremes. By the end of May last year the temperatures had gone over 90 degF four times. We haven’t broken 90 yet, this year, and it looks like we won’t by the end of May this year, either. Then too, while our total rainfall is still around that 70% mark it has at least been distributed regularly. Hardly a week has gone by that we haven’t gotten at least some wetness.

Whatever it is, the bluebirds don’t care. This family of six were practicing flying and eating and stuff, a couple of days ago.


Around here, you have to look for the birds, unless you recognize enough bird calls to know what’s around. Birds are wary here, and they have too many other interests. I wouldn’t have know the bluebird family was even there if I hadn’t gone looking through the canopy.


In town, on the rare occasions when we visit friends, the density (if not the variety) of birds is striking, particularly how close they’ll let you get, and especially if they’re being fed. Here, I think the variety is greater - certainly there are many warbler types that I think would puzzle my urban acquaintances.


Several weeks ago we had fairly large numbers of bluejays in the area. They didn’t come close but they did move about the trees, calling raucously. It will surprise many, but we seldom see bluejays. They ignore the feeders (on those occasions when we try the feeding experiments) and while I think they’re still around, they don’t make their appearance evident at all. Feeders will attract the usual riot of titmice and chickadees, cardinals and purple finches, some sparrows, but unlike what I see in town, carolina wrens ignore a feeder every bit as much as the bluejays. Yet they too, are around. I hear them close by the house, see them frequently, and I especially see them haunting the low places in and around the creek banks, a habit I bet few know of.

It would be disappointing if I were a constant, expectant bird feeder. But I think all this shunning is a reflection of something good. The birds are certainly there - we hear the cacophany in the early morning and then again at night. But what’s out there in those woods is of more interest to them than what we could offer.

Yesterday was a fairly busy day, with a number of surprises. In the evening a series of thunderstorms blew over the area, ultimately delivering 0.16 inches of rain to our house. I’m still watching the CoCoRaHS map develop this morning to see what others got. Unfortunately, in this regard only, the Oglethorpe County rainfall measuring network and CoCoRaHS users were in a conference room at the OC Library for a get-acquainted meeting so we all sort of missed the rain. It was nonetheless a good and productive meeting.

One reason I want to view the maps is that the storm system, of which at least some portion blew over us, was concentrated in an east-west band mainly south by 40-100 miles, and it was a spectacular radar image once I got home. It seems to have produced extremely intense electical activity - I’ve never seen such a concentration of lightning strike icons. Unfortunately, those counties are where the fewest cocorahs observers are, but they should still provide some interesting data.

Yesterday’s walk presented me with the very nice Matelea, possibly M. carolinensis, near the top of the southwest ridge.

(BTW, the plant in the center right is a Spotted Wintergreen, Chimaphila maculata, aka Striped Prince’s Pine. Some call it Pipsissewa, but that’s the common name more associated with the more succulent, larger C. umbellata.)


While I’ve presented Spinypod, or Climbing Milkvine, before, I’ve never seen the flowers in such a fine clustering inflorescence before, and have to wonder if it’s a different species despite its habitat similar to what Glenn *swears* is Carolina spinypod. Clearly we need to get these things sorted out since we are the lucky recipients of at least two and possibly more species of milkvine.


Finally, this new female box turtle presented herself just south of the Kat Semetary, across the little gully. She’s very light-colored, with a much more yellow pigmentation, as opposed to the darker reds and oranges I often see. I think that makes #14, with six spotted so far this season.


The usual documentary thumbnails:

Not sure if this is going to work, but browsers should be able to handle it.

I saved the front page US daily map image at CoCoRaHS for each day between April 1 and May 18, then used an animation program to stitch them all together into an animation. You should be able to view this in a new page by clicking the link below.

By the way, that map of the US on the front page, the one with the dots, is the current accumulation of data. Click on it for an enlargement, then click “get map” again to refresh. It’s fascinating to watch it in the early morning as participants add their data. By noon it’s fairly complete.

ADDITION: Just in case it’s not clear, this is not a governmentally provided set of data. Thousands of people like me added to it yesterday, and the day before, and so forth. Just in case you were confused.

Note to dialup: that is a 457kb file.

Lots of different lepidopterans about in the last few days, mostly nondescript diurnal moths fluttering high in the oaks. Eastern tailed blues, American ladies, the occasional eastern tiger swallowtail, all of which we’ve seen here before.

I idly photographed a Coreopsis in flower, hoping for a decent image of the flying insect here. That didn’t turn out but I’m not sure how I failed to notice the caterpillar until I looked at the photograph later. Tsk. I’m not even going to try to figure these out.

This one was easy. The snout gives it away, and since there’s only one North American species that is regularly found north of the US-Mexico wall, it must be American Snout, Libytheana carinenta. There were several of these puddling, and when they do, they’re nervous and flighty. But when perched on a roost as this one was, they’re calm and collected. Still wouldn’t open its wings, though. The caterpillars of this species apparently go for hackberry, Celtis occidentalis. Well, we have plenty of that.

This one was resting briefly in the oregano. In philosophical opposition to the snout above, this skipper wouldn’t *close* its wings. So I wasn’t able to detect the silver spot that would have identified this as a silver-spotted skipper, Epargyreus clareus.

However I don’t think that’s what it is anyway. If zipcodezoo is right, then the small brown triangle fully enclosed by the gold bars on the wings would be diagnostic for a hoary edge (skipper), Achalarus lyciades. Regardless, both species prefer legumes as a caterpillar host plant: beggar-lice, honey locust, lespedeza, kudzu, wisteria, and pea and bean.


Finally, I recovered the rambunctious male box turtle of Saturday May 10, after he’d spent a week of wandering about 100 feet.

He’s every bit as charismatic as he was a week ago, and did not care to withdraw himself even upon handling. I’m not sure a week is long enough to constitute a “rediscovery”, but I think he deserves the name Ernest.

In comments a couple of days ago, F. Almighty alerted me to CoCoRaHS, the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network. I took a look at it and thought about it for a day and then I registered.

During that time Arcolaura had posted a thoughtful comment on a concept she’s calling “root shift.” I mean to address this more specifically in the next couple of days but go over to her site and offer some feedback. Bev has for a long time promoted the idea of “citizen science”, and of course yesterday I posted a gripe about the upcoming crop of students. It all seemed to come together in some way that I have yet to work out.

Before I say anything else, let me say this: get over to the CoCoRaHS page, and register. Better yet, get your kids to do it, if you have kids. There is simply no excuse not to - participation in citizen science could not be easier, nor the instant gratification so great. If you have an interest in the weather, and who does not?, you can add to a daily database that provides unique and valuable information. If you can read a rain gauge, remember to read it every morning by 7am, have enough access to the internets to log on and put in one number and hit submit, then that’s it! It occupies about 5 minutes of your time, or better yet (again), your kids' time. CoCoRaHS would like everyone to use the same rain gauge, so there is that investment (I ordered mine yesterday, even though I have a good one), and they would like everyone to have participated in at least an online training session.

From their "about us" page:

The network originated with the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University in 1998 thanks in part to the Fort Collins flood a year prior. In the years since, CoCoRaHS has expanded rapidly with over 9,000+ observers in thirty states. Folks in many parts of the country have shown interest in having their state join the CoCoRaHS Network in the not too distant future. (for further information on the origins of CoCoRaHS, check out http://radarmet.atmos.colostate.edu/~rob/hail/origins.html ). Click here for a look at the order of states admission to the network.

Now not all states are yet a part of it, but many that are not, are coming online in 2008 - check the home page for CoCoRaHS for the listing. Georgia just came online May 1, due to the efforts of a few interested folks. California goes online in October, it looks like. HAHA - Georgia beat California, neener neener.

I took a few screenshots because I think it’s pretty impressive. As I said, there’s instant gratification, and your results are updated fairly instantly onto the maps. And so I can enjoy refreshing the Oglethorpe County map (there are *12* active participants in Oglethorpe - imagine that!) during the course of the early morning to see my fellows gradually adding their data along with mine. The power of the internets, used the way it should be!

Here’s the US map on May 11, the Mother’s Day storm system, for rain that fell from 7AM May 10 to 7AM May 11. You can pretty much tell the states that don’t participate yet - Washington, California, Minnesota, Arkansas (and isn’t that a pity, considering), but many of those are coming online soon. The gray dots are reports of no rain, and those are extremely important. ALWAYS enter the zero for no rainfall - that negative evidence is just as good as any rain at all, even better.

Just look at Oregon: you can see where the rainshadow cast by the mountains is just by viewing the transition from blue dots to gray ones.




Here’s the map of Georgia on the same day, with portions of surrounding states. Unfortunately a lot of folks who are registered didn’t add their data if there was no rainfall. But they should have! And you can see that there are empty counties - Georgia needs a lot more participants, particularly if you live in a rural area. CoCoRaHS ultimately would like to see active participants every few square miles, and especially in rural areas. But not bad, really, considering that Georgia has only been online for less than three weeks.




Here’s what you see when you look at the station map for Oglethorpe County. I’m down there at near the southwestern boundary with Clarke County. Notice that my station, GA-OG-12, is right next to GA-OG-3, the labels overlap. That’s my neighbor up the street. But those data are not redundant, because even a mile away rainfalls can be different, as everyone knows. And that’s another thing - yes of course there are professional weather stations, but they’re so far and few between, nothing like this density. And as the May 9 Catch points out, climatologists WANT to know the results of their predictions.




And so on May 11, nine of the twelve Oglethorpe County participants gave climatologists and other interested parties these data. I’m the 2.00 inches of rain, but just north of me two folks only got half that, whereas Lexington got slightly more than that.

It’s that degree of resolution that makes this so valuable, something that cannot be achieved professionally.




Another benefit: yesterday’s email exchanges with the Oglethorpe County Coordinator, as well as with the Georgia Region 1 Coordinator, introduced me to a couple of great folks whose interests overlap considerably with mine, and not just in the arena of measuring rainfall. And as you know, I have daily rainfall measurements, for our house at SBS, going back to May 2002. They may actually turn out to be of some use!

The Georgia State Climatologist, David Stooksbury, has made his report on the first four months of the year, and it’s not good news. You can find a powerpoint presentation on the University of Georgia College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences drought page, along with a lot of other neat stuff. Level Four water restrictions will remain in place for 55 counties in Georgia.

Basically, the winter recharge was simply insufficient to place us even at the level we were at this time last year. And with La Niña still in place, the forecast is for a hot and continuing dry summer. To give one example, Lake Lanier, Atlanta’s primary water source, is 11 feet below normal at the beginning of May. This is much lower than at the same time as last year, so we begin the dry period with even less in resources than those that led to last year’s crisis.

I’ve been toying with additional presentations that illustrate the extent of the drought for us.

From the data for Athens, here’s a plot that shows the accumulation of precipitation throughout the year for 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 through April. The red line is the rainfall expected to accumulate through the year, by monthly average from 1920-present. By this presentation the current drought clearly began in 2006, and intensified in 2007. But 2008, the short green curve, is certainly not very promising.


Here’s another way to look at it. Again the red line is the average expected, but now I’ve added it on for each year from 2005 to present, giving a continuous expectation. The green line shows the reality, which continues to diverge from expected.

It’s the blue line, the difference between expected and measured, that tells the story more visually. It’s plotted using the left-hand axis, and clearly indicates that the decline in accumulation began in January 2006 and continues.


If we were going by Athens data, we would have to wonder why anyone would think the drought is over (and there are plenty who do). But what about the rest of Georgia (or for that matter, to place things in some perspective, the rest of the US)? Variation in rainfall over even the state of Georgia is fairly high - for instance, the southern portion of the state is considered to be in a lower state of drought at this time.

Here’s a composite from NOAA graphics that shows the precipitation anomalies during four different time periods. They range from the top left, over the last 30 days, to the bottom right, over the last year. As you go toward the bottom right, extremes tend to get ironed out and white predominates. Not for much of the southeast, though - sections remain brown, indicating anomalously low rainfall that has persisted for a year.

And in Georgia, those persistent areas of brown lie primarily in the northern half of the state (in Alabama the situation is even more widespread). There’s a lot more going on here, but I’ll let those with their own regional interests address the rest.


Using NOAA’s Climate at a Glance page, I selected Georgia and then extracted numbers for the precipitation and temperature both seasonally and annually. From my own data for Athens, I produced a parallel table. These are for the years 1990-present, and show trends over a longer period than merely the last three years.



The decline in rainfall for Athens is about twice that of Georgia as a whole. Georgia and Athens both experience a trend toward a decline in rainfall during the winter and spring months, the most important time of the year - the recharge months.

The biggest difference is the considerable decline in rainfall for Athens during the summer months - there has actually been a small increase in summer rain over the entire state.

A trend toward an increase in temperatures is seen for all seasons except one - winter. For both Athens and Georgia in general, the winter months have become colder. But we must take both precipitation and temperature into account here, and with a drier winter you’d expect clearer skies that allow more heat to escape by radiation, so a reasonable hypothesis is that winter shows a temperature/precipitation connection.

One of the reasons this has been bugging me is the reaction I’ve had from a number of folks over the last few months. There are those who pay attention on a short-term basis, and so are thrilled with the winter rain this year, not realizing how paltry it really was, and not having connected the dots between recharge and a hot, dry summer. I think this is the larger group, or at least I hope so because the other group is extremely depressing.

This group includes my students, along with a certain type of local, and their attitude isn’t just limited to sneering observations on anthropogenic climate change, but extends to conservation of any sort, whether it be water or gasoline for their cars. It’s not too surprising, though dismaying still, that they don’t care about what’s going on in Athens. My students, who are mainly young adults, will point out that they don’t actually live here, and so they don’t have to worry about local concerns. But this is just a strawman - they don’t participate in voting or concerns even local to where they (or their parents, actually) do live. What’s really dismaying is the arrogance and lack of concern with which they’ll comfortably lecture me that there’s no chance that they’re going to stop buying crap and ease off on the driving. No, they don’t have time or inclination to recycle, either, conservation is really out of the question. And as for their thoughts on the welfare of other living species, well, that’s so distant from any of their immediate concerns that we have no common ground to communicate from. They’re genuinely puzzled that this should be an issue.

And - I saved this for the last - this group includes my *biology* students. They’re reasonably good students, they’re on a science or pre-professional track, and they really don’t care.

For the last week or so I’ve been seeing these Red Mirids (aka Scarlet Plant Bug), Lopidea spp. We won’t even try to go further than genus on this one. Discover Life lists 88 species and identification probably requires keying at the microscopic level. The ones at left were found on Dichanthelium commutatum, or Variable Witch-grass. The bright red and contrasting black of this true bug (Hemiptera, Heteroptera, Miridae) is an aposematic warning that this bug may not taste good. One species in this genus, L. robiniae, black locust bug, has been found to make nasty long chain alcohols and aldehydes, and squirt them out. That may or may not apply to these, but I’ll bet there’s some version of that chemical defense here too.

It turns out there’s a mimic, the locust leaf miner, Odontota dorsalis, that dishonestly takes advantage of the locust leaf bug’s coloration, though it does not itself make nasty chemicals.

The thumbnails below may be the same Lopidea species as the two above, or a different one. It’s possible that species specialize on different plants, and if so then perhaps it’s relevant that these are found in abundance right now on whatever buckeye species (Aesculus. sylvatica?) is growing in the sun on the deck. Notice two of the photographs show the piercing stylets in action. Nice red eyes, too!


There are a number of words that relate to mimicry and coloration, and they’re confusing. Without involving the mimics themselves, there are two ways that organisms use appearance as protection:

The first is cryptic coloration, or what is also called apatetic coloration, where an organism blends in with its surroundings.

This is in contrast to warning coloration, or aposematic coloration, where the appearance is usually eye-catching, and warning of some kind of defense.

When mimics are involved, they are posing as the model, that which they emulate. In apatetic coloration, the model is the surroundings.

When the mimic is posing as an aposematic model, and the mimic is itself harmless, or palatable, the mimicry is called Batesian. Batesian mimics must be careful, because their presumptuous strategy will fail if they become too numerous in relation to their model. Predators will then learn that the appearance means tasty and harmless, rather than disagreeable or painful. In that sense, Batesian mimics are frauds, visual parasites that benefit at the expense of their model, and we can imagine many examples in human society.

It also happens that two species that are legitimately unpalatable or defensible come to resemble one another. This is called Mullerian mimicry, and serves to accentuate or underscore the aposematic coloration. This doesn’t constitute fraud, which is one way to remember the difference between Batesian and Mullerian mimicry.

That is merely the simplest layer of definition and distinction. There are also words that describe more subtle resemblances, such as the resemblance of, say, two species of caterpillars to each other because they each assume the apatetic resemblance to pine needles. Cryptic, or apatetic coloration, can be seen as protective (procryptic), as in moths that resemble the bark upon which they rest, or as aggressive (anticryptic), such as the wormlike tongue of an angler fish, which tantalizes and draws its prey into reach.

If you care to delve into those levels of subtlety, here’s a rather quaint and confusing discussion. Scroll down to the section “mimicry.”

It’s implied, though never overtly stated, that mimics are animals, though the model can certainly be a plant. Are there any plant mimics? If so, Smilax would surely have its share!

(Actually, it occurred to me that there should be examples of plants that make flowers that produce nectar (at considerable expense), mimicked by plants with similar flowers that produce no nectar. Such mimics would get away with the benefits of pollination without having to produce the expensive gifts. That’s fairly insidious on several different levels, insofar as a pollinating insect is at a loss if it doesn’t still attempt all flowers, whether real or bogus.)

(Actually, I should further refine my question, since yes, there are plants that mimic animals (the Australian orchid that mimics its wasp pollinator shape and pheromones is an excellent example). So: Are there plants that mimic plants? Or plants that mimic their surroundings? If not, is it a timescale thing that prevents this, or our notice of it?)

Back in January I spent some time obsessing about the prickly vine Smilax, and in particular, Smilax bona-nox, or Saw Greenbrier. Here are the inflorescences of this vine, now appearing in trees high above. This particular one had been blown down so I was able to photograph it more closely. Looks like a female plant, with pistillate flowers as judging by the stigmas atop the swollen ovaries. I suppose that means I should be looking for male plants and staminate flowers, just to be complete. Not very showy, colorwise, but a nice geometry to the simple umbel!

This morning’s low of 43 degF (48 degF in Athens) is the final result of the cold front that has been moving through enthusiastically since the rain ended Sunday. It lacks 4 degF for a record-breaker on May 13. So perhaps a blue theme is in order.

To start with, another box turtle:


I ran across this fellow down by Troll Rock yesterday. He’s Number 13 overall, the fifth of 2008, and he doesn’t resemble any of the previous discoveries. He’s also not feeling well - definite signs of some respiratory problems with bubbling at the nose and a lethargy pronounced even for a box turtle. Definitely blue.


On the west side of the deck, completely limited to the shady understory, were these very abundant Spiderworts, Tradescantia. I’m a little surprised to search through the blog and discover that I’ve only dealt our spiderworts a glancing blow or two - here on Aug 10 2005, for instance. The species we have are fairly good citizens, and I’m not sure why I haven’t elaborated on those that grow on the slopes of the hardwood forest - Glenn and I spent a considerable time investigating them last year. This population on the west-facing deck slope may or may not be the same species as that that grows in much sparser abundance on the east-facing slope of the hardwood forest.


The predominate character of both populations is that of hairy stems, plus a nice compact growth habit. Of the thirty or so species, I’ve eliminated those that are geographically unlikely, or glabrous (without hairs) and narrowed this one down to three: T. subaspera (Zigzag Spiderwort), T. hirsutiflora (Hairyflower Spiderwort), or T. hirsuticaulus (Hairystem Spiderwort). North American Flora is helpful in this regard. Clearly a physical collection is going to be a requirement.


There was some enthusiasm for whatever the flowers were offering:


As long as we’re on the theme of blue, the Toadflax of a month ago is nearly gone, but Clasping Venus' Looking-glass (Triodanis perfoliata) has ascended.


Like their predecessors, these plants are sunloving and were found on the southfacing deck field.


The tiny fly, a syrphid of some kind, was clearly enjoying its discovery.

That brings up a similar syrphid fly, also very tiny, that I caught on Apr 25 feeding on the nectar from what I think is Sweet Cicely, Osmorhiza claytonii. It grows in abundance during April and I mentioned it last year, Apr 8 2007.


Some differences between the two flies here, I think, but I’m not going to even attempt to go further than “syrphid” here. Look at how flat that abdomen is!

By dawn, yesterday’s storms were pretty much done, having delivered here 2.00 inches of rain (only 1.01 inches claimed in Athens, which is odd, since I would have thought the rain coverage and intensity much more homogeneous than that). The rest of the morning the weather pretty much sulked, with cloudy skies and temperatures in the mid-sixties, so I decided to grab my gps, and combine a mapping expedition with some exploration.

Here’s a screen capture of the local area from google earth. The white road running along the bottom and lower right is Wolfskin. I’m not sure I’ve ever indicated the geographical relationship between our home and WVFD, so I’ve indicated those too. It’s about 2 miles from our house to the fire station, travelling by car. (Looks like I could walk there about a mile through the woods!)

I’ve also indicated the results of the gps measurements in yellow lines, depicting roads cut through the woods. This area is more or less undeveloped, except for timbering and for use by hunting camps in the autumn and early winter. Technically I’m not supposed to be there, and I certainly wouldn’t be during hunting seasons, but under the circumstances it’s probably ok, and I was curious.

I should mention that I put the latitude and longitude of my gps readings directly into Google Earth. That’s the software, not the interactive google maps website. As far as I can tell you can’t put coordinates into google maps or yahoo! maps. Could be wrong about that. The points that appeared were spot on as far as recognizable landmarks were concerned.

Another feature that google earth (the software) now offers is a “sun mode”. I used that here, illuminating the land features as if it were 7:30AM. That means that the dark areas are westward-facing slopes, and the light areas are either high elevations, or east-facing slopes. A way of getting contours without cluttering up the image with contour lines, although it’s compromised a bit by vegetation colors. You can actually tell what part of the land is planted in pines, and what part contains deciduous trees.


This, btw, is a parcel map of the area, with the parcel in question outlined in red. It amounts to about 300 acres (NOT the size we’re considering!). I’ve copied and pasted the portion that more or less corresponds to the above image.


That land has been owned by several entities in the last couple of decades. It was owned by Champion Paper Company for many years before finding its way into the current foreign ownership.

Here’s a portion of the above view, along with numbers representing photographs thumbnailed below. The added orange lines indicate potential boundaries for a new purchase, and is Goulding Creek. From the point marked “#1” north to the “Deck” is a crude road that we’ve photographed and presented several times in the last few weeks, so I won’t belabor that here. That little road winds down from the south clearing, and then back up to the deck. You can actually see the scar of the “deck” at the northern terminus of the road.


The thumbnails, left to right:

#1: A clearing at the other end of the deck road, which is joined to a more-travelled road (#3) by a less-travelled loop (#2). #3 shows a broad field established to the right of the road (and yes, those are thistles in the forest margin). Periodically along the road are maintained fields, probably as wildlife attractants for hunting.


#4 is a junction which to the left in the photo should have taken me back along a loop, but I wasn’t able to find the continuation of the road in that direction, so I tried the offshoot in the photo. That took me along about a quarter-mile of fairly well-travelled road to a dead-end field (#5). The majority of trees in this area of upland are pines and young hardwoods, such as sweetgum, maple, and tulip poplar. This is probably a result of timbering. Get down in the hollows, which I did not, and there is a different variety (though not necessarily more variety, nor more mature).


Finally, I did find this very pretty, presumptive Painted Skimmer, Libellula semifasciata. Another Libellula! They seem to be coming out in force these days.


The range for this species seems to be “eastern US”, but it certainly seems to extend into at least southeastern Canada as well.


By this time, around 1pm, the sky had cleared and the winds were picking up ferociously, for what we’re used to. I returned via the deck road, made my way north along Goulding Creek, which hadn’t risen much at all. In fact, although there were a few puddles here and there, the ground absorbed that 2 inches of rainfall very quickly.

The winds blew strongly and gustily throughout the afternoon and evening, with treetops tossing back and forth in the turbulent atmosphere. No apparent damage.

Here’s the weather this early Sunday morning. We oughta get a bit of rain out of this one. Can’t miss!


We’ve been in a tornado watch since late yesterday afternoon, but up until 3AM the weather was calm. The watch has been extended several times, now to 10AM. Right now, most of the lightning is down around Columbus, 150 miles southwest of us, but I did manage to recover this cloud to cloud discharge.


And because we are what we are, a nice Libellula vibrans, Great Blue Skimmer. He was actually a rather small one. Apparently the white face is diagnostic.

This morning I was awakened at 3:30 by the sound of thunder. This wasn’t scheduled to happen, though it was a perfectly good time to get up.

Apparently a tiny thunderstorm had developed just over our heads. Within a few minutes it had developed into a fairly substantial zone of instability, and with the last hour of rolling thunder and frequent lightning mixed with spates of rain we’ve all been having a cheerful time of it.

So where did this come from? We *are* scheduled for potentially spectacular thunderstorms later tonight as a cold mass collides with a magnificent sending of warm wet air on its way at this very moment from the Gulf. But this little episode of instability was quite a nice surprise.

Thursday night’s rain left Friday morning wet and drippy. I had another agenda that I’ll mention at some future date but part of it was documenting the bank along Goulding Creek as we move upstream from the western portions of the potential new property to the old. Just before we get to the old property line we encounter an S-curve in the creek, which comes into the photo from the center left, turns sharply at center, flows past us at the lower left, and then snakes back around unseen to the right, behind where I’m standing.


You can make out the high bank on my side of the creek straight ahead, and the big mass of deposited soil on the far side just ahead of me. That’s the result of periodic floods, which in their furious rush scour out the banks ahead of the flow, and then drop the soil and sand in the lee of the flow. It’s a story told many times along Goulding Creek as it winds through our little watershed.

The walk eventually landed me at the point at which the old roadcut crosses Goulding Creek, the site of so many previous investigations. Looking into the floodplain, you can barely see the roadcut as a depression in the foreground, now covered with Smallanthus, Bearclaw, on the right, giving way to Verbesina, Crownbeard, on the left.


If you walked down that roadcut and headed into the the vanishing point of darkness, you’d eventually arrive at SBS Creek, flowing downstream from left to right. Here, for fun, are a couple of photos, the left taken March 9, and the right taken May 9. What a difference two months make!


And that’s where I found the fourth box turtle of 2008, apparently in high anxiety. Or maybe he, and it is a he, is just happy to see me.


I am always hoping for a re-encounter with an old friend, but was fairly sure this one was new. And so he is - the pattern of spotting is unique and actually fairly unusual. The individual spots, usually connected into ideographlike patterns, remain unconnected and isolated here.

The usual documentary thumbnails:


Finally, a little puzzle. Connect the dots:

	On my way back up to the house, and at the start of the big gully, I stopped to photograph a wolf vaccinium, and found this bone, about six inches long and fresh enough to have flies investigating the shreds of meat still attached. I didn’t check the general area so can’t be sure, but the bone is certainly isolated from any larger kill.
However, within five feet was this artifact. The isolated bone. The fallen balloon. The silly conclusion.

We got a little rain relief last night, 0.29 inches, about twice what Athens got. Meanwhile I’ve been watching evapotranspiration climbing as the trees leaf out and the temperatures rise. ET has climbed 20-fold in the last month, from a winter’s end of usually 0.01" to 0.20" most dry days now. We hardly dare but to skirt around the issue, since there are surely those that but they understood it would suggest that cutting down trees might be a solution to the problem of water reserves. Fortunately them ones are none too bright.

I’ve been good about letting dragonflies sit in photo folders, but I have to let this one out now. In fact, there are two of them, both individuals spotted on the same day about a thousand feet apart. If this is a Twelve-spotted Skimmer, Libellula pulchella, then it’s new for me and adds to the collection of Libellula. I like the deep chocolate brown coloration. The twelve spot designation is obvious - three dark brown blotches on each of the four wings.

I’m guessing that the individual above, and this one below, to both be females, although I am not looking at the terminal appendages. I’m going by the new word, “pruinescence”, that I learned at bugguide. Pruinescence is the appearance of pigment atop the old which imparts a frosted appearance, and it usually occurs in males as they mature. Common whitetails are great examples of this, but the Libelluidae also sport this trait, and this species shows it as additional frosty white spotting on the wings. So these are either females or immature males.




If you go to google and click on the maps tab, then zero in on your location, you’ll probably be presented first with a terrain map (if not, click on that tab). Why should you do that? Because these are very neat, and surely everyone should know their terrain!

Here’s the immediate area between Wolfskin Road and Black Snake Road that shows our current property in yellow (very roughly). The contours show that it’s situated on the southeast slope of a large hill, and straddles the hollow through which SBS Creek flows. The added blue is Goulding Creek, at the 600 foot contour above sea level. Within the yellow is the house at about 650 feet, and northeast of the yellow is an elliptical peak that marks about 700 feet. As you’re driving (or biking) along Black Snake Road, you can look southeast and see the rise of the substantial hill of which we’re a part. The orange boundaries include versions of the property we’re considering purchasing. That little contour loop at the north end marks the “deck” that has been featured lately.

A larger view of the area including west Oglethorpe County, in the right 2/3 of the image, and the eastern portions of Clarke (Athens) and Oconee Counties at upper left and lower left, respectively. I think it’s particularly neat how the terrain south and east of Wolfskin Road is much more rugged that that north of Hway 78. That’s the bicycling area, and by that you would know it even if you hadn’t seen it here first.

And finally, an even larger view that now includes Athens at upper left, Watkinsville at lower left, and more of the north and southwest portions of Oglethorpe County (right half).

Yesterday’s walk, a good bit earlier than usual, took me to the deck, that open area of the property we’re trying to negotiate, and then back by way of the knoll that sits up to the north of the house. GIGO:


I cheated a bit on the knoll photo above - I shot obliquely into the morning sun so that the contrasts were exaggerated, but it really is that vibrant. The cool season grasses are thick and luxurious and I’m sure I know people who are screaming to get out the mower. But no: walking through the grass disturbs large numbers of tiny moths and other insects. Tiny moths mean tiny caterpillars, and these both serve as food for arthropod and tetrapod predators up the food web, and I’m thinking that that is all to the good. Right now I hear a multitude of the latter expressing their deep appreciation of our forebearance in the matter of mowing.

The visit to the deck was mainly for taking another look at the buckeyes for the developmental abnormalities I mentioned yesterday, but I did admire the Appalachian Ragwort that is coming up through the grasses.


You’ll recall that several years ago I decided to document the box turtles that wander the property. None of these gets a name until a second observation, and that’s only happened once, with Sylvia, a delightful re-encounter indeed. The last couple of box turtle discoveries have been of inexplicably dead animals, so I was pleased to find one on May 4, and then two yesterday, all happily feeding. None of these resembles the previous finds, and so they’re numbers 9, 10, and 11 (neglecting the dead ones). My last find on Sep 4 of last year was the second of only two living turtles spotted in 2007, so this is already a good season!

I’m not sure about including the first one, since it was found across Goulding Creek on the bank opposite the confluence of SBS Creek and Goulding. However, this one may range back across the creek, so I’ll keep it.


This one had a very slight concavity to the plastron so it may be a male, but I’m going with female. If so, then we have documented four males and seven females (living).

Nice red markings on the legs! And a few documentary thumbnails.


The next two were found yesterday morning, and I’m wondering if this was just coincidence or if they were more out and about in the early morning.

This female was nestled down in the litter eating some disgusting soft gray thing. She was halfway up the west slope from SBS Creek, fifty feet downstream from Troll Rock. A very oddly shaped turtle!




And another female, this time with red eyes, which are usually considered male characteristics. Her plastron says otherwise. She too, was engaged in a messy breakfast. I found her just above Goulding Creek on the shady floodplain north of the deck area.

Glenn was examining yesterday’s collection of buckeye leaves when he found something a little interesting. To the left is a photo of a normal bract on the branch of a buckeye. In buckeyes, the leaf is palmately compound, with 5-7 leaflets radiating from a central petiole. In painted buckeye both the first leaf and the young inflorescence emerge from the bud. The bracts are a pair of leaflike organs that cover and protect the bud that contains the developing shoot. When spring arrives, the bracts open up and the new leaves expand. Bracts, like leaves, are terminal organs - they don’t develop into anything else or act as a source of new growing points. Once their role in protecting the new shoot is over, they senesce and fall off.

You can see how the bracts function in the photo below. They’re the curly reddish pair attached to the old twig of last year, and though the new leaves are now greatly expanded you can see how they fit within the enclosure made by those bracts.

But look closely at the tips of the bract at center.

There is a tiny, but perfect palmately compound leaf emerging from the tip of the bract. (This is also true for the other bract in the pair.) Looks like the bract itself is a bit abnormal, more swollen, thicker, and curlier than the normal bract in the first photo. Glenn suggests that the bract or a patch of cells on the bract have been redefined to act as a petiole. The petiole is the stemlike structure that connects the stem to the blade of a leaf and it will also enclose all the plumbing, the xylem and phloem, that nourishes the leaf blade. Here the bract, or a part of it, seems to be acting as a petiolar source, thereby producing leaves, like a petiole normally does. This is not necessarily a genetically transmittable mutation; we’ll have to go back to look at the plant that produced this branch to see if all the bracts look like this. It is a developmental abnormality, but it could have been produced by environment. Temperature, disease, and other insults can cause one organ to develop as another. Or it might be a somatic mutation in a cell that led to the formation of this pair of bracts, but which mutation has not made it into the germ line that produces pollen or egg. Or, and this would be the jackpot, it might be a mutation that is also included in the gametes and then it would be genetically transmissible.

Mutations that produce changes in body parts fall into the group of homeotic mutations. Homeotic mutations cause identity changes in organs, since body shape is defined by homeotic genes. A part that would normally develop into one organ instead develops into another, so you get the peculiar classic examples of legs growing out of the head of a fly, instead of the proper antennae.

Since mutations in homeotic genes redefine body parts, they’re avidly studied. Homeotic genes were first discovered and mapped out thoroughly in animals, and in particular the fruitfly Drosophila, with its enormous collection of spectacular mutations. But the same strategy of using homeotic genes to make a body and to define body parts is also employed in plants, though by a set of genes that is not homologous to that in animals.

And, in plants as well as in animals homeotic mutations have been isolated to map out and understand how the plant body is formed. Mutations in one homeotic gene may convert a petal into a sepal, or a sepal into a leaf. And so a host of such floral mutations in the model mustard plant Arabidopsis thaliana has been exploited, as in fruitflies and other animals, to unravel the molecular genetics of flowering, called the ABC model of floral development.

In plants, homeotic mutations have been unwittingly used as sources for crop and floral varieties. Brocolli and cauliflower, both forms of the species Brassica oleracea, are homeotic mutants that cause inflorescences to arrest and proliferate into chubby edible structures.

Or take cultivated roses, for instance. Cultivated roses have multitudes of petals, but the family Rosaceae is characterized by five petals and many stamens, the male flower parts. Where did all the extra petals come from? The extra petals in the cultivated rose derive from conversion of stamens into petals, and if you look at the innermost petals in the center of a rose you’ll probably see some stamens that seem to be halfway in between being a petal and a stamen.

As for this particular buckeye abnormality, even if it is a transmissible mutation it doesn’t look to be a very successful experiment. The tiny leaves are already rather parched, and seem to have stopped developing as the supporting tissue of the bract senesces and prepares to fall off.

Something a little different from last year - barred owls are asserting their existence. Yesterday, walking along Goulding Creek about noon, I heard one calling very close by. And just now, taking a little break from writing, one just over the hill toward our neighbors and another farther away, were vociferously warning each other off.

Perhaps you’ll forgive yet another dragonfly if I tell you that I’ve refrained from posting a large number of Absolutely Beautiful Photographs of previously blogged cruisers and clubtails. Or maybe not, but nonetheless here is another one.

My trip yesterday took me to the dry, sunny deck area, which has seemed to net a different complexion of odonates, and introduced me to this one:


It appears to be Libellula auripennis, Golden-winged Skimmer. There is another possibility in Needham’s Skimmer but the black legs in this one suggest the former.

Two things: first, the very broad side stripe, unlike the broken segment patterns of so many other dragonflies, perplexed me. And the yellow-white stigma, which is dark-colored in most other dragonflies, was also striking.


A couple of other enlargements accentuating the focus along different planes - the wings in the left thumbnail, and the abdomen in the right one.


Here are two additional observations of dragonflies in the genus Libellula, in the Common Skimmer family Libellulidae. At least I hope they’ve been properly identified:

15 July 2007: Slaty Skimmer, L. incesta, along with Common Sanddragon, Progomphus obscurus.

27 May 2006: Blue Skimmer, L. vibrans.

On to something a bit different that we’re just beginning to investigate: “Preliminary Observations on a Possible Cline of Hybrids between Aesculus flava, Yellow Buckeye, and A. sylvatica, Painted Buckeye.”

I’ve noted for the last few years the flowering in the early spring of our resident Painted Buckeye, a small shrub, generally a meter tall or so, that enjoys the moist, shady understory along the steep slopes close to the little SBS Creek. On 20 March 2008 I posted a photo of the emerging leaves and inflorescence.

I resurrected this previously unposted photo of one typical shrub from April 12 of this year, and it links to a closeup of the inflorescence:


A little more data from earlier posts:

16 April 2006 full flower.

20 April 2005 full flower.

Now for the odd part. All those early flowering shrubs are now making fruits here and there (successful fertilization is not a common event), but there are two other populations of buckeyes that are just now flowering. AND they are occurring in two distinctly different areas. One is in the same locations as the early flowering plants, intermixed with them. The other is a thousand feet away and in quite a different environment.

Here is one such specimen, photographed yesterday, nearly a full month after the early-flowering population was photographed.


One thing unusual about this is that it is 50 feet above the usual elevation for the buckeyes we’ve been calling “painted”, it is quite large, 2 meters, and it’s not unique - this area has a great many specimens, some much larger. And it’s in full sun at an elevation and in an environment that is quite dry. Having attempted some transplants I can at least tentatively say that seed-grown, potted individuals from the shade-loving populations will not survive transfer to drier, sunnier locations.

So we seem to have three populations: one is what we surmise to be “pure” A. sylvatica, growing in the proper shady moist conditions and flowering early.

The other two populations flower a month later. One resembles the “pure” sylvatica population in terms of size and moist/shade preference. The third population of late-flowerers has individuals that are much larger and grow in sunnier, drier conditions.

We suspect that the third population is actually A. flava, Yellow Buckeye, and that the second population is a hybrid between the two species. The hybrid retains the sylvatica shape and preference for moist shade, but has the flava late flowering. Glenn has done an examination of the floral and vegetative characters of some samples I brought back. He suggests that the dry sunny population itself may be a hybrid form, selected for those conditions, in which case those individuals have the flava sun/dry tolerance along with late flowering, but are intermediate in size. He’s identified some characters that we can measure as we move from one location to the other. In all this we’re wondering: where is the *fourth* population, the original “pure” A. flava?

I should add, quickly, that it’s well known that various Aesculus species readily hybridize, and some are even sold as hybrids, selected for appearance. The flava x sylvatica hybrid is known as Aesculus x neglecta. But Red Buckeyes, A. pavia, also hybridize with A. flava, called Aesculus x hybrida, and with A. sylvatica, called “Harbisonii”. Throw in Ohio Buckeye (which we don’t have here, probably), A. glabra, and you have even more hybrids.

But this natural experiment in hybridization and selection by environment is kind of neat. In addition, it extends the period of time in which heavily nectar-producing tubular flowers are available for the hummingbirds, and I’ve actually heard them buzzing about in the last couple of days, down in the hollow.

I did another tour of the possible land extension yesterday, a hike that if properly undertaken requires a couple of hours to complete. My route takes me from one end of the crude mowed road that connects two fields, one at the south end, and one at the north end, and the things that go on there are completely different from the happenings in the lower, moister, shadier areas.

At the south field, I thought this might be one of the heavy hummingbird mimics at first, but no - it turned out to be a cluster of Variegated Fritillaries, Euptoieta claudia. And not just a pair, but up to five. In this photo you can just barely make out a third individual underneath the lower one.


All three are clearly visible here, the one topmost with wings aflutter. These photos were all taken at 1/200 second exposure, which was fine in the bright sunlight. I’ve taken to doing that whenever possible now, insisting on the short exposure time, and adjusting the ISO if necessary to keep the aperture small (high 1/f number) for depth of field.

Even 1/200 second isn’t sufficient to freeze the wings.


Both of these fields are heavily disturbed, with the earth compacted by the tree cutters and harvesters of ten years ago. But the variety of tough grasses and perennials (currently Golden Ragwort) is surprisingly great. This north field, near Goulding Creek and overlooking it by 40-50 vertical feet, was being patrolled by a number of dragonflies that I had not seen before.

This beauty seems to be one of the common skimmers, a Tramea, or Saddlebags, perhaps a Carolina saddlebag or a red saddlebag.


I’m going mainly by the extraordinary vista of brown pigmentation on the hindwings close to the body, which probably gives the name “saddlebags”. It really sets off the wing venation, which is itself multicolored from white above the brown spread to reddish brown along the leading edge of the hindwings.


I saw the first Ebony Jewelwing, Calopteryx maculata, a coupla of weeks ago but now they’re very abundant. They’ve appeared on this blog every year, and who can resist adding another nice female with a pretty green face and thorax?

The word for April around here was “dull”, so much so that it was hard to get the enthusiasm to do the monthly summary of the climate of the month of April, here in Athens. But not elsewhere, it seems.

From the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center, this is a plot of mean temperature anomalies for the US. That’s the difference in the average temperature for this April above or below the average for April over many years, plotted in colors. The anomalies are in Fahrenheit.


Much has remained the same since the month of March, only more so. The northeast US continued to experience warmer than normal temperatures, quite a bit warmer than normal along and east of the great lakes. The US midsection continued to experience colder than normal temperatures. And the Pacific northwest was a *lot* colder than normal this April. Except for the tip of Florida, the southeast US experienced no real anomaly over the month of April.

From the (click through to the monitoring maps from the left sidebar) National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center, this is a plot of mean precipitation anomalies for the US over the month of April:


The US midsection had a surplus of rain in April, much as it did in March. So did eastern North Carolina and Virginia, but elsewhere it was either normal (us) or dry (much of the western US).

One thing that has gradually come to my attention is the persistent deep brown in the above figure that has not changed in at least the last couple of years. That indicates deep drought, and Mexico and the southwest US are the targets. I’ll have to try to do an animation of this - it seems to me that that deep brown has been gradually creeping upward into northern California.

For Athens:

The above figures show that we had neutral temperatures and normal normal rainfall during April. Whether coincidence or not, we had no fire calls either, in April, and I closed out the NFIRS incident reporting for the month with 9999999, no activity. Other than the usual exemplary training sessions, of course.

Here is my plot of high temperatures for the month of April in Athens. As usual, the black dots are for the 17 years 1990-2006 (black dots), 2008 (green line), and 2007 (red line).


As in March, the temperature variations were well within the cloud of black dots, and only once in April did highs reach record levels, on Apr 11. While you can see it in the high temperature graph, it’s the graph of daily lows that shows last year’s cold snap compared to this year’s.


The red line of 2007 dropped down into record lows on April 7 and then remained very low for the next four nights. While we had a cold period a week later, this year, and we certainly fretted about it, the green line of 2008 did not dip nearly so low. Most importantly it didn’t come after three weeks of abnormally high temperatures, as happened last year.

Temperature-wise, April was notable for matching the average monthly high, and ending up less than one degF higher than the average low. April highs in Athens averaged 73 degF, exactly normal. The average low of 49.4 degF was only 0.7 degF above normal but in some ways this might be significant: we’ve been trending toward being lower than average for nightly temperatures for quite some time now. April had only 5 days higher than one standard deviation above the mean, compared to a normal 4.4 days. There were 7 days below one standard deviation below the mean, compared to a normal 5.2 such days in April.

Athens saw only 3.00 inches of rain in April, while out here in Wolfskin we had 3.43 inches. According to the official analysis, Athens averages 3.35 inches in April, though I don’t know what period they’re using for that. But my estimate for Athens averages 3.96 inches 1920-present and 3.09 inches 1990-present. That explains why the Athens accumulation this April rises just to the average accumulation in the figure above.

But this also says that April has in the last 17 years become much drier than it used to be, with only about 75% of the rainfall over the 17-year period, when compared to the 87-year period. We’ve already talked about April, around here, being the most affected month of all in terms of rain.


I continue, against reason, to manually record the experience of daily temperatures, several times a day, in Wolfskin, versus those in Athens. The small figure below links to a larger one on a new page. The larger ones are 150kb or so, but you might not have the interest in them that I do.

As before we see large sweeps from nightly lows to daily highs, but the range is smaller than in Feb and Mar. And the influence of rain and clouds is marked.


Another little graph that plots the difference in temperatures between Wolfskin and Athens. As in March we were often as much as ten degF below the Athens temperatures at night, and generally at least five or six degF warmer at some point during the day. Basically we warm up a lot faster, and then usual achieve higher temperatures. Then we cool off faster in the late afternoon and evening. It appears that the urban heat island effect should be more properly called the urban buffer effect, at least with regard to Athens. Maybe it’s a small city thing.


I’ll continue to link to this neat prognosticator in which you can get variously timed precipitation and temperature outlooks.

Geekstuff:
NOAA’s weekly ENSO update has not changed since March with its forecast for moderate La Niña conditions continuing into summer. This is the tenth month of La Niña conditions in the Pacific.

Finally, and to reiterate the link way above, NOAA has a neat State of the Climate product. By clicking on the year, such as 2007, you can get to monthly and even weekly reports and zero in on regional descriptions that are much nicer than my own.

It was nice to get a chance to take a long walk in the woods. The days have been dry and warm, and the canopy has now completely closed over the long hollow that follows SBS Creek. I was surprised and pleased to find this patch of fleabanes growing in dappled shade on a bank of the creek.


Glenn identified these with near-certainty as Robin’s Plantain, Erigeron pulchellus, and pulchellus means “beautiful”, of course, as we all know. It’s a first here. We have lots of the garden-variety (so to speak) roadside daisy fleabanes (not that there’s anything wrong with that, I like them very much). But this one differs by having much larger, lusher vegetative parts, and the flower heads are several times larger than the daisy fleabanes.


The somewhat gauzy appearance of the clutch of flowers of Crossvine, Bignonia capreolata, is because they’re 40 feet up in the air. I noted a few fallen flowers on the litter beneath the grove of white oaks, and examined the trunks until I found one nearby with the vine growing up it. That led to spying out the flowers. I never see these things flowering near the ground, unlike their unruly, thuggish Trumpet Creeper cousins which flower later in the summer on fences and mailboxes.

Several times I heard hummingbirds going after these. All this winter I’ve been checking out the locations of the near-evergreen vines which were then quite visible way up but are now completely occluded by the canopy.


As long as we’re looking up, there’s this common denizen of our woods, a red-bellied woodpecker. This one escorted me for a distance, and I may have gotten too close to its nest.


Down at Goulding Creek, just next to the creek itself, was this puddling herd of azures, or at least I think so. At one time there were seven of them. Plenty of room, but they wanted to cluster together.


And here’s an unknown beetle, a short distance away. Very tiny, just a few millimeters long, it was fine with me until I started using the flash.

UPDATE: Bev has this one pegged, I think. It’s not a beetle, it’s a bug - Sehirus cinctus, White-margined Burrower Bug. Further, and far more interestingly Bev points to an especially remarkable website that details this species and its maternal care of its progeny. Not the sort of thing you usually think of in insects, other than the social ones. And by the way, that first photo on that page shows the Lamium purpureum, dead-nettle, that this bug is fond of. We’ve got tons of that here.

The other thing is that I just happened upon this insect, and idly photographed it. I’ve felt bad about neglecting beetles, and so included this one that I thought was a beetle, but which isn’t. And that has led to this, that, and the other thing, with the upshot that it turned out to be far more interesting than I idly thought. And if that isn’t nice, what is?



Then it flipped its antennae up, and began scurrying along the surface of the sweetgum sapling leaf it was resting on.


No idea. Leaf beetle family? For a time I thought tortoise beetle of some kind, but no, probably not. One of the characters even at the family level has to do with the shape of the third tarsal segment, but the photographs here are not good enough to make that out.

One of the pieces of information that we weren’t able to get out of the hospital was when Glenn would be discharged. This was of some concern since we’re in the middle of finals week, the mass chemistry slaughter (ALL chemistry finals, encompassing at least a coupla thousand students, 7-10pm!) was Thursday night, and I was in high demand. The brief conversation with the post-op nurse suggested a 24-hour observation period so I scheduled a few appointments to end at 3pm.

As it turned out the surgeon was ready to discharge Glenn mid-morning, but as that was the start of the appointments I’d made, he had to stay until 3pm, when I did get away and retrieved him. We spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing outside in the pleasant weather, reviewing the adventure.

He has a very nice long incision on the left side of his neck, from just below the ear to just above the collarbone. Blog material! Apparently he was a very good patient, and was up and walking around ICU all morning. In fact, there’s no discernible effect of what must have been at least a three-hour general anesthesia surgery on him at all. It’s a little rough trying to conform to the prohibitions, when everything seems perfectly normal. The post-op orders, by the way, come from two sources, and are somewhat contradictory. One set prohibits driving for four weeks. The other says, sure, fine, short distances, so long as you feel ok.

What is amazing is the lack of trauma in what you can see with your own two eyes is a significant surgery. We have Dr. Sailors to thank for his skills and expertise in that! And by the way the occlusion did turn out to be a plaque, but unfortunately Glenn didn’t successfully acquire the souvenir, preserved in a little vial, as I’d hoped.

Well, I didn’t acquire my preserved gall bladder from 17 years ago, either, though at least I did get a videotape of the surgery. One thing did intrigue me, as it did then, and was one of the first questions I asked Glenn, concerning something that I’ve never read or heard anyone remark about. “Did you turn off like a light and then just turn back on?” He admitted that that was exactly how it was. And that, to my mind, is one of the most memorable aspects to the whole thing - one moment you’re lying there breathing deep of the fumes and the next moment you’re in a completely new place, feeling totally different. Several hours have passed, a huge amount of work has been done, and you’ve passed through it with absolutely no awareness at all.

So ends the adventure, we hope, and how interesting how quickly the routine resumes.

I see that the grass sk*ppers are returning. I photographed this one on April 27 along the banks of Goulding Creek, resting atop a christmas fern. Unlike the earlier spring skippers, the grass skippers have these striking jet fighter wing stances, and the ones I’ve caught sight of around here are always a rich blend of yellows and oranges, set off by the deep brown markings.


This is probably just another individual among the two that I’ve documented, one June 6 2007 and the other a year earlier, May 7 2006.


I doubt that the 2007 encounter is a least skipper, as I suggested then. In comments, DougT referred to zabulon skipper, and most likely that’s what it is. I see that Doug also recommended photographs of the undersides of the wings, and at least there’s a hint of that in the forewings in the first photo above. So again, it may be a zabulon, or it may be a hobomok skipper. There are probably other possibilities, but at least it appears to be one of the Poanes.

Hard to believe that it’s Thursday. Thanks to all the kind wishes in the last few days, both in comments and by email from friends local and not at all local - it’s been much appreciated.

Glenn did well with the surgery, which appears to have lasted for at least three and maybe four hours. I waited for a call up until 3pm yesterday, when I had to start work and would be unable to answer the phone. I was becoming a bit anxious so I got on the CELL PHONE and called the hospital.

Our hospital experiences have been extremely limited, but Athens Regional Medical Center has always been good - at one time they employed liasons who made sure that persons of interest are kept informed, and maybe they still do. If so, in this case the liason has been rather invisible. But ARMC could do a lot better with their levels of barrier between the hospital’s yellow pages number and the patient. At each level I was met with an inability, expressed in strange incomprehensible accents, to answer the main question, and so forwarded to the next barrier. I almost wondered if reception was being outsourced. The most annoying (and really, this is trivial, sort of, I’m just venting) was the receptionist at Level Three, who suggested forwarding me to the waiting room. “To what end would that help me?” "There might be family members there who could tell you how he’s doing."

To be fair, Glenn and I are unusually pragmatic. The hospital is probably used to the usual drama in which all family members are gathered anxiously in the waiting room, prepared for the worst even in the most routine of surgeries, and rather excited about it all. I should be there, fretting. The problem is that without a clue from the professionals that that’s necessary, I (or Glenn were the situation reversed) must continue with our jobs. Were this truly life threatening, we would certainly be there, jobs be damned. Under the circumstances it would surely seem that the hospital should be pleased to deal quickly, without hindrance, with us, without the drama. It seems that there is no provision for this pragmatic approach that both parties would appreciate under these routine circumstances. At any rate, the waiting room scenario didn’t work.

I was prepared to do battle at this point, and had already felt obliged earlier to establish my status as “THE family member”, with power of attorney, and perhaps it was this mention that had in parallel filtered down to the recovery room in the meantime. As distasteful as seems and unnecessary as it should be, it may be that the dreaded phrase “power of attorney” is the key that opens the lock that concern does not.

Whatever, and fortunately, the CELL PHONE interrupted with a call waiting, and it was the post-op nurse offering a return to competent sanity for us all. She was immediately able to tell me that Glenn was just fine, he’d just woken up 15 minutes before, and would I like to talk to him? Indeed I would, after thanking her profusely, and he sounded great - lucid and wry as always. After a very brief conversation I asked to be returned to her and was able to thank her again and get a little more information about when he would be ready to go home the next day.

I’m afraid I left the previous receptionist hanging, only because I still don’t know how to return from a call waiting, but I’m afraid I’m vindictive - I’d have left her hanging anyway. But these are small issues and refer only to the barricades. The actual professionals in attendence have always been very solicitous once you can get hold of them, and that’s what’s important.

I had just enough time to call Glenn’s father in Wisconsin, who was pleased and relieved, and then my sister to forward the news.

It is great to have the last couple of months come to a tentative conclusion so smoothly. Glenn is in intensive care overnight, but that’s standard, and I’m assuming that he’ll be ready to come home late this afternoon. The kats are at loose ends without him, and so am I.