The 25th box turtle, found along the bank of Goulding Creek just west of the dry creek, was documented as 090525mf.

Most of the time it’s easy to tell whether the plastron is concave (male) or flat. This turtle, which was already boxed up completely when I found it, had a very slight concavity. So it’s hard to tell which it is, which is why the designation is “mf” instead of “m" or ”f."



The color patterns are more finely detailed than on most box turtles I’ve found, with spidery “fingers” descending from the top of the carapace.



At one time there was a website whose owner made an attempt to classify the patterns of eastern box turtles. I finally found the right keywords that hit on it, or rather the AOL explanation that it had been taken down. Fortunately the wayback machine provided a screenshot.

There are two basic patterns with a third that is a mixture of the two. The “crown” pattern refers to the presence of a crownlike pattern on each scute along the very top of the carapace. This turtle does not have that pattern (first thumbnail) although it does have a radiating pattern. The turtle here shows what I think the fellow intended by the classic “crown” pattern.



The other pattern is shown by today’s turtle - it’s referred to as a “sunburst” pattern, and refers to the fingerlike rays the radiate outward, as shown by the second photo above, and the two thumbnails. Not all turtles have these rays - for instance, this one, which is arguably more spotted than radiant or crowned. There’s too much interruption of continuous pigment along a line.

Actually I think the fellow would classify today’s turtle as being a mixture. In context he doesn’t distinguish between the “crown” shape, and the presence of at least some pattern along the top, the crown, of the turtle. And that might be a weakness in the simple description.

So it’s a good start for classifying patterns, but as I look through my twenty five turtles I see, earlier, that there are quite a few that would escape the simple system. It needs some tweaking and analysis of a great many turtles to categorize them as parsimoniously as possible. I think there is some value to a classification of patterns since it makes each turtle easier to remember without referring to an increasing number of photos.

But even so any such system is at best simply descriptive. We might hypothesize that there is some genetics that underlies the pattern, such as spotting in mice or cats. But trying to figure out the genetics in box turtles is not just a very long term affair, requiring years, but also an experiment that requires penning and careful breeding of turtles. Not an easy thing to do, and not something that especially appeals to me.

Today is Danny Elfman’s birthday. Who is Danny Elfman? He’s a fine composer, mostly recognizable for his scores for movies (and television).

His birthday wasn’t something I anticipated, I was alerted to it by the usual birthday clip on NPR this morning. But I got to thinking of the many movies I’ve enjoyed all the more because of his music.

Elfman is much more prolific than the few rather old excerpts here. Most of these are from the wayback machine of my mind, since I’m not much of a moviegoer these days. I went through youtube to find videos that more or less match up nicely with his music.

You’ll get to the video on a new page by clicking on the image. But in the way of youtube, here today gone tomorrow, so don’t tarry.

First up, Beetlejuice. Please note the arachnid on the roof. This is actually the first scene from the movie, so please note that Alec Baldwin starts to show the proper way to handle a spider.



Next, the end scene for Men in Black. (not the rap crap). A great joke to top off a movie of jokes - it tickles me no end. The opening credits are great too, but I couldn’t find a youtube of those.



I may be in the minority for enjoying Mars Attacks!, but Elfman captures the silliness well.



Elfman’s score for Stephen King’s wonderful and sad Dolores Claiborne was much more subtle. Instead of opening or ending credits I’ve chosen the scene in which Kathy Bates ensures that abusive husband David Strathairn meets his end. I don’t think this gives much away - the story is way too involved for this - but superficially it’s potentially a SPOILER. Language may offend the sensitive, and it’s pretty disturbing.

And finally, Tim Burton’s fanciful The Nightmare Before Christmas. Danny Elfman did quite a bit of stuff with Tim Burton - Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, Batman. Elfman himself did voice for Jack Skelton Skellington .

This probably deserves special attention apart from The Month of May in a few days.

The last half of May has been a rainy roller coaster for much of the southeast, especially Florida. Volusia County topped the list of CoCoRaHS totals for May 15-28, with more than 28 inches of rain in a few days. But many other Florida counties received 10 inches or more over the last half of May.

In Georgia, some of the southeast counties, such as Appling, Camden, and Chatham, got up to ten inches of rain in the last half of the month, but most were more moderate, and locally variable. Atlanta counties generally got 1-5 inches, and here around Athens a paltry 0.7-2.2 inches (I observed only 0.67 inches since May 15). Ironically we’ll end the month under average for rainfall.

Despite the only occasional spate of rain we’ve been cloud-covered and unusually cool since mid-May, with temperatures down in the 60s at night and only briefly reaching 80 or so during the day. Despite this humidity is extremely high and an hour or two of yardwork ensures sweat soaked clothing.

The visual weather patterns here, despite the poor rain performance, have been interesting. For the last week weather has been coming from the east, consistently. This is almost unheard of except in late summer. Usually the weather is predictably from the west or northwest, occasionally from the south. In the last day or two prevailing winds are once again from the west northwest. And that seems to mark an end to this notable two-week period.

So what was all this about? I’ve put together a frame by frame animation of weather evolution from surface maps obtained at Unisys. The frames change each second and represent 12-hour snapshots May 15-28. Clicking on the fuzzy image below will bring up the larger and better quality animation in a new window. It’s built by an old program, so you have no control over the animation, and I’ll probably disable it in a few days.

The majority of rain in southeast Georgia and northwest Florida occurs May 18-19. The little image below that links to the animation shows the May 18 weather that produced so much rain.

Warning to dialup - the animation is 1.8 MB.



The green areas are rain events, of course, and the heavy blue lines are cold fronts. The rain just shows the effect of something more important that you can’t tell by this composite: plumes of moisture being belched out from first the Atlantic off the coast of Florida, and then later from the Gulf of Mexico.

The moisture driving in from the Atlantic probably explains our flow of weather from the east. That veered to the south as the source of moisture switched into the Gulf.

It’s only in the first few days of the animation that any significant cold front operates here in the southeast - they disintegrate before reaching us after about May 20. From then on rain is controlled by diurnal convection and instability. That only took place from central Georgia southward - here it was just too cool for instability to develop much. And so that probably explains why we didn’t get much rain, except very locally.

Had it been later in the season, I’d bet those two sources of moisture would have developed into tropical storms or hurricanes.

Here’s a moderately tall Asteraceae member to watch out for. It may be abundant enough locally to be called a pest, especially if you keep a lawn. Since I don’t, I don't:

Pyrrhopappus carolinianus, Carolina desert-chickory, may resemble the nonnative dandelion (Taraxacum) and be found commonly as a lawn weed, but it is a native in the eastern US. Most striking to me is the pale lemon-yellow color. Secondarily, the head is unlike that of a sunflower or typical aster, with ray and disk flowers. Here the head is a cluster of fully formed florets. Kind of a nice plant. There are three species and the two other related ones occur more southerly and westerly.

Not a lot to report on as far as charismatic lepidopterans go, but there are a couple of obscure moths that use the desert-chickory as a larval food source. HOSTS mentions two. A noctuid moth, Schinia mitis, has a small range in Texas and Oklahoma. A pyralid moth, Rotruda mucidella, is obscure enough to get only three google hits.

On the animal side, and fairly close to the plant above, I found my first little wood satyr, Megisto cymela, resting on a leaf. That is said to be a fairly typical encounter. Its underside would have another display of spots but it wasn’t cooperative in that respect.

Its larvae feed on various sorts of grasses, especially orchard grass, kentucky bluegrass, and centipede, so perhaps some would consider it a lawn pest too.



It has a broad range in most of the eastern US. Keep an eye out for it!

I suppose I should be shot for the photo, but this presumptive clubtail landed just briefly, very close by the little wood nymph in fact, and then took off not to be seen again. I don’t believe I’ve encountered it before; the broad “tail,” yellow piping, and green eyes were striking. Perhaps one day I’ll get a better photograph.

(It’s not a lawn pest )

Yesterday’s walk to check out the colony of lady’s slippers was interrupted when a moderately large bird flew up from the ground from very close by.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen a whippoorwill (Caprimulgus vociferus). This one seemed to be considerably larger, and in comparison a much lighter brown, especially the head. I’m guessing it to be a chuck will’s widow (C. carolinensis) on the basis of those two characters but someone else may know for sure.

She was playing the “poor little tasty bird with a broken wing” trick:



She stayed about ten feet from me at all times, pitifully thrashing in the pine straw all the while watching every step I took. I’d advance a little, and so would she. A periodic chirp, very unlike the usual call, seemed to accentuate her agony and maintain my attention.

Then I played a trick of my own. I started retracing my steps back to the presumptive nest. This wasn’t in her programming.



Now she was following me, all the while imploring me with her distraction tactic.



I didn’t let her agonize too long and gave the poor thing a break. She was glad to see me go.



FYI she was in a piny area atop the ridge across the long SBS Creek hollow. Fairly close by there is the meandering logging road, and there it opens into a broad deer browse field. The ground here and there is covered with muscadine.

Her distraction maneuvers were well choreographed. She didn’t flutter about randomly in a panic, as a real wounded bird would. Her wing movements were very coordinated. Sort of like a swimmer, she used them to drag herself along on the ground.

As you already probably know, goatsuckers lay a couple of eggs directly on the ground. No nest is built. Seems like a very precarious way to raise kids.

Looks like we have at least ten solid days of clouds and rain ahead of us. What a difference a year makes!

This modest, homely plant made an appearance outside the front door. Glenn suggested, and I think he’s right, that it’s a blacksnakeroot, Sanicula, either S. canadensis or S. trifoliata. One of the Apiaceae, it goes by the common names of blacksnakeroot, sanicula, and “footprints of spring.”

It was harboring quite a puzzling menagerie yesterday. I have only the vaguest idea of what any of these are. More questions than answers, today.

UPDATE: A couple of identifications via Doug, and thanks for those.

Let’s go with the caterpillar first. That’s about as good as I can get right now. It’s about 2 inches long and holds itself very stiffly. Its modus operandi seems to be to hold onto a stem (or rebar) and thrust itself stiffly onto a leaf.

Doug says a member of the Geometridae. Although I haven’t found much in the way of photographs of larvae, looks like it might be a large maple spanworm - Prochoerodes. It is imaged in my little golden guide, and looks pretty much like it. It is a twig mimic.





This has the appearance of a milkweed bug nymph, or perhaps a larval or nymph form transitioning into an adult.

Doug says it’s an immature ladybug. I’ve seen the younger stage nymph, which you’d never dream would turn out to be a ladybug. This looks like an intermediate stage of maturation.





This wasn’t the only spider nestled into the emergent leaves, but it was the only one cooperating. A very tiny spider, it may be immature. It doesn’t seem to match any of the crab spiders.

Doug doesn’t do spiders .

I ran across the phrase Blackberry Winter in reference to our several nights of near-record low temperatures (mid-40s, F) this past week. I like it. I’ve since found several other phrases: Dogwood Winter, Redbud Winter, but they don’t strike me as so euphonious, nor so timely. Here in deep May, the dogwoods and redbuds have already flowered, but the blackberries are just about right.

Stephen King fans will also recall Strawberry Spring - an anomalously warm, foggy time toward the end of winter, especially in an obscure Maine university setting when serial murders take place.

Around here, Blackberry Winter promises not serial killers, but perhaps serial defibrillations, as the saps begin to run.

Many years ago I ran across a little area in the pine woods in the southeast portion of the property, and was startled to see pink lady’s slippers in flower. Since that time the plants have never flowered again - I’ve checked each year. The number of plants in the colony, as well as their individual size, has diminished with each successive year, too, and this year I could find no plants at all.

So I was very excited yesterday to come across this little colony of Cypripedium acaule, this time in the southwest pine woods. There are just three or four plants - I could find no others close by. This group is isolated from the southeast group by a considerable distance of pine forest AND the entire hollow that SBS Creek runs through.



I missed the flowering by about a week, it looks like, so I can’t be sure it’s C. acaule. The previous group certainly was though, and from the USDA Plants page and the map below, we’re certainly in the range for it.

Pink lady’s slippers, aka moccasin flower, are orchids, of course. There are a dozen species but only four or five are to be found in Georgia. C. acaule is considered to be “unusual” here, but none of the others match my recollection and previous identification of the flowers I saw in such abundance years ago.

C. acaule has a requirement for acid soil, but is otherwise fairly forgiving of moisture abundance and lighting. Both these colonies are under pines, so sunlight is only partial and the soil is pretty thin and acidic. As the areas are at the highest elevations on the property, they are quite dry.

I imagine that these colonies of lady’s slippers may be unstable, given that they’re in what is now a pine forest. Pine forests are only a stage in succession and there are already signs of replacement by the usual hardwoods of the area: oaks and sweetgums. These will certainly modify soil characteristics - perhaps not the acidity, but certainly the type and depth of ground litter.

If you’re googling today, you’ll see this:



Looks like today is in celebration of Ida, a remarkable old and well-preserved fossil that may (or may not) represent ancestry to monkeys, apes, and humans (note the cautionary remarks in that article). At 47 million years, Darwinius masillae shows the synapomorphies (shared derived characters) of the three groups of primates most closely related to and including humans. She had binocular vision, nails instead of claws, opposable thumbs, relatively short limbs, characteristic teeth, and a talus bone. In contrast she lacked a grooming claw and a toothcomb, which makes her an outlier of non-anthropoid primates like lemurs.

(Note, however, PZ Myers’s post here, and his link to Brian Switek’s reflections).

(UPDATE note: I may have more to say about this later but Ed Yong has hit my funny bone now. h/t to PZ Myers, once again.)

Ida was actually discovered a quarter-century ago but was split into two parts for sale. It was only recently that Jorn Hurum at University of Oslo completed and announced the analysis of the fossil. Her fossilized remains were found in the Messel pit, the fossil-rich remnants of a fifty million year old lake in Germany. The lake’s anoxic characteristics are thought to be similar to those of lakes such as Nyos in the Cameroon, but that’s another good story.

So let’s take a look at a couple of recently discovered examples of one of the oldest reptile groups, the anapsid Testudines.

Actually discovered on May 12, and languishing in the files for a week or so is 090512f, number 23. While a bit battered, this pretty girl was found munching away just above Goulding Creek, about halfway down toward the westmost point.




And a few days ago, I ran across 090516m, a nice male plodding through the mayapples just above the dry creek between the two decks at Goulding Creek West.





I’ve found several other box turtle enthusiasts who document the animals in a particular locale. Earlier I speculated that my documentation could be thought of as a sort of mark and recapture experiment. That’s pretty much what these folks are doing, though they take more physical measurements than I do.

Here is a group at UT Tyler who actually work on more than just box turtles.

And another group at Davidson College in North Carolina has been going at it for six years as of 2004. There is the interesting comment that of the many box turtles marked, there have been few recaptured. Tentatively they conclude that the box turtle population is fairly large.

The temperatures did get down into the forties last night - 44 degF was our low out here, not low enough to do any damage. We’re promised a windy day today and with humidity dropping below 25% a red flag warning has been triggered.

The plant below is a closeup of something we’ve seen recently, Appalachian or Small’s ragwort, Packera anonyma. I’ve chased a few Zebra Swallowtails around the margins of the deck area but haven’t yet found one that will settle down sufficiently.

The tattered butterfly on the plant looks like Silvery Checkerspot, Chlosyne nycteis. I assumed while photographing it that was a Pearl Crescent and there is some similarity. But if I understand right then the presence of white spots (the silvery aspect) inside the dark spots at the bottom of the hindwings marks it as silvery.



Butterflies and Moths of North America shows the range as extending south into central Georgia - we’re pretty much at the southern limit of its range. I see there that Oglethorpe County does not have a documented record for this one.

The thumbnails open a larger photo. The first one shows some of the underside.



So if that’s what it is then it’s a new find for me. Not that it wasn’t there all the time - just that I hadn’t noticed it until now.

Both the above BaMoNA and hostplant database indicate that plants of the Asteraceae serve as larval food. This would include Helianthus (sunflowers) and Verbesina (crownbeard), as well as some other asters. We certainly have those around.

Always something new!

If you weren’t able to get to the blog this morning, it was because a hijacking of the site took place sometime early this morning. Folders containing redirects were uploaded to the parent directory - we immediately saw this but didn’t immediately delete the folders. I think it’s kind of important to let the ISP see what the situtation is and have them make changes.

A very responsive startlogic tech spent over an hour with Glenn on the phone to work things out. We still don’t know whodidit or howdidit but for the moment things seem secure.

The hijacking was probably more associated with the store than the blog - it was only in the parent URL that you got redirected to the infamous sedoparking dot com. Other URLs simply gave you an error page.

As I recall Bev also had a hijack problem awhile back. This looks like the same sort of thing.

Weather in Georgia has been just unusual enough this weekend to be remarkable. Normally our spring rainfall develops in a fairly tight front that sweeps from the northwest to the southeast. On Friday, numerous spots of heavy rainfall developed 300 miles to our southeast and then these spots propagated northwestward during the course of the day, and persisted throughout Saturday. Not the usual pattern, at all.

We ended up with 0.14 inches over Friday and Saturday, but locations even just five or ten miles away got up to an inch of rain total.

And tonight and Monday night the temperatures are to be down in the mid-forties, approaching recorded lows of 39-43 degF.

It’s not that we haven’t had dragonflies, but none has been new. I think I’ve made the reacquaintance of all the species I’ve encountered before. But you could be watching out for these two:

Still, there’s nothing wrong with saying hello to this one, a gray petaltail (Tachopteryx thoreyi), I think. I saw my first one last June 1. It’s a lovely, huge dragonfly. They are actually known for their habit of perching on the trunks of trees, or the observer, for that matter. I followed this one from tree to tree in an environment similar to the third photo down in Friday’s post. Several times it buzzed me deliberately.

And here we have the spectacular widow skimmer (Libellula luctulosa), seen last year June 18. They’re haunting the same area too, the top of the first deck, a large open and sunny place.

I noticed that these fly in a fluttering manner, rather than the zipping about of most dragonflies.



Finally, an unknown narrow-winged damselfly, one of the many bluets or forktails or dancers or sprites. Identification will drive you crazy. This one was persistent in its patrol of the south house deck. Even Giff Beaton’s excellent website didn’t help me.



It doesn’t have the bold shoulder markings of most of this family of damsels. Maybe it’s a teneral.

Just a quickie today, after amusing myself by gathering together some photos looking eastward along the floodplain from the westmost point along Goulding Creek (which would be to the left in the photos). They’re from approximately the same position, looking approximately in the same direction.

March 20:



A week later:



Today, May 15. Photography conditions are shot all to hell without flash!

We are experiencing a flush of fungi recently. Not a riot by any means but it seems like a plentitude after the last two years of drought. I’m enjoying encountering them, but there are so many that defy my primitive abilities of fungus identification.

I thought identifying coral mushrooms, at least as to genus, would be easy, but no. All the species listed in my Audubon guide fail by date of appearance - these are earlier by at least a month or two than the early to late summer that seems to be the rule there. And the most obvious candidates fail in their distribution - red coral, for instance, is a coral of the western US. And then there is the habitat - so many of these are specified as preferring conifers, and these were on the slopes under red oaks, tulip poplars, and ash.

Well, I’ve found that appearance times for mushrooms are often plain wrong in our area, often by months. From morels to chanterelles, the only rule here is that they will appear, but as to when is anyone’s guess. Likely range and habitat can be similarly variable.

We’ll just have to enjoy their appearance and gradation of colors without knowing exactly what they are.







Very close to the corals were these oak leaves providing sustenance to something that is producing a very nice and regular array of tiny sporangia. I’d have suggested zygomycete, the most primitive of true fungi, but those usually grow on substrates that contain easily digestible simple sugars - not something you’d find in leaves dead for half a year. Ascomycetes are the next step up in ecological succession, feeding on more complex polysaccharides that most zygos would find indigestible. Some of the more stripped-down ascos grow more like the molds these appear to be, producing just such asexual sporangia.

So again, we’ll just have to view the pattern of display as a form of art.

There were several possible titles for this post: The Last Supper, Clean Your Plate, Don’t Play With Your Food, and Save Room for Dessert were among the other finalists. I was definitely feeling a little queasy after writing this, but maybe it was coffee overdose.

About halfway down Goulding Creek yesterday, I came upon this little tableau. The dead male turtle was on its back, with lots of large carrion beetles in attendence. That’s not a previously discovered box turtle, by the way. I didn’t notice it at the time but there are a couple of larvae of some sort in transit through holes in the carapace.



There are at least four species of arthropods represented here. Some of the ridged carrion beetles, Oiceoptoma inaequale, are carrying mites. There are at least two species of flies also present.

The antennae of carrion beetles are very distinctive. Not that you normally want to get that close. A wikipedia article on carrion beetles gives us an idea of what’s going on. The adults here, in the subfamily to which this species belongs, tend to feed on fly larvae from eggs previously deposited. They’ll also lay their own eggs too, and the beetle larvae will feed off the carcass. The flies and fly larvae therefore represent competition.

The wikipedia article, and also this fine presentation by Hilton Pond, mention these mites as a possible Poecilochirus species. They are phoretic mites, hitching a ride on the back of the carrion beetle. They’ll disembark to feed on fly eggs in the carcass, thus providing more competition in favor of the carrion beetles over the flies.

For whatever reason, there were a number of beetles that had two mites, in exactly these positions.



At least one individual of a related species, Oiceoptoma novaboracense, margined carrion beetle, was also present. The side-by-side comparison of the two species was a nice find.



I see that Doug at Gossamer Tapestry also observed both the above species in his post on the dead deer a few weeks ago.

The elytra often don’t cover the last couple of abdominal segments. This individual was in the company of one of these tiny orange-eyed flies. I haven’t figured out what the identification is there.

I hadn’t noticed until I looked through the photos, but I did catch one of the little flies in flight.

A long three-hour hike down the creeks and through the woods netted quite a few interesting things but it was only as I was approaching the west fence gate that I came upon this fellow:



It’s the first eastern kingsnake (Lampropeltis getula getula) of this pattern that I’ve found around here (actually, it’s probably the first period). So you can imagine how excited I was. With its chain pattern of pale yellow banding on jet black it’s a very handsome snake.

Hatchlings can be up to 12 inches long and old adults up to 7 feet. This was maybe 3 feet long so probably a young adult. I played with it a bit and it scooted under a log raised off the ground. It didn’t appear on the other side, and it wasn’t under the arch of the log, so it seems to have somehow gone inside the wood or had a passage underneath.

As the link says, kingsnakes are impervious to pit viper venom and so those turn out to be good candidates for dinner. SREL reports that populations are here have been documented to be in decline, especially in the coastal plain.

The head there wasn’t much in focus, so let’s get a better look. Photos are linked to larger versions on a new page.





ADDED: There’s a really neat resource site on eastern kingsnakes. Right up my alley, it’s a collection of individuals and their variations, organized by state on the left sidebar. Quite an amazing range of variation. At the bottom are links to similar sites for corn, rat, milk, and moleking snakes.

Found growing on the slope above SBS Creek, little clusters of Marasmius rotula, Pinwheel Marasmius. My Audubon mushroom guide says that they particularly like decaying oak wood. It also says that M. capillaris is a lookalike, but that that species grows on dead oak *leaves*.

Now there are oak leaves in the photo, but I’m pretty sure that’s not where the mushrooms are coming from. I’ll have to go back to check, because apparently the substrate is an important clue. Photo links to a larger image of the left cluster.



Wikipedia gets the credit for discussing the derivation on the genus and family (Marasmiaceae) names. One of the characters of this family of mushrooms is that they can dry out, and then rehydrate and revive after some time in the dry state. The word for this is marcescence (from the Greek marasmos), as opposed to putrescence. Putrescence is what happens when rehydrating just leads to rotting.

And just to follow up on the multiple shooting by UGA prof George Zinkhan, who killed his wife and two community theatre enthusiasts on April 25: On Saturday, two weeks following, he was found dead in northwest Clarke County, not far from his home. He had dug a hole, got in and pulled in the dirt, and then shot himself. There must be a word for this - the behavior is bizarre, but it also seems very specific, enough so you’d think that forensic experts would nod and say - yes, he “***ed” himself.

In the nine days of May we’ve had rain for six, amounting to more than two inches. It’s likely we’ll have more today. Just looking at the statistics from the Climatology Research Lab at UGA: Since Jan 1 we’re 1.6 inches over normal rainfall; last year at this time we were 5.6 inches below normal. Since March 1, just after the bounty began, we’ve had 4.3 inches more than normal rainfall expected since then.

Warmth can be summarized as the cooling degree days: since March 1, 123 such, compared to 85 normal. And yet we haven’t had record-breaking heat, by any means - the temperatures have felt warm, but mild. Since we haven’t had hot days, the denizens in the Athens area are becoming extremely wimpy.

Enough of statistics. Here’s one result, looking down the floodplain on what I’ve come to call Goulding Creek West. Glenn confirms that the majority of the grass is six-weeks fescue, Vulpia octoflora:



That’s actually a fairly open area - in most places along the floodplain the vegetation is at least thigh high. Crownbeard and bear’s paw are just about that high too, and they’ll quickly grow to my height. It’s what we call tick city.



I always have a learning curve, each spring, in terms of dealing with ravenous arthropods. We have two groups - chiggers and ticks (mosquitos and deerflies count too, but they’re short terms pests). In the past I’ve been easy-going until the fateful day when I’m bombarded with ectoparasites, and the resulting itchy lesions, whereupon I take more care. This year I’ve been careful early on and other than a tick here and there have had little trouble.

Some other observations:

Shorts vs. long pants: sorry, but I go for shorts. I can monitor the progress of ticks up my legs. Glenn goes for long pants, with his socks pulled up over the cuffs.

Barred owls have been calling throughout the day and night. They’d practically disappeared in the last couple of years.

Ebony jewelwings are hunting near the house. This is the first time I’ve seen them so uphill from their usual haunts down close to the creeks. Last night Glenn and I watched a female for over an hour, patiently waiting in ambush on one leaf or another.

Previously mentioned tent caterpillars. They’re gone now, vanished in the space of a few days, but not until they had been dropping upon us or crawling all over the place for several weeks. In retrospect, a definite population burst, with no discernible effects on trees.

Tulip poplars are in abundant flower - for those who keep bees around here this is the major honeyflow. Beekeepers watch the weather nervously around May 1 - a late frost can destroy the nectar source. Yesterday I watched a gray tree squirrel gorging on them.

Poison ivy. There’s a bumper crop of ground plants. I get the rash if I’m rash, but it’s so easy to identify and avoid that I’m conflicted on getting rid of it. Ultimately looking to the future, and eradicating the ground infestations will inform me. As for the tree-climbing giants, that’s ok. Poison ivy produces a marvelous crop of soft mast for birds.

Lastly, and what did you expect? Turtles.

Here’s the roadcut that crosses Goulding Creek just ahead - you can see the dip in the vegetation that signifies the cut.



It was to the left and above the cut that I found Sylvia last week. In exactly the same place yesterday I found the fourth box turtle of 2009, not including Sylvia, and the 21st overall. This is a female and she’s of interest for several reasons, and not just because she’s the prettiest little thing you’ve ever seen.

First, she’s the smallest (living) turtle I’ve run across so far. Only about four inches long, she’s maybe half the length of the usual turtle. She seems to have six rings, definitely a record low.

Second, the color patterns on her carapace seem fuzzy. She seems like a low resolution photograph. You can begin to imagine what her pattern will look like once she has a few more rings in her scutes but for now they’re unresolved, almost overlapping.

The first photo is of her, and the one beneath it of an arbitrarily selected older turtle. Look at the difference in the sharpness of the patterns. Up to this point I’ve never seen a turtle without the distinct, sharp markings of the old one. Are the youngster’s indistinct patterns due to her age and rapid growth, or are they just the way she is and always will be? Only time will tell.





And as always, the documentary thumbnails:

In lieu of our normal responsibilities this morning, Harry Pewter demonstrates the proper use of a box.

If you’ve been watching the fields and roadsides as spring progresses, keep an eye out for yellow daisy-like flowers. Besides dandelions, you may also be seeing various sorts of ragworts.

A few weeks ago, if I have it right, the early spring yellow around here was contributed by golden ragwort, Packera aurea. That has given way, in mid-spring, to southern ragwort, P. anomyna. USDA Plants uses the common name Small’s ragwort.



The 60 or so species of Packera (syn Senecio) encompass the New World ragworts, or groundsels. No matter where you are in North America there’s probably one near you.

Quite a few are threatened or endangered in places, or of wetland importance. Only one, butterweed (P. glabella) seems to be regarded as noxious.

Clinging to an inside wall at night. Not so great for photography. Despite the feathery antennae, this is a fishfly, and probably a spring fishfly, Chauliodes rastricornis. Furthermore the feathery antennae do identify it as a male. Females have serrate antennae. We’ve seen what I thought at the time to be a male summer fishfly, C. pectinicornis. That was somewhere around May 20 2006, so a couple of weeks later than this sighting. And we’ve also seen a more distant cousin, dark fishfly, Nigronia serricornis. That one looks to be a female.

Finals are winding down, and I should have an opportunity for a long walk today. In the past three days we’ve had a bit over two inches of rain, with springy-type thunderstorms. The understory is now completely enclosed and alarmingly green.

I was entertained a few days ago by this presumptive ichneumon wasp canvassing the front porch and the potted plants around it. She’s looking for a friend that she’d like to make better acquainted with her future children.

"Thousands of species and notoriously difficult to identify from photographs," is the way bugguide puts them, which means you probably have to get into counting the hairs on the tarsi and dissecting for genital shapes. And if you look at the above link, you’ll see that there are thousands of photographs of ichneumons that remain unidentified. Nonetheless I did find several groups of ichneumon photos that resemble this one closely, two in Texas here and here, and one in Arizona.

The Arizona link above had a notation that “I think this might be a mimic, the model being a spider wasp, Priocnessus apache. When I was looking at the thumbnails I was hoping that’s what it was (they are colored and patterned almost identically)...” (Nick Fensler).

Checking out Priocnessus apache there is a certain resemblance but I’d already pretty much concluded the resemblance to spider wasp hunting behavior just from watching. This one was nervously twitching her wings and antennae as she scurried about looking for trouble. I’ll bet she doesn’t actually hunt spiders (although there are some ichneumons that do), but perhaps is intimidating to them by her behavior and appearance.

The Month of April, Number 39 in a series. No griping here, for the second month in a row! How about you?

From the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center, this is a plot of high and low 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.



Although there are not many deep blue or red spots, the northern tier of states from the Pacific to the Great Lakes were unusually cool for at least the second month in a row. The northeast US was warmer than usual, as was a swath in the southwest centered around a very odd peak in NM just inside the NM-AZ border. Sounds like persistent high pressure over most of the US prevented Arctic cold from penetrating very far.

The National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center is hiding these precipitation plots here, and that’s where we’ll find the plot of mean precipitation anomalies for the US over the month of April:



The southwest US continued to be dry, as it has generally since November. Dry conditions also occurred throughout the Pacific states. For Florida this marks the sixth month of unusually dry conditions, although there was a large abundance of rain in north Florida and the southern half of Georgia. We talked quite a lot about that! Similarly wet conditions were felt along a diagonal from Montana through Texas.


For Athens:

April brought above-average rainfall for the second month in a row, bringing our total since Jan 1 to 17.9 inches, compared to 17.6 inches normally found by May 1. Out here in Wolfskin we’ve had 18.4 inches so far this year.

Here is my plot of high temperatures for the month of April in Athens. (It seemed appropriate to present high temperatures this time.) As usual, the black dots are for the 18 years 1990-2007 (black dots), 2009 (green line), and 2008 (red line).



For the most part, temperatures in April were about as average as could be. It was a little cool on the 7th, and we approached a record-breaking high on the 25th.

We were more than one standard deviation above the mean high daily temperatures 5 days in April, compared to an average 4.8 days per April. We had 4 nights more than one standard deviation below the average, compared to an average 5 such in April. Things evened out to an average high of 73 degF, precisely the historical average.

For rainfall, the figure below shows the Athens data which are official for our area. As usual the green line shows our actual rainfall, the red shows the average accumulation expected. The black dots are rainfall over the last 19 years, the vast river of peach shows the standard deviation. Lots of blue surplus here!

Athens eventually ended up with 4.47 inches of rain, compared to 3.35 inches average for April. We ended up out here with 3.49 inches, but still above average.



So how is our long-term water situation? The red line shows the expected accumulation of rainfall over the four years since Jan 2005, and the green shows the actual rainfall. The blue shows the difference. Sure, we’re still at 24 inches below normal after four years, but the upswing in the last couple of months is encouraging.



I’ll continue to link to this neat prognosticator in which you can get variously timed precipitation and temperature outlooks. Last month the predictions were pretty accurate for us, over the one-month outlook. The prediction for May is for drier weather, and consistently warmer than usual. Looks like the next three months will be average in both respects.

Geekstuff:
NOAA’s weekly ENSO update indicates that we’re still in a very weak La Niña, but approaching neutral conditions as far as the eye can see.

Relive your favorite weather events of the year 2008, courtesy of NOAA. NOAA has a neat State of the Climate product. By clicking on the year, such as 2008, you can get to monthly and even weekly reports and zero in on regional descriptions that are much nicer than my own.

1. Immune to Everything

All the “experts” come out when something new is happening, and the H1N1 swine flu virus is no exception. Did you know that the virus is so dangerous because it’s “new”, and that we have no “natural immunity” (whatever that is) to it? I frown at this, and yet I see the trope repeated endlessly. By dint of an amazing choreography, you are, when everything works normally, essentially immune to everything but yourself. Long before you’re born, certain cells undergo a DNA shuffle, resulting in millions of immature B-cells, the cells that will produce antibodies. The DNA shuffle is done to produce new genes each slightly different from any other. Each B-cell will therefore express an antibody that is the tiniest bit different from that made by any other B-cell. The entire suite of ten million or so lines of cells is capable of producing a range of antibodies that can recognize practically any conceivable molecular shape, or epitope.

Here’s a part of the elegance: as these cells mature, the ones that recognize *you* are destroyed or suppressed so that your immune system will leave you alone. With this twist, you are left only with the precursors of an armada that will be with you for life, able to recognize the intrusion of foreign shapes - the antigens that are pieces of foreign bacteria, viruses, proteins, or other invaders. Nothing, if everything works right, remains to mess with your own self.

The reason any new virus or bacterium is not dealt with quickly isn’t because we aren’t “naturally immune,” we are. But while you have the B-cells that produce the appropriate antibodies, they are “naive:” they haven’t been exposed to the new intruder. It takes time to respond and amplify the required cell lines that will produce the antibodies in large enough numbers to deal with the intruder. For something like rabies, for instance, the response is too slow and the invasion too rapid.

I admit to a fondness for the name, “naive B-cells.” So innocent, so pure, and just waiting for their close up. Rabies, then, would take the role of the masher, the overwhelming cad.

Enter vaccines: they contain the antigens that will stimulate the appropriate B-cells to be amplified over a period of days or weeks, and then you will be able to deal quickly with an infection that corresponds to those antigens.

This description of B-cells is really too purple to be rigorously correct, and does not do justice to an extraordinarily elegant process. Similar DNA shuffling occurs in other genes to produce an armada of cytotoxic T-cells, helper T-cells, regulatory T-cells and other components of the adaptive immune system. Not only do the cellular components of the system shuffle their DNA around to produce new receptors, but all the different cells interact with each other in an intricate dance to the tune of antigen presentation. The dance ensures that only the right cells are amplified, and only for a certain period of time. They’re then shut down, but forever after there will be a population of circulating memory cells that recognize the antigen, just in case. Memory cells: what a coda!

2. David Souter

I’ve long had a soft spot for retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter. There is a great deal about this lonely, independent, and solitary fellow that warms the cockles of me heart.

"What we try to do is pass it on, to make the gifts and kindnesses that come to us the kind of human currency that goes on traveling," he said. “I will try to preserve it, transmit it, I hope refreshed, to another generation of the American republic, which is the inheritance of us all.” –Oct 1990, swearing-in ceremony.

The simple articulation of such an idea is something I immediately understand. I think his tenure, for the most part (for no political figure is without warts) reflected this, just about right.

Have a good life, Mr. Souter.


3. Mission Accomplished

And in contrast, Happy Codpiece Day. We shan’t post an image of the warts associated here.

4. She’s Back

A little more existential a thing I didn’t know, I guess, and I at least imagine her to be the same snapping turtle that has haunted the place for the last four years. She’s now in the Bufo pond, I suppose she was there all winter, hibernating, and she’s very very shy. I’ll catch her like this, but the moment she sees me she slowly sinks down from the surface.

Let’s call her Jezebel, what do you say, a good name for a defiant but most probably also sweet snapping turtle.



*B-cell image from Wikipedia. SCOTUS image unknown origin. Jezebel: me.