Shallow Thoughts : : nature

Identifying Trees and Shrubs in Winter: a PEEC Plant Walk

Last week Craig Martin led a tree and shrub identification walk for PEEC around Kinnikinnick (yes, I had to look up the spelling) Park in Los Alamos.

It was a very welcome addition to the summer flower walks that Craig and Chick Keller have led in the past. Nothing wrong with flowers, but I get curious about the non-flowering plants I see around me. I guess I'm not the only one who feels that way, because the walk was very well attended despite the mud and snow.

And it was fabulous. I scribbled notes as I could, but I'm sure they won't make any sense to me a week from now, let alone a year. Hence this writeup.

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Beaver Ponds at Bandelier

A couple of years ago, while hiking up Frijoles Canyon in Bandelier we came across some hikers one of whom carried a huge boxy backpack with a sheet over it.

We asked about it, and it turned out they were carrying a pair of beavers for release.

Like many places in the western US, Frijoles Creek used to have quite a population of beavers, but they were all wiped out for one reason or another. Now, park officials are trying to repopulate them.

It looks like it's working. We had heard rumours of beaver dams and beaver ponds, and about a month ago we hiked up Frijoles Canyon to see what beaver evidence we could see.

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Tyuyoni Overlook in June

It's been hot this week, but most of the spring was lovely. We went for a quick hike to Tyuyoni Overlook a week ago. There was a virtuoso mockingbird singing his heart out near the amphitheatre. Mockingbirds aren't at all common here, so in case it might be a thrasher or something else, I fired up Merlin on my phone. Merlin agreed with my ID of the mockingbird; but I left it running for a few minutes, during which it identified lots of other birds (the mockingbird was the only one singing): Woodhouse's scrub jay, piñon jay, mountain bluebird, chipping sparrow, Cassin's kingbird, and ... Virginia rail! Fun.

I sure hope he sticks around and finds a mate. Global warming is scary, but if it brings mockingbirds here, that would at least be a small up side.

Here's the view from the overlook, looking down into Frijoles canyon toward the ancestral puebloan ruins called Tyuyoni. Visible on the left is the Frey trail ascending up the mesa to join with the Tyuyoni Overlook trail. Tip: now that the shuttle buses are running again, a great hike is to take the shuttle to the Visitor's Center, hike up the Frey trail and catch the shuttle from there back to White Rock. Or, if you prefer to go downhill, you can do it in the other direction. Great views, either way.

Lizard Hunter

This is the first of two baby fence lizards that got into the house in the last few weeks. I guess I can't really blame them: it's getting cold outside, even for an endotherm.

It's funny how we always start seeing lots of baby lizards when the weather seems like it's getting too cold for reptiles to be out and about. Maybe the little ones just haven't learned yet that they should find a nice burrow to wait out the winter.

We usually capture spiders and crickets in the house with a cup and card, and escort them outside. But lizards are a lot harder to capture than spiders. Even with cooperative hunting — Dave holds the cup and sneaks up on the lizard while I try to herd the lizard toward him — lizards are fast, and there are so many possible hiding places.

This lizard didn't duck under the cabinets, the hole you can see in the photo. Instead it went the other direction and dove into the heater vent. We pulled the vent cover and left a little ramp so the lizard could get back up easily; later in the day, we found it, caught it and escorted it outside. As we did the second lizard (assuming it was a different one), a few days later.

I hope they've found a nice place to hibernate.

Red Velvet Ant, and Other Interesting Insects

Jenni at the Los Alamos Nature Center had an unusual request: if I saw any red velvet ants, please scoop them up (alive) and bring them to the nature center for display. They already had a few, but wanted more.

Red velvet ants aren't terribly uncommon here in White Rock. I see maybe one a month. They're gorgeous: well named, with bright scarlet patches against black and a texture that looks velvety-soft. There are several other species of velvet ants worldwide, but only Dasymutilla aureola is common around the southwestern US; rarely, I'll see a white velvet ant, also called the thistledown velvet ant, D. gloriosa.

You don't want to try petting them to see if they feel velvetty, though: they're actually wasps, and possess one of the most painful stings in the insect world. The red velvet ant's other name is "cow killer", because of how painful the sting is (the venom isn't actually dangerous, and certainly won't kill a cow).

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A Brood of Small Cicadas

Our trees in La Senda have been ticking madly for about a week.

The noise had been worrying me. Some of our drought-stressed piñons might not have enough sap to fight off bark beetles (we lost four trees last year to the beetles). On the other hand, cicadas do make clicking noises (like an orchestra tuning up, preparing for the symphony). And the ticking noise came from junipers as much as piñons; bark beetles are usually species-specific..

But eventually we were able to find a few of the tickers and photograph them. Definitely cicadas, though they're noticeably smaller than the big broods of 2014 and 2019, and greener, with bigger eyes (here's a 2019 cicada for comparison).

It's remarkably hard to locate cicadas to photograph them, even when you're surrounded by junipers that each have several of them clicking loudly. Once you see them, you can see the movement as they make their ticking noises, and as they slowly work their way along a branch.

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Time-Lapse Video of Pyrocumulus from the Hermit's Peak Fire

The Cerro Pelado fire that was threatening Los Alamos is mostly under control now (71% contained as of Tuesday morning), and the county has relaxed the "prepare to evacuate" status.

That's good, and not just for Los Alamos, because it means more people who can fight the much larger Hermit's Peak/Calf Canyon fire, currently 26% contained and stretching over a huge 299,565 acres.

For those of us on the Pajarito Plateau, that means we're getting views of enormous pyrocumulus clouds towering over the Sangre de Cristo mountains from Las Vegas to just south of Taos.

I keep missing the opportunity for photos, but on Sunday night I took a series of images and made this time-lapse movie.

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Earth, Wind and (Cerro Pelado) Fire

It's the windy season, and the winds are crazy here. I'm pretty sure I saw a house, some flying monkeys and a woman on a bicycle fly past the window twenty minutes ago.

I'm not sure precisely how crazy — our weather station is only showing a max of 18 mph, which mostly means there are too many trees around it, but the weather station at TA54 just up the road is reading 26 right now, with a max of 48.3.

The cage that I built this spring to keep the deer away from the apple tree (not that it ever flowers or fruits anyway) keeps wanting to slide into the tree or topple over on top of it. I had to jump up twice during dinner and run out to rescue it. So now it's tied to some big rocks and, if those lose their grip, it's also tied to the fence.

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