Mother of Thousands

It is a succulent driven to succeed, and for the longest time, we just called it "the alien plant." In fact, we didn't know what it was. We did know that the plant thrives in the King William District of San Antonio.

It thrives just about anywhere it is set down for more than four or five minutes. One gardening forum poster wrote that the plant took over a soil-less cement patio in Florida. I believe it.

Kalanchoe daigremontiana, also called "Mother of Thousands," "Pregnant Plant," "Devil's Backbone" and "Mexican Hat," is native to Madagascar.

Drought-tolerant, the plant is sometimes touted as a candidate for xeriscapes. The green leaves are often mottled with a darker -- almost reptilian -- pattern on the undersides. The plant blooms ... well, it could be just about anytime: ours bloomed in the spring, but others claim winter and even summer. The blooms themselves are showy, usually red or orange or purple, and last quite a while.

Why it has blooms at all is another question. It's not like the Mother of Thousands needs them. The common name of the plant refers to the fact that it is viviparous. It has a remarkable habit of forming "plantlets" (technically, "bulbils") at the margins of its leaves. These baby plants will develop roots and, when they're ready, separate from the mother ship and colonize wherever they happen to land.

Here's what the literature says about propogation methods for this plant: By dividing rhizomes, tubers, cormsor bulbs; from leaf cuttings; from herbaceous stem cuttings; from softwood cuttings; from seed; by simple layering; from bulbils.

In other words, just about any way you care to try will likely produce more plants.

One tradition, reported from both the American South and from Cuba, is to pin a leaf to a window curtain where it will live in near-perpetuity and produce plantlets ready for transplantation.

The incredible "life force" (as one of Tam's friends aptly put it) of this plant is the primary reason we decided this week that it does not have a place in our planned succulent garden. It wasn't hard to envision ranks of alien plants spreading across the greenbelt.

It's just not safe to keep them outside. In fact, the plant is highly toxic to all sorts of critters, including humans.

Australia has reportedly banned the propogation of "Mother of Thousands" because it is so invasive, and the government there is on a mission to eradicate it from the landscape.

But we do think it's an awfully cool plant. One will live on as a house plant upstairs. And if anyone wants some plantlets, just let us know.

'Bird of Peace' my shiny, white hiney ...

Doves are thugs. No kidding.

My dad had told me some stories of the Eurasian collared doves that regularly beat-up on everything from grackles to jays at his backyard feeders when my folks lived in West Texas.

Turns out our native white-winged doves are just punks with plumage as well. Dove hunting season in Texas starts in about two weeks, by the way. I'm just sayin' ....

I've noticed over the past couple of weeks that when our resident white-wingeds fly down to the feeder, other birds take off. Titmice and chickadees are tiny, and commensurately skittish. But jays and cardinals also give way.

This afternoon, one dove (I'm pretty sure he was a gang member) beat the bird snot out of two others. He left one of the other birds in serious (if not critical condition). It hunkered down next to the English ivy near our fence. When the bully bird approached it again it -- I kid you not -- tried to limp away.

Doves have hackles, too, like dogs. And when they're upset, they raise them. At least today's bully did.

Papa described to me the way a collared dove would sidle up to a feeder and then: "thwack!" with its wing, pummel some other poor bird out of the way. The dove would do this repeatedly until the other bird left.

What I saw today was one particular bird who was not content to intimidate others away from an easy meal, but actually pursued them -- in the air and on the ground. After one particularly violent tussle beneath our oaks that featured multiple wing batterings, the other two birds did their best to stay out of the batterer's way.

Historically, white-winged doves were endemic to the Lower Rio Grande Valley and points south. After killer freezes in the 1980s that destroyed the citrus groves they had colonized, they expanded their range northward. In 10 of the past 11 years, there have been more white-winged doves in upper South Texas than in the Valley.

In 2000, Travis County (which is outside the South Texas ecological zone) had more than a quarter million of the birds, while all of West Texas had only a bit more than 30,000.

According to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, the majority of nesting occurs within urban and suburban environments.

"The nesting white-winged doves seem to prefer the older more established residential neighborhoods with large live oak, pecan, and ashe trees. This may be due to better protection from predators and a consistent food and water sources due to watering of lawns and bird feeders," opines the fact sheet on the department's Web site.

I guess that's us.

For my part, I'd be happy to see fewer white-winged doves and more mourning doves, the latter native to all 254 Texas counties and an altogether gentler animal.

So, how did the dove come to symbolize peace? The Azerbaijanis have a charming legend to the point, but in Western culture it's probably due to the story in which a dove was released by Noah after the great flood.

In the Bible story, Noah first set loose a raven, which flew back and forth, back and forth. There is no mention of the raven returning. He then loosed a dove, which returned to the ark.

"And having waited yet seven other days, he again sent forth the dove out of the ark. And she came to him in the evening, carrying a bough of an olive tree, with green leaves, in her mouth. Noe therefore understood that the waters were ceased upon the earth." (Gen. 8:10-11)

So here we have the answer to two longstanding metaphors: the olive branch as peace offering (as in "He extended an olive branch.") and the dove as the symbol of God's cessation of hostilities against mankind.

But I think there's more to this story. Remember the raven that didn't come back? I'll betcha anything the raven found the olive branch and the dove mugged him.

Even as I write ...

Even as I sit outside and write, wildlife happens.

Earlier, as I was busy moving old blog posts over to this site I heard the distinctive "B" song of an eastern screech owl, Megascops asio. It's a haunting, falling tone; really, quite unmistakable and a little bit spooky. Then, I heard the "A" song, a melodious trilling.

These (relatively) little owls (8-9 inches long with wingspans of 21-22 inches) are quite common in central and southeast Texas, and their range overlaps with the western screech owl subspecies through the middle and southern parts of the state.

Screech owls are active only after sunset and eat the usual owl fare: rodents like shrews, mice and rats, but also bats and birds. They'll even snag large insects on the wing, and have been known to eat fish, crawdads and scorpions.

At a work gathering at the Parrie Haynes Ranch the year before last, one of our video producers took a recording of screech owl calls and a PA system into the woods.

Some of my colleagues who accompanied him told me that half a dozen of the small owls flew down around them and perched in trees around the clearing in which they stood.

Clever boy that I am, tonight I hopped right over to The Owl Pages, scrolled down to the eastern screech owl recordings, and started playing them on my computer. After about two minutes, Tam stuck her head out to tell me dinner was ready.

As I got up to go inside, I heard a clatter above my head. It sounded as if something was running across our patio roof. I looked up in time to see a large, brownish bird flying back into the yard.

A screech owl had flown under the porch, into the light, and then circled back into the night. The clattering I heard was its wingtips beating against the underside of the roof.

Cool.

I sense a fun evening coming on in a week or so ... something that involves sitting out by the fire ring with red lights and a laptop and my 8-year-old.

In other news

In other news we've had buckets of rain, again. This time it was courtesy of Tropical Storm Erin, which made landfall just north of Rockport early Thurs. morning. The creek is flowing, and -- I couldn't help noticing today -- it's awfully pretty as it sparkles beneath the junipers and oaks in the late afternoon sun.

What is a "wet-weather creek?" Well, it's an intermittent stream. A sometimes -its-there, sometimes-its-not watercourse. The Edwards Plateau is a karsty kind of place, and a lot of our streams sink right through the porous limestone (and through caves and crevasses) into the Edwards Aquifer. Our neighborhood is smack-dab in the recharge zone for the aquifer, so it's no surprise that some of our creeks disappear almost as fast they appear.

This phenomenon makes for some lovely juxtapositons, like the prickly-pear cactus in the middle of the stream pictured above.

As I was leaving my office this afternoon I walked over to the wildscape garden that grows just outside the entrance to my building. There I was startled to find a grasshopper roughly the size and color of a canary.

It was clutching the stalk of a Turk's cap and it was so large, and so bright, that at first I thought someone had put a toy there as a joke. And then it moved.

Naturally I had to get pictures. I've posted them to BugGuide.net -- a fabulous site -- and so far have this educated guess as to what it is: "One of the bird grasshoppers in the genus Schistocerca."*

Speaking of wildscapes, that's something Tamara and I are giving some thought to. As I'm fond of mentioning, we have a great backyard.

There are a couple -- three -- non-native shrubs I'd like to see gone, but the laurel and oaks and ashe juniper are all healthy and beautiful. The oaks have a nice understory of brush that the birds really appreciate.

Oh -- the owl's back. Two yards over it sounds like. Time to crank up the owl song. I'll just let it play as I type ... see what happens.

Anyhow. Wildscapes. Yeah, so we're studying-up on what we can do to make our yard even more wildlife friendly. A water garden is a sure thing. But does the English Ivy really have to come out?

A couple of nights ago we had our biggest backyard visitor to date: ol' brer 'possum. I surprised him, he surprised me. He fled up an oak tree and I grabbed the camera (see the second photo on the page).

This morning as I was waiting on the cable guy, a brilliantly striped butterfly fluttered by. Turns out it was a zebra longwing (Heliconius charithonia). One of the fascinating habits of these butteflies, also called zebra heliconians, is that they tend to travel a circuit or "trapline," following a particular route again and again as they gather food.

I found a red spiny orb weaver in the oak grove at the back of the yard two days ago. I think it must be that connection to my childhood, when I found these spiders so fascinating, but I just can't get over how cool it is to have three different color phases of this animal in the yard.

For the birds

I think I mentioned that we put two bird feeders up. The one with the mix of seeds has been quite popular, and not just with the birds. The suet/peanut mixture (probably the wrong time of year) has been visited infrequently, mostly by titmice and chickadees.

Jays, cardinals, Carolina chickadees, black-crested titmice, white-winged doves and wrens all come through daily. A particularly enterprising squirrel also has made a couple of runs at the feeder.

On day three, I took it down and swapped out the sturdy rope it was hanging from with 30-lb. monofilament. I also hung it farther out on a limb and away from the trunk of the tree.

The squirrel has been pretty frustrated since then.

I wrote "Carolina chickadee," (Poecile carolinensis) but the birds I see here may in fact be black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapilla), or hybrids of the two. They all look about the same. One way to tell them apart is by their songs. Carolina chickadees have a four-note song, black-capped chickadees a two-note song.

The hybrids -- you guessed it -- invariably sing a three-note song.
These birds often will pick up a seed from the feeder and fly with it up to a nearby branch. "Tap-tap-tap-tap-taptaptap ..." the bird will hammer it open, then flit back down for another.

We'll call them Carolina chickadees for now. We're a bit south of the range of the black-capped, and smack-dab in the middle of the Carolina's summer range.

The cardinals have been fascinating to watch. There is one male adult and a fledgling that visit together fairly regularly. The fledgling, which will feed itself when dad's not around, will cheep "feed me" noises and shiver his feathers from a nearby branch when dad's on the feeder. The adult male dutifully takes him cracked seeds and puts them in his beak.

Cardinals are monogamous and typically mate for life. Males actually take on the majority of parental care, at least when it comes to foraging for the youngsters.

One theory is that because there is a sex bias among cardinals -- there are more males than females -- the males who have mated have to work hard to avoid "divorce." Does this mean China is in for a period of doting dads?

The owl, apparently, has thought better of a repeat visit to the porch. Oh well, another evening perhaps.

[I've since discovered this grasshopper is an Alutacea Bird Grasshopper, Schistocerca alutacea.]

Dragonflies are cool

Dragonflies are cool because they come in jewel tones and earth tones. Dragonflies are cool because they hover and swivel like little helicopter gunships. Mostly, though, dragonflies are cool because they eat mosquitoes.

I hate mosquitoes.

We have plenty here at the new place; big ones, little ones ... nighttime biters, daytime biters. I think I'm getting more allergic, too. I came in from a brief photo foray with my legs covered in welts.

I hate mosquitoes.

Our very wet spring has been a boon to the mozzy population around here. In turn, dragonflies are thronging our backyard. It's some mighty crowded airspace, between the birds, butterflies, dragonflies, mosquitoes and wasps.

I suspect one of the spiny orb weavers is providing air traffic control.

Twice today, cicadas bounced off the patio roof with a startled buzz. Either their Terrain Avoidance Warning Systems are on the fritz, or they're not on the right frequency.

I don't have the foggiest idea what species these dragonflies are. They're either darners, or clubtails, or spiketails, or petaltails or skimmers or emeralds. I think that about covers the possibilities here in Texas.

I hung two bird feeders yesterday, but so far the birds haven't found them. Bet they do sometime this week.

Tam had the only snake sighting today. She got up from her chair on the porch and uttered a rapid succession of "Ooh, ooh, ooh ..."

"What?" I asked. She just pointed to the ground at the edge of the deck.

I looked down to see the tail of the Texas garter snake, probably the same one I saw yesterday, disappearing into the recesses of some pretty good cover. We've agreed that she will try to use more descriptive language in the future.

Our excellent neighbors said they haven't seen many snakes, but they did have a raccoon on the back fence the other day. Deer have mosied up to their back yard. And bobcats, but that was a while ago, before the other side of the creek was developed.

Still, almost anything could show up. Streams -- even mostly dry ones -- are like that. They serve as both habitat and corridors for wildlife. I'm glad we have one in the backyard.

[Ah, but I do know what these dragonflies are! Some of them, anyhow. The first two dragonfly photos are of a male and female band-winged dragonlet, Erythrodiplax umbrata. The male is the one with the banded wings and has not yet developed mature coloration The female has the plain wings. The third photo is of a dragonfly I still have not identified. The lavendar-colored dragonfly at bottom right is a male roseate skimmer, Orthemis ferruginea. "They are pretty common in central Texas, but even so I still have people who sidle up and whisper 'I saw a pink dragonfly' as though I would think they had been sampling the home brew before it was ready," said Forrest Mitchell, co-author of A Dazzle of Dragonflies. Forrest was kind enough to help me with the identification of three of these photos. For high-resolution scans of live dragonflies, visit his site: The Digital Dragonfly Museum.]

More backyard wildlife

As I sat down on the back porch to write this, I heard rustling in the bushes. I looked up in time to see a shiny tail disappearing beneath a low-lying hawthorne bush near the fence on one side of the yard.

I ran over to see if, today, I could catch the big mystery snake in our back yard and identify it. It was gone. I looked up. I looked down. I looked everywhere. Nuthin'.

I am flummoxed. That's one very sneaky snake. So long as he leaves my root beer alone, though, I won't worry about it too much.

But I will just point out: any snake big enough to make noise is pretty big.

As I wrote yesterday, our back yard goes on for a ways. Actually, it doesn't, but the property backs to a greenbelt. That's a fancy word for a wet weather creek and flood zone that nobody can build on.

And that suits us just fine. It's a football field-and-a-half, maybe two football fields, to the luxury condominiums on the other side of the creek. We can't see them at all from the back porch, and only a hint of a roof from the back gate. The greenbelt runs for miles, and widens just to the east of us.

In addition to the creek, we have lots of oaks and some ashe juniper (which we all call "cedar" around here). The creek bed is limestone, of course, and there are reportedly a number of caves in the area.

One of them -- just about a mile from the house -- is Whirlpool Cave. I visited with Patrick and family and friends back in Christmas.

Cicadas are buzzing in the trees just now, and this morning we surprised a couple of white-winged dove on Patrick's playhouse; they were engaging in the birds part of "the birds and the bees."

Earlier today we took a little hike out behind the fire ring, which is just beyond our back gate. We found a surprising number of wildflowers, including morning glory, lantana (my mom's favorite), verbena and cat-claw sensitive briar.

This last plant is a ground-hugging member of the mimosa family with a blossom that looks like one of those fiber optic nightlights. It's also one of the first plants I remember my father showing me: stroke the leaves gently, and they'll fold right up.

We saw a young Gulf coast toad, some raccoon scat (er, poop) and some holes that looked to me like the work of an armadillo. I've left the back gate open to see what wanders in.

We also saw a yellow garden spider (also called the "letter-writing" spider, black-and-yellow orb weaver or black-and-yellow argiope). Orb weavers (Family Arneidae) comprise the third-largest family of spiders in the world. Charlotte, with the famous web, was a barn orb weaver.

Some orb weavers, including the black-and-yellow species common here, create zig-zag designs in their webs. There's a name for this interesting feature: stabilmentum. Scientists don't really know what purpose it serves, though it may help camouflage the spider in its web

The argiope on the other side of our fence is one of the largest and most conspicuous in this large family. We also have another conspicuous, though diminutive, orb weaver here.

I mentioned yesterday the spiny orb weaver I found in the back yard. These spiders were common around our home in Rockport when I was a child, and I loved to watch them. I recall seeing all the color phases -- red/orange, yellow, and black and white.

On a roadtrip back from Rockport early last month, Tam and I discovered a spiny orb weaver had hitched a ride on her hood. We pulled over and, after taking some pictures, set it free on the roadside. It was the first "crab spider" I'd seen in years.

So, I was excited to find one, then two, in our new back yard in South Austin. Today I noticed they're pretty much everywhere.

Spiny orb weavers (also called spiny-backed orb weavers and "crab spiders") are short-lived but prolific. The females die after laying an egg mass (from which more than 100 spiderlings will emerge) in the fall. Males, which are much smaller than their mates, die about six days after depositing sperm in the female.

They eat flying insects -- wasps, moths, flies ... and, I'm hoping, mosquitoes. They rarely come inside a house, and their bites are not known to be dangerous to humans.

In the photo above you can see the little tufts of silk that often are found in crab spider webs. Some people think they serve as a "flag" to birds, who otherwise might fly through the web and destroy it.

A woodpecker visited today, too. I wasn't able to get a clear shot, but I think it was a ladder-backed woodpecker, though it may have been a red-bellied. If anyone can tell from this photo, leave a comment.

One thing I haven't seen yet is any geckos or lizards, which is a bit of a puzzle. I would have expected to find them congregated around the porch light at night. I'll keep watching.

In the meantime, I'll be keeping a keen lookout for that snake and any other critters that decide to pay us a visit.

Listening to the jays

Home for lunch today, I enjoyed the view of our back yard from the dining room table. The back yard was the number-one selling point for our new house: it's lush and a little wild and goes on forever.

Well ... it goes on for several hundred yards, anyhow. Tam and I haven't put up bird feeders yet, but we have been on the lookout for wildlife. After a week at the new place I was beginning to feel a bit cheated; not much to report.

Last weekend we transplanted a couple of fat Canyon Springs toads. Canyon Springs is the name of an apartment complex, not the species. Yesterday I saw a young toad hopping across the yard from the direction of the creek, which is dry again.

Several days before, I had noted the web of a spiny orb weaver strung between two cedar trees near the back gate. These curious little critters are my favorites among the arachnids. They have shells with spiky points arrayed around the perimeters.

Typically the shells are white with black polka-dots. This one featured a yellow carapace with black dots and red spikes.

Today, as I was enjoying the view, a blue jay flew to a low oak and began shrilling an alarm. Soon he was joined by another jay, and another. Pretty soon there were four jays and a cardinal, making a racket.

Usually, blue jays gathered and cussing means something evil (by their lights) is afoot, or more properly, a-slither. I walked outside to see what it might be, but could see nothing unusual on the ground.

The birds scattered at my approach, but quickly flew back into the yard, perched in a different tree, eyeing the ground and making a fuss. I looked up in time to see a VLS making its way toward our thick cover of English ivy beneath the trees on one side of the yard.

When I say Very Large Snake, I mean a four-footer. Big for our backyard. I only got a fleeting glance -- definitely a colubrid (it had that friendly, innocent face), but thick-bodied with a light pattern on a dark background. My first thought was -- because of its size -- "bullsnake!"

My next thought, because it was shiny (not dull or rough like a bullsnake) was: "kingsnake!"I didn't get a good look, and it could have been any of a half dozen or more native non-venomous snakes.

I beat the bushes for about 10 minutes, but it was gone or successfully hidden. As I walked back to the porch -- actually a covered deck -- I noticed, peaking from beneath the trim, the dinstinctive, bright orange dorsal stripe of a Texas garter snake. I made a quick grab for the tail, but the snake was too fast and crawled deeper beneath the porch.

I'm cheered by these encounters with backyard wildlife, and I'll be on the lookout for more. In fact, I might even snip a couple of holes in the wire fence between our property and the greenbelt, just to see what quadrapeds might wander through.

And, for sure, I'll be listening to what the jays have to say.

About this blog

This is the story of two nearly-40-year-olds who fell in love and decided to share a life, and a home, together. One of the individuals in this story comes with an 8-year-old, who also shares the home on a part-time basis.

But it’s really the story of our backyard in the Oak Hill area of South Austin. The backyard is the number-one reason we chose this house; it’s lush and woody and wild and backs to a wet-weather creek and greenbelt.

Here we'll chronicle the wildlife that wanders into, flies through and slithers and crawls around our backyard. We'll look at and learn about the plants that grow here. We'll also figure out how to "wildscape" our small, already largely natural plot of land.

Please join us as we discover nature at our doorstep.