Monday, September 8, 2008

Oh no! Not another moth to feed!

This beauty showed-up last night just before midnight. According to Audubon, it's an Imperial moth (Eacles imperialis), a pretty common member of the giant silkmoth family.

It's about the same size as the Vine sphynx moth I wrote about earlier.

Some adult moths, such as sphynx moths, drink nectar. This one, in its adult stage, has only vestigal mouth parts and no digestive tract.

Males use their broad antennae to scent pheremones emitted by the females (sometimes a mile or more away). The adults breed, the females lay eggs on the underside of leaves, and then they die. It all happens in about a week.

Imperial moths, so-called for the purple splotches on their wings, are one of about 1,500 described species of the family Saturniidae. They're considered common below the Mason-Dixon line.

TPWD's invertebrate biologist, Mike Quinn, recently posted a photo of an almost identical moth at BugGuide.net.

It might be time to get a visible ultraviolet bulb -- a "blacklight" -- and sheet and hang 'em in the back yard. No telling what else might show-up.

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Tiny Bubbles

About six weeks ago my brother John bestowed upon us a rescued animal, a checkered garter snake (Thamnophis marcianus) my son Patrick promptly dubbed "Mr. Bubbles." John, in the course of his duties as a police officer, had plucked it from a terrified housewife's porch.

The snake readily gobbled goldfish (the $ .12 kind, bred to be fed), was nice to look at and seemed to be doing just fine in a cage in the garage.

I've always been fascinated by snakes; their colorful patterns and glossy keratin-coated skins, their behaviors too, but mostly just the fact that they're here at all.

More than 2,700 species of snakes burst out of the Paleocene about 60 million years ago. Today they range across every continent except Antarctica. Some are marine reptiles, some live in trees, some live nearly their entire lives underground. None have external limbs and that's what I find so fascinating: they're basically bellies with mouths and some highly specialized senses, and they've been incredibly successful.

I fed our newest snake four medium-size goldfish right before we left on vacation last week, checked on her with a cursory glance the night we returned and woke up yesterday to a snake cage crawling with miniature replicas. Fourteen tiny Bubbles, to be exact.

When he dropped her off weeks ago, John mentioned the snake might be gravid, thought she felt heavy. After seeing no eggs for weeks and weeks, I kind of forgot about the possibility.

Just like I forgot that garter snakes are viviparous, meaning they give live birth. Some of the newborns still have tiny threads of placenta attached to their belly buttons (I know, I know ... snakes with belly buttons; crazy, eh?).

What the heck do baby garter snakes eat? Smaller fish, says the man at PetSmart. So we load up on red comet minnows, some bigger fish for mom (Mrs. Bubbles, we now assume) and brought it all home. Bubbles devoured her five big goldfish, but the newborns didn't seem to know quite what to do.

Finally, the first one figured it out. Then another. Now only about six of the minnows are still swimming.

In the wild, checkered garter snakes eat all sorts of things -- amphibians and fish, worms and mice -- whatever they can get to hold still long enough to swallow. They can grow to as long as 4 feet, but 24-inch specimens are much more common. That's about Bubbles' size.

Mrs. Bubbles is still pretty skittish around human hands, and likely will never be entirely tame. The babies, though, have no fear of humans and are perfectly comfortably climbing onto a hand reaching into their enclosure.

Because they're relatively docile -- the captive-born animals, anyway -- and easy to keep, checkered garter snakes are common in the pet trade. A quick Internet search uncovered a handful for sale at $15-$30 apiece.

Patrick's not sure what he wants to do with the little ones. He thinks maybe his friend Spencer will take one, if Spencer's mom says okay. Some will probably be set free to patrol our backyard and greenbelt once they're past Blue jay snack-size.

That's going to leave a lot of tiny Bubbles ... anyone want a snake?

Things that fly at night

I've been hearing our resident screech owls more often lately, almost always between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. The whinnying "B" song seems to be the preferred call right now, though I sometimes hear the soft, trilling "A" song too.

I'll get my own audio of both sounds one of these nights to throw up here. Maybe even a photo, if I'm lucky.

Sometimes I hear owl sounds that are neither but seem to be from the same birds. Do Western and Eastern Screech Owls hybridize here?

I have no idea what the difference in sounds means, whether one is territorial and the other is a mating call or just what. And I'm too lazy to look it up at the moment.

As I sit and read on the back porch, another flying critter has just dropped in. I noticed because it threw a bat-sized shadow across my page.

It's a huge, resplendent moth that I initially identified as a white-lined sphinx moth (Hyles lineata), which I've seen here (and afield nearby) before and we call a "hummingbird moth" in these parts.

On second thought, though, I'm going to call this one a Vine sphinx (Eumorpha vitis), a related hawk moth common to the Gulf States. It really is quite striking. The caterpillars eat, well, the leaves of vines -- grape vines, as you might guess from the species name, but also Virginia creeper, seasonvine and grape and oak ivy.

This moth has huge eyes and looks quite fierce, though it's a twilight and night-time nectar feeder. When I approached it with the camera several times, it assumed a defensive stance on each occasion and put one foot forward, as if preparing to box.I like the little feller.

Pretty soon I'll turn that false moon off so he can navigate off into the night.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Listening to the Jays, Again

One of my very first posts to this blog was about a snake I caught just a glimpse of after belatedly realizing the shrill alarms of the blue jays in the backyard actually signified something.

Today, when jays, wrens and even a few feathered thugs went into a frenzy in the big cedar at the back of the yard, I was a little quicker on the uptake. Grabbed my camera and headed out the back gate and ....

Stood there, looking dumbly around my feet, for whatever was making the birds so nervous. Finally, I turned my eyes skyward, and there it was: a long, shiny, mostly black form draped across several green-needled branches.

The Texas Rat Snake (Elaphe obsoleta lindheimeri), also commonly called a "chicken snake" is quite common through much of the state, and its presence near the top of a tree is explained by a taste for eggs and baby birds. And that, in turn, explains the mobbing behavior of adult birds programmed to protect their nests.

Rat snakes can be quite beneficial, as they are voracious eaters and small rodents feature prominently in their diets. They subdue prey by constriction.

Unlike the closely related Corn snakes of the North American pet trade, rat snakes are nasty-tempered creatures. Not venomous, but certainly toothy. Even knowing this, today I actually walked back to the house for a rake, thinking I would be able to dislodge the snake and capture it.

My brother, John, who shares my interest in herps -- in fact has taken it much further than I ever did -- says "not a chance."

"I once climbed 25' in an oak tree chasing one," he e-mailed today. "Once you do find one you can catch, you will get bitten, you will bleed and it will shit all over you as it thrashes it's tail."

By the time I returned to the tree, the snake was gone or successfully hidden. Lucky me, eh?

Missing, Presumed Eaten

I hate to say it, but I don't think Leo is coming back.

Leo's a male Yorkshire terrier, and his name is scrawled on a large, neon poster taped to the streetlight down at the corner. The Yorkie joins a pair of Lhasa apsos and at least a brace of beloved cats in the neighborhood's milk carton gallery. All this in the past couple of weeks.

I'm pretty sure we're not dealing with a ring of sneaky, sadistic pet thieves. What all these animals have in common are two things: size (small, some might even say "snack" size) and proximity to one or or more of the floodplain greenbelts in the area.

While walking Pete over the weekend, Tamara met a neighbor walking her own dog, and she mentioned that she's been hearing coyotes lately.

Lately? I've heard them off and on since we moved in last summer.

A study in Chicago found that domestic cats make up only a bit more than one percent of urban coyotes' diets; small rodents top the list for prairie wolves in the city, just as they do in rural areas, followed by fruit and deer (each coming in at less than a quarter of the food items found in coyote scat). According to this study, coyotes ate more grass than cats.

In Los Angeles County, local authorities warn residents to keep their cats indoors: "Keep small pets (cats, rabbits, small dogs) indoors. Don't allow them to run free at any time. They are easy, favored prey. Some coyotes hunt cats in residential areas. "

What everyone agrees on is that coyotes are among the most adaptable predators in the world, and there are more now -- in more places -- than there were 200 years ago, despite extensive efforts to control the species.

Coyotes breed in Feb. and March, giving birth to litters of 3-12 pups about two months later. So, we're entering the high food demand period for the wild dogs -- a time when kitties and ankle-nippers look particularly tasty.

Pets are definitely on the menu in Austin.

Here's one of my favorite news ledes ever, in a recent Austin American-Statesman story by Claire Osborne:

Thor, a Chihuahua, barked as he charged out to his Shoal Creek backyard about 3 a.m. on a January morning. That was the last time his owner, Kay Aielli, saw him.

Maybe it's just the juxtaposition of that name, Thor, and the word chihuahua.

In the same story, Randy Farrar, a biologist with the Texas Agrilife Extension Service -- Wildlife Services (and all-around okay guy), joined a City of Austin animal services official in blaming an abundance of available pet food for the recent rash of puppy snatchings in central Austin.

Farrar agreed, saying that coyote droppings he recently found in the area were "100 percent pet food."

"The last coyote I caught was a female on Feb. 19 that weighed 33 pounds, which is pretty large," Farrar said. "She looked well-fed."


Well, yeah ... Chihuahuas can go, what, 7-10 pounds apiece? I guess the definition of "pet food" depends on how you parse those sentences.

Rest in peace, little Leo. And Thor. And Mr. Jingles.

But don't blame the coyotes. They're just doing what they do -- what they've always done -- and we've only made it easier for them, bringing the supermarket to their doorsteps.

[Okay, just so you know, I don't really think it's funny that anyone has lost a beloved family pet. The little girl who knocked on our door, passing out flyers asking for information on her cat, was near tears, three days after the feline disappeared. And I love dogs. I love big dogs more, and Pete's a brute so I don't much worry about him getting snatched, but I do love dogs. I do think it's rather amusing that folks are actually shocked that coyotes are prowling our neighborhoods and preying on animals smaller than them. They're, you know, predators. Second photo by Steve Jurvetson. Photos licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License]

Monday, March 24, 2008

Worldwide Celebrity!

So, before I took a weeklong sabbatical from the office to work on my captain's license, I get an e-mail out of the blue (the color of my email background page) from Simon Busch of the Financial Times. Of London.

It's sort of like ... The Wall Street Journal of Europe. Maybe bigger.

Simon writes a column for that paper called "Outside Space," and he'd been reading this blog and wanted to conduct a phone interview for an upcoming article on wildscaping.

Once we finally connected, I think Simon was a bit disappointed the most exotic wildlife we've seen yet was a couple of raccoons. I assured him we've heard coyotes and that a mountain lion is not completely out of the question.

I'm pretty sure he's the first journalist to tell me an article will appear "a fortnight Saturday." That's, um, "two weeks from Saturday" in Texan. This coming Saturday, in fact.

At any rate, it was fun to be on the interviewee end of the arrangement for once, not talking about dead babies or fish kills or boating accidents.

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Raptors

I'm notoriously bad at identifying raptors. Caracaras and the common vultures I get every time. Ospreys, too. Bald eagles -- the adults, at least -- are hard to miss. I can reliably make a kestrel, and I once saw a wild Aplomado falcon.

Many of the others, though, are just a jumble of talons and hooked beaks and barred-striped-spotted underparts. I'm pretty sure I've assigned many birds that didn't belong to the Red-tailed hawk clan, though I've likely misidentified far fewer Red-tailed hawks as something else.

Today at lunch I was sitting quietly at the table on our back porch, reading, when I heard a commotion at the bird feeder. I looked up to see a very noisy male cardinal. Nice. Then, I saw a grayish blur flutter across the back of the yard -- heard it too; White-winged dove, I assumed.

A minute or so later, a chunky bird landed on the fence just a dozen feet away. I glanced up, thought "dove," and went back to my book. Then it dawned on me: that was no dove. I look again, to find a smallish hawk peering back at me. The hawk sat on the fence for more than a minute, then hopped into the neighbor's photina bush, fluttered back to the top, peeked at me again, and then flew off.

The whole while I was intensely cataloguing: dark gray/black head and back, rusty barred chest, wide stripes on tail, dark beak, faint eyebrow stripe ....

As soon as the bird flew off, I dashed inside for the books. I turned first to the falcons, because of it's small size and longish tail -- and also the fact that it was hanging around my backyard. Nothing there fit the bill, so I started flipping through the pages.

As best I can tell, our visitor was a Sharp-shinned hawk, which looks much like a Cooper's hawk, only smaller. It's no surprise, then, that Sharp-shinned hawks -- winter visitors in this part of Texas -- primarily eat songbirds. I hope it doesn't too terribly often, but I'd be glad to see it again that close when I have a camera at hand.

Today's hawk was the second bird-eater to visit the neighborhood in recent weeks. Several weeks ago, on several different nights, a pair of Great horned owls held a hoot-off all across the back of the yard and into the greenbelt. It's mating season for Great-horned owls, and mating season is when they are the most vocal.

Great horned owls dine on their little cousins, Eastern screech owls, among other critters.

[Red-tailed hawk in flight, photo ©2006 Walter Siegmund, used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. Illustration of Sharp-shinned hawks in the public domain.]