When I left the Mississippi River Valley to come back to the West, I thought, Hmmmmm, no chickadees in the low desert.  What’s that going to be like?

We were very accustomed to Carolina chickadees as ever-present “fee-bay-fee-bee”-ers in our St. Louis yard.  They accompanied us on hikes; we heard them in the parks, they were everywhere, all year round — active little birds that deserve the gooey description “perky”, sociable to the point of seeming to boldly hang with people if there was seed to be had (safflower, yum!), or nesting fluff (white dog hair, good!). And in Berkeley and Santa Cruz, we’d encountered Chestnut-backed Chickadees frequently.  So when we got to Phoenix it seemed strange to not have “dees” about the place.

But we didn’t need to worry — here we have Verdin (Auriparus flaviceps).   The default little gray bird of the Sonoran desert is taxonomically unrelated to chickadees, but they are superficially like them in that they are small, predominantly gray, active birds who are common permanent residents in their habitat, vocal, and fairly unabashed by humans.  In fact, though they aren’t related, the Verdin’s genus, Auriparus, means “golden parid”, or chickadee-like bird (Chickadees and Titmice are members of the family Paridae.)

“Small” may not be emphatic enough: tiny, or even dinky (the technical term) is more like it.  Verdin are in fact among the smallest of North American song birds: bigger than hummingbirds, but that’s about it.  They flit and glean busily among the thorny green-branched desert trees emitting chip notes and a three-note call that’s frequent and loud considering the size of its source.  Their sounds, along with the mechanical Drr-brrr-drr-brr-drr of cactus wrens and the Curve-billed thrasher’s quick “whit-wheat”, means home to me.

The photo at the top of the post, taken in our yard, is of a male doing nestling-feeding duties — you can see he’s got a little something in his beak.  He was so busy he allowed me to approach fairly closely, and you can see one of the most excellent things about Verdin: the color of their head.  They aren’t called  “flaviceps” (Latin for “yellow-head”) for nothing.  But it’s not just yellow, it’s a very particular sort of golden yellow — slightly green and slightly gray, too, mustard, perhaps, and by some amazing biological coincidence, it’s exactly the color of Creosote blossoms, as if the birds used them to powder their heads.  The bird above is in a creosote bush (Larrea tridentata), and though most of the blooms have become white seed puffs, you can still see a few yellow flowers over the Verdin’s back.  They exactly match his head.  You can also see another colorful field mark, his sharp little chestnut epaulette.  Both the head color and the epaulette are vivid in the close-up image here (photo by T.Beth Kinsey, from the always excellent Firefly Forest).  Notice the narrow, sharp beak of a gleaner, rather than the sturdy beak of a seed-cracker.

As bright as these plumage features seem in photos, they are not always easily seen in the field, unless you’re equipped with binoculars.  So, many folks don’t notice this industrious little desert-gleaner working above their heads in their xeric yards.  What is very easily seen are the nests of Verdins — messy round stick-wads built in thorny trees and shrubs, often placed out towards the end of branches, to catch cooling breezes.  Verdin are prolific nest-builders, and often have a couple underway at the same time.  They build both breeding nests and roosting nests, and you might say they’ve got a complex nest-culture.  The male starts a sample nest which the female helps him finish, probably strengthening the pair bond.  Here’s a photo of an active breeding nest in our yard with noisy hatchlings in it.  The adult birds are hard to pick out, but the same little gray papa in the top photo is hanging in the “front door” along with the female — you have to imagine away the foreground branch of the Little leaf Palo Verde that’s blooming.  The nest is the wad of brown sticks against the blue sky, and the nest opening is at the bottom of the wad, which is where you can see the gray backs of the parents (click to enlarge the photo; it’s easier to see the birds). The low placement of the nest openings make them rain-sheltered and somewhat protected from larger winged predators.

The materials Verdin use for the exterior of their nests are the same ones Cactus wrens prefer for their own, so Verdin nests under construction in spring are often the focal point of theiving-and-chasing interaction between the two species.  In general, Cactus wrens seem to enrage Verdin, and the smaller birds will gang up on any wren they find in their area — nesting material isn’t the only thing Cactus wrens will snatch out of Verdin nests.

Verdins enjoy a variety of food sources besides gleaning bugs and larvae from foliage.  They take a sip of nectar now and again, and often hop around inside the stems of Chuparosa, robbing the sweet nectar from the base of the red flowers (they’re delicious — pop a whole Chuparosa flower into your mouth sometime; they taste like sweet cucumbers).  And we frequently see them hanging upside down from the hummingbird feeders, sipping the drips on the bottom after the sloppy Gila woodpeckers are through.  This acrobatic hanging upside down of Verdins is a family trait — they are the only North American representative of the family Remizidae, or Penduline tits.  Whatever that may sound like, it actually means little birds that hang upside down.

So, although the desert has no chickadees, we’ve got other little gray birds. ( And I haven’t even mentioned gnatcatchers, Bushtits, and Lucy’s warblers…)  But Arizona is not “dee-free”.  When we need a hit of chickadee or titmouse, we have choices — there is actually one more species of Paridae here than in the Midwest: Mountain chickadees in the high pine forests above the Mogollon Rim, Juniper titmice on the Colorado Plateau, the fantastic Bridled titmouse (yes, its ornate facial markings put the Plain titmouse to shame!) in the evergreen oak woodlands of the foothills and mountains of central and southern Arizona, and even a small population of Mexican chickadees in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona.  All we need to do is go uphill and it’s ‘Dee-a-Rama!

Here’s a red subject for Valentine’s Weekend:

In Phoenix there are cardinals.

Everybody knows the football Cardinals, aka “the Redbirds”, who  nearly won the Superbowl recently.  But fewer people, even native Arizonans, know that we also have real Northern cardinals, (Cardinalis cardinalis), aka cardenal comun.  You can’t imagine how surprised some people are when they find out the familiar peaky-headed, conical-billed redster lives in the desert.  I can’t explain this, except that so many folks who live here are originally from the leafy Midwest and Eastern US where the bird is an iconic resident of yards, gardens, and woodlands.  The classic Redbird is so common in the East that it’s the state bird of no fewer than seven states: Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia, more than any other bird (just edging out the Western meadowlark with six and the Mockingbird with five).  But the spiny, dry desert?  Nope: in many people’s minds, the cardinal doesn’t figure in this land of Cactus wrens, buzzards, and roadrunners.  Without going off on a much of a rant (see “PS” below for a short one), I blame popular culture —  especially cartoons — which are such a pervasive influence on what we “know” about the world around us that they can override actual observation.

For example, this is a typical conversation:  Friend:  Hey, what kind of a bird did I see at the Desert Botanical Garden yesterday?  It looked exactly like a cardinal, but I know it couldn’t be, because they don’t live here! Me: Was it all red with a black mask and a point on its head, a little smaller than a robin? (We don’t frequently see robins here, but it’s a meaningful comparison for most non-birders because everyone knows robins).  Friend: Yes.  Me: Then it was a cardinal. Friend: What do they do, stock them there or something? etc…

But cardinals do live here, and they are more or less native. By that I mean according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology whose range map this is, Northern cardinals were “first sighted” in south-central Arizona in the 1870s.  (Were they here already, and some white guy just noticed them and told some official ornithology guy back east?  I don’t know.)  But their range is expanding northward, and now they’re found along the Colorado River, among other western locations, and there are even insular populations in Los Angeles and Honolulu, although somebody put them there, they didn’t wing themselves over.  Our desert cardinals like desert scrub and riparian areas, especially if there is water convenient.  They are found in some neighborhoods in Phoenix, but not all.  We see them occasionally in our yard, but the only evidence I’ve personally seen of breeding sadly involved a female cardinal feeding a cowbird chick.

Nothing looks redder than a male cardinal against greenery, and the cardinals of the Sonoran desert are no exception; in fact, they may look even redder.  There could be a couple of reasons for this.  Our subspecies, Cardenalis cardenalis superbus is the largest of the subspecies, and its crest isn’t significantly less red than its breast, and its black facial mask is slightly less extensive than that in other subspecies.  All of this adds up to More Redder.  Above is a picture of a Cardinal in front of a fully leafed-out Ocotillo.  He has a grub in its beak which he flew away with, which means he was feeding young or a female at the nest.  Otherwise he would have gulped it down himself.

So, in the interest in promoting the broader image of cardinals in all of our minds, the photo to the left is a replacement iconography to “cardinal in the snow”: a male cardinal in the Sonoran Desert.  This one, along with about six others heard or seen within a half-mile of the trailhead, was singing out his nuptial qualifications loud and clear on the Peralta Trail in the Superstition Mountains east of Phoenix last March.  Feel free to click on the photo to see a larger image.

Photos: #1, male Northern cardinal at Boyce Thompson Arboretum, Superior, AZ (A. Shock). #2, male Northern cardinal and Ocotillo, Rancho Esmeralda, Sonora, Mexico (A. Shock).  #3, male Northern cardinal and saguaros, Superstition Mtns, Pinal County, AZ (A. Shock).

P.S. — Please note that none of the real cardinals pictured in this post has a yellow bill.

Rant warning (this makes me see red).  The prevalent and imaginary species “yellow-billed cardinal” has been a pet-peeve of mine since we lived in St. Louis.  Both the baseball Cardinals and the football Cardinals (who were still in St. Louis when we were) use jazzy redbird logos that show Cardinals with yellow bills.  The baseball Cardinals’ mascot, Fredbird, has a yellow bill, too.  The artist in me understands that the second spot of color makes for livelier graphics. Unfortunately, I think it’s also another example of pop culture infesting our knowledge of the real world: robins have yellow bills, duckies have yellow bills, therefore cartoon crows have yellow bills, and therefore all bird’s bills are yellow.  And it’s not just the two Cardinals teams — start looking at images of birds in advertising and popular graphics: most birds have yellow bills.  Having made the complaint, I’m not saying sports logos should all be biological illustration (although the Baltimore Oriole is pretty realistic).  But for me the redbird logo loses some “cardinal-ness” with the bill color inaccuracy — it is shifted away from cardinal and toward generic bird, which is less interesting.  But I empathize with an artist who has to make a cardinal look tough, and I do admire the result, from a graphics point of view.  Here’s the Arizona Cardinals logo, and I have no idea if I’m infringing on copyright to post it here; I hope not.

However, I don’t think there’s any hope of biological integrity for Fredbird.  Sorry.  I have never seen a Cardinal with yellow gloves on.  And what’s with the primary-colored primaries?  A real cardinal isn’t colorful enough?  It’s just not right…

Bonus Bird with yellow bill absolutely free:

Now, if you want to see a real desert-dwelling cardinal-like bird with a yellow bill, check out the fabulous Pyrrhuloxia at an excellent post from Firefly Forest, which I can’t improve on.  Except to add, here’s a Pyrrhuloxia portrait magnet, from Three Star Owl:

An excellent feature of Turkey vultures is see-through nostrils.  That is, they lack a septum, so the opening to their sinuses goes straight through the top of their beak. This is handy for an organism which eats its meals with its head in the liquescent innards of dead things. With just a quick sneeze, any annoying clogging matter can be ejected. Also, the free passage of air into the sinuses enables the scent of lunch to be picked up even from an altitude of several hundred feet.

The pervious nostril can be easily seen in the photo above (by E. Shock).  If this vulture were chilly it would keep warm by pulling his feathery neck-ruff up to his ears by corrugating his forehead skin even more.

The “pervious nostril” is a characteristic of the New World Vultures (the Cathartids: Turkey, Black, and King vultures, the Lesser and Greater Yellow-headed vultures, and both California and Andean condors) and like their bare facial skin is a physical characteristic most likely related to their ancestry: genetic studies have shown they are possibly more closely related to storks than to the Old World vultures and other birds of prey.

It goes without saying that the pervious nostril, as being indispensable to the visual character of the organism, is always faithfully reproduced in Three Star Owl vulture items such as candle-holders (seen to the right, as well as in the Three Star Owl Shop) and a small vulture bottle.

Etymology: If you grew up calling Turkey vultures “buzzards” as many Americans do, you are using a word translplanted here by European English-speaking settlers.  There are no vultures in the British Isles, but there are hawks, which are called “buzzards”.  When newly arrived Europeans saw our big vultures circling overhead, they used the word they had always used for raptors.  The “Turkey” part of the common name “turkey vulture” comes from the fact that at a distance turkey vultures, which like wild turkeys spend a lot of time on the ground, look like turkeys, being of a similar size, with dark body plumage and having colorful bare heads.

A vulture blew up in a bisque kiln yesterday.  Dang!  And it was my own fault, too, a foolish, neophyte error: its body was hollow, and I forgot to make a hole in it for the hot air inside to escape, kerPOW.  The carnage is visible, right.  Fortunately, nothing else in the kiln was harmed.

Vultures have been on my mind recently.  Not only because I’ve been making turkey vulture items like the candle-holder that blew up, and the small “bottle” with the movable head in a recent post, but because of a show I watched recently on PBS.

It wasn’t about vultures.  It was called the Dragon Chronicles, and it was an episode of Nature with a genial herpetologist traveling around the other hemisphere finding examples of real reptilian organisms which shared some of the characteristics of dragons, to promote how each could have given rise to the existence of the legendary fire-breather.  It was a pleasant way of spending a TV hour, but the basic premise seemed a bit of a stretch because the narrator put forth several separate organisms rather than one as possible sources of the dragon legend.

I’ve got a different theory.  I think tales of dragons arose from encounters with vultures.  Think about these “known” characteristics of Dragons:  they are reptilian and large, with snaky necks, they fly, live in caves, horde treasures, are long-lived, wise, fire-breathing, and man-eating.  You can make a good case for each of these also being true of vultures:

Eurasian black vulture. Photographed by Julius Rückert.

Vultures are very large; in the Old World, the Eurasian black vulture of mountainous regions between the Iberian peninsula and Korea is one of the largest birds of prey in the world, massive by both bulk and wingspan (weighing in at nearly 30 lbs and keeping this heft in the air with a nearly 10 foot wingspan).  Its nearest competitors, the Lappet-faced vulture and Andean Condor, are also airborn giants.  With their bare neck and head, vultures are quite reptilian but, unlike modern reptiles, they can fly.  Their contour plumage is stiff and when a vulture rouses (shakes) to adjust disarrayed feathers it rattles like a scale-covered creature, often emitting scraps of fluff and powdery cuticle flakes from feather sheaths.  They lay eggs which are much larger than most birds’, and if broken, would have a baby vulture embryo inside, looking very dragon-like.  Many species of vulture roost and nest in caves and ledges, often in inaccessible peaks and cliffs, where their (to our noses) malodorous lairs are filled with a loose pile of sticks, droppings, and debris — maybe not golden treasure, but a heap of stuff for sure.  In the case of the European vulture-like raptor the marrow-eating Lammergeier (photo below), there are often bones on the ledge, enhancing its image as horder.  When approached too closely, a vulture will hiss loudly, and when pressed further, will sometimes disgorge the contents of its stomach in a forceful jet — like breathing fire.  This disagreeable material (remember they are carrion eaters) is acid enough to be corrosive. A fine deterrent to an interloper, this is also a way of lightening the load for flight.  Most vultures are long-lived, and there are records of Turkey Vultures living past 60 years in captivity.  They are “smart” in the way people mean it, because to some degree all vultures are social, interacting in large numbers at carrion and in migration.  As for man-eating?  Well, long bones in the lair could be interpreted as human by someone who only got a quick glimpse before being driven away by an enraged incubating vulture’s hot projectile carrion slush.  Grimmer still, in times when battlefields and other human casualties were not always swiftly cleaned up, vultures would have made meals of human dead.  As nature’s “Nettoyeurs” (remember Jean Reno in La Femme Nikita?) it isn’t uncommon even today for vultures to be blamed for deaths of livestock they didn’t cause, but were taking advantage of.

Lammergeier, photo by Richard Bartz.

I should add that there are also dragon-type creatures in the mythology of the New World, like the cliff-dwelling, human-devouring Piasa Bird of the Mississippi valley, and of course, Black Vultures and Turkey vultures live in the U.S., not to mention California Condors which had a range of nearly the entire U.S. in the times legend would have been made.  And this doesn’t even scratch the surface of New World vulture mythology; the King Vulture of Central and South America has a prominent place in the mythology of the Maya.

There’s no way to know for certain that vultures were the source of the dragon myth, but I find vultures to be the closest thing to dragons that I’ve personally experienced.

Right now most Vultures that breed in the U.S. are on their wintering grounds, in the far southern states and points farther south.  Even in toasty Phoenix, we won’t see them again regularly until spring, where as in so many places like Hinckley Ohio their return is celebrated on a specific date.  Here in central Arizona, it will be around the third week of March.  So after that, look up in the sky and see if you can Spot the Dragon.

To the right are Turkey Vulture Candle-holders from Three Star Owl (inquire for pricing).

Bonus fact about turkey vultures:  they have an excellent sense of smell, and I’ve heard that some Gas companies use a rotty-smelling compound called ethyl-mercaptan in their gas, to check for open-country gas leaks by looking for kettles of (frustrated!) vultures circling over broken pipeline.

Bonus bonus trivia about Lammergeier, from Wikipedia:

The Greek playwright Aeschylus was said to have been killed in 456 or 455 BC by a tortoise dropped by an eagle who mistook his bald head for a stone – if this incident did occur, the Lammergeier must be a likely candidate for the “eagle”.

The black and white photo of the very vulturine Dragon Bridge is by Barbara Meadows.

The last post was about really big mammals that seem on a scale with mammoths, condors, and whales.  That’s the thing about the Western US, you can never be sure when you’re going to run into some immense mammal, left over from the Ice Age:

E does field work in Yellowstone, so I have an acquaintance with relict Pleistocene megafauna. Once when we were at a back-country hot spring taking measurements, someone stood up and said, “What’s that?” Everyone stood up and looked, and saw a Grizzly Bear. I stood up too, but the autumn grass was tall, and all I could see was a brown woolly hump lurching closer.  It could have been anything, a moose, an elk, a ranger. But it was a bear, scavenging old bones where bison had gone to die on a warm thermal hillside. That’s when I realized how effectively height is selected for in humans.

It’s easy to be afraid of a grizzly bear, but it’s smart to be afraid of a Bison. Even if you know how fast and big they are, they’re actually even bigger than that, and much faster. Not long ago I ran into one, not in Yellowstone, but on Catalina Island, on a hike up to Butt Hill (its real name) above Two Harbors.  I was alone, coming down a “social trail” — an informal path made by people’s feet rather than Park Employees’ shovels — and as I came out of a shrubby oak woods (see photo on right) onto the official road from above, a Bison came out in the same place from below. He was headed up hill, up the trail I had just come down, and was Not At All Pleased to see me. He began to snort, and kick clods, and in general act like a Warner Bros. cartoon bull, except not funny a bit. I sidled up to a shrubby little oak with spreading branches figuring I could climb if it came to that. The bison was only about 15 feet away, so I held very still. After more macho display, he moved off a short distance.  But then I moved slightly, and it set him off again, scuffling dirt and huffling snort and hopping around rocking back and forth, wagging his huge bearded head over his fore-hooves, like an owl “toe-dusting”. The problem was that he had moved off down hill, where I needed to go, and I was standing where he wanted to go. All I could do was hold still until he stopped doing Crabby Boss-man Dance, imagining being late for dinner at the conference dining hall, which seemed very very very far away from that scrubby oak woods, trying to not think what a bison horn would feel like hooked under the ribs. Eventually he stopped acting thuggish (I swear it felt like an hour, but it was probably only a couple of minutes), then he moved off behind some trees, uphill, and disappeared. I stuck to the crummy oak for a few more minutes and then picked my way down hill, on the downhill side of the trail, saying intelligent-sounding things like “Ho, bison,” and “Hey, bison,” so it would know I was there and not be surprised. The rest of the hike was treeless, and I kept looking over my shoulder for the big angry animal, but I never saw it again.

Bison aren’t supposed to be on Catalina Island, but like a lot of things living in Southern California, they were left behind by a film crew. In 1924, so the story goes, 14 bison imported to the island for a film version of Zane Grey’s “Vanishing American” were left to fend for themselves. They did, for better or worse. To judge by the number of close-call videos posted on You Tube, I’m not the only one who’s had an adventure with one of them. I didn’t get photos: the last thing on my mind at the time was the camera.  So my only record of the actual encounter is the Fauxtograph and sketches from my journal included here.  (The very telephotic picture just above shows a bison at a distance — probably the same one I ran into later, but I never imagined he’d cover so much terrain so quickly.  He’s the brownish deceptively tiny blob in the brightest green patch of grass, lying down calmly chewing cud.)

Nature is unpredictable: the next day I came down with a horrible cold.  I’d been worried about being gored on the spot, but instead I was laid low by a bacterium or virus, and was miserable for days. I’ll bet the bison never even gave the incident a second thought.

In memoriam: favorite rust-colored bandanna lost at some point during the escape, when it fell out of a pocket.  On the other hand, I ask: is it smart to hike in bison country with a reddish flag wafting at your side?…

Photos: A. Shock.  Yes, it’s a plastic bison.  That’s the fauxtograph.  Left: bumper sticker on the gear box of a Colorado River raft.  I’m sure the Condors would appreciate Pleistocene rewilding, too.  I’m not so positive: Bison are bad enough, but Short-faced bear and Smilodon?  Don’t know about hiking with those guys…

Pleistocene megafauna trivia

It’s a fact that Lewis and Clark were told to look for Mastodon dead or living on their exploratory jaunt out West, because the terrain was little enough known that the cognoscenti back East weren’t absolutely SURE they were extinct.  Besides, Thomas Jefferson (right, B&W) wanted to prove wrong the eminent French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (right, in color) who claimed that the degenerate North American environment couldn’t support a robust fauna (including its humans).  Jefferson was a big fossil enthusiast, and had a relatively new shiny country to defend against Old World criticism of not coming up to snuff.  To refute Buffon’s claim, so the story goes, he dispatched US soldiers into the north woods to shoot a bull moose to ship to France for display, but Jefferson felt it was necessary to substitute a more impressive rack from another individual to bolster his case that the fauna of North America was indeed macho.

To come back full circle to our bison, it has a prominent place in a monograph Jefferson wrote in response to Buffon’s claim that America was a land “best suited for insects, reptiles, and feeble men.”  Jefferson pointed out that quadrupeds occurring only in America not only out-number by four to one quadrupeds unique to Europe, but that one of them by itself, the American Bison, actually outweighs all of the indigenous European quadruped species combined!

Left: Peale’s mastodon, the critter that everyone was talking about in 1803.

After the family Christmas gathering, E the M and I made our way down the California coast towards the M’s house.  Every few years we find ourselves doing this, stopping sometimes in Santa Cruz, sometimes Big Sur or Davenport, but more than once in Cambria.  The twee shops in the village don’t draw us as much as the surrounding coastal landscape, gentler and less remote than the raw edge of the Big Sur coast (that jagged and temporary fringe of an entire continent): it’s less dramatic but more accessible.  Humans are not the only organisms to find this coast attractive: Sea otters, harbor seals, dolphins, and gray whales can readily be seen in season in these waters; also, northern elephant seals.

In our long ago years at Santa Cruz, E and I would visit the elephant seal rookery at the point Año Nuevo, in those days the only place the enormous pinnipeds were known to haul out on the mainland.  The visit involved advance reservations and a naturalist-led slog through seal-festooned dunes to a viewing point looking down on the rookeries and the island lighthouse of Año Nuevo, in which, the story was told, the lighthouse-keeper’s claw-footed bathtub still contained the skeletal remains of an elephant seal that had crawled into it to die.

So, imagine our surprise when we pulled off from Hwy 1 to hike a bluff trail just north of San Simeon — a hundred miles south of Año Nuevo — and looked over to see a heaving heap of snorting, snoring blubber, jostling and making the same distinctive bladdery croaking sound (described as a Harley starting up in a gymnasium, listen here: 02-alpha.mp3) that we remembered from the rookery north of Santa Cruz.  Since 1990, Elephant seals have colonized the narrow strands stretching south of Piedras Blancas lighthouse, and each December, they return to give birth and mate on these beaches.  Viewing them is easy — a couple of  parking areas have been built atop the bluffs along coast Hwy 1, and low-visibility fences are in place to separate scarred, cantankerous males from pesky human voyeurs.  By mid-December, bulls have staked out their section of beach, and cows are lying about in harems.  The real draw, though, is the young of the year: wrinkled black-furred seal pups lying at their mothers’ side, chirping and bawling until she rolls over to expose a teat, or, rather, a slot where the teat lurks.

We’ve never been lucky enough to see an actual birth, but we’ve seen such newly-born pups that gulls and Brewer’s blackbirds were still fighting over afterbirth among the sandy heaps of seaweed. Last year 4000 pups were born just in the Piedras Blancas rookery, and they’re expecting similar numbers this year.  The density of seals is astounding: in addition to hefty 1600 pound cows, massive 4500 pound bulls, and an assortment of bulky young males, there are piles of blond yearlings lying about in the dunes, snuffling and spraying briny snot on one another, occasionally engaging in mock baby-fights, baring their teeth and striking at each other in practice territorial behavior, then falling back into a doze piled together in heaps like bleached drift logs.

For those of us less inclined to gawk at the unnatural concentration of the world’s riches crammed into William Randolph Heart’s folly (the ersatz Moorish castle overlooks the rookeries), the Piedras Blancas elephant seals put on a different type of oversized spectacle.  Check out the website of Friends of the Elephant Seal for more info and images.

A tip to would-be visitors to Piedras Blancas Rookery: Because viewing access is easy here, there are lots of people, and parking can be problematic.  So, go early (before 10am) or late (after 4 pm, and sunsets can be spectacular!).  Or, visit alternate viewing sites along the same coastal bluffs, where you will see fewer seals, but fewer people, too.  For a less drive-up experience of the seals than at Piedras Blancas, take a hiking tour out to the rookery at Año Nuevo, but don’t forget to get advanced reservations for peak breeding months (Dec -Mar).

By the way, if curious architectural follies of eccentrics do appeal, drive by the eclectic Nitwit Ridge in Cambria, in disrepair but surprisingly resonant with Hearst Castle.

And here she is: meet Miss B.

Sorry, that’s all you get.

Every once in a while, I find a clay pot — a tiny, perfect clay pot — on the wall of the house.  They look like little half-buried Mediterranean amphorae, without handles, with a narrow neck and a flared rim, the entire thing only half an inch across.  But they have no openings: like the false-necked vessels drachmai-conscious Athenian families left at the graves of loved ones — they looked full of precious oil while only actually containing a thimbleful — these tiny pots are sealed at the top.  Sometimes, however, they have a hole in the side, as if a micro-tomb-robber struck the belly of the pot with a spade, to sift through the contents.

A little spadework in books and on the internet turned up the answer to who the tiny potters in our yard might be : Microdynerus arenicolus, the Antioch Potter Wasp, who builds up this mud cell for its offspring one mouthful of clay at a time.

You would think a wasp bringing mouthful after mouthful of mud to a wall right by the front door might be observed easily, but I’ve never knowingly seen one of these wasps on the job.  What I can glean about the appearance and habits of the Antioch Potter Wasp is that they are about half-an-inch long, live in California, southern Arizona and New Mexico, and are solitary wasps.  The adults have creamy white or yellow and black markings, and there are subtle differences in coloring and morphology between males and females that are probably mostly important to other wasps and entomologists.  (The photo on the left is not our Potter Wasp, it’s a related species from Australia.)  The females have stingers, but are “docile”.  They are also “domestic”: it’s the female who does all the housework.  Here’s what an Arizona Game and Fish document says about the Antioch Potter Wasp:

These are solitary wasps, each female constructing nests and provisioning them for her own offspring. Each nest looks like a small jug, about half an inch in diameter, with a short sealed neck. When the female decides to make a cell, she selects a sheltered place, and then carries dollops of mud there for construction. This is a precision process with a thin walled pot resulting. When the pot is almost completed, with just room for her to get her head in, she starts to provision the cell with hairless caterpillars, which she has paralyzed by stinging them in the central nervous system. Once the cell is full she lays an egg on the prey and restarts the cell making process. She adds mud to the edges of the nearly spherical pot. Closing the sphere presents problems that are solved by simply adding extra mud and leaving a small neck. The larva that hatches from the egg eats the prey, spins a cocoon inside the pot and pupates. When the new adult is ready to leave the pot, it simply makes a hole in the side and leaves. Using the neck would be logical but that is where the pot is the thickest.

–Arizona Game and Fish Department. 2004. Microdynerus arenicolus. Unpublished abstract compiled and edited by the Heritage Data Management System, Arizona Game and Fish Department, Phoenix, AZ. 4 pp.

Unless you’re a hairless caterpillar, this is a fascinating process.  Especially for a potter: the technique of building a pot from the bottom up, adding little bits of clay at a time, and contouring it as you go is exactly the technique potters use to build vessels or vessel-like sculptures.  Vessels of any size and shape can be made as long as the supply of moist clay holds out: the potter wasp makes her own by carrying a mouthful of water to a dry clay source and mixing it up to the right consistency and carrying it to the construction site.  To the right is a picture of a Three Star Owl VLO (Very Large Owl) being constructed in the same way as a potter wasp builds her nest.  (It will be more than two feet tall and at this point lacked its face.  Please note that the finished owl sculpture was not provisioned with hairless caterpillars nor were any eggs at all laid during the process.)

I determined to keep an eye on the little wasp-pot, hoping to see a new wasp break free and fly away, to carry on the work of potter wasps in the yard.  Of course, the next time I looked, there was the hole, and the empty belly of the tiny clay amphora — the wasp had flown.  Here’s a picture of the hole made from the inside out by the wasp itself, not a grave robber after all:

Etymology

The common name, Antioch Potter Wasp, seems like a very appropriately Mediterranean name for an organism that makes structures that look like amphorae, the storage and shipping vessels found all over the Mediterranean region from about the 13th century BC until the 7th century AD.  But it’s mere coincidence, and not connected with the ancient city of Antioch on the Levantine coast of the Mediterranean (the stretch of land from which the earliest amphorae, the so-called “Canaanite jars”, come), a hub of commerce and shipping.  The species was given its name from the town of Antioch, California, also a hub of commerce and shipping, where the type specimen was collected and described.

(Photos: #1, 3, 4, A.Shock, Three Star Owl.  #2, from the following site: http://www.geocities.com/brisbane_wasps/images/MudDau7.jpg, no photo credit found)

Here is a photo of a lovely Red barrel cactus in Miss Thang’s garden.

The barrel is happy where it is, and is growing quickly and healthily.  Unfortunately, we’ve had a Bermuda Grass invasion nearby, and despite E‘s manual, non-toxic efforts to control the grass, it’s spread up to the Red Barrel.  It was bad enough when the awful spikes of grass began to come up around the fat base of the cactus, but look closely — at about 3 o’clock on the shadowy right side of the barrel, there is a double spike of insidious grassy green poking out between the cactus’s ribs, inside the cage of the spines.  That is a Bermuda grass shoot growing out through the side of the barrel!  The horrid monocot grew around and under the cactus, and sent up sharp new shoots through its flesh and out its skin about 4 inches up from the soil line, where it’s now established itself contentedly at the expense of the barrel’s structural integrity.  I imagine roots spreading through the interior of the cactus, sucking moisture without remorse.

If you can stand it, here is a close-up, click on the image to enlarge it.

It turns the stomach.