“In the dark was a boojum, you see,” to paraphrase Lewis Carroll.

The javelinas, bats, and skunks get to see it like this all the time. But before last friday night, I’d never seen a boojum in the moonlight.

Turns out waxing gibbous is a good look for the strange tree.

(Boojum, Fouquieria columnaris, or cirio in Spanish, “candle”. Photo A.Shock, Boyce Thompson Arboretum)

… “Don’t take this frog for granite”

I never can resist posting Canyon treefrogs (Hyla arenicolor), those most toadly of frogs.

This one was sunning itself on a rock this morning, looking quite like its substrate, the granite of Devil’s Canyon. As we canvassed birds along Queen Creek for North American Migratory Bird Count, we had to look down as well as up, because the warm rocks were frequently festooned with fat frogs, each one blending in just as nicely as this one — a stream cobble with gold-flecked eyes. (Photo A.Shock)

…and other creatures of shift and change.

The day began with a coyote, and an oriole. The coyote we encountered in front of our house, at the start of our early morning walk toward the neaby desert park. It was on its end of the day commute — on the way from our street where it had likely been marauding for spare cat food and spare cats, back to the neighboring butte <<, where its family lives. This time of year the desert dogs are very much in evidence: the butte “goes off” every time a fire engine roars up the surrounding streets, especially in the early or late hours of the night. In the dark the porous rock seems to emit howls and yelps of a number of coyotes, and sometimes the yips of a local gray fox or two.

The cheeky Bullock’s oriole we saw as a brilliant orange flash overhead against the early blue sky, is also a migrant, headed to its breeding grounds uphill from the low desert. This bird might have been close to the end of its journey to cottonwoods somewhere in one of the riparian corridors of Arizona’s mid-elevation waterways and lakes, like the Verde Valley or Lake Roosevelt. It flew scolding out of our palo verde and we didn’t see it again. (Photo of male Bullock’s oriole by Kevin Cole from Wikipedia Commons)

The day ended with migration, too, but of a different sort. Friday night Three Star Owl was part of a trunk show hosted by Tuttibella Designs (thanks Teresa!), and during the evening, several items migrated away from the home territory to new nests: including an owl jar with a continuously swiveling head, a blue raven mug, some hummingbirds-of-AZ-ware, and an octopus mug. May they bring their new caretakers much pleasure!

>> Three Star Owl Beastie Ware (iPhone photo & mugs, A.Shock)

Finally, in a true stretch of the migratory theme that also has to do with acceptance, Three Star Owl has finally wandered into the milling herds of merchants who take credit cards. This has been a grudging and lengthy journey with what I hope will be a satisfying and stable ending, in which submission to technology and its costs brings benefits to everyone. And fortunately, so far, so good!

Well, not actually an alligator, but a beautiful spiny lizard. As we were packing up, we found him snoozing in a sheltered nook under my table foot at Birdy Verde.  The event is in a huge tent set up in a field, and they put a carpet down over the dirt — this dude found a good spot to take refuge from all the bustle.  The nights were still going down to near freezing, and who knows, maybe the carpet covered his hidey-hole.

I think he’s a Desert Spiny lizard, since he didn’t have the barred forelegs of a Clark’s.  But I’m not an expert.  Anyone care to weigh in?

At any rate, there he was, all 9 inches of him including tail, looking a lot like a small alligator.  Tom of Tom’s Bird Feeders (and Reptile Supplies) wrangled him into a box >>, and E released him at the edge of the woods.  He scuttled away, a little sluggishly because of the cool temperatures.

<< This is what the west end of an eastbound spiny lizard looks like.

(Photos E.Shock, click to enlarge, especially the middle one!)

Though the lady bug life cycle has been covered here before, I can’t resist posting this photo of a brand new Lady Bird Beetle and its recently exited pupal casing.

>> the bug and the box it came in. Click to enlarge, it’s a nice big file (photo A.Shock).

Just a couple of days ago, I’d noticed the pupa on an artichoke leaf in the veggie garden. It was practically the first evidence I’d seen of the spring lady bug generation’s progress since finding the eggs on the cilantro earlier this month. Later, I’d only managed to find one active larva, so I was pleased to locate this pupa. Sunday morning I went to show it to E, and there it was — split open now, while its erstwhile occupant, having backed out of the crack in the posterior of the casing, pumped its new flight wings full of hemolymph in the bright morning sun. The unripe-tomato-y quality of the elytra at this stage is perfect, starting out transluscent waxy-yellow and slowly deepening to the familiar cherry-tomato red. The spots appear and darken gradually like darkroom images, gaining contrast and intensity as the carapace dries and hardens.

This time of year the world is pregnant with nests full of eggs, tiny cottontails hopping and hiding in the yard, fledgling birds following their parents food-begging insistently, new yellow-green leaves and catkins on the mesquite trees, and glorious cactus blooms.

<< Praying mantis egg-case on a Palo Verde twig (photo E.Shock). >> close-up of a mesquite catkin (photo A.Shock)

But as this acceleration of generation increases, we see another side of abundance: broken eggs on the ground, young birds not experienced enough to stay out of the street, small mammals learning the hard way about the swimming pool, an adult gopher snake swallowing a tiny cottontail.

Spring is a scavenger’s prime-time. We’ve been watching an Inca Dove carcass decompose under the tangerine tree. In the dry desert, this isn’t a grisly thing: if not enjoyed by raccoons, foxes, or feral cats, the soft parts are quickly consumed by the local scuttling scavengers, usually ants or dermestid beetles and the like. Inca Doves are small, anyway — there’s not much to them, and small bodies don’t have time to bloat, liquefy, or smell very much.

>> Inca dove skeleton (photo A.Shock)

Decomposition is short and if not sweet, at least efficient. What was an intact dove carcass lying in the leaf litter a couple of days ago was, by yesterday, an articulated partial skeleton. The head was gone, but the ribs were still festooned with a few feathers, and the pelvis dangled two femurs and a foot. The ants’ tidy de-fleshing revealed a possible cause of death invisible to us before: egg-binding. Look below the rib-cage under the vertebrae and pelvis, and you can see an intact egg, cracked but still heavy with its contents, in place in the abdominal cavity.

<< Here’s a side-view. The large blade-shaped bone on the right is the little dove’s keel, or breast-bone; the egg sits snugly — perhaps a little too snugly — under the tiny pelvis.

I don’t have my own photo of an Inca Dove — although they’re common in our yard, they’re camera-shy, at least in my experience. But if you need the reassurance of a living image, or more info about Inca Doves, click here, for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology entry on the species.

And just to sweeten the pot because after all it is the holiday season, here’s a photo I posted last spring, of two terribly tiny bunnies snuggled into the form their mother scraped out for them. Go ahead; click to enlarge to see their tiny fluffy details. It was either this or one of the gopher snake eating a baby cottontail, but I think I’ll save that for next Easter.

>> two infant cottontails stashed in a form (photo A.Shock)

To the right is the photo key to the Rock wren of the current Spot the Bird. Rock wrens rock one of my favorite Latin names in the bird world (along with Upupa epops, the hoopoe): Salpinctes obsoletus. According to Choate, the name comes from Greek salpinctes, “a trumpeter” and Latin obsoletus, “indistinct”, referring to its ringing voice and drab plumage. These contradictory traits explain why the little bird is often heard before it’s seen.  Some of you who wrote to tell me you found it said that after not seeing it for a while “it just suddenly popped out of the picture”.  That’s the way it tends to happen in person with these guys, too.

Below is a rock wren up close, singing its song. You can see its long, de-curved bill, useful for probing rocks and crevices for insects and spiders.  It’s also good for carrying and manipulating small rocks: Rock wrens construct a pavement of tiny flat stones and pebbles leading up to their nest, which is concealed in a hole or crack in a rock.  No one (except the wrens) knows why they do this.  (<< photo E.Shock, taken at Fremont Saddle in the Superstition mountains) One thing the beak does not do is take up water: Rock wrens are thought to get all their moisture through their prey, and don’t drink even when water is available.

Speaking of water, E would like me to add that the rocks in the top photo, along Castle Hotsprings Road, are significantly hydrothermally altered.  You know, subjected to intense heat in a moist environment, either at depth, or nearer the surface, as in a hotspring.  I don’t suppose the rock wren cares, except that the hydrothermal process has left the rock cracked and full of holes, which is just what a rock wren likes.  Click here for a tale about another hydrothermally-altered rock that hosted many organisms.

….but not the quadrupedal kind.

One of the main attractions of following the Castle Hotsprings Road through the edge of the Buckhorn Mountains NW of Phoenix is the spring wildflower bloom. This past weekend the succulent plants predominated: Ocotillos were in full swing, and the prickly pear were starting to get the hang of it.

<< one solitary ocotillo bloom leans in close as if to check out the saguaro’s underarms. This one needs a caption, like those dweeby cactus humor books I remember from my childhood. Something like, “Stubble?, umm, I think you missed a spot.” (all photos A. Shock unless noted; click each to enlarge, it’s worth it)

This horizontal Englemann’s pear leaf sprouted buds like shrimp on a plate, instead of just around the top edge (photo E.Shock). >>

It must have been close to peak for the display of Englemann’s hedgehog cactus (Echinocereus englemannii) in explosive, glorious, hot pink bloom. The stems of these spiny succulents are only about a foot tall and their green skin is concealed by both long and short spines, so despite their numbers, the sturdy hedgehog clumps are easily overlooked for most of the year. But their pink-to-magenta flowers are up to three inches across, making flowering cactus stand out on the most brutally exposed slopes of rocky hills and arroyos. <<

They don’t need much of anything to grow or bloom — their preferred medium is stony, desiccated, mineral soil, sometimes in the scant shade of a shrub or larger cactus, sometimes not: they’re happy baking in the full Arizona summer sun, and can thrive in a crack in solid rock that even a rock wren would scorn.>>

<< One hog we found had the hugest flowers I’d ever seen: that’s E‘s man-sized palm for scale, not my girly-paw.

Native solitary bees buzz in and out of the cuplike blooms, sometimes invisible except for waggling stamens deep in the throat of the flowers. Click on the photo below to see a bee-butt poking upward, right next to the apple-green pistil, which hasn’t opened fully into its star-shaped ærial panoply. You can also see the formidable armory of spines on the fleshy, water-hoarding stems. Even javelina are discouraged by them, although I’ve seen otherwise imposing boar javelinas with lips daintily reddened by the petals of the flowers of a “claret cup” hedgehog cactus. This petal-snacking would be considered hog-on-hog predation, except that neither javelina nor hedgehogs are actual pigs.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a SPOT THE BIRD.

Rock wrens, Salpinctes obsoletus, live among rocks in the arid mountain and desert west.  Here are some rocks.  These rocks are along the Castle Hotsprings Road between Phoenix and Wickenburg, AZ.  There is a Rock wren in these rocks.  If you could hear the wren, it would be singing its spring song which sounds a little like a small mechanized Mockingbird, and also calling “zhe-deeee zhe-deee,” etc (or, if you prefer, “tick-ear”).

Remember, you are looking for a tiny tiny grayish bird among big rocks.  You should be able to click once or twice on the image to enlarge it, although that will make the search a good deal easier.  Answer to be published later.  As usual, no prizes, but I’d love to hear from you when you locate the wren.

(Photo A.Shock)