…but it’s not from the bottom of the sea.  If you had a hard time with the centipede or the solpugid, you may wish to look away.  Or not…

This is one of my favorite desert arthropods ever, in kind of an oscillating horrified/fascinated can’t look away from photos of the train wreck kind of way.

It’s a Tailless Whip Scorpion, or an Amblypygid.  Let me just say at the outset that it is completely harmless to humans, and has neither stinger nor venom nor powerful jaws like its “cousins” scorpions, spiders, or solpugids.  Like them, it’s an arachnid, but it has its own Order, Amblypygi.  It’s got narrow pincer-like pedipalps to capture and hold its small pray items which it detects with the long sensory appendages. The other six legs (as an arachnid, it’s got 8 altogether) are used for scuttling about.

>>A live “Rock lobster” on our front cinderblock wall; note that I do not have my hand nearby for scale. Also note that the entire creature is not in the photo: at least another two-inches of “feeler-leg” is out of frame in the upper right.  (Photo E. Shock)

But, it’s really big.  A few years back, I found one in the garage, all folded up with its legs held close to its flat, broad, segmented body.  Hoping to liberate it back to whence it came (the wash in our yard), I approached it with a glass jar and a postcard.  It saw me and moved a few feet away, very quickly and sideways like a crab.  Then it extended its long front pair of legs and suddenly my Bonne Maman jam jar seemed totally inadequate.  I had to get a plastic Trader Joe’s ginger cookie container and a 9×12″ manila envelope to cap it off with, so as not to crush the lil dude’s end leg segments.  Capturing the fast-moving skitterer involved two of us, a fair amount of herding and chasing, and some undignified screeching as feelers encountered fingers.  An odd sensory relic of this capture is that, having just bought new tires for the Honda, the whole garage smelled strongly of new rubber: the whipscorpion’s shiny black exoskeleton looked like a plausible rubbery source of this odor, and every time I’ve seen one since, my mind’s nose smells new tires.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen the “Rock Lobster” — we’re due for a sighting, and this is the perfect time of year to find them abroad on warm Monsoon nights.

Here’s a pleasant fact about tailless whip scorpions, courtesy Wikipedia:

Amblypygids, particularly the species Phrynus marginemaculatus and Damon diadema, are thought to be one of the few species of arachnids that show signs of social behavior. Research conducted at Cornell University by entomologists suggests that mother amblypygids communicate with their young by caressing the offspring with her anteniform front legs. Further, in an experiment where two or more siblings were placed in an unfamiliar environment, such as a cage, they would seek each other out and gather back in a group.

Is that not adorable?

A centipede, a solifuge, now a dinosaur: all have recently made an appearance on our back porch.

Just now, I was sitting in the den with the sliding door open, when suddenly a winged dinosaur landed on the bricks right outside and ran up to the screen-door, its tail held high behind it like a velociraptor.

Greater roadrunner (Photo A.Shock)>>

Although my camera was inches from my feet, I couldn’t move without spooking the creature, so I sat still and watched it forage for a few minutes, searching around the furniture, planters, and nooks just outside the door for goodies. Goodies like centipedes and solifuges, I suppose, and geckos, all of whom might be hiding in their concealed day roosts.

When the bird moved away, I grabbed the camera and followed, only able to get a blurry shot as it looked down at me from the palo verde tree by the wash. Greater roadrunners (Geococcyx californianus) are fairly common in the Phoenix area, but we see them in our yard only occasionally — not every week or even every month. It’s always a surprise and a thrill when one swings by.

“I assure you,” the solpugid says, “it’s good you are bigger than me.  Otherwise… well, I couldn’t account for my actions.”

(Photos A.Shock)

Here’s the whole creature, my hand for scale:

Hoover, the semi-tame African Collared Dove who hangs out in our neighborhood, has been a bachelor for a while. But earlier this summer, we observed him in the company of a female dove who appeared to be a smallish Eurasian Collared Dove, a naturalized old world species that has become very numerous across the US. African Collared Doves are also non-native but less common; our Phoenix-area neighborhood just happens to sustain a small population probably descended from birds released in nearby Papago Park a couple decades ago.

We wondered if these two had something going on. We may have had our answer this morning, when Hoover showed up for his daily handout with Offspring. Darker than its parent, the young one was just starting to develop the black neck-ring that both of its parents have. The little dove didn’t fall very far from the branch; after some jostling, both birds settled in for a feed on E‘s outstretched hand.

The young one has the typical gangly, big-beaked look of an immature dove. (Photo A.Shock)

By the way, I don’t recommend hand-feeding wild birds. Hoover was initially hand-tamed by soft-hearted neighbors. We inherited the “responsibility” sort of accidentally, while caring for our neighbor’s yard a while ago, and have continued it out of the same soft-hearted impulse. Now the behavior seems to be being passed on to the next generation. Time will tell if the youngster will learn Hoover’s in-your-face-wheedling technique of zooming low over our heads whenever we’re outside and he’s in the mood for safflower seeds.

(This post newly updated with better link to owl sound)

Here’s a Spectacled owl (Pulsatrix perspicillata), staring hard at us from its perch in the tropical lowlands of Sarapiquí in Costa Rica.  What could be more delightful than a cinnamon-and-cholcolate owl with white “spectacles?”

I have the answer: one that makes a strange, rapidly pulsating noise like a ray-gun, pwup-pwup-pwup-pwup.  Click on this previous post for etymological details of its scientific name.

(Photo A.Shock)

I’m dying to make one out of clay — a jar perhaps, with a swiveling head?

Last big monsoon event brought rain and a spadefoot to our Phoenix area yard. Tuesday night’s big monsoon event brought even more rain and a centipede.

This guy is a Scolopendra polymorphus, a Sonoran centipede, sometimes called a tiger centipede. This one is about 4 inches long (they can grow up to about 7 inches), and has crawled up the outside of our back door screen, possibly in search of prey, or maybe to escape flooding in the nearby soil, where it very likely dens up.

It’s a beautiful animal, although I have to admit I’m not partial to centi- or milli-pedes (it may be all the pointy little appendages) but as this one’s a neighbor, I’m trying to be inclusive. Apparently, I’m not the only one who has a hard time liking them. Our cat, Hector Halfsquid, spent the evening on the inside of the wet screendoor alternately approaching hesitantly and hurriedly backing away from the centipede, giving the impression of being simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by it.

(Photos A.Shock)

In fact, even today he’s still giving occasional neurotic “creepy hops” where from deep sleep he suddenly jumps out of his skin, apparently having received Gary-Larson-esque “cumulative willies” from the many-legged visitor. Hector’s wariness is probably justified, as these guys can deliver a powerful and venomous bite; not dangerous in most cases, but certainly painful.

Saturday night in our yard, a Couch’s spadefoot emerged after a substantial monsoon event, and used our swimming pool as his stage to advertise his availability to females, and sovereignty to other male spadefoots.  (See previous post.)

<< Spadefoot in the pool net, after exciting dawnzerlylight rescue orchestrated with dramatic Great horned owl background music (photo A.Shock).  Look at those eyes — better than dichroic glass!

Swimming pools are not terribly good for wildlife.  Wonky chemistry + steep sides = unfriendly locale.  At two in the morning, however, I was not able to fish out the wary spadefoot, who fled to the bottom every time I approached with the soft mesh pool skimmer to rescue him.  Eventually he swam right to the very deepest depths of the deep end, where even the long-handled skimmer pole could not not reach.

So, I assembled an impromptu spadefoot ramp.  Mr. Spadefootdude had been calling consistently from one spot at the edge tiles of the shallow end, so rustling up a four-foot one-by-ten and some bricks, I put the structure there in the hopes he’d return to his stage after I’d gone away, and climb out if he wished.

<<  Spadefoot ramp.  Like purpose-made cat toy, not used by spadefoot.

Sunday morning, I got up at dawn to check on his progress.  After the rain it was cool enough to shut down the AC and open doors and windows, so the Great horned owls duetting from the alley phone pole had awakened me anyway.  These were very late hours for them, as the sky was lightening, and the Brown crested flycatchers and Abert’s towhees were already up, brrting and chnking.  Sure enough, the spadefoot was still in the pool, strongly kicking along the bottom of the deepest part with its sturdy legs.

By now I was more awake (and more coordinated), so using both the pool brush and the skimmer, I managed to gather the spadefoot gently in the net and lift him up to the surface.  He paused for the photo portrait above, then competently took himself off hopping, to find a sheltered hiding spot for the day.

If you are wondering why the word “toad” doesn’t appear in these spadefoot posts, it’s because, toadly as they look, spadefoots are not true toads.  On the basis of structural differences, they have been assigned their own family, Pelobatidae, which means spadefoot in Greek.  More info here.

Coincidentally during that very spadefoot night I’d done a smoke firing, and in the bin were two batrachian images, frogs to be sure (prominent tympanum instead of parotoid gland), but still in the ballpark.

<<  Here’s one of the whistles, very Couchy. They’ll be offered at Southwest Wings Birding and Nature Festival in Sierra Vista next week (object and photo A.Shock).

I hope the spadefoot doesn’t make a return appearance on his watery stage tonight; I might not hear him again, if the windows are closed.  I guess that toadramp will be staying in place a little longer.  “wraaaaaaah”

…of finding a spadefoot in the yard!

A few minutes ago — just before one a.m. — I was awakened by a sound I haven’t heard in our yard or in our neighborhood for years: a loud bleating croak, with the slightly rising tone and resonance I can only describe as being like the noise a wet rubber boot would make slowly squelching against another wet rubber surface, like an inflatable raft.  “wraaaaaaah”   “wraaaaaaah”   “wraaaaaaah”  It was the advertising call of a male Couch’s spadefoot.

Couch’s spadefoot (Scaphiopus couchii, photo by A.Shock), having taken refuge at the very bottom of the pool, after I rudely interrupted his advertising song in the middle of the night by shining a flashlight on him, and looking at him.  >>

Our very own spadefoot!  This is exciting because, as I said, we haven’t had them in years.  I figured they were extirpated from around here, so when my friend Kathy, who has them, well… in spades in her north Scottsdale yard, offered me a mort o’ spadefootlets, I jumped at the chance.  I fed them up in a terrarium (a task made more difficult for being necessary during a nationwide retail cricket shortage) and released them in the yard.  After that, there hasn’t been a word from the spadefoots (spadefeet?).  Not a peep, not a croak, not a sighting, nothing.  Mind you, this release was two years ago, in September 2008.  (I blogged the event here.)  I figured they hadn’t “taken.”

Last summer’s monsoon was a pretty weak one in these parts; maybe the spadefeet didn’t get what they needed.  But this afternoon we had about six tenths of an inch of rain in just over half an hour.  The wash in the yard ran; I had to do some engineering to keep water out of the studio (at least from the ground up; water always comes into the studio from the top down).  Anyway, as much as we need the rain, and as cool and lovely as a windless monsoon event makes the desert air, I was not feeling fully friendly toward our wet weather.  Until it brought out a spadefoot!  I’m hoping there are others out there, females, with luck, and we can get a spadefoot thing goin’ on again in the joint.

(Now to get him out of the pool, which can’t be good for him, chemically; plus, he can’t get out by himself, so he’s a sitting duck for the raccoons, which have been marauding recently, mama and two kits.  Poor dude, he’s just lookin’ for love…)

When I tell my non-birding friends that we saw quite a few owls in Costa Rica, many of them are surprised.  The common perception is that owls are indeed woodland creatures, but that’s “normal” woods — not, you know, the “jungle.”  I suspect this monolithic concept of owls — where “owl” pretty much equals “great horned owl” — arises in part from our being exposed from early on to things like halloween images of owls perched in leafless trees over tombstones, defining owls glibly as creatures not only of the night, but of deciduous woodland.  For many, it even takes some getting used to think of owls as desert creatures, living in and on saguaros, and eating scorpions and other Sonoran fare.

So the concept of tropical owls takes many people by surprise.  Of course, owls are at home in rain forests as much as woodlands and wetlands and tundra.  Just not the same owls in all of those places, for the most part.  There are in fact many species of tropical owls in central America, some endemic to Costa Rica, others widespread in tropical habitats from Mexico to South America.

One of the latter is the aptly named Black and white owl (Ciccaba nigrolineata).  They are birds of moist forests.  They also can be found in urban and suburban habitats within that range, much the way Great horned owls successfully exist in proximity to human settlements.

<< Black and white owl scratching its itchy face (digiscoped by C.Gómez)

This Black-and-white owl was roosting in the central city park in the town of Orotina CR, high in a tree it was sharing with a sloth, spending the middle of the day preening itself and scratching its face with its strong-toed yellow foot. It could only be seen by standing directly below its branch and looking straight upward.

From an owl’s viewpoint, a city park is a good place to hunt large insects, like cockroaches, and small mammals, like mice and bats.  From a human point of view, it was humorous to be enjoying such an excellent owl in such an urban setting: we were surrounded by ice-cream vendors, mothers strolling their babies, pan-handlers, too-cool teenagers eyeing each other, and romping, boisterous children, as we craned upward in broad daylight at an owl who seemed to care nothing for all the traffic noise and people far below it. The owl’s primary concern seemed to be that its face itched. As it scratched like a cat, rapidly kicking at its facial disc with a talon or two, bits of down fluff, owl dander, and even a contour feather drifted down unnoticed onto the activity and bustle in the park below.