payday loans

Archive for the 'natural history' Category

You are currently browsing the archives of Three Star Owl – Functional and Sculptural Clay Artwork with a Natural History .

Phoenix Herpetological Society

Vicki arranged for a tour of the Phoenix Herpetological Society (PHS) for some ASU colleagues. It seemed like a fascinating way to celebrate our anniversary (#24!), so E and I went. Vicki and her husband Calvin are long-time volunteers at PHS and they showed us around the facilities, which are up north off of Dynamite Rd in Scottsdale.

We swam a python, scrubbed an education ‘gator, and fed other alligators and a crocodile, tortoises, and iguanas of several species. By “we” I mean Vicki and Calvin, while the rest of us took pictures and asked questions. We helped a little, lobbing handfuls of produce at large lizards, poking expiration-date challenged chicken legs and donated elk shreds by the gobbet through chain link enclosures with tongs, to be snapped up by eager gator jaws. Iguanas adore grapes, and African tortoises love lettuce. A lot of lettuce. Each day crates and crates of produce donated by grocery stores go into the non-native tortoise corrals. Any idea you may have had of slow-moving giants lying about motionless is destroyed once you see a horde of tortoises trundling towards lettuce mounds.

We watched Tigger, an 11 foot Reticulated Pythoness swim in the pool, while wallabies cowered at a distance. Tigger was beautiful, and unlike most snakes I’ve seen swimming who skim the surface skillfully but with purpose (why does a cottonmouth swim a creek? – to get to the other side), she was swimming for pleasure, and loved to dive down to the very bottom, where small bubbles trickled up from her iridescent scales. She looked at home in the water, like a very long, sinuous salamander. Another “Retic”, Donny, returned from an event just before we left. He was still coiled calmly in his open traveling crate, a very sturdy, well-ventilated plastic trunk on wheels, waiting for several volunteers to lift him back into his regular habitat. Donny weighs something like 350 pounds, is 18 feet long, and hasn’t maxed out in length yet.

PHS is a place where unwanted/abandoned reptiles can find a home, where relocated rattlers live temporarily, and where herps used for education programs in schools and other venues both private and public are housed between gigs. Most of the animals we saw were either confiscated or abandoned — people leave critters in boxes on PHS’s doorstep, to avoid paying the drop-off fee. They’re homeless because of their owner’s inability or unwillingness to care for them as they grow larger.

More animals are coming in to places like PHS these days because of the current economy and rising foreclosures and evictions; it’s the same at dog and cat shelters, too. We shed a few tax-deductible dollars their way before we left: PHS survives mostly on green — money or the edible sort. If you ever see your local grocer throwing away produce (or meat), tell them about Phoenix Herp Society — daily donations don’t always match the tortoises’ (and gators’) needs. And seeing all those sheltered animals drove home the need to think before buying an exotic herp to bring home: many of the PHS’s tortoises, and even some of the snakes and monitors are available for adoption to suitable homes, a really hands-on way to help out (you need to apply, be approved and pay an adoption fee). Or consider volunteering, or hiring PHS to bring critters to a home birthday party or work event for a truly unique and educational experience. Check out their website for more options.

Posted by Allison on Oct 26th 2008 | Filed in field trips,natural history,reptiles and amphibians | Comments Off on Phoenix Herpetological Society

Migration nation

There is a gap in Three Star Owl postings between Cranky Owlet hears autumn and the Canyon Wren post. This is because for nearly two weeks I was in Mexico, looking at birds. Though the trip had long been planned and paid for, it was a strange thing to be doing while the US economy was falling apart. I was out of the country during the initial flap while the bailout was being tussled over, while the market was first plunging, while the vice presidential candidates were debating. These serious events made looking for birds seem both frivolous and fundamental simultaneously. Frivolous because spending money on vacation travel in a time of economic uncertainty seems unwise and even trivial. Fundamental because, well, the birds were still living their lives, existing in their environments as usual, evading predators, searching for food, migrating thousands of miles to distant wintering grounds, and observing this was a connection to an elemental reality.

The group I was with was traveling in the Mexican state of Veracruz to see, among other things, the spectacular flights of north American birds of prey funneled along the Gulf Coast of Mexico, the famous so-called Rio de Rapaces. Osprey, Turkey vultures, Broad-winged hawks, Swainson’s hawks, Mississippi kites, Peregrine falcons, Merlins, and others, as well as non-raptors such as American white pelicans, Scissor-tailed flycatchers, Wood storks, and Anhingas swirl overhead in dynamic kettles, spiraling upward on thermals, rising like litter in a dust-devil until they are high enough to stream outward in a south-bound line, some to Central America, others like the Swainson’s hawk, all the way to central South America. Below, their vast exodus is mirrored by the southward movement of songbirds, some nearly at ground level: warblers, thrushes, shorebirds, flycatchers, dickcissels, vireos, grosbeaks, and other songbirds, heading southward mostly at night, stopping to rest and feed during the day in the resource-rich coastal plains, transitional foothills, and tropical forests of the moist state of Veracruz.

These are birds that we are accustomed to thinking of, imprecisely, as “ours”. They are ours, in a sense, because they breed in various parts of the United States and Canada. But for more than half the year, they live in regions closer to the equator, Mexico, Central, and South America, which countries have at least as great a “claim” to the birds as “we” do. They belong to both northern and southern America: this is a hemispheric, in some cases even global, avian economy, in which birds go when and where there is a living to be made, whether the seasonal draw is fruit, seeds, insects, other birds to eat, or survivable temperatures.

At that time, watching CNN in English on a hotel lobby TV hearing US announcers and US politicians expound, it was easy to think of all the economic turbulence as a US problem, with the rest of the world watching from a distance. That was until the the day before we left, when the peso, after a decade of stability at 10 to the American dollar, fell nearly 40 per cent in one day, largely because of the drop in the price of oil. Suddenly, like the movement of birds across the Americas, everything seemed closely related after all.

For the Pronatura Veracruz October 2008 actual day-by-day count of raptors seen, click here.

For an excellent read on the astounding fact and feat of avian migration, try Scott Weidensaul’s “Living on the Wind: across the hemisphere with migratory birds”. He’ll make you realize that migration is an even more amazing phenomenon than it seems. Chapter 5, Rivers of Hawks, is specifically on the Veracruz migration and its fairly recent discovery. As for learning about global economics, you’re on your own. I think we all need to start from scratch, at this point.

Photos: Top, (A. Shock), mural of a Broadwinged hawk and birdcensuser motif on the parapet wall of the Pronatura Hawkwatch site on the roof of the Hotel Bienvenidos, Cardel, Veracruz. Center: kettle of raptors, photo pinched from the site of the North American Ornithological Conference 2006, because I couldn’t get my camera to focus on all those little specks. Below: Osprey from National Park Service Padre Island website.

Posted by Allison on Oct 17th 2008 | Filed in birding,birds,field trips,natural history | Comments Off on Migration nation

Vertical Napping Bark: it’s hard to see an owl

My friend Kate McKinnon recently posted that she has a hard time seeing owls in the wild, and she takes it personally. Well she should, because an owl’s Primary Goal other than to eat something, is to escape detection, by you, by me, by a thoughtless human with a crossbow, by the other bigger owl, by sharp-eyed prey, and by Kate McKinnon. We are all of us intended to Not See Owls.

Owls have many tools for escaping detection: cryptic coloration, shifting outline often modified with cranial feather tufts, motionless roosting, self-effacing habits, and nearly silent flight. They are chromosomally adept at Hiding in Plain Sight.

Seeing an owl is a lightning bolt, a mistake, a gift, a shock, a plot by crabby song birds. A sighting is usually because someone who knows where an owl day-roosts points it out, or we hear one call and get a glimpse as it glides across a dark sky, or because wrens and chickadees and jays fink it out. If the owl is seen, a small owl will shrink or stretch, and squint to hide its telltale eyes; a big owl might merely turn its head, or not, because though it prefers to not be seen, it isn’t too worried since you cannot fly. If you spot an owl don’t point or wave the hands, it might make it flee. If you remain still and quiet, they often will too, allowing a few photos, especially if they are rock stars like certain Mexican spotted owls in southeastern Arizona, who frequently host googly-eyed camera-toting visitors like me in their woods.

Here are some things to do if you wish to see an owl: put up a nest box; go on an owl prowl (check Audubon groups and raptor education outfits in your area); keep your ears open; look for owl pellets and whitewash under horizontal boughs close to the trunk; inspect the tops of saguaros at dusk; look in every tree/cactus hole you know of that’s above head height; go into the woods at night; watch the news (urban owls often wind up on TV, like the famous Scottsdale Safeway Urn-nesting Great horned owls); make secret offerings to the Great Owly Entity. But remember, owls’ desire to escape detection is greater than our ability to find them. Good luck, and Good Owling.

photos by A. Shock: Great horned owl with downy chick manifesting as barkless tree skin, San Pedro River, AZ; Mexican Spotted owl pair manifesting as dappled sunlight through branches, Huachuca Mountains, AZ.

Posted by Allison on Oct 15th 2008 | Filed in birds,natural history,owls,spot the bird | Comments (4)

New things in the yard and in the season: Canyon wren!

There are wrens in our desert world. Big, raucous, busy Cactus wrens are always here. And there are wrens that pass through: eye-browed and long-tailed Bewick’s wrens in spring and fall; a Rock wren usually comes around a few times in the winter, and even a House wren once, on its way to its breeding grounds uphill from here.

Today we had a new-for-the-yard visitor: a Canyon wren “jeeting” around on the back porch. It was early morning, and we were up for our Papago Park walk, but before we left I spotted a small dark form flitting in and out of small spaces under the bentwood rocker. At first I thought it might be a rodent, but after better looks, it proved to be a Canyon wren, its cinnamon and gray back and white throat clear even in the early light. It was actively foraging first on the canes of the chair, and then between the flower pots by the pool.

Canyon wrens live in arid places, but usually not in lowland deserts. They are characteristic denizens of precipitous canyon terrains in higher elevations, like the Mogollon Rim or the Grand Canyon, the Superstition Mountains, and such hard-surfaced vertical spaces as those, where their clear descending call rolls down the rock, and absolutely means “Desert Mountains” to many of us who live or visit there. Perhaps there’s a downward movement of a small percentage of the birds from higher elevations for winter, so some birds must pass through occasionally, but it’s a bird we’ve neither seen nor heard in our yard before, nor in Papago Park, where the buttes provide habitat more like what it would naturally occupy.

Canyon wrens are structurally specialized for probing stony crevices for delicacies: their bill is long and straight, and according to Sibley, their spine is attached to the skull at the back, instead of from underneath, which gives the small bird both maximum probing capacity and a nearly constant upward-tilt to its head.

Amazingly — it’s a very active subject — E managed to get these two photos of this morning’s bird, a bit blurry but very identifiable. The last we saw of it was its little rusty tail disappearing into the dark spiny interior of the Mexican fan palm. Then we lost track of its “jeet” call, and we didn’t see it again.

For the record, this week in October seems to be one each year when it’s possible to find species on the move: last year, this was the part of the month when an Ovenbird, a tiny, unexpected out-of-range thrush-like warbler made a brief appearance under the backyard mesquite, as if it belonged there. White-crowned sparrows have also recently returned for their winter stay, making themselves known by their characteristic and pleasing song, along with the male Red-winged blackbirds, who trickle in a few at a time and stay until spring.

To hear a Canyon wren sing go to ASU’s Ask a Biologist and under “Sound files” click on “click to open” then click on the right-pointing triangle to play.

Photos by E. Shock.

Posted by Allison on Oct 12th 2008 | Filed in birding,birds,close in,natural history,yard list | Comments Off on New things in the yard and in the season: Canyon wren!

Yard list: Desert Iguana, spotted

The first day of autumn has been a red letter day in our yard. Not only was there a Western screech owl calling last night — a new species for the yard, as far as my observations go — but this afternoon, in the heat of the day, a young Desert iguana raced under a creosote bush in the front yard, when I went out to get the mail.

I whipped out my tiny Canon Elph but the little ‘zard was all warmed up from hanging out in the midday sun, and it sped away before hiding in the shade under the creosote where I could see him but couldn’t get a picture. So I pinched this nice photo by Jason Penney from the excellent Reptiles of Arizona website which you can check out for more detailed info about this lizard. When full grown, Desert iguanas (Dipsosaurus dorsalis) are large lizards — almost 6″not counting tail and up to 16″with it — with a blunt face, long tail, and distinctive buffy coloration below a colorful pattern of speckles. This little guy shone pale gold as it raced across the cement driveway; its color gave away its identity even before I got close enough to see him well. Tiger whiptails (Aspidoscelis tigris) the lizards we see most often around here, are darker and lower to the ground.

The little iguana was also exhibiting another trait of its kind: it was out in the hot part of the day, when most other lizards have retired to shaded shelter or underground to rest and digest their forage. Diet is another thing that makes Desert iguanas distinct from our other lizards — they’re largely herbivorous when mature, eating a variety of desert vegetation, including the yellow flowers of creosote bushes, which they will climb to feast on. The first Desert iguana I ever saw was among the spring wildflowers at the Desert Botanical Garden, grazing in the hot sun like a small-scale reptilian cow, even leaving behind it large (for a lizard) fibrous pellets of poop like plant-eaters do. And, yes, they are related to their better known cousins, the Green “Tastes Like Chicken” Iguanas (Iguana iguana) of Mexico and Central America. I don’t know what something that feeds on pungent creosote blooms would taste like.

But this is why seeing him was especially exciting: there are only a few in the neighborhood, and that number appears to be shrinking, at least by informal observation. It’s only a theory, but mortality of Desert iguanas (specifically in our neighborhood) seemed to accelerate after the City re-coated our streets with a dark sealant. It makes for good basking, perhaps, the dark surface heating up earlier and staying warm later than the old gray road, and sadly, for several weeks, I would see Desert iguana roadkill regularly: three along one stretch of a heavily-used street nearby alone. So, seeing this little guy who was perhaps this year’s hatch, or more likely a yearling, was a very welcome sight.

Etymological notes:

Dipsosaurus is constructed of Greek elements, meaning “thirsty lizard”; dorsalis refers to the spine, which in Desert iguanas is protected by prominent, keeled scales.

Tiger whiptail, photo by E. Shock

Tiger whiptail, photo by E. Shock

Aspidoscelis tigris: Aspidoscelis is also from Greek elements, and means “shield leg” because of the sturdy scales on the whiptail’s legs, and “tigris” because it is stripy.

Posted by Allison on Sep 22nd 2008 | Filed in close in,etymology/words,natural history,reptiles and amphibians,yard list | Comments (1)

Autumnal Owlinox — new season, new yard bird

Last night was a busy night in the yard. Well, I suppose they’re all busy nights, but last night I was awake to appreciate it. Before human bedtime, the geckos were at their posts under the porch lights (our yard residents are the non-native Mediterranean Geckos, not the indigenous Western Banded, but they’re still charmingly rubbery voracious devourers of insects, especially moths), and the Butte was going off sporadically, the coyote pack’s yelps ricocheting off the slickrock. There might have been the sharp yip of a Gray Fox, which also inhabit the neighborhood, but it was faint. Somewhere, the spadefootlets must have been hopping around foraging in the dark, as well.

After “bedtime” though, things really got going. A female raccoon marauded past the bedroom trailed by at least one kit from this year. Last year there were two separate families, one with two, the other with three kits each. That’s a lot of pounds of raccoons living off the yard, plus Papa, too, who has only half of a tail, diminishing his raccoon-gestalt but not his swagger. We’re not sure how many there are this year, because our view of them is most often through the arcadia door, and sightings are limited to who rolls by the framed glass, like watching a dog show on the TV animal channel.

Last night the main event (for me), however, was again being awakened by an owl. Not the Great Horned owl this time, but an owl I’d never heard in our yard: a Western screech owl. They’re not uncommon in the area — I’ve seen them peering out from day-roosts in saguaro cavities at the nearby Desert Botanical Garden — but we’ve never heard or seen them in our little scrap of modified desert. This one called from just after 2 am until the Butte really exploded about half an hour later, when the owl stopped. Its mellow short hoots were emitted in a cluster which descended slightly at the end. It sounded much like the “Morse code call” of its cousin the Whiskered screech owl, but that species doesn’t live in this part of Arizona. The call was soft but regular, and started up again at 4 am, and went on for at least 45 minutes, when I fell back to sleep.

So far, like the generously rainy Monsoon of 2008, this has been a generously owly season in the yard, and this Western screech owl, who may always have been here, or who may be a new neighbor, ushered in fall last night; I’m glad I was awake to hear it. With luck maybe we’ll catch a glimpse of it sometime, hunting pocket mice and crickets under the desert trees. Right now, though, I think I need a nap: the first nap of Autumn!

“The northern autumnal equinox takes place today, Monday, Sept. 22nd, at 15:44 UT (11:44 a.m. EDT) when the sun crosses the celestial equator heading south for the year. Autumn begins in the northern hemisphere, and spring in the southern hemisphere. Happy equinox!” (Spaceweather.com)

***

Photos: Raccoon family, A.Shock. Western screech owl by L.Kovash. Left: a Western screech owl peering from a saguaro vessel (stoneware, 12″), from Three Star Owl. Photo by A.Shock.

Posted by Allison on Sep 22nd 2008 | Filed in art/clay,birds,close in,natural history,owls,three star owl,yard list | Comments (1)

Yard list: Great horned owls part two

Update to an earlier post:

Our local Great horned owl has a friend. Last night from about 4 am we listened to two owls duetting and singing antiphonally for about half an hour, the higher hoots of the female alternating with the lower calls of the male. It’s early in the year for coursthip, but my guess is that these are our usual, established owls reinforcing their pair bond.

Posted by Allison on Sep 15th 2008 | Filed in art/clay,birds,close in,drawn in,natural history,owls,yard list | Comments Off on Yard list: Great horned owls part two

Yard List — Great Horned Owl

Last night at 3.00am exactly, I heard the Great horned owl call. Very close, somewhere right in the back yard. The windows were open because a light monsoon event had brought fresh rain-cooled air, so the call, though soft, carried clearly.

Great horned owls are regulars in our area because there are plenty of perches, and plenty for them to eat. A favorite owly destination is a big Aleppo pine in our back yard. At night that tree is stuffed with roosting doves and other perching birds, a veritable Fresh and Easy for owls. Sitting outside at dark with friends, we’ve watched a horned owl glide stealthily into mid-level branches and then listened as panic ensued among the roosting doves as the owl hopped between branches as if it were going aisle to aisle in a grocery store, filling a cart. Finally it burst out of the needles with a meal clutched in its talons. We got a good look at it is it slid past us, sihouetted against the lights of the house. The feather pool under the pine the next morning was evidence that it had enjoyed a bit of mourning dove.

They are not called “Flying tigers” for nothing. Horned owls, like toadlets, will eat anything that moves and fits down the gullet. Rock squirrels, snakes, desert cottontails, other birds (even other owls), insects, and bats — all are fair game. Even small pets may be at risk, if left unsupervised after dark. The first owl I ever saw was at the family dinner table when I was a kid: a thump, a commotion, and we looked up to see the underside of a Great horned owl pressed to the window, wings flapping against the glass. The owl was trying to separate the family cat (a calico named Ringo, to give you an idea how long ago this was) from the window ledge. A grown cat is awfully heavy prey, however, and the owl had to give up after a few seconds. No one was hurt, but the bird went away hungry. (It was a spectacular view of an owl in action, and I’ve wondered if that was THE bird for me, in a formative sense — I was no more than seven). The boldest hunters are often adults with young to feed — a nest full of hungry owlets requires a lot of sustenance. During that time of the year, parent owls sometimes can be seen hunting even during daylight, working a day job to put food on the table. So, hatching and fledging are timed to coincide with the local peak of yearly rodent production, usually spring, but in the desert areas often much earlier.

Our local owls have reproduced, and sometimes I’ve heard the distinctive, raspy oink of a horned owlet begging, installed on the top of a phone pole while its parents search the alleys for rats or young cottontails to stuff into it. (If you enjoy camping, you’ve heard a sound like it: the creak made by the plastic hinge on a cooler lid when it’s raised.) The female makes the same sound during courtship while soliciting her mate for food. In our area, courting owls can be seen and heard duetting on phone poles and rooftops, visible against the fading sunset sky. As they call together or alternately — the male and female have slightly different voices and cadences — they bow and “hoo.” She holds her tail up, soliciting attention from the male, who strikes a courtly pose to “sing,” tail raised and wings down, maximizing himself like an operatic baritone (he’s smaller than her). Here’s an excellent quote, where the author’s voice slides from ornithologist to owl, almost inadvertently:

“Courtship is fairly boisterous and involves bowing, bobbing, posturing, vocalizing, and allopreening. These elaborate activities lead, as one might hope, to copulation.” (from Hans Peeters, Field Guide to Owls of California and the West, my current favorite owl sourcebook. In the same series as the excellent book on Horned lizards, the California Natural History Guides, published by the UC Press)

If it’s still light enough while all this is going on, you can see flashes of white feathers at their throats, the “gular patch”, flashing as each hoot puffs the owl’s throat briefly. It’s a semaphore for them, like the feather tufts on the top of the head: a way of producing meaningful signals to each other: facial expressions without flexible tissue like lips or eyebrows.

As big, powerful generalist predators, Great horned owls can make it almost anywhere. Their range is right across the US and Canada through Central America and into northern South America. They live in urban, rural, and wilderness areas: desert, woodlands, mountains, wetlands, grasslands and cities, so the chances are you have them where you live, too. Keep an eye open, an ear cocked, and the Chihuahua in at night.

Below are Horned owl salt and pepper shakers from Three Star Owl. Each pair is an adult with an owlet in different stages of development ($48/pair).

Posted by Allison on Sep 11th 2008 | Filed in art/clay,birds,close in,natural history,nidification,owls,three star owl,yard list | Comments (1)

Couch’s spadefoots: Tons of tiny toadlets!

My friend Kathy gave me a bucket of toads. Twenty five tiny toads, actually Couch’s spadefoots (Scaphiopus couchii) to be precise. Spadefoots are toadlike amphibians, with their own family, Pelobatidae (see etymological note below). They’re native to the Sonoran desert, and their reproductive cycle is timed to take advantage of summer monsoon rains, needing only 7-8 days to go from egg to tadpole to toadlet. In between monsoon seasons, the adults stay buried deep in the soil of sandy washes to keep from drying out. They can stay buried for 8-10 months at a time, until storms bring the right conditions for them to feed and breed. The sheep-like bleating of the singing male spadefoot is an archetypal sound of the Sonoran desert. Some Arizona tribes associate toads and owls with monsoon rain, and that’s the origin of the fanciful Three Star Owl pieceTwo-Toad Owl“.

These little spadefoots hatched in a standing pool in Kathy’s Scottsdale yard, where they’re plentiful. They’re very tiny — each could sit on a penny. They’re so small that it wasn’t until I saw the close-up photos that their emerald green eyes were noticeable. If you’ve never nourished toadlets, they’re easy to feed: if it moves and fits in the toadlet’s mouth, they’ll eat it. These guys have been snarfing up crickets, and other protein-rich yummies like Miller moth larvae from birdseed (and an old bag of flour!). Even ants will go down the hatch, as long as it’s not one of the larger soldiers, which put off a noxious chemical. The one on the left was photographed before the first cricket feeding; it plumped up noticeably after downing a small cricket or two.

But I’m not keeping them in captivity. Once they’re fed up, I’ll release them in our yard at twilight, where hopefully they’ll replenish our neighborhood population. Releasing them after dark will give them a head-start over the foraging Curve-billed thrashers and Cactus Wrens. A couple years ago, we would hear male spadefoots bleating like lambs after a big rainstorm, and one or two would end up in the pool, looking for somewhere to breed. But recently, we haven’t heard or seen any. So I’m hoping these guys get things going again. Good luck, little spadefoots, and ‘ware Raccoons and Coachwhips!

Photos: the adult spadefoot photo is from the US Fish & Wildlife site on Arizona Amphibians. The other photos are by A. Shock. Excellent photos and still more info about Couch’s spadefoot can be found at Firefly Forest — check it out.

Etymolgical note and stray ornithological note

About the term “spadefoot”: It comes from the small, hard digging appendage on the underside of the back legs of these amphibians. Members of the family Pelobatidae are not considered “true” toads, so it’s proper to call them simply “spadefoots”. Pelobatidae, the family name for all Spadefoots, comes from a Greek word, pelobates (πηλοβατης), literally “mud-walker”. A nice tie-in for a potter is that the first element of this word comes from the Greek word pelos, meaning “clay”, specifically the clay used by potters and sculptors. The genus, Scaphiopus, is constructed of two Greek elements and means “spade-foot”. The species name, couchii, comes from the surname of Darius Nash Couch, a U.S. Army officer who, during leave in 1853/54, traveled as a Smithsonian Institute naturalist to Mexico, where he collected specimens of both the Couch’s Spadefoot, and Couch’s Kingbird, a tyrant flycatcher native to south Texas and the gulf coast of Mexico. Out-of-range Couch’s kingbirds occasionally show up in Arizona. Recently, a Couch’s kingbird has wintered in Tacna in southwest Arizona, eating bees and behaving like a tyrant flycatcher.

Spadefoot Update

All toadlets released tonight, in three batches around the yard, in areas with lots of cover, leaf litter, and access to sandy soil. Turns out there were about 30. They all hopped away dispersing almost instantly in the dark. They are hereby encouraged to eat earwigs and small cockroaches.

« Prev - Next »