A June Day on Mount Lemmon, Catalina Mountains close to Tucson

Wednesday morning: driving across town to join Debbie Bird and her Wednesday Walkers on Mount Lemmon at Turkey Run. Up there it's lush, green and so cool at above 8000 feet elevation while below the city sweltered under 106 degrees Fahrenheit

The drive through town took longer than expected, so we were late and nearly missed the sensation of the morning, a Rose-breasted Grossbeak. We got no photos, but I got a glimpse of this: the red breasted bird among the pink blooming Robinia. Striking!

Kira found everything scary and exciting. Either she had never seen tall trees, or she expected a bear behind every one of them. It made her edgy - she growled and barked at people and dogs. She has to learn that that's not like our dogs behave

It was her first walk away from her new home and she soon took her clues from Mecki.  He took good  care of her. The two got to walk by themselves, leash-law obedient: leashed to each other.

 When I had to lead them, photographing birds became a challenge. I remember that for this yellow-eyed Junko, I was holding the dogs with one hand, the little point-and-shoot camera in the other, fully extended for maximum zoom. I think bird, wind, and dogs must have moved in exact unison for once.

 Bill Kaufman was so kind to send me some of his excellent shots. The Red-faced Warblers were very active - we first thought that they were slipping around on the ground with quivering wings to distract us from a nest, but later I saw several rather small individuals do it and now I believe that some of them might have been very young fledglings.  

 Solitary Thrushes were singing, Stellar's Jays shrieking, and Flickers were loudly claiming the tallest dead trees, while the Hairy Woodpecker whispered only quietly in the understory.

 As usual, red Netwinged Beetles were flying or clinging to the young bracken fern leaves, sharing the undergrowth with the local Fireflies

Sabino Creek is only a small trickle up here, but its moisture is responsible for  all the beauty around Turkey Run. 

Monkey Flowers along the creek were hosting scores of leaf miners Octotoma marginicollis

A beautiful green eyed monster also made use of the water: A tabanid fly in the genus Stonemyia. Beautiful shots by Leslie Brown Eguchi.

Ephemeroptera (Mayflies) are completely dependent on water, because they spend 98% of their live as nymphs and most nymphs develop in streams and rivers that are well-oxygenated and relatively free of pollution; Don't expect mass emergences from the creeks of the Catalinas, but you can always find a few.  

Silver-spotted Skippers claimed territory along the creek, and a Satyr Comma landed a couple of times. 

Seinet photo Heracleum maximum

The creeks also nurture the huge leaves and flowers of Heracleum maximum, Horse Parsnip. The big umbels were in full bloom. There weren't as many insects on them as I would have expected, but still a great variety. 

A huge iridescent blue female Pepsis grossa on Heracleum - do they lick nectar or also feed on pollen? Maybe my video will tell. Many flowers make nectar hard to get, which limits the pollinators to a faithful few that coevolved with the flowers to master deep throats or convoluted access, see the monkey flower for example. Parsnip, and the one blooming white rosaceae, New Mexico Rasberry, Rubus neomexicanus seem to follow a different 'strategy' they offer pollen to beetles and wasps, to flies and butterflies, all of them generalists. How do they ensure that their pollen reaches another flower of the same species? On Mount Lemmon the answer seemed obvious: those two were extremely dominant in certain areas. So nectar seekers were quite likely to return to flowers of the same species and become good pollinators, even though they are typical generalists.

Altica sp. Flea Beetle

Fly, beetles, bee, and something too tiny for my camera on the left on Rubus

Lepturobosca chrysocomaon Heracleum

Lepturobosca chrysocoma on Rubus

Dermestid and Daysitinae (beetles) on Heracleum

Dozens of tiny weevils in Rubus

Grey Hairstreak on Heracleum

 Of course there were a few other flowers, too. little Snow Berry flower bells were attractive to certain flies

And Leslie climbed a slope under the pines to reach beautiful Shooting Stars - I've seen different species of these on high elevations and on poor, acidic soils in Swiss Alps before

So between lovely temperatures, great birds, beautiful flowers, a few bugs and great company, this was another lovely Wednesday Walk!

Roadrunner's Coming of Age

Roadrunners are bold, active birds. At times also very vocal, from a mechanical clicking sound that is repeated rapidly to a strange moaning sound that I could not attribute to any known bird or animal when I first heard it.

Young Roadrunner -note the short tail - chasing a lizard. This one easily escaped.

Roadrunners are THE caricature-characters of the desert Southwest. Together with the trickster coyote they are known to children around the world. And I must say, watching the real bird, with all its velociraptor fierceness, is much more interesting and even amusing than all those cartoons. Immediately after my arrival in the southwest, I experienced them as skilled, opportunistic predators who didn't refuse a juicy bug, grabbed tadpoles out of my aquarium, did not spare the occasional song bird, but also did not back off from a rattlesnake.

Photo by Doris Evans

This fierceness increases exponentially when a hungry brood is waiting. 
 My friend Doris Evans documented how even little chicks devoured whole lizards that the parents delivered to a nest in her yard. Compare that to the little bits of meat that mother hawk carefully feeds her chicks! Doris was lucky to have the nest so close to her window that she missed no details of the nursery. Over the years I watched two nests in Sabino Canyon, but from a safe distance: What was going on there was surprisingly quiet and secretive. Here at home, we see and hear all the preliminaries for nesting and breeding, like the gift-giving from male to female and the haunting, moaning cries that seem to claim a territory, but then it gets eerily quiet: the Roadrunner parents are not betraying the location of their nest and vulnerable young-ones by a lot of obvious activity. The nest is out in the open, if concealed by a prickly cholla cactus, and roadrunner chicks are born featherless and blind, so it takes a while for them to reach fledgling status.

But when the chicks are finally out of the nest, they soon carry on with the  typical boldness of their species.  First they mostly follow their parents around to noisily demand their lunch, but soon they begin to bother everything that's smaller than they and check it out for prey-value. They explore every place that could hide any morsels, including the inside of my parked car and my friend's computer desk. I have seen them watch the tail of my cat with the worst of intentions, and a friend who was hunting bugs for scientific, not culinary reasons, found them following him around, hoping for a hand-out?  The ones in Sabino Canyon seem to quickly learn the schedule of the tourist tram. I saw bits of hamburger tossed to them, which is of course absolutely wrong. Don't do it.

So my latest painting is about the hunger of the dragon brood. It sold as soon as I put it up on Facebook.

April in Cochise County

No bugs at all on Prickly Poppies, But maybe there's a painting in this?

 I had to drive to Hereford Arizona to discuss the color settings for the printing of tiles of my watercolors. So of course I took the opportunity to check how spring is progressing in the Huachucas. Clearly, it's very dry. Besides oaks, not much is blooming except close to paved roads where run-off nourishes at least a few prickly poppies and New Mexico Thistles.

A male Collops and some Nemognatha on the thistle heads

 Pat Sullivan's garden in Ramsay Canyon always offers something special, because he keeps planting all kinds of native blooming plants and some that are not quite native but just irresistible to bugs.  Of course he also waters them regularly.

On little flee bane flowers, we found baradine weevils that maybe Charlie O'Brian can identify ... there were so many of those that the yellow disk of some flowers was black with them.

Osmia sp.

Daleas were buzzing with green metallic bees that might be genus Osmia, but I'm waiting for confirmation. I'm proud of the accidental in-flight-shot! The captured specimen got contaminated with moth scales before it was photographed. Terrible stuff! I don't even collect any moths!

The nicest surprise was a little black, red banded Leaf Beetle, Lema balteata. Years ago Eric Eaton photographed  a mating pair in Catalina, also in a garden. Since then I've been searching for these elusive guys that look deceptively similar to our common Lema trabeata. On Kitt Peak, I thought I saw one on white blooming solanaceae, but it immediately disappeared.  I went back several times, and then the plants fell victim to gardening crews tending to the observatory. But maybe what I saw was just L. trabeata after all. The beetles in Pat's garden, 2 that I found and 3 in his collection, seem to prefer a sunflower with very narrow leaves (need to ask for the sp). They weren't close to any solanaceae at all.

Carr House

I drove up Carr Canyon and found it dryer than Ramsay. Very dusty along the road, so even the fresh oak leaves yielded nothing. At Carr House, I managed to get away from the road and things looked up.

Narnia sp. on Cholla fruit

 Three species of oaks were leafing out. Most hosted nearly no insects that I could find, but the ones that did offered many different species.

A clearing planted with young oaks and Alligator Junipers

 It seems to me that oaks, even of the same species, may contain very different levels of their main defense,  tannic acid. So some trees are just much more vulnerable than others and I have learned to look for those.

Leaf Beetles on young oaks: Pachybrachis haematodes, Octotoma marginicollis,  Xenochalepus ater, Pentispa suturalis

Brachys cephalicus

 There were several different Leaf Beetle species and a Brachys,  a leaf mining Buprestid. So not all Metallic Wood-boring Beetles are real borers . I think I'll use the European term "Jewel Beetle' instead

The nymphs of membracid Treehoppers, probably Cyrtolobus sp., would have been very well  camouflaged among the leaf buds of the oaks, but were given away by the dark shapes of ants that were hanging all over them.

Crematogaster sp. attending to a molting Cyrtolobus sp. nymph

 There were at least 2 species of ants in attendance, Honey-pot Ants and Acrobat Ants. In one case they seemed to assist in the molting of a nymph like a pair of concerned midwives.

So much productivity had of course attracted a number of predators, from still in-pupa Lady Bugs, to strangely elongate Robber Flies,   Leptogastrinae,  to jumping spiders and Little dark beetles, all of them in pairs, and shaped like melyridae.  
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Encounter - a watercolor painting

Young Gray Fox exploring. I watched him when I was camped at Madera Canyon - in the morning he went about his business quite unconcerned, doing his toilet from stretching, yawning, scratching and preening to well, everything... but he was petrified when the Tarantula walked by. To pounce or not to pounce?

The Gray Fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus) is widespread throughout North and Central America. In the eastern US the Gray Fox seems to be loosing territory to the dominant Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes). In Arizona Gray Foxes are holding their own, together with their smaller cousins, the Kit Foxes. Red Foxes are only found in the north eastern corner of the state. 
Gray Foxes are small agile canines that can even climb trees. Their diet consists mainly of rabbits, rodents, birds, reptiles and fruit, but in dry western areas like Utah's canyon land and the southwestern deserts,  arthropods are the main component of a rather omnivorous menu. He could probably tackle the tarantula but in this case, the young hunter just stood back and watched.

I know gray foxes occur in the open desert, but I imagine that they appreciate some cool canyons and lusher vegetation more. So I gave that to my guy when I tried to make the light source more obvious and enhance the contrast to give the painting more interest. Did it work?

Centris Bees and White Ratanay in the Tucson Mountains

Krameria grayi – White Ratany is a grayish inconspicuous desert bush that grows in the lower elevation of the Tucson Mountains  Even when it's blooming, they are not very showy, though the single flowers and later the heart shaped seed pods are very pretty and intricate.

But right now, during their blooming season the bushes draw attention not through their looks but by the noise coming from them. Loud, deep buzzing, very sonorous, very different from the higher sound of Honey Bees.

Big Centris bees are coming and going, sometimes hovering with a strange wiggling motion, sometimes landing in the sand nearby - seemingly just resting.

These New World bees range with 250 species from Kansas to Argentina, and here around the Tucson Mountains I have found at least 3 species. Females of these bees possess adaptations for carrying floral oils rather than (or in addition to) pollen or nectar. According to Wikipedia, they visit mainly plants of the family Malpighiaceae to collect oil, but also Plantaginaceae, Calceolariaceae, Krameriaceae and others. Yesterday, they were definitely concentrating on that one blooming Kramericea, the Ratanay.

Some also visited Janusia, Fam. Malpighiaceae. I did not know the family of this strange vine, but obviously I can rely on the good senses of the bees and in this case Wikipedia (I think I know who is the careful editor of these bee entries).

The Centris bees  completely ignored a desert lavender bush in direct proximity. These flowers were later in the day extremely popular, but with honey bees.

Centris Subgenus Paracentris, Oil-Diggers and Desert-Diggers, Female, could be C. cockerelli or atripes

I have watched Centris pallida  dig tunnels and nesting chambers into loose sand and J. Alcock describes the same for another sympatrically occurring Sonoran Desert Centris, C. rhodopus. So I expect this Centris bee to behave similarly. 
I asked Entomologist and pollination expert Doug Yanega how the oil is used in the nest to rear the larvae. Here is his answer:

'The nest cells are vertical and they have a lining that prevents the oil seeping into the soil, and the bees just scrape off the liquid (which is rather viscous) into the cell.
Once they have a good pool, they float an egg on top and seal it. There are numerous bee genera that do this worldwide, but in the US I think only Macropis and Centris, IIRC.

P.S. Today I found this C. cockerelli  on our neighbor's hybrid (Desert Museum) Palo Verde. There is no sign of C. pallida yet, but most of the foothills paloverdes are not blooming yet around Picture Rocks. I just learned from Doug Yanega that there are no oils in Parkinsonia - just nectar that the bees need to feed themselves. I guessed that already because I often see male Centris on those flowers.

As for the species identification of the Rantanay Centris: One suggestion was C. caesalpinia, but they have red eyes, which mine did not.  Not C. rhodofus because they have red eyes and legs. Mine look like C. cockerelli, except that those should have yellow faces, and mine have a reddish orange clypeus. But:
 John Ascher When all else fails, consult the literature! Turns out that there is a western form in CA and AZ of C. cockerelli with a reddish yellow clypeus and an eastern form form in TX with a white to yellowish clypeus intergrading in NM. I had forgotten about this. So C. cockerelli is likely correct. Sorry for the confusion. At least we learned something (if nothing else, to consult the literature rather then rely on memory!)
 So: western form of Centris cockerelli!