Marbles in Florida Canyon

One day after my birthday we - Randy, the pack and I - hiked up Florida Canyon Trail towards the saddle. A beautiful, if slightly muggy day.

From the highest point, we had great views all the way over downtown Tucson to the Pinal mines and Green Valley.

On the way up I told some birdwatchers to look for Montezuma Quail and when we met them again higher up, they proudly reported that they actually saw some: 'and suddenly two rocks began to move!'

Heading down I let go of  Mecki because he kept getting in my way on the steep trail with loose rocks. He stayed nicely on the trail until he saw the quail too. He is usually no hunter, but this time he ran. I normally trust our dogs to be smart enough to find us again, but this time we had to wait ominously long. We called and whistled and felt rather bad that he was running free and anxious that he was lost, or worse. There were signs posted along the trail warning of a dead horse that might attract predators. We saw neither carcass nor pumas ...
and Mecki eventually turned up behind us on the path, panting and wet. Very tired, too.

There were only some Blue Dicks and a few Sand Verbenas blooming and we saw few insects with exception of very active Carpenter Bees that constantly droned across our path.We did find some interesting butterflies, though, mating pairs of Desert Marbles, Euchloe lotta.

Looking down from the trail into the Santa Rita Research Station I recognized some familiar figures with beating sheets and nets: Charlie and Lois O'Brien and their Canadian guest Robert Anderson were searching for weevils. So our hike concluded with  a nice visit with them and station manager Mark Heitlinger.

BugGuide Gathering 2013 in Arizona

This year the insect enthusiasts and members of the BugGuide community will hold their annual get together at the Santa Rita Experimental Range (SRER) in Arizona on July 25 to 28, 2013.

View into Florida Canyon from the SRER

The SRER is located in Florida Canyon in the Santa Rita Mountains, in the heart of SE Arizona, one of the most arthropod-species rich areas of the United States. Located in the juniper-oak belt of this sky island the station provides easy access Florida, Madera and Montosa Canyon and to habitats ranging from dry grasslands to high elevation mixed conifer stands. SRER not only provides us wirh affordable bunk style housing, but also with great meeting facilities and electricity and space for black lighting. The station is part of the experimental range of the University of Arizona.

Caterpillars from a night hike at the SRER

 U of A Professor Wendy Moore, curator of the Insect Collection of the University of Arizona (UAIC), functions as our official host who made the use of the station possible.

Since it was conceived in 2005 by Troy Bartlett, Mike Boone, and Pat Coin, BugGuide has developed from an on-line identification help into a citizen science project par excellence. It is now hosted by John K. VanDyk at Iowa State University. Daily thousands of contributions come in from all over the US and Canada, a devoted team of volunteer experts works tirelessly on identifications, and the collected data are easily accessable for lay people and experts alike. I know a number of scientists who value BugGuide as a source of first hand distribution information, links to collectors, and identified on-line images that can be licensed from the individual photographers.

 Wendy Moore at the U of A (a land grant university) has been promoting the local insect collection (UAIC) as a museum for the public and has made many efforts to further public interest in insects, their ecology, and their natural history. She has been instrumental in the creation of the very popular Arizona Insect Festival and is actively supporting many citizen science projects like for example the BioBlitz in the local Saguaro National Park and the online Encyclopedia of Life. So when the BugGuide community needed a sponsor in the U of A faculty to be able to use the SRER, Wendy was the obvious person to turn to and she graciously agreed.  

 The BugGuide Gathering 2013 in Arizona will be an opportunity for established BugGguide members to finally meet each other or see each other again in an environment full of opportunity to find bugs, hike, black light, get sun burned, and mostly to enjoy each others company. With Troy Barlett and Patrick Coin we will have two of the founding members of BugGuide at the meeting!
But we also hope that many newer BugGuide members can take the opportunity to get into the field with a lot of the experts who have been identifying so many of their entries over the years. We will let them in on the secrets of finding our favorite bugs in desert and mountains and let them watch how we get puzzeled by new unexpected finds. It should be great fun! BugGuide members, please sign up by going to the BG home page, column on the left, Gathering in AZ 2013, then click on 'My Account' to input your info and choices, which will appear under 'Who is coming' (make sure you are logged into your account). 

Eric Eaton, Robyn Waayers, Art Evans, and I - all looking forward to the BugGuide meeting at the SRER in July

This is also a chance for local bug enthusiasts and entomologists to take part in the trips we will be organizing and to meet some interesting people. We don't have a fixed program yet but on Thursday afternoon both Art Evans (Author of 'An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles and several other insect books) and Eric Eaton (Author of  Kaufman's Insect Guide for North America) will be at the SRER where we will set up several black lights and mercury vapor lights to attract beetles, moths and more.
Charles O'Brien, our world renown weevil expert, his wife Lois, equally accomplished fulgorid scholar, will also join us at the meeting.   Chip A. Hedgecock a great nature photographer and connoisseur of the local insect fauna will set up his photo studio and allow us to watch his technique. Warren Savary will also demonstrate his new photo equipment and  help with our questions about scorpions. Fred Skillman will add his expertise about cerambycids and Pat Sullivan will help with scarabs, bombylids, and his general knowledge of the area. 

Oh, and the gathering is also registered as a  National Moth Week event!

I hope to see many of you in July

Margarethe Brummermann
reluctant organizer but excited participant of the BugGuide gathering 2013
  

Florida Canyon Buprestids - a last Hurrah in late November

On November 20th Randy and I loaded four of our five dogs into the bed of my little pick up truck with camper shell, but the fifth, our Husky Tana, run off to visit the neighbors instead. She missed a beautiful autumn hike in Florida Canyon in the Santa Rita Mountains. Florida (pronounced floor-EE-da in this part of the country) is the Spanish word for "flowered". Of course, November is not quite the right time to experience that aspect of the canyon.

Great Purple Hairstreak

Chauliognathus profundus

Tachypompilus unicolor

When I discovered this area two weeks ago, at least the Desert Broom along the dirt road that connects Box and Florida Canyon was still in bloom and attracted scores of wasps, butterflies, beetles, and grasshoppers.  But even those bushes had gone to seed by now.



The rocky dry creek bed under its dense canopy of Mexican Blue Oaks (Quercus oblongifolia) where I had found several interesting grasshoppers now also seemed quite abandoned by insects.

The hiking trail begins next to the Florida Work Center of the Santa Rita Experimental Range. The range, the first of its kind in the country, was established by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902 to study recovery efforts on land that suffered from the devastating effects of overgrazing and drought.

Following the creek and its gallery of 400 year-old oaks, we hiked through lush grassland towards the juniper-oak-pine forest of the higher elevations.

 The dry grasses still carried their feathery plumes, golden in the light of the low sun.
Only Cody’s tail rivaled the effect. All four dogs loved exploring the unfamiliar terrain.

 Rusty old stock tanks held only a few inches of water. Tadpoles and insect larvae were moving in the murky green soup and made us wonder whether they would find their way out in time. As we started to feel the strain of the steady climb we marveled at the miles of partly buried metal feeder  line that brought water from the mountain top: what a plumbing job.

It was a cool day by Arizona standards, but we welcomed the shady forest of the higher elevation.  Here oaks, pines and junipers dominated in shades of cool bluish greens. By contrast, the golden foliage of a few sycamores and mountain ashes seemed to glow from within.







Agaves, Sotols and Yuccas added some spiky silvery accents.

Eventually we reached clearings and openings that had been created by a fire that swept through the canyon in 2005. Beautiful skeletal remains are still recognizable as those of Aligator Junipers and various species of oaks, and even of the rare Madrones.

Fresh growth around the dead trunks announces that the roots survived and the trees are coming back.

We didn’t quite make it to the 7,800 feet high Florida Saddle but climbed a lower hilltop – to enjoy the great view over the Santa Cruz valley, eat some apples, let the dogs rest, and maybe see some hill-topping insects? It was quite cool and windy…

Lampetis webbii LeConte 1858.

A big insect appeared. I heard the low buzz and saw a blurr of dark and lighter stripes out of the corner of my eyes and mistook it for a big paper wasp. But the heavy body that was hanging upside down from in the leaves of one of those fire damaged oaks was unmistakeably that of a buprestid beetle.

 Loose rows of golden spots reflected the sunlight, but he most striking feature were the electric blue legs and feet: Either Drummond's or Webb's Blue-footed Buprestid. Buprestids are called jewel beetles in Europe with good reason: they are beautiful. Their ponderous and prosaic American name Flat-headed Metallic Wood-boring Beetle points to their biology: While the adults live on pollen or sweet juices, the larvae of the larger species live mostly in the sap or core wood of trees. The flat thoracic segments of these legless larvae are what’s described by 'flat-headed'. The cross-sections of their tunnels (galleries) and the exit holes are broad ovals while those of Cerambycids are more round. Buprestids attack mostly weakened or damaged trees. The females of some species are so attracted to the smell of fire that they fly nearly into the flames of a forest fire to lay their eggs.

Last September, the manager of the Little Outfit Ranch in the Canelo Hills had collected a couple of  Lampetis  for me, also from a fire damaged oak, but this one in Florida Canyon was the first that I saw in the wild. As for the species:  

Lampetis drummondi and Lampetis webbii

Lampetis drummondi that were collected further east in Texas, New Mexico and Cochise County Arizona have spots that are nearly fused into irregular bands. The specimen above, left, was collected by Jason Schaller in Texas Canyon, Cochise County, in late July of 2010. My specimens of L. webbii from Montosa Canyon, Santa Rita Mountains and theLittle Outfit Ranch in the Canelo Hills, AZ  have clearly independent spots. It seems to me that in the larger females of L. webbii the spots that are more lined up than in the smaller males but always distinctly separated. So my Florida Canyon guy is also L. webbii.  The host plant for that species is supposedly the Palo Verde of the lower desert, but none of the beetles was found in habitats where those occur, instead all were associated with fire damaged oaks.

Hippomelas sphenicus

On our way back through grassland interspersed with small bushes of Velvet-pod Acacia Randy spotted another big Buprestid: Hippomelas sphenicus. From early October to mid November these beetles could be found all over the lower parts of the western Santa Rita Canyons. They met on the acacias to mate and probably lay their eggs. Surprisingly for Buprestids, they were especially active at sunset.

Tree Cricket Oecanthus sp.

The musical song of the Tree Crickets accompanied us all afternoon. David Ferguson commented: 'I suspect it is of the O. californicus "group", and likely of the "pictipennis" segregate, which seems to like to sit in (and probably feed on) Junipers and perhaps Piñons.'

The last few Arizona Thistles were visited by so many Mexican Yellows Eurema mexicana that the butterflies sometimes looked like flower petals.

After a great exhausting day we were greeted at home by our wayward Husky who was waiting in the driveway and very happy to have her pack-mates back.