A List of Things I Am Thankful For In 2011

I was recently challenged to list one thing I am thankful for for each of the 21 days in November leading up to Thanksgiving Day. I tried to do them one by one, but I just can't keep up that sort of thing, so here goes a list all at once and in no particular order:

My spouse who supports me in my crazy plans and even helps implement them with me. 

My sons who are not children anymore but competent adults with opinions and ideas and goals all their own, who are smart and kind and generous and creative and inventive and compassionate and who remember to call their mother on the phone now and again, and their father who helped nurture all those things in them.
Their girlfriends who value their originality and compassion and individuality and do things to take care of them when I can't anymore because we live so far apart.
Friends who support me even when I'm a jerk.
My artwork that has brought me self-confidence and satisfaction and fulfillment and has brought me the company of other artists and has lead me to Mineral Point, Wisconsin.
Nature, especially prairie, and my gardens at my homes and the people who have shared time with me in them.
Music and musicians and especially local singer songwriters that you can see live and up close and musical instruments, and CDs and electronics that allow you to take it home and on the road with you.
Wild Ones Natural Landscapers organization that promotes end educates about native landscaping and the friends there.
Photography
Amazing parents
An amazing sister
The seasons and the changes in nature that it brings. The cycle of a day that brings morning light and warm glowing later afternoon light and night that brings starry skies and cicadas and morning that brings fog and dew and frost and songbirds' song.
Health and quality health care and healthcare professionals and researchers.
Flowers and florists and garden shops and nurseries and growers that supply them.
Facebook and reacquainting with old friends and meeting new friends .
Books and used book stores and small book stores.
Cats - also lemurs, horses, otters, tigers, dogs, and other animals - the companionship offered by some and the gracefulness, playfulness, and beauty of them all.
Hiking and backpacking and paddling and trips to the wilderness.
GPS's that help me with my total lack of a sense of direction and geocaching with my kids.
Schools and teachers and opportunities for individualized education.
Boy Scouts and leaders and parents and how it shaped my sons.

Lakes and rivers and paddling in them and overcoming fears so that I can enjoy the company of other paddlers and the solitude of a solo trip on the water.

Wood and making things with it like houses and furniture and such.
Good food and fine restaurants and chocolate and olives and raspberries and pomegranates and asparagus.
My senses, the ability to see color and light and the ability to hear a voice and music, the sense of touch to feel warm breeze and cool rain, the smell of a damp woods, dry corn fields, skunk, rosemary, flowers, and the essence of a loved one, the tastes of good food and salt in seaspray.

Lost Camera, Revisited

Some have kindly suggested that the loss of the camera frees me to enjoy the experience of paddling, to enjoy my hike in the woods, to enjoy the views and the flowers for their pure beauty instead of their potential as a photographic image, to experience the experience without the obligation to photograph.
While I appreciate the friendly efforts to console and cheer me, I cannot really relate to that advice.
To me, part of the joy of nature IS the joy of capturing it in a photograph. To me, there is joy in seeing a beautiful scene and in the process of deciding to frame just a certain part of it to convey a specific message. When you see, you see whole panoramas, you see objects in their situation and in their relationship to all the things around them, but in making an art image, you must edit out much of that and make a conscious choice of what to include and what to exclude. Those decisions determine what message the viewer will take away from the art. Sometimes, there is more than one message, such as the beauty of an individual tree in fall foliage, the beauty of that tree surrounded by others of different shape and color, the separate beauty of the relationship of the reddening leaves to the red rock that gives our Lake Redstone its name, the shape of the individual leaf, or even the vein pattern on part of that leaf. Sometimes, the plant covered in flower is one message and the individual flower with pollen drifted onto its leaves is another and the visiting bee, with its leg pollen sacks stuffed to overflowing is yet another. Ferns say one thing from this angle with the leaf litter under the fronds and another thing from another angle where they rise up to the sky. Lit from behind, the leaf is a glowing bright green that stuns while photographed from the same side as the light source presents a more solid earthy sheen to the surface. Photographing the nature is a way to look at it more deeply, in more detail, to explore the relationships among the parts of the natural world, and to enjoy far more about it than would be seen at first glance. Photographing, or rather the looking and the deciding what message to convey, make nature a richer experience for me and allow me to see more deeply into the relationships and more precisely into the details. Quick, how many lobes on a maple leaf? What is the back side of a white oak leaf like? Where are the legs attached to a bee's body? In taking the photographs and viewing them later, these sorts of things can be studied and learned.
Photography to me is NOT an obligation but a joy, and a way in which I experience more fully the joy that is out there in the world. It is also a reason to linger. Someone might think me a kook if I just stopped and lingered too long in front of their house to look at their magnolia tree buds or their rose shrub thorns quite closely, but if I have a camera in hand, I can inspect and peek and stare and study and no one calls the police or yells at me or send their dog after me. They just smile at the crazy camera lady and leave me be to my joyful soaking in of the details of the world.
And then there is the sharing it with you. I NEED those images to show to my kids and to my spouse and to my mom and to my sister, to email around to friends. to post on this blog, to post on Facebook, to share my story. "I went for a paddle today" is some news, yes, but accompanied with a dozen of the finest shots, it makes other people smile a little bit and hopefully inspires them to get outdoors for a paddle or a walk on a trail or even just around their neighborhood, and maybe the pictures of the things closeup makes them walk a little slower and look a little harder and notice things of beauty that might have been missed. Maybe it makes them love nature a little bit more and support the conservation efforts of some local organization or vote for the candidate who has a 'green' record.
A walk or a paddle with no camera is just me alone, but with a camera, I bring you all along and share it with you in that little way and it is not just me alone anymore but all of us loving nature and our surroundings together. Yeah, it really it that big. I need my camera!

Savage Blood Sucking Beasts

I took one for this photo.

Nature Vs. Us

The bald-face hornet is not really a hornet but a wasp. They are all black with white markings on their all black face. They use their mouth parts to scrape wood from dead trees and logs and wooden furniture and wooden siding and mix it with saliva and shape it into paper with their feet. Inside are horizontal layers of cells where the eggs are laid and the larva are raised.
I cannot find information to verify this but in thinking about how the nest is enlarged, as they add more layers to the outside, they must remove them from the inside so that the internal chamber is enlarged so that the layer of cells can be enlarged.
They are reputed to be aggressive defenders of the nest and since this nest is along the end of the house that faces the driveway, the only way to get to our back door, I suppose we should spray it. It will be with great reluctance that I do so, and only after I consult a few more experts to help me decide.

Dragonfly Sex - Really!

I knew it was strange, but I'd never seen it before. I managed to snap one poor photo before they flew off. Remember you can click on these photos to make them really big so you can see details. Go ahead, search on "dragonfly mating" to read about the weird process of how and why they do this and to find out which is he and which is she and read more details and variations.
Or search on "dragonfly mating photo" so see better shots of this and of other species.
I will summarize: Dragonfly sex parts are at their tail ends like most animals. Most insects have a head, a thorax where their legs and wings are connected, and an abdomen, which in the dragonfly, is the part we call the tail. So male dragonfly sperm is emitted at the end of his long 'tail'. When he wants to mate with a female, he grabs her by the back of her head with special pincers on his tail. So now is tail is 'busy' and can't deposit sperm, right? Well, that is okay, because BEFORE he grabbed her by the head, he moved the sperm from his tail end to the bottom side of his thorax. Once he grabs her, if it 'feels right' to her, she moves her tail end, which is where the sperm needs to be, up to his abdomen where he earlier placed it. There are 'plates' in their exoskeletons there, and if they match and can link up, the sperm transfer occurs. If not, she flicks him off and flies away.
Now, why did such a multi part mating exchange evolve? Because in the insect word, the mating is the last useful thing a male does and egg laying is the last useful thing a female does, since few species help raise the young. So for the female to make a quick meal of the male gives her fabulous nutrition for forming the eggs with the newly acquired sperm. It is fairly common among predatory insects for the female to eat the male after mating. But if the male has her grasped behind the head, she can't very well eat him. But with his tail pincer busy grabbing, well that made that sperm moving step necessary. In many dragonfly species, he remains attached to her head, and she straightens out her tail and flies off to find places in water to lay eggs. His continued attachment guarantees no other male gets to mate with her.
Isn't nature . . . amazing?

Promise of Blackberries

It was a long winter for me. It seemed like the earth would never green again. It seemed like the snow would never go away. It seems like this meadow now white with blossom was just a few weeks ago still covered in snow! I know it was at least a couple months ago, but it does seem that once the long long winter ended, things greened up awfully fast! And now, the earth is covered with lush green and the green in many case is covered with lush color of some delicate bloom. This frothy white is the blossom of the blackberry, a bramble with thorny burgundy canes and leaflets in fives. Soon, oh, soon, if they are pollinated by wasps (can you find one in the blossoms?) and bees, these flowers will give way to luscious deep dark blue-black berries that can be picked by the handful and eaten in the field. If you are lucky enough to be there in the morning, after the sun has been fully up for an hour or so. the berries on the top will be warmed by their exposure to the sunshine, and the berries below, protected in the shade of the leaves, will be cool. You can alternate warm and cool berry and taste the delicate nuances brought out by the temperatures and know that this is the very best the earth offers to us! For now, these blossoms are hope incarnate.

More Fauna: Spittlebug

You have probably seen the white foam on plants this time of year and wondered what it was. Well, if you dare, you can gently poke around in that foamy glob with a stick and find a critter called a spittlebug. Related to cicadas and aphids, the spittlebug has mouthparts suited for sucking plant juices. The feeding can cause distortion of growth of the plant, as seen here on this goldenrod plant. The insect leads a life of incomplete metamorphosis which means that it sheds its skin a number of times, growing larger each time, but does not undergo pupation. A spittlebug may molt around 5 times before it reaches its mature size, which will have wings. These wings grow large and larger under the skin until the last mold when they are freed for use so that the adult can fly off to find a mate. There are 23 kinds of spittlebugs in North America and over 800 kinds known to exist in the world. They make the spittle as a protective hiding place to defend themselves from predators. This foam is made as the bug swivels its tiny hind end, emitting a mixture of 'water waste', i.e., pee, from the end of its abdomen along with a glandular secretion that makes the liquid foam, sort of like soap, and into that mixture, it blows air from openings along the side of its abdomen. Sort of like being able to do a hula dance to mix up sweat from your armpit with your pee and lather it up with air from blowholes along your waistline. Imagine! No more running from mountain lions and wolves, just hunker down in place and wiggle up a protective confusing foam to hide in! If you look closely at my crummy photos you can see little pads on this guy's little feet that help it cling to the plant surface, and you can see the 'nozzle' at the tip of its rear end and you can see its eye and you can see the wing buds under the skin along its side.
Cute, ain't it?

Flora . . . and Fauna

Flowers with sucking bugs and spiders and spider webs and dead sucked dry bugs caught in webs remind us that there quite a bit going on out there in the pretty pretty woods. Find the fauna in these lovely floral portraits. Delight in the dead mosquito carcass. Remember you can click on a photo to have it shown large on your screen, then use your back arrow to come back here.
Spider with complex tiny web network.
The spider is behind stamens at upper right of center with its legs drawn up close to its head. Other objects are dead things caught in webbing.

Two sucking bugs, one yellow, one paler.

Spider lurking. No web, so this is apparently an attack spider.

Weevil with pollen on its back.

Fine webbing between upper ends of flower tubes with a dead bug well-encased in webbing.

Special Flower

Nodding trillium (Trillium cernum) is much more rare than the similar white trillium (Trillium grandiflorum) and I have seen it only once in the wild and once again in this garden behind Rolli's building. It is wonderful with its waxy center and pure clear white petals, but few see it since it faces the ground. But the point of the flower is not for us to see it, now, really, is it? The point is for it to be seen by its insect pollinators. These include beetles which would be crawling along the ground and be attracted to the scent of the nectar, and bumblebees which often have barely enough warm and energy to fly in the early spring and so buzz along a few inches over the ground cover and so might actually fly up to visit this flower.

Flowers in February

What are flowers? The sex parts of plants! Have we talked about this before? Spores of 'early' plants such as ferns and mosses are very very tiny and they float on the wind and land in potential sites for new plants. Complicated things happen under the right moisture conditions. New plants happen. Flowering plants are different. The girl part with the ovary is on the plant. Pollen, the plant equivalent of sperm, needs to get to the ovary. Some primitive flowering plants make pollen that is very light and can float on a breeze.








But if the pollen is heavier, it will just fall to the ground, so it begins to be beneficial for the plant to engage some moving creature to carry the pollen to the pistil which is the part of the ovary that sticks out of the plant. So the plant invests some of its energy into making a show to attract a pollinator. And it offers a reward of nectar, sweet plant juice, for the pollinator. Some plants make a big bright show and other plants make lots of little shows. Some plants rely on vision alone to lure in the pollinator while others offer olfactory inducement: Fragrance! No, the flowers are not there for our enjoyment. Rather, they are there for the plant to trick some insect or bird or bat to help it have sex. Do you know that if you click on the photo, a new window will open with the photo greatly enlarged? Enjoy!

Faith

When the world is white with over a foot of snow over all the ground for as far as you can see and the temps have been below zero for days and below freezing for weeks and the cold wind triggers your asthma and literally takes your breath away when you round the corner of the house out the back door, it is difficult indeed to believe in a green world. Flowers? Leaves glowing in the sunlight? Was it really like this and will it really be again? Am I crazy for remembering that it was once green and warm and alive with the buzzing of insects and chirping of birds? Faith is truly needed in times like these to keep us from going stark raving mad at the thought that life might always be cold and white. Faith that the world once was and will again be warm and green is what gets us through to the other side of winter.

Ewwww - But It IS Nature

This lovely creature is a tomato hornworm. Yes, it is as large as it looks. Over a half inch of width and at least three inches of length. Some might think the 'Ewwww' of the title refers to this lovely creature, but I find them quite beautiful. They almost glow in the sunshine and they are such a clean fresh crisp shade of green. They are quite magnificent.

No, the 'Ewwww' is for this poor unfortunate shrunken individual. Sometimes, tomato hornworms are parasitized by other insects. In this case, a braconid wasp, a tiny stingless wasp, laid her eggs on the body of this tomato hornworm. The many larvae lived inside the live hornworm, eating its insides gradually without yet killing it. When they were mature, these larvae chewed their way through the hornworm's skin to the outer surface, causing fatal injury, where they spun tiny cacoons, pupated, and later emerged as adult wasps to mate, after which the female goes off to find another host hornworm on which to lay her eggs.

How Many Kinds of Bees?

I have to write it down because I cannot quite believe it myself. I was arguing one day about whether the demise of the honeybee was such a bad thing and my argument was that the honeybee is not native to North America, so it is suppressing the populations of the native bees. If there were no more honeybees, the native bees would repopulate the continent to take over pollination duties and improve the environment as ecosystem. My friend said there were not nearly enough native bees to do all the pollination that honeybees do and I said there were at least 5 native species of bumble bees and 400 species of native solitary bees and he called me a liar. Well, admittedly, I pulled those numbers out of the air. So I looked it up. And there are 45 species of social bumble bees native to North America and . . . I told you I could hardly believe it myself . . . over 4000 native species of solitary bees! And it is true that if honeybees were eliminated from North America, the native bee populations would rebound. It would take a season or maybe two for them to increase in population enough to take over all the pollination now accomplished by honeybees, so we would indeed have a reduction in the quantity of some products like almonds and peaches and apples for a season or maybe two. But they would come back from the remnant populations that still exist to populations that fit the availability of pollen and nectar.
Have I piqued your interest, making you wonder what social bees and solitary bees are and how they differ from honeybees? Well, solitary bees work alone, finding or making a hole in a plant or in dead wood or even finding holes in rocks, and filling that hole with plant nectar and pollen. They then lay an egg in the hole, then sealing it shut. The egg hatches into a larva, whose food is the pollen and nectar packed into the cell. When the food supply is gone, the bee larva pupates, then emerges from the holes as an adult. These bees range in length from 1/8" to over an inch and can be black or brown or even metallic colors like red, orange, amber, blue, and green.
It is while they wander from flower to flower to gather pollen and nectar that they accidentally brush pollen from one flower onto another flower. This pollen exchange is how the genetics keep mixed up and how the open pollinated plants keep diverse in their ability to tolerate moisture conditions, temperature variations and so on, and this cross-pollination allows the diversity on which natural selection works to cause the slight genetic shifts through which evolution happens.
Social bees work together instead of alone and they make their own groups of cells instead of finding them. The workers pack pollen and nectar into the cells, and a special queen bee lays eggs in them while the workers go about the other business of making, filling, and maintaining cells. Each cell is filled with just enough food for that one larva, and at the end of the season, a new queen is grown, who goes out and mates with a drone and then hibernates until spring. The entire rest of the hive, all the workers and drones, die off. The queen wakes in the spring and begins to build some cells that she lays her first eggs into. When these emerge, they become the workers and she then specializes on only egg laying.
Honeybees are special because instead of the workers dying each fall, they live over the winter, so they must have food stored for when there are no flowers. This stored food is honey. It is make entirely by evaporating nectar. The only reason they make it is to have food to survive the winter. If we harvest it early enough in the season they recognize the shortage and make more before winter, and that is how we get them to make honey for us in addition to making if for their own use over winter. Other social bees do not make honey because they do not need it since all but the hibernating queen die.
Let's review: How many native bee species? 4000. Yes, four thousand! How many bumble bee species? 45.