Reproduction in the non-Arthropods #2

The mourning doves have embraced our yard once again as prime nesting and fledging territory. I walked out the door to find this young one perched on the old dead waxflower trunk that remains in the yard as a decorative element and, well, a place for birds to perch. This little guy was so darned cute I almost fell off the porch.

Reproduction in the non-Arthropods #1

I was filling a watering can when I noticed what looked like debris down inside, so I tipped it out and a largely gravid southern alligator lizard (Elgaria multicarinata) literally and loudly plopped out onto the driveway. She looked annoyed and uncomfortable, but I could be projecting my own dismay at the possibility of having harmed her in her delicate state.

It's weird: usually I just let the old leaves and what-not float around in the watering can as this detritus just pops out through the spout given sufficient back-pressure. Some intuition caused me to dump the lizard out, otherwise this situation could have been messier.

Maybe the lizard considered the watering can, laying on its side under the Texas Ranger, a likely spot for a nest. Anyway, she blinked a few times then ambled fatly off into a chink in the cottage stones nearby presumably to find a drier and more stable spot to lay her eggs.

The Triplets of Porchville

Now there are three adult polistes wasps tending the small papery nest on my front porch. The founding female (an adult wasp that mated last autumn and hibernated somewhere in the yard) was first noticed by me with her 15 cell nest and eggs in the beginning of April. Her nest is now being tended by two more adults, possibly so-called joiners which are over-wintered fertile females and likely to be sisters of the founder; they join up to share the work of building and tending the nest in a non-competitive way. The two could also be subordinates, or possible usurpers (fertile females that attempt to take over an established nest), but the behavior of the triplets leads me to think they are not these.

The wasps are fairly friendly. They allow me to get close to observe them and take pictures. Aside from the occasional alarm posture (the wasp raises her head and thorax off the nest surface toward the offending human) the three go about their business as I carefully watch. They seem to take turns resting on the top surface of the nest, between the nest and the ceiling of the porch. Probably this is less strenuous a position than clinging to the cell openings and hanging head down. Sometimes two of them will engage in what appears to be grooming each other, stroking the antennae of the other and clasping each other with the front legs for a short time. But most of their time is spent feeding and attending to the larvae. You can see various sized wasp larvae here, with some of them getting close to filling up their cells.





Notice the wasps' antennae are solid brown. These are polistes apachus, where the paper wasps on my porch in previous years have been polistes exclamans, which are similar in appearance but identifiable by their yellow-tipped antennae. What happened to cause a species shift in my front porch wasps? For one thing, in summer 2008 ago Mr. Cardui exterminated the p. exclamans nest due to the growing aggression of the burgeoning adult wasp population. Are p. apachus more docile? Time will tell, perhaps.

This nest seems to be taking longer than usual to develop; the larvae seem to be growing slowly. I have also noticed very few caterpillars on plants nearby. Maybe the upsurge in wrens (two nests within earshot of my front door) has resulted in less prey for the wasps. Or maybe its just a bad year so far for caterpillars.

Snail Meditation and Yoga

There usually aren't any snails in the back garden, so I was a bit surprised to find this particularly large and attractive helix aspersa crossing my path during snail patrol yesterday. I set it on the seat of my mom's old bouncy chair, intending to deal with it (i.e. carry it to the front yard and toss it into the street for the crows to eat) after checking around the rest of the garden.







By the time I got back to it, the snail had moved down the leg of the chair toward the safety of stuff on the ground. I picked it off with some small difficulty; the suction to the smooth chair leg was pretty strong. As I held the creature in mid-air, it assumed a series of athletic and amazing poses. The snail's foot ripples with musculature and slime; the skin (do I call it skin?) is decorated with ridges and bumps making it look armored and tender at the same time. The four tentacles move with what seems like curiosity, although the visual sensors ("eyes") themselves are blank and non-expressive. The shell is beautifully colored, richly patterned and perfectly formed with the whorl on the right. The pneumostome, the breathing pore seen open in some of these pictures, is on the right side of the animal tucked under the shell's edge. You can make out the mouth opening in the first head-on picture, which is the part of the snail anatomy (unless appetite is an anatomical feature) that gets it into trouble with gardeners. Must protect my rudbeckia transplants.









After getting to know it, though, I didn't have the heart to toss this snail to the birds so I let it go in my neighbor's front yard. Sorry, Neighbor! But if I know snails, this one will make it back to my more gastropodically interesting yard, mate (if it already hadn't when I interrupted), and lay eggs under the sedum before the week is done.

Mid-May Snail Patrol

A rainy morning in May is not a common thing in these parts, but here I was at 9 am trolling the garden for snails in a light drizzle. Leaves of all sorts of plants were studded with water droplets, the phlomis, the eriogonum, the abutilon to name a few. In such conditions I would expect to find snails anywhere on the plants, or everywhere, especially the recently planted rudbeckia. But most of the snails I saw were on spiny or soft succulent plants: sedum, aloe, between the spines of a cactus. Except in the case of the cactus, this may be because under the succulents is a relatively moist place to hide during our normally dry weather, and this is where most of the snails started when the rain began. How far does a snail travel in a night's foraging?








I throw the snails I pick into the street because I'm too much of a weenie to crush them, preferring to let the crows have their way with the succulent little molluscan tidbits.

Bloom Day May #4: Tagetes

This is the Tagetes lemonii of Dia de Los Muertos fame: it blooms every year spectacularly at turn of the year that straddles Oct/Nov. But it also blooms for May Day, six months later (or earlier, depending on your point of view). Here is a view of its wonderful yellow-ness looking up into the sun from the perspective of this syrphid fly perched on a leaf below the bloom; possibly laying eggs.

Bloom Day May #3: Aeonium

I have had this aeonium haworthii in the garden for aeons . . . ha ha. I don't remember where it came from, possibly an arboretum sale. You don't see the species in nurseries around here much if ever, although it's variety A. haworthii 'Kiwi' is pretty popular and well promoted in these days of saving water. The species is from the Canary Islands, another imported hardy plant that thrives in our trying-to-be-less-thirsty So Cal gardens.

My plant has grown large, verging on huge, a round ball about 3 feet in diameter. The stems underneath the canopy of foliage are brittle and have aerial roots all up and down them. I cut off part of the top last year, and new rosettes of leaves are growing out, starting a lower canopy. This plant is ridiculously easy to start from cuttings, just throw it on the ground somewhere and it will root and prosper.

The bloom has just begun as you can tell from the numbers of unopened buds. These flowers attract lots of honeybees with their nectar.

There were also a few syrphid flies (these are Allograpta obliqua) nectaring at the flowers. The female syrphids can also be seen laying eggs on foliage nowadays. Their eggs will hatch into aphid-consuming maggots, so this group of flies is an important component of a balanced garden environment minimizing the need for pesticides.

Making sure to plant plenty of nectar-producing flowers to provide food for these flies will enable them to thrive in your garden and help the ladybirds control your aphids; nectar flowers, it almost goes without saying, are essential for supporting those honeybees, as well.

Bloom Day May #2: Santolina

Santolina chamaecyparissus is a mouthful, so let's just call it Lavender cotton. As you can see the flowers are not purple, so I guess the moniker lavender comes from the leaves which are reminiscent of some lavandulas. My plant is growing in less than full sun, so the bloom is never full like you see in typical photos of this. Still, the plant has been in that spot for many years spilling over a big rusty pipe and encroaching on the Aloe brevifolia. In autumn, it's time to undercut this one to clear out the dead stuff and make room for healthy new growth, and to give the pipe and the aloe a chance, too.



Holy Herb! That's another colorful common name for S. chamaecyparissus but it's also what I exclaimed when I noticed the tiny green lynx spider (Peucetia viridens) with prey of some sort (looks like another tiny spider) right under a flower. Green lynx spiders of all ages and sizes hang out in the tops of flowering shrubs and perennials to exploit (!) the visitors to the flowers. This little one has chosen a plant and flower in scale with its own body size.

Bloom Day May #1: Aloe

This is Aloe homedepotensis; an unnamed variety picked up long ago on the succulent oddity table at the local warehouse store, before such things were all the rage. Of course, succulents aren't only popular now: They seem to have become necessary to demonstrate a gardener's commitment to conservation and begin green.

Anyway, I have a fair number of aloes in the garden and this one is in bloom right now. Nectar drips from the flowers, and a fly (maybe Minettia flaveola? or more likely Photopsis blurrii) perches on the flower stalk below . . . exploiting the drip?

Sure, aloes are tough, but in my experience they are appreciative of occasional to regular watering and tolerate of a fair amount of shade in hotter climates. There are a huge number of aloe species, representing a wide range of needs and forms. They come almost exclusively from South Africa; oh, and they are not cacti. Do not use aloes to represent the American southwest! They are lovely in their own right, easy to grow, not native to here.

The Joy of Gardening

2010 so far has been an outstanding year for blooming perennials here in southern CA. Since the beginning of the year we've had intermittent periods of helpful rain and cool weather, spliced into periods of abundant sunshine so the dormant perennials got lots of water and not too much heat to hurry them into premature summer senescence. So.

This young greybird grasshopper (Schistocerca nitens) is hanging out on a tickseed flower, Coreopsis lanceolata, one of a whole bouquet of them on this particular plant. For now this nymph (oddly the first one I've noticed this spring) will chomp on a few leaves or petals. Later the ripened seeds will attract finches and other seed-eaters, especially when I forget to fill the Niger feeder.

In the background you can also see erigeron karvinskianus and cistus (I think this is 'Sunset'), just a small sample of the abbondanza of bloom in our parkway. A neighbor boy asked me, as I was puttering around out front, "why do you have so many plants?" I thought a half a sec and answered, "I like 'em." So do the buggies and the birds and together under the sun and rain we make a joyful noise of gardening where once there was only half-assed turfgrass.