Cooling Off in the Catalinas With Butterflies

It's been an entire week since I fully intended on updating my blog. And I've even been outside twice in the past week, otherwise glued to the computer screen, studying up on Oregon geology, or scrubbing my neglected kitchen. My friend Nick Acheson puts me to shame with his delightfully relentless updates to his Compare the Marsh Tit blog http://comparethemarshtit.blogspot.com (which I'm still catching up on, only up to mid-February now). Not to mention his spotless kitchen.

So last Thursday I boarded my 1991-vintage Bridgestone City Limits bike, and road in the not-so-fresh pre-dawn 80°F summer heat at 6:30 a.m. for 12.2 miles to meet up with my friend Mary Klinkel for some butterflying up the Catalina Highway. Apache Scrub Cicadas (Diceroprocta apache) were already drowning out all other environmental sounds with their incessant, sizzling buzz, but I did notice a Peregrine Falcon along the way.

Mary surprised me with a little diversion before we were to reach our high-elevation butterflying destination: she had been given an Ursine Giant Skipper pupa that had emerged last night and required releasing. In a big jar was the little giant.

So about halfway up the mountain, we released it, but the sluggish creature posed for photos before lumbering off. I've always wondered why the Kaufmann-Brock field guide printed that one plate of Megathymus in black-and-white, but now I understood that it's the whole genus that decided on the the dichromatism. I even set my camera to take a photo in BW mode for comparison, and there's little difference in the foreground subject. I think there's a PhD in the waiting here, investigating how different groups of animals perceive color. Or not. Or not.

We got to Incinerator Ridge (8000 feet elevation) at about 8:45 a.m. and it was already busy with insect activity. Our primary focus was the masses of blooming buckbrush (Ceanothus fendleri) that apparently has a delightful nectar, despite the insignificant, foul-smelling flowers.

And it was a delightful morning at this elevation, fabulous view to the south, looking over the Tucson metro area…

…and looking north over expanses of Pinal County's Sonoran desert.

We saw a total of 23 species of butterflies in our 2 hours here. One of our most hoped-for butterflies was also one of our first: this gorgeous Colorado Hairstreak. It's a giant among US lycaenids, and the upper side is a stunning iridescent purple.

Another beauty which abounded here (we saw maybe 15) is the Arizona Hairstreak, unusual in not having the normally requisite hindwing tails of the hairstreak subfamily.

Perhaps the most abundant butterfly here was the Southwestern Azure (formerly Spring Azure), probably because its main caterpillar host plant here is the very buckbrush.

I spotted but one Leda Ministreak. Closer to its host plant, Velvet Mesquite, it can be incredibly abundant.

There were quite a few duskywings, but the only one I could ID for sure was Mournful Duskywing.

Taxiles Skippers were pretty common – this one is a female.

And this is a male Taxiles Skipper. Not many skippers are so sexually dichromatic.

Nais Metalmark was scarce when we arrived, but by 10:30 they were everywhere. This one did me a favor by settling on one of my favorite plants, a milkweed. This is Asclepias hypoleuca, the Mahogany Milkweed.

The buckbrush flowers must be irresistible. The numbers of diptera and hymenoptera were unbelievable. I managed a photo of this one beefly (family Bombiliidae, perhaps a Villa sp.).

Two species of raptorial robberfly were taking advantage of the smorgasbord of pollinators. This tiny one less than a centimeter long…

...and this giant of about 3 centimeters.

Spider wasps (family Pompilidae), despite their gruesome life history, freely enjoy the nectar high.

A few nice flowers posed – this a Penstemon barbatus. While I did hear a few Broad-tailed Hummingbirds zing past, their distinctive wing noise unmistakable in flight, none stopped to feed here.

And this is an Indian paintbrush, Castillea austromontana, probably the host plant for the very local Black Checkerspot, of which we saw just one.

Of course there were birds. I took a moment to mimic Mountain Pygmy-Owl and was rewarded almost instantly with a maniacal mob of House Wrens, Pygmy Nuthatches, Yellow-eyed Juncos, Hairy Woodpeckers, and others. I managed to digibin (with my camera held up to my binoculars) this Olive (not a) Warbler with an Audubon's Yellow-rumped Warbler posed in the background.

Back at our rendezvous spot, it was already over 100°F, soon to be the day's forecast of 106°. I biked just 2.5 miles this time – to the nearest and easternmost bus stop this time of day – and had great luck to meet the bus that was staging for a couple minutes before its scheduled departure.

I Posted My Brazil Trip List to eBird

I was in Mato Grosso Brazil earlier this month with my friend Doug Futuyma, sort of a scouting trip/practice guiding trip. I even saw a couple lifers.

Each evening we went over the list of all the birds we saw and heard, and I entered numbers on a spreadsheet on my iPad, trying to keep separate lists for each area we birded. This morning, after about 5 hours of working on it, the spreadsheet was ready to be uploaded to eBird – all 56 separate lists, and a total of 490 species.

One photo highlight below is the Crested Eagle that Doug spotted on a very distant snag from the New Tower at Cristalino Jungle Lodge on June 15th. I took perhaps 50 digiscoped images, and most were dross. Even this one is barely worth keeping, but it's the best there is. What made this rare sighting all that more memorable is that it came just moments after we watched a magnificent Harpy Eagle disappear into the distant canopy with what was probably a partially eaten young White-cheeked Spider Monkey. It was a great morning on the tower.

I Gave A Talk!

Though I've been birding and guiding the past couple of weeks in Brazil, last night's event was foremost on my mind almost the entire time – the joint meeting of Oregon Field Ornithologists and the Western Bird Banding Association, at which I was invited to give the key note talk on the second night.

Despite my worries and not having a polished, rehearsed presentation, it went as well as I could have hoped, and I had fun. I presented sound recordings of a bunch of species that incorporate songs and calls of other species in their vocalizations, and there's lots to talk about there. It's a topic I've been fasciated by almost since I started birding 28 years ago.

Earlier in the day I led one of the field trips, taking the four birders with me to the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge and a bit into the Lava Beds National Monument. Our first stops were actually in Oregon where we saw an irrigated field full of White-faced Ibises and Ring-billed Gulls with one California and six Franklin's Gulls mixed in, and later a colony of Tricolored Blackbirds in a blackberry hedge. Our first stop on the California side of the border was a the monument's Petroglyph Cliffs where we saw hundreds of Cliff Swallows, one White-throated Swift, a pair of Prairie Falcons, and these young Barn Owls.

We finished with a drive through the auto tour route of the national wildlife refuge after  lunch at the headquarters picnic tables. Two surprises there were a Vaux's Swift well-spotted by Anne Heyerly as it dashed through hundreds of Cliff Swallows and a very out-of-place Swainson's Thrush foraging on the lawn with a pair of American Robins.

Vocal Sacs on a Passerine!

I think the presence of vocal sacs – that is, bare patches of skin inflated during singing – should have been plenty of evidence to have placed the Black-capped Donacobius in its own family deacades or centuries ago. But museum ornithologists seemed to be hell-bent upon forcing this obviously unique taxon into already named families. So the donacobius has been called a wren, a thrasher, and who-knows-what. But when you actually experience the bird in the wild, you are quite aware this bird is like no other in the world.

Here, on the floating vegetation of an oxbow of the Rio Cuiabá upriver from Porto Jofre, Mato Grosso, Brazil:

Jaguar in the Pantanal!

I just got done birding for 3 days in the Pantanal with my friend Doug Futuyma. Long, bumpy, dusty (and sometimes muddy) roads led us to the middle of the largest freshwater marsh system on the planet. We then boarded a boat, had lunch in a "floatel," and after 2 1/2 hours of slow boating upstream I spied this face looking out at us from the bank.

Gambell Cooking – And a Little Birding

I'm sorry about absence here on my blog as well my ignoring all my e-mails this past week. I've been cooking for the WINGS group here at Gambell, Alaska (where there really is a view of Russia, not that Sarah Palin has ever been here).

I've gone a bit overboard, but we've come to the end of the week, and tomorrow afternoon begin the series of four flights that will get me home 18 hours later. I have little doubt that I'll sleep most of the way. Last year I slept more than 12 hours straight through on my first night off after this week of nonstop running back and forth in the kitchen.

Day 2, May 30

Breakfast: Fluffy Scrambled Eggs and Cream Biscuits with Cheddar Cheese, Oven-fried Bacon                 

Lunch: Classic Tuna Salad, Barley Soup With Mushrooms and Kale

Dinner: Crispy Roast Lemon Chicken, Baked Wild Rice, Maple-roasted Brussels Sprouts and Rutabaga with Hazelnuts, Apple-Pear Salad

Dessert: Orange-scented Olive-oil Cake with Orange Compote and Ganache

Southern Spain Wildflower gallery

Wandering around southern Spain in early May, I couldn't help but notice the astonishing abundance of fabulous wildflowers. I haven't had a chance to identify all of them (which would be restricted to perusing the world wide web in my spare time), but I thought I would go ahead and the photos here.

morning glory

Tassle Hyacinth, Leopoldia comosa

unknown borage?

unknown borage

unknown Centauria-like composite

unknown clover

unknown composite and beetle

unknown lavender

unknown mallow

unknown mint

unknown pink flower, maybe Valerianceae?

unknown yellow cress

unknown pink cistus and beetles

unknown white cistus