Butterflies are Cheap at Work, Too

If it's not a female Eastern Tailed Blue, it's something pretty similar, on Joe Pye Weed, a native in wet places around here, and an excellent plant for a butterfly garden. We have some.  Click pic to embiggen.

Out of Breath at The Beach

Another beach day much like yesterday, warm, muggy, partly cloudy, but as always happens, somehow different too.

Today, what was different was the Bay.  We appear to have been on the edge of a low oxygen event, caused by a couple days of consistent south winds, which move the bottom water up on our shore through a process called upwelling.

 The first clue to that was a large number of pipefish, hanging right in the surf zone.  Pipefish are a relative of seahorses, both have their bodies armored in strong scales, a tubular mouth and an unusual form of reproduction where females lay eggs in a pouch that the male has, making them one for the few groups of animals where the males "give birth".

There were lots of other kinds of fish in the shallows as well, including this little flatfish.  Likely a Hogchoker, this may also be a relatively rare Winter Flounder.

There were also large number of crabs in the shallows, making wading a bit dicier than usual.  There were other fish in the shallows as well, silversides, clingfish and others, but I saw only a couple of dead silversides washed up.  By the time we finished our walk, the hypoxia must have been dissipating.  There were much fewer fish and crabs in the shallows.

The birds find these so called "crab jubilees" to be a good thing, because it brings a lot of fish up into the surface, for easy pickings.  This eagle was fishing in the nearshore waters.









 As was this Osprey.

I think the Cardinal in the Kudzu was just a coincidence, though.

Coming and going.













Another dragonfly.

There's Something Happening Here, at the Beach

 And what it is ain't exactly clear...

We got another early start to beat the heat, and even maybe the rain.  It was mostly overcast, with no wind, and temperature in the mid to high 70s and humid.  

 The Navy is doing something offshore, and it's very mysterious.  There were three vessels hanging out near the channel of the Bay, two small and one very large. 

One of the two smaller was clearly a crane mounted on a large barge.

 The big ship was odd; a catamaran design with a huge space under the hull.  It looks like another vessel maybe tucked up under there.


They were out there for most of our two hour walk.  Somewhere along the way, the two smaller one disappeared (moved away south or across), and eventually the big catamaran steamed up north.

Much like the Honey Badger, Skye don't care.  We attacked her this week with the comb, (it takes one of us to hold her down, while the other combs), and the result was a huge pile of down, and a dog that looks much slimmer and less scruffy.

Neither do the butterflies.  Eastern Black Swallowtail or Eastern Tiger Swallowtail black form? or maybe even a Spicebush Swallowtail?

Well, I'll leave that to the taxonomists among us.

For about 10 minutes the sun actually came out, and it was rather warm.

Probability of Sea Nettles, still 100%.

Lots of dragonflies about, but not streaming down the beach the way they had the last two weeks.

WTF?

Is this?  Some kind of beetle I guess. 

The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other, for the simple reason that there are nearly 300,000 species of beetle known, and perhaps more, as compared with somewhat less than 9,000 species of birds and a little over 10,000 species of mammals. Beetles are actually more numerous than the species of any other insect order. That kind of thing is characteristic of nature.

J.B.S Haldane - What is Life? The Layman's View of Nature, 1949

The quote is also sometime rendered "The Creator, if He exists, has an inordinate fondness for beetles."

Have I told you it's hot outside yet today?

July 4, 2012 at the Beach

Anticipating another hot day, we once again decided to make an early start, and got down to be beach at 8 AM sharp(ish).. It was already getting warm, but a slight north breeze kept it tolerable at least on the way up.

Something I'd never seen before; a mass flight of dragonflies.  Over about 5 minutes, there must have been hundreds flying north along the beach.  I've never heard of that.  You can see a few blurry ones in the photo with the crow.

The crow?  It had just been mobbed by a Mockingbird.  It's carrying something away; baby Mockingbird maybe?

 A Mom and kids out for an early walk and dip on the Bay









Skye saved one of her "special" kisses for the baby.

A Morning Glory, that's either native or escaped cultivation to the cliffs.  There's a lot of Morning Glories so I won't pretend to know, or even care much either way.

Trumpet Vine, a native to the Southeastern US, but widely planted elsewhere.  Sometime welcomed, sometimes not.  Hummingbirds like them.

-Wear gloves when handling trumpet vine. Some people will get a rash from handling the foliage, so it's better to err on the cautious side.

-Some modern cultivars are suppose to be less invasive than the trumpet vine found in the ditches and growing wild.

-Do not use a tree as a pole for the trumpet vine to climb. Eventually it will strangle the tree. Use an actual pole or fence instead and again, prune in spring or fall, or even during mild winters.

A Spin Around the Garden

I went out a little after lunch today to pick up some of the debris the "Super Derecho" (yes, it's new word for me too; I wonder how it's pronounced?)  left on our lawn, and brought the camera.  I was pleasantly surprised to find another Great Spangled Fritillary on the Purple Cone flowers.  They seem to attract a remarkable number of pollinators and nectar sippers.

I find it hard to get a good shot of the top of the wings; they seem to spend most of their time with their wings folded up, just to frustrate me.  But I did get this shot of it leaving the flower, that's sort of in focus, and shows most of the upper pattern.

These are Cleomes from the seeds I won in Laurence Meade's contest to identify the seed capsule over at the Althouse blog.  We have Cleomes that we allow to reseed from year to year (in fact, you would have to be ruthless to root them out entirely), but we were hoping these might be a little different.

And in fact, they are.  Our original Cleomes (on the right) are much farther along at this point, and much taller.  I guess in Wisconsin you want to be sure spring has really sprung before you put much effort into growing.  Meade's Cleomes are also a darker shade of purple than ours.

Another butterfly, the Red Admiral, on our deck.  Top view...

... and the undersides of the wings.  A very cooperative butterfly.

The tiniest thieves of all: Termites in woman's safe eat through £32,000 in cash

The termites munched their way through more than £32,000 in cash after getting into a woman's safe

-Money-saver scrimps and saves for eight years to study abroad

-She discovered the insects had munched their way through the notes

If you thought the NatWest fiasco was bad, spare a thought for this money saver.

While millions of customers of the beleaguered bank had their accounts frozen, one woman was faced with her money disappearing altogether.

The culprit? Hordes of hungry termites.

The Taiwanese woman's safe might well have been blast and fire proof, but it could not protect her money from the insects.

The tiny creatures somehow got into her safe and munched their way through £32,700 in cash.

She had spent eight years saving the money so she could study abroad.

She turned to Taiwan's Investigation Bureau to help her exchange her bundles of damaged notes for new ones after she found the files of cash she stored in her safe had been eaten by the termites.

However, forensic expert only managed to piece together a quarter of the notes from the piles of shredded paper.

The Investigation Bureau in Taiwan urged people to put their money in banks instead of safes to avoid similar incidents from happening again

The woman, identified only by her surname Chen, who graduated from a Taipei university last year, was originally going to spend the money to study aboard, according to the Chinese-language Apple Daily.

It took her eight years of hard work to come up with the money which she stored at a safe in her house. This April, Chen found that termites had eaten most of the piles of cash in the safe.

She later sought out the Investigation Bureau for help after a bank refused to honour the bills.

They were sent to the bureau's forensic unit for further examination. They will be honoured based on the number of bills the experts succeed in restoring.

The bureau urged people to put their money in banks to avoid similar incidents from happening again.

News by Dailymail

Read current news at http://bbc-cnn-worldnews.blogspot.com

Bugs!

I took a brief pass around the garden with the camera.  I was inspired by a few insects.  Here we have a pair of some kind of beetles, pollinating the flowers, and themselves at the same time.  Multitasking!

A small skipper butterfly.

A skipper or skipper butterfly is a butterfly of the family Hesperiidae. They are named after their quick, darting flight habits. There are more than 3500 recognized species of skippers and they occur worldwide, but with the greatest diversity in the Neotropical regions of Central and South America

A small native bee, presumably pollinating the flower.  We don't see many Honey Bees any more, probably due to colony collapse disorder, but there seem to be a lot more bumble bees and small native bees of various sorts.  I think the doom predicted with the loss of Honey Bees has been exaggerated.

I spotted this dragon fly over the pond.  In this photo it's sitting on a blade of Blue Flag Iris.  It was a pretty cooperative subject for photography, allowing me to get pretty close, and take several tries.

It tool off at one point, and set back down on our Elephant Ears. It took a pretty interesting pose, with its wings tilted oddly.  I wonder if that was meant as a threat display? 

Definitely click on this one to see it enlarged.

Another blogger got a pretty good picture of what looks like the same species.

Important Discovery of the Day

You can't scare a fly off the screen with the mouse cursor...

Saturday Non-Beach Report

Yesterday morning, Alex, Kelly, Georgia and I went out on the boat to give Kelly the full "Chesapeake Experience." Unfortunately, the wind was up from the north, and after lumping up to Parkers Creek in a half hour, we ran home soaked.  Sorry, no pictures; it was unsafe for cameras.

To make up for that, we went wine tasting in the afternoon.  Our subject was Perigeaux Winery, over on Mackall Road, near St. Leonards Creek on the Patuxent River.

It has a very well kept vineyard, and a pleasant tasting room.  $5 each will buy you a sip of every wine they have.  We tried a good number, and settled on a bottle of desert wine.

Just a butterfly on some of their plantings.  I think it might be an American Lady (Vanessa virginiensis)

With some of the afternoon left to kill before the afternoon nap, we stopped in at the Battle Creek Cypress Swamp, a Calvert County park created to protect one of the the most northern stands of Bald Cypress in the United States. Bald Cypress are the classic swamp tree, with the large 'knees' that stuck out of the wet soil or water to help provide air for the roots.  They also shed their needles in winter, unusual for conifers.

The swamp itself was rather dry, so mostly the knees stuck out of mud and not water.  The Cypress are old growth, and so tall it difficult to see that they are conifers, all you see are the trunks and knees.  It was a pleasant shaded walk on the boardwalk on a sunny warm afternoon.  However, the displays in the visitors center were pretty sparse

Alex got a bit of a kick out of going back to where he'd visited many times on elementary and middle school field trips.

Butterflies are Cheap, If Not Free

I spotted these butterflies hanging around a Milkweed plant at work today.  I took a bunch of pictures, and got a couple of decent ones.  I looked around to try to figure out which butterfly they are, but couldn't.

Bottom (Ventral) view

Top (Dorsal) View

UPDATE: My guess is that they are one of the Fritillaries, maybe the Great Spangled Fritllary.

The milkweeds were very fragrant, and attracted other visitors too.

Monsanto Takes on Bee Disease

Article by some whacked out liberal site hurt that Monsanto would actually try to solve a problem that's been vexing government scientists and beekeepers; what's killing the Honey Bees:


What Biotech Company Blamed for Bee Collapse Just Bought Leading Bee Research Firm?

Bee colonies around the globe are mysteriously disappearing, a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder (CCD). Since 2006, it's estimated that close to one-third of all honey bee colonies have simply vanished into thin air. Where are the bees going? What's causing their devastating demise?

One forerunning theory is that genetic engineering of crops is involved, either through the genetically modified crops themselves or the pesticides and herbicides that go with them.

Monsanto, which is the world leader in this type of biotechnology, is likely none too pleased about the recent accusations hurled against their product, so they've taken matters into their own hands and purchased one of the leading bee research firms – one that, conveniently, lists its primary goal as studying colony collapse disorder.

If this isn't the classic example of the fox guarding the henhouse then I don't know what is.

I just love the outrage being generated against the company that actually likely to do something about colony collapse disorder (if only for the profit), instead of studying it to death like the government scientists are likely to (why cure it, then you lose the grant gravy train).  If Monsanto doesn't find a treatment, Monsanto doesn't make any money.

In the past, colony collapse disorder has be blamed on a wide variety of different things including:

Zombies,  Cell phones, Mites, fungus, starvation, global warming (of course), genetically modified crops, and pesticides.

Of course, domestic Honeybees are not native to the Western Hemisphere, and are an invasive species much like Phragmites (the bad form) or Snakeheads.  In fact, without question, I daresay Honeybees cause more human deaths in the United States than either Phragmites or Snakeheads.

There are countless species of native bees willing to take up the slack that the honeybees leave behind...

Sunday, May 6 Beach Report

Today was not a repeat of yesterday's good sunbathing weather. It had cooled to the high 50's, and the area was blanketed by clouds.  Looking southeast across the Bay to Taylor's Island, the sky fairly glowers.

Looking north, it didn't look a whole lot better.  The Bay was a bit choppy, but not horrible.

We met Joel and Red on time.  Red found this nice stinky fish to pull out of the surf.  Fortunately, he was persuaded from making a meal out of it.

There were a few of these beetles washed up on the beach.  This one was battered, but still crawling.  What amazing colors!

Salsify, or Goat's Beard (Tragopogon sp., probably dubius).

Some kind of Milkweed (Asclepias) that is quite common on the dunes.

Pollination in this genus is accomplished in an unusual manner. Pollen is grouped into complex structures called pollinia (or "pollen sacs"), rather than being individual grains or tetrads, as is typical for most plants. The feet or mouthparts of flower visiting insects such as bees, wasps and butterflies, slip into one of the five slits in each flower formed by adjacent anthers.

The bases of the pollinia then mechanically attach to the insect, pulling a pair of pollen sacs free when the pollinator flies off. Pollination is effected by the reverse procedure in which one of the pollinia becomes trapped within the anther slit.

While editing the picture above, I accidentally hit the "threshhold" control in GIMP. I kind of liked the effect. I played with it for a minutes, and decided to keep this one....