of Life                                                                                                            18 July 2015

Down to the river this morning at 7:30. Setting out, I scanned the drainage ditch for the big box turtle, I’d seen there two days ago. No show this morning. Along the jeep road of packed sand and clay covered with a dry cracking algal crust, the Johnson grass leans in, young elm too and poison ivy extends its leaves.. the green perimeter seeking to gain the open growing space.

Stepping off the end of the road and onto the jumbled barrier of cottonwood logs, I bent back fresh new leaves and stems of willow and wild grape and poke. Contemplating one stem of rough leaved dogwood I suddenly saw the thin green snake perched at the height of my head, quietly retreating down the stem a foot away.

Emerging from the path through the green hedge I looked hopefully at the 40 foot diameter pool of water in the basin of brown river silt. The surface was roiled with minnows, scores of them, cut off from the flow of the river,  doomed to die if their pool dries before a heavy rain can sweep them back down the braided delta into the river. Movement at the near edge of the pool drew my eye to two good-sized crayfish emerging from the water’s edge. One propped itself up on its front chelipeds as though looking around in the dry air. The other, slightly more cautious, remained barely submerged ..but either would have been easy prey for a bird or quick raccoon.

 I walked out onto the clean white sand of the levee and left my sandals there. A small pencil-width hole led down into the sand with strange tracks across open nothingness of sand two feet to the only blade of grass within 2 m in any direction. Perched on the grass, was the shed exoskeleton of the small cicada that had emerged from the hole.

Further along the sand levee a large Bembex sand wasp swooped around me twice. I watched it as it returned to a burrow in the sand and hovered at the entrance as I counted to 60. Then it settled and dug a little sand like a dog digging sand between its legs at the beach.. all the while, the wasp was tapping with its antennae up and down. After 45 seconds it walked into the burrow and disappeared. I waited a few seconds and then tapped the ground by the burrow with my hiking stick a couple of times. After a short few seconds the wasp emerged and swooped around me again, then returned to its burrow, hovered there for 60 seconds, landed and paused at the entrance for 45 seconds doing its antennal movements, then disappeared into the burrow. I tapped again. The wasp re-emerged, chased off a large robber fly then hovered at the burrow for 60 seconds, landed and paused for 45 seconds etc. I repeated this once more with the same result, except this last time a male velvet ant flew in and landed two feet from the nest. Its hoped-for female mate has no wings but will march into the sand wasp's nest without fear, and parasitize the sand wasps nest. ('Sphexishness' : unthinking hard-wired behaviors that look like deliberate considered behavior.)

  So much to see and watch. After an exploration of the water and walk/ swim/ float across and back, I left as I had arrived, by the small pool. There in the sun and two foot deep water, was a nice, young diamond-backed water snake, little bit longer than my forearm. It was swimming/ writhing up and down in the water in an odd fashion. I think it was trying to catch the minnows that were much more agile in the water. Watching a moment, I saw a second snake, same species, same size glide to the edge of the pond and watch me. When it spooked and moved back into deeper water the first snake quit its gyrations and glided cautiously onto some floating sticks where it could watch me.

  After a while I decided to head out.. enjoying the stands of fresh white and pink doze daisies along the way.

Water and Boats

Out to the Canadian this Saturday morning at 8.. pretty quiet. The river flow is down enough to expose some sand bars but it is still about a foot too deep to shrink to main channel and shallow slow side channels or backwaters. Lot of water flowing. I did not see the great blue. There were a couple of kingfishers, some swallows up by the power lines, a couple of doves, a green heron fishing from the low hanging willow, a couple of cattle egrets. Lots of robust Grindelia gumweeds along the jeep road.. also Chaemaecrista partridge pea and white Chamaesaracha (looks sort of like a white solanum). Watched a dark red brown Polistes wasp struggling with a heavy green caterpillar it had killed. It was trying to climb a sunflower and gain a launch pad, but its load was too large and awkward.
  No snakes or turtles.. one large white-tailed doe in broad day light standing exploring a sandbar closer to the interstate bridge. It frequently looked up at the bridge with the truck traffic passing along. Wonder what it was thinking.
  Getting ready to leave when I heard a familiar roar from long ago in the Everglades and to my astonishment saw this approaching and then passing by with a wave. What would Dr Seuss say?

Turkeys to greet me

As I approached the head of the short path down to the river, I glimpsed a large mottled brown animal disappearing beyond some willow. Thinking it was likely a feral cat, I was surprised & delighted to round the bend and see two large brown turkeys standing in the shade. They moved off a few paces slowly and then began to trot away down the sandy road southeastward. I stepped onto the path and a few paces through the tangle of amaranths, willow,  ragweed, pokeweed and broken dead juniper branches, I stepped out onto the sloping sand levee of the river. By the brown churning turbid water, I saw the back of a tall great blue heron. It stayed just a moment and then flew off as a cattle egret was flying by downstream.

The water had receded enough to reveal a narrow sandbar where the heron had stood.. but the river was still high and deep and fast enough to be risky walking.  The moving sand made shallow 'quicksand' where the sand bars were shifting. The previous broad sand bars, barriers and winding channels have all been reconfigured by the continuing flood and high water. I headed upstream and enjoyed a few of the mudflats on the east shore but there was not much there. Corixids present in the tens and hundreds of thousands last year and the year before in the shallows were hard to find. Only one small pocket of minnows. A few bronze Bembidion beetles on one portion of sand. All the life was likely still there..just dispersed.. or maybe waiting to burst into rapid growth and reproduction when water levels fall a bit more and the warm side pools become freshwater estuaries for life.

On the jeep trail heading back: Oenothera evening primrose, Heterotheca, Chamaecrista partridge pea, Solanum/ Nicotiana (white) all in abundant bloom along the northeast bank and sandy road. The number of pollinators is picking up.. skipper, blue, syrphid, a bumblebee, lots of halictids. Tamarisk is still in bloom. One kite overhead and a few flycatchers across the river.. nice morning but exploration still limited by high water.

Flooded River

After yesterday's dawn flash flood, I went to the river at 7 this beautiful morning to see what the rains had done. I made it down the trail just as far as the first glimpse of the river. It was running high and fast with red brown flood water. I waded into the shallows but retreated from the deeper water. No river walk today. On my retreat, I saw the tracks of muskrat, otter or coon (i.e. I don't know) on the fresh sand washed out along the ditch parallel to the lower trail.

Several More River Walks

[From July 2012]

Like a frog slowly being boiled this past ten days we've had highs solidly above 100F..but I am starting to not mind so much. I just slow down and take it easy.. and get out early to enjoy the morning down by the river. Two days ago Thursday there was a large much anticipated rain storm - that just missed us.. rained east and south - a good bit. The river flow has been gradually decreasing and now with the warm temperatures and the 50+ days of no rain this river band of abundant life will begin to turn into a zone of death. But Saturday morning it was delightful as I stepped out to the river floodplain. I walked southeast this time and took the short path through the brushy willows and Arundo cane. Odd guttation from the leaves got me wet walking through the foliage despite the hot dry previous days. I wonder what makes for abundant guttation here. I did not expect.

Walking east toward the sun along the river sand bar and in the water.. much to see. I began recording GPS coordinates so I could watch and see if populations of surface dwelling aquatic insects like gyrinids tended to be found in the same location each day.

In the still well flowing river, a population of corixids gather around the white lid of a water bottle. crunched and coated with algae. Corixids must have it good.. lot of vegetation to eat and few predators on them. Why do they gather here? Is there some social value.. maybe some protection..?

A New River and a Beaver's Front Yard

I stepped into a new river, morning of fourth of July 2013.

In 2012 I had gotten to know riverside landmarks along this section of the S. Canadian: tilted willows, muskrat ponds, deep pools, kingfisher perches, bank side debris. High water of spring and early summer 2013 re-contoured banks, obliterated the muskrat backwater and removed the leaning willow where gyrinid whirligig beetles gathered. Old familiar landmarks were mostly gone.
I wanted to see what there was to see.

My welcome was the call of the kingfisher flying along the river... followed by a pair of green-backed herons I surprised as they were starting to land on the river bank below the sandy levee where I stood.. until they saw me just above them, did an aerial 180 turn and headed back across the river. I watched a youngish yellow & black water snake in shallow water (1 foot depth), quickly head for the steep bank.. try to climb the slippery side, then turn and come towards my ankles, then turn again & head down river. A young small garter snake in a good slimy side pool zoomed away swimming ten feet from me - keeping its small black head high up above the algae and froth like a periscope. A family of four eastern kingbirds gathered in the dead branches of an elm on the opposite bank.. spying the land and looking for breakfast on the wing. 

The sandy broad bed of the river is quite a banquet breakfast with all sorts of things to eat and things eating.  Fast moving small Bembidion ground beetles, shining bronze glinting light are everywhere along the wet river edge. In shade of reeds long the northwestern bank there were schools of black, elliptical gyrinid whirligig beetles. In the sun on the flat sandbars & along the river edge small shallow 3 inch deep pools hold trapped minnows by the thousands waiting for slow drying of their pools and death. Nocturnal foraging raccoons gather dinner there, leaving their tracks. Cattle egrets with their bright yellow feet and black legs love these shallow pools.. eating there is like shooting fish in a barrel. Trapped minnows are Nature rolling the dice. In the small pools they escape predation from larger fish, can find abundant food and can grow quickly in warmer water. If thunderstorm rains come then and wash them into the main channel, they win. If rains do not come, the small pools dry and they lose.

The largest snake I saw was a big fat well-fed water snake sunning itself on a bed box frame washed up along the river bank above a deeper pool. I splashed water on in it to see it move and slip into a darker hiding place.

There was one - just one Mississippi kite circling overhead. Last year, the weather brought down 10-20 to this part of the river. Lower down over the eastern wooded river bank a lone turkey vulture was soaring, looking for food.

I walked down a mile to the inflow of Inhoffe creek.. closed in with tall reeds overhead and young willows almost touching across the narrow, shaded, cooler and deeper small creek. Very little flow but enough good water depth to provide a highway for muskrats commuting in the stream 50-100 feet away from the river to small burrows in the thick impenetrable stand of reed. Lots of cool insects along the river: tiger beetles mottled wine red and bone white.. fast running and flying chasing the small flies and other insects along the water's edge. At the mouth of the creek there was a young turtle in the water, a red-eared slider the size of a silver dollar. Up on the dry sandy levee above it I surprised an old 3-toed box turtle with its back to me grazing happily on some polygonum until I came around front into its view. Then it froze. I stayed a good 6 feet away so it did not retreat into its shell but stood there, staring at me with its yellow green face looking as if it was willing me not to notice it.

There were tracks there.. some I think were otter from nocturnal runs along the river. There were batches of white turtle shell egg cases that looked like some had been dug out and eaten and others had survived to hatch. 

By the box turtle there was a small wetter depression of soil with a good population of white flowered saggitaria.. bright and colorful with fresh large arrowhead leaves.. also stands of 4 foot high Oenothera evening primrose were full of yellow flowers and invasive Tamarix salt cedar shrubs were blooming pink. There were young white toads hopping along the white sand,  green & brown leopard frogs in the water along the shaded river's edge, and small quarter sized red brown clay colored young frogs hopping away from their birth ponds.

Lots more.. swallows zooming around and feeding under the bridge, dragonflies and damselflies, dark green and black Gomphus clubtails or bright sky blue Enallagma damsels, 100's of thousands of small young corixid water boatmen feeding on any submerged plant or plant debris, a nice big black bull snake disappearing into tall johnson grass off a dusty road, aerial duels between agile predatory robber flies and predatory dragonflies attempting to defend the same patch.

This Sunday morning a new highlight was a face to face encounter with a beaver. I was scanning the bank under a cut older willow tree when I saw the glint of the eye of a beaver facing me 15 feet away. It watched me for a moment or two, then slipped fully out of its burrow under the willow and disappeared into deeper darker water. On the adjacent sandbar I found fresh cut willow stubs and tracks where branches were dragged across the sand to the water. 

As I was getting ready to leave I saw another kingfisher dive to the water.. and right beside it a flycatcher did the same (great crested?). I watched the flycatcher when it flew up to its perch in the top branches of a dead cottowood, and saw it repeat its dive. I think it probably was not going for fish, but may have been picking Polistes wasps or other insects off the water surface. The Polistes come to drink and float along on their tarsi with no trouble. But I also found a pretty grey and gold Ctenucha moth trapped in the water surface. I netted it and left it on some sunny leaves to dry. 

More..  a couple of flickers chasing around a big cottonwood, velvet ant rust red trundling along the hot sandy jeep road, sphecid digger wasps digging for prey in the loose hot sand like insect dogs - sand flying out between their back legs, white flowers of Cephalanthus button bush, small mysterious tumuli of fresh diggings in moist silty sand - with no one underneath, crayfish skeletons and bits here and there and one good large live one.

Walk along the Canadian

Saturday morning at 7:15 I drove and walked down to the south end of 24th St. It has been hot - most of the past week has been around or above 100F.. but on this morning it was a comfortable 76 F before the sun.

Walking down the shaded jeep road I felt I was leaving at my back the noise and clatter of human culture and entering a quieter saner green world. Where the path crosses over a narrow shaded ditch with cool puddles there were many tracks from last night's traffic. There cross turtles, garter and water snakes, foraging mammals and others. I walked on firm sand SW beyond a landscape debris dump. Two or three threads of gossamer woven last night touched my skin as I walked. They are tied to the surrounding 'rambunctious garden' of shaded cottonwood, willow and salt cedar saplings. There will be more gossamer as the season progresses. I walked to the junction and took the path back through the 20 feet of young thick willow stems to the open river sand bar.

On the north bank a green heron eyed me suspiciously, hesitantly deciding to fly or stay. I heard geese, looked up and was surprised to see 44 birds in formation rising, flying north.

Along both sides of the active river floodplain shaded deeper meter wide trenches are filled with minnows and dark green algae. The fish are cooler in the shade. Beaver keep some of the trenches open to flowing water.

In the ankle to knee deep main flow of the river there are many schools of hundreds and thousands of minnows. The larger minnows are limited to the deeper sections, with few of the smallest fish (fish feeding on fish likely). In the shallower ankle deep water there are the smaller minnows and in the quieter eddies the smallest fry.
The eddies and shallow waters are like estuaries: safer, warmer, relatively food filled. In the shallowest water, hundreds of thousands of aquatic corixid bugs graze on the algae (and diatoms?). It is a neat ecological zonation created by trophic ecology (?)

In the trenches a half dozen gyrinids zoom back and forth. Watching them I wonder if the reason for what looks like their continuous frenzy of motion is predator confusion. It is difficult to focus on one beetle at a time. On the far bank, the south west side, downstream from the old brown bleached snag a foot above the water, there is a larger group of 40-50 gyrinids. It would be interesting to bring a GPS unit and see if the animals along the river tend to remain in the same location.

Unfortunately seven Chrysops horseflies attempted to bite the back of my legs and ended up on their backs floating in the current. I did not see any taken by predators as I watched.

There is a group of three crows that seem to be constant companions and greeters, hanging out where my path comes down to the water. On the sand bars covered with algae there are four or five robins foraging on bugs (or minnows in the shallowest water?). A belted kingfisher flies along the SW shore between favorite perches (need to mark with GPS again) and a flock of 5-6 redwing blackbirds are just downstream. The bright redwinged male emerges as I approach what looks like a hidden backwater (nesting?) area. He gives occasional alarm(?) calls until I get closer and the females and other younger males fly up to join the first male on his snag.
I hear the distinctive killdeer call and watch a fast flying bird come swooping in for a running landing on firm smooth wet sand at the river's edge. A flycatcher likes to perch and forage from a thicket of willow branches hanging low along the SW bank. I see one great blue heron flying to a new perch in the cottonwoods. A pair of doves flies overhead twice as I walk along the wet sandbars.

Along the SW shore there appear to be four or five tiers of vegetation from the open sand bar with its covering of dry or wet algae and sparse vascular plants. The first well defined stand is of grasses and sedge and polygonum - perhaps 50-75 cm tall. Farther back is a rank of Arundo giant cane and abundant willow and cottonwood saplings, maybe 1.5 - 2 m tall. Then farther back there is taller giant cane Arundo bearing brown seed heads.. and finally there is a stand of scorched cottonwoods. I wonder if these stands are topographically delimited by the slope and shelf of the shore and levee.. or temporally defined - areas where the river has not been cutting for longer or shorter periods.
It might be an interesting sampling exercise to count all the willow and cottonwood stems within 1 or 1.5 m of the water for a distance of 10 or 20 m.. see if the data changes significantly up and downstream.

Across the wet sand from the water's edge I see a beaver's dragging of branches up into it's bankside den. The wet algal crust of portions of the sandbars looks to be highly productive.. looks to include N-fixing cyanobacteria and have plenty of biomass growth. I don't see that many herbivores feeding on it. Are they there below as larvae? Are there herbivores such as the Bembidion ground beetles that fly away before I am close enough to see them? Across the drier but not driest open sand the surface is covered with tumuli, small coin sized mounds of excavated sand connected by serpentine tracks like a snail produces. These mounds are a mystery to me.. not ants (almost no ants to be seen anywhere here).
Interesting to think about disturbance and recolonization of the algal crusts on the sand bars and along the shallow river bottom. The river bottom comprises a shifting mosaic of moving fresh sand moving/ creeping along in the current and patches of sand stable for some days, now covered and somewhat stabilized by algal growth.

Turning back at the old bridge abutment and heading back downstream along the shore and a sandy road the sun is backlighting a whole stand of 50-75 cm cottonwood seedlings and other rank new vegetation. It is a magical view revealing hidden herbivores, beetles, aphids, other insects walking on the leaves. I see the Coleomegilla ladybeetle busy searching a stem for her aphid breakfast.. and then see a heavy flying lumbering tank of a Plectrodera cottonwood borer. I follow as it flies 30 feet and can see where it lands. I picked it up and feel its strong mandible and powerful legs. After a few minutes of inspection and wonder I set the beetle back on the twig where I found it. I hear the cicada buzz and see a chrysomelid leaf beetle (by silhouette) trotting off to find a good place to feed.

But the best wildlife observations were on the short sandy trail preparing to leave the river. A black shiny Pompilid wasp was energetically dragging a paralyzed (grass?) spider nearly as large as the wasp. The wasp dropped the spider and flew off 10-15 feet when I approached; but then in about 3-5 minutes it returned to pick it up and continue dragging, all the while nervously and almost continuously flicking its wings. Remarkably, when it reached a deep pool maybe six or seven meters long and 1-2 m wide, filled with schools of large minnows, it gathered the spider up and flew/ swam across/on the suface of the pool for a full munute, carrying the spider to the dense stand of Arundo cane on the other side where I could not visually continue to follow it.
A few m. further along the trail a fence lizard scuttled off to the edge of the Arundo cane and sat there cooperatively for several minutes for me to observe. (I found my binocs focus to about 3 m.) As I stood, a small bright orange and black Phyciodes crescent butterfly came flitting by and stopped to bask in the sun near my feet.. although why it wanted to be any hotter on this day was not clear to me. At 8:30 it was probably 82 air temp. Finally as a parting gift, a Myzinum tiphiid wasp crawled out onto the cool shaded sand and groomed herself or sat quietly. I wondered if she was waiting to detect some sign of the scarab grubs in the sand below.

Best morning walk along the Canadian I've enjoyed this year.