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Four baby mink were filmed swimming with their mom tonight at the primary dam. Here’s initial footage, more pictures soon. Keep your eyes peeled. This is very unique and it means that they’re local.
So I was sitting at my parents’ table after a recent camping trip and noticed the Sacramento Bee’s Carlos Acala was having a poetry contest about gardening and asking for submissions. Winners would be published July 18th. Of course he would expect the usual complaints about moles and slugs, and a few fruit stealing incidents in literary form. I had a vision though. I wanted something different. I wanted to be the Upton Sinclair of horticulture. I wanted to be the “Silkwood” of the gardening industry. I wanted to rock their world.
Devoted gardeners everywhere will instantly recognize this avaricious visitor. The Horn worm, or tomato worm, is much despised in the agricultural world. He is famed for eating through your tomato leaves at the rate of a whole plant in a single night. Certainly there could be absolutely no reasonable value in letting him stick around. Except for this:
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Have you ever seen one of these? This is the Hummingbird, Hawk, or Sphinx Moth. They come to your flowers to take nectar and their heavy bodies move as if they were flying underwater. I first saw one when I was camping on the Russian River. It was twilight, and the strange evening hummingbird appeared to visit the flowers but didn’t fly away when we went to investigate. I couldn’t imagine what it could be and called the park ranger in the morning. He hadn’t seen one either, and had to call three friends, but we eventually solved the mystery. They are nearly as big as your fist, and there are many variations in coloring. I have only seen three in my lifetime, but I remember each precious glimpse.
It is stunning to me that considering all the gruesome detail with which we are warned against tomato worms, we aren’t at least given a mention of what they grow up to be. It’s almost an illicit secret, suppressed by the Ortho lobby or the Tomato Growers Association of America or something. With the weighty moral compass of a woman who had helped save beavers, I figured that my entry to the garden verse contest would have to address this prejudicial silence. I rolled up my sleeves and went to work.
Make friends with the Pest and Potato
Cultivate Peace: Garden NATO
No moth, me thinks
can rival the sphinx
She just needs a little Tomato!
I was proud of myself. A limerick, more accessible than the lofty sonnet, and how many women can rhyme sphinx? Garden descriminations being what they are, I, sadly, didn’t win, although I was contacted by the columnist running the contest who cleverly remarked that he would garden NATO but he didn’t know “where to get the seeds”. Aha! Suppressed by a Burpee and an Ortho lobby! It’s a green consipiracy.
Here is the fully-expected tomato poem that contained adequate prejudice to win.
If I had to pick my garden’s number one pest I think that the Tomato Worm stands above the rest It can devour a tomato plan almost overnight To see the devastation is quite a fright It’s voracious appetite one must stop Left uncontrolled and you’ll have no crop In addition to all this, it’s such an ugly worm Just the sight of them always makes me squirm
— Craig Wahl, Sacramento
Ahh Craig, you’re sooo establishment. You can read the other stepford-gardener-entries here. They’re a lot of fun, and the Bee’s garden section is one of the best around. But its missing a poem about sphinx moths. The gaping hole is obvious. Sigh.
I’m just curious. What if they grew up to be puppies? or unicorns? would gardeners still routinely kill them?
So this little fellow has been hanging around our beaver dam. Cheryl Reynolds photographed him here sitting on the filter for the flow device. He’s a juvenile starting life on his own, which is not so surprising. What is remarkable is that she noticed he had a band on his leg, meaning he was caught and released.
She’s been piecing together images and was able to identify from the numbers that he was tagged by IBRRC: International Bird Research and Rescue Center, where she volunteers. She showed the photo to the director who says that they released 34 green herons this year from Susuin Marsh, and it is definitely one of theirs. Then last night we saw it in the company of another one, who also looked banded!
Maybe you’re wondering whether those crazy volunteers at Lindsay or IBRRC actually do any good treating wildlife and releasing it back to take its chances. Well this little bird was rescued and went 25 miles towards finding a good new home. Maybe he heard about the Martinez Beavers and wanted to see for himself, like the couple from Pennsylvania last night who stopped by for some prime beaver viewing.
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There are some 5000 species of dragonflies, broadly spread around the planet. Fossilized records show a wing span of more than 2 feet! Dragonflies are hugely important as an indication of the health of a creek, and last year we noticed an encouraging expansion of them. The young are entirely water dwellers and feast on mosquito larvae (thankyou!). Adults live for only about 2 months, after they emerge from their nymph state, unfold their wings and take to the sky.
Dragon flies have better eyesight than any other insect. Their eyes are massive, and can scan both down for food and up for danger at the same time. They are predators on a mission and are excellent hunters on the aerial serengeti. An adult dragonfly can eat up to 600 insects a day. Many’s the time I’ve rescued a soggy dragonfly from the water in my canoe, and allowed his colorful body to dry out on my knee. It is in these moments that you realize what an alarmingly large BUG the dragonfly is, but I’ve been assured it can’t bite and it never has yet.
Dragonflies wings are independent of each other, which this Attenborough video shows very well. Their long legs can grasp and hold but they cannot walk. Watch a dragonfly when its resting to figure out what family it belongs to. Heavily bodied (or true dragonflies) hold them out to the sides, slender winged damsel flies fold them on their backs. Dragonflies have been studied by everyone from NASA to the Air Force who have been eager to learn how they manage speeds of 60 MPH and then come to a complete stop in mid air.
So far they’ve kept most of their secrets to themselves.
[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=Q-7k2HNJpXA]
There have been a fair amount of grebe-sightings between the second and third dam. These are slender-necked, fish and crustacean eating birds that build floating nests on the water and mate with elaborate dance rituals.
Our VP of Wildlife thought we had a Clark’s Grebe, and I thought we had a Western Grebe. Turns out we were both right! Check out this amazing photo from Cheryl Reynolds showing one of each down at the secondary dam. They look almost identical, but the Clark’s grebe has white around his eye, and the Western’s dark stripe goes right through his eye. See for yourself:
Boy we’re all going to be naturalists before this is through.
Speaking of eyes, mom’s is looking unhealthy again. Remember she was photographed with a condition back in October, and then it seemed to improve. I’ll do some more asking to see what can be done, but it appears to be a recurring condition that at least, isn’t contagious to her or to the others.
