Serendipity...Or Lives That Want To Be Shared?

Okay, this is a warning.  I am going to sound a little "Woo-woo" in this post.  I can't help that because sometimes that's just how I am.

So, with the appropriate warning out of the way, I have to confess that sometimes it seems as if certain animals consent to show themselves to me so that I can photograph them.  How else to explain the chance to photograph the fly attacking the hornworm last week? 

Or the funnel spider that sat at the entrance to its hole and just looked at me one morning last summer?   That's very unusual behavior for a funnel spider.

How about last week, when the scissor grinder cicada (Tibicen pruinosus) flew to the stem of a sunflower, about 5 feet from where I was weeding in the vegetable garden, and started to loudly sing away, making sure I had the chance to put his song and his appearance together. 

He even sat there singing while I stood up and photographed him!

Then there was the hanging thief robber fly (Diogmites sp.) that landed right in front of me to munch away on her wasp victim, while she dangled nonchalently from a single foot hanging onto the dry tip of an aster leaf.

Look how gently she seems to be cradling her prey.

I shouldn't forget the beautiful (and BIG) garter snake that posed prettily on the back path earlier this summer, obviously replete from a satisfying meal of (probably) cotton rat or baby rabbit. 

I walk the paths with 2 large German shepherds and I make little or no attempt to be quiet or to keep the dogs on heel.  That snake HAD to know we were coming!

Don't get me wrong - I am definitely not complaining.  I absolutely love getting glimpses into the lives of the animals that share our "little bit of Earth" with us.  It's a privilege and an honor to share their stories with a wider audience, too.

I'll leave you with one last animal story I was privileged to witness recently and with the related thought that it sparked in me.

I saw this David and Goliath story in my front garden just last week.  How in the world did that little crab spider manage to catch - and especially hold onto - that huge swallowtail butterfly?  The butterfly was obviously old - it's tattered wings hint of multiple adventures survived.  Was the butterfly just too old to have the energy to get away this time?  Or did it, somehow, know that its time was done and "consent" to become a meal for the little spider, passing along its energy to help the wheel of life spin just a little bit further around?

Do animals "consent" to be eaten and to become part of the food chain?  I've read that the Native Americans always used to say thanks to the animals they hunted for giving their lives to them for sustenance.  Was that a willing choice on the part of the animals?  Or was that simply an acknowledgement, on the part of the Native Americans, that they were taking the lives of other animals to support their own?

Of course I have no answers to my questions and I know that I'm being fanciful, especially in imagining the animals' desire to have their stories shared on the internet, but thanks for reading this and letting me indulge in whimsy from time to time.  I hope you'll always share the chance encounters you have with wildlife in your gardens - and the stories behind those encounters, too!

Double-banded Scoliid Wasp

Double-banded Scoliid Wasp.  Scolia bincincta.  What the heck is that?  Won't it sting me?  It looks menacing!

Well, it may look menacing because it's a big, black wasp, but the main animals that scoliid wasps menace are beetle larvae, especially beetle larvae in the ground.  You know, those things in your lawn called grubs?!

Every summer, Double-banded Scoliid Wasps are frequent visitors in my yard, especially to goldenrod and brown-eyed Susan blooms.  I doubt it's a coincidence that I rarely see June bugs any more, no matter what time of year it is.  Apparently, the female scoliid wasps dig down into the soil, sometimes following a grub's own tunnel, find the beetle grub, and then sting the grub to paralyze it.  The female often lays an egg on the grub then - but not always.  Even if the female doesn't lay an egg,  the grub will never recover from being paralyzed and therefore will never mature to reproduce.

Scoliid wasps, it naturally follows, are important predators on June bugs, May beetles, green June bugs, and even Japanese beetles! 

Meanwhile, the adult scoliid wasps feed on nectar and pollen, so they are frequently seen at flowers, which is where I almost always notice them.  Looking at the photo above, you can see the amount of pollen on this wasp.  Not surprisingly, scoliid wasps also act as pollinators, although they are not as efficient at that process as many of the native bees are.

According to BugGuide.net, there are 20 species of scoliid wasps in the U.S., spread among 5 genera, so there's a good chance you, too, can have scoliid wasps in your yard and garden.  Insects in Kansas shows 3 different species, in 2 genera, but there are probably more in our state.

By the way, if this wasp still looks dangerous to you, this is another of the myriad of solitary bees and wasps that won't sting you unless you physically try to hold them in your hand or accidentally step or fall on them.  Scoliid wasps are not aggressive towards humans.

Scoliid wasps are wonderful natural predators.  I hope you discover a species or two of these beautiful animals sharing your garden too!

The Fly and the Caterpillar: Not a Love Story

As I was doing a quick look-see in the vegetable garden yesterday, I heard a fly buzzing.  Why a buzzing fly caught my attention, I really can't tell you, but it did.  Perhaps it was because the noise was coming from the top of a tomato plant, which isn't normally fly country.  Anyway, I stopped to see what was going on.

At first I didn't see anything, then a movement attracted my attention.  Was that a smallish horn worm? 

I kept looking, finally able to see the outline of the caterpillar against the underside of one of the tomato leaves tucked in a ways.  Suddenly I saw a quick, dark movement and the caterpillar thrashed wildly.  What was going on???

As I watched, it became obvious that a fly was attacking the hornworm.  Every time the fly circled around and came near, the hornworm would move.... Trying to defend itself?  Trying to attack the fly?  Trying to keep the fly from landing?  I couldn't really see what was going on, but I took a series of photos, hoping to capture something with my lens that my eyes couldn't see.

Here are the best shots from the encounter...

The hornworm when I first saw it.

The first view of the fly.

Another "fly by" by the fly.  (Look carefully - you can see the fly's legs above the caterpillar;  the body of the fly is mostly hidden by the tomato stem.)

The fly comes back for another go-around.

And another attack - Fly attack #4...

This one lasted a little longer and the fly seemed to land on the caterpillar's body, despite the hornworm's thrashing and attempts to defend itself.

Fly attack #5.....  (You can just see the eyes of the fly coming into focus to the left of and slightly below the caterpillar.)

Fly attack #6...

Now there's fluid on the back of the caterpillar;  the fly has definitely made contact.

Still the fly comes back again....

But this seems to be the end of the attack.  A drop of "blood" on the back of the caterpillar remains, but the buzzing fly is gone.

According to my camera's time stamp, all of these photos were taken within a 2 minute window.  I don't know how long the attack had been going on when I chanced upon it.  Still, overall, the action didn't last that long.

I am assuming that the fly was a female and that she laid at least one egg in the caterpillar.  Judging from the fly's hairy abdomen that I could see in the photos, this was probably a tachinid fly.  If that's the case, the hornworm will go back to eating as if nothing has happened, but when it goes to pupate, the fly larva that has grown inside it will take over and kill the developing moth.  The hornworm pupa will actually only produce one or more fly pupae, which will, in their turn, produce more tachinid flies to carry on the cycle.

I knew that tachinid flies were parasitoids of caterpillars, but this is the first time I've actually witnessed the interaction between the caterpillar and the fly.  I see many, many tachinid flies in the garden, especially in the fall when they are feeding at my asters, so I knew this sort of event had to be occurring.  Adult tachinid flies are pollen and nectar feeders...and good pollinators.  Hornworms, while I think they are cool and interesting, are pests on tomato plants.  This is natural predator control at its most basic.

Life is not particularly gentle, but it tends to balance itself when allowed to do so.  Sometimes the variety of feeding strategies truly boggles my mind.   What predatory insects have you seen in YOUR garden lately?

Insect Music: Cicada Songs

When I posted my cicada photo on Bug Guide, for help with identification, I was also given links to pages that have recordings of cicada songs.  For example, there is the page called "Cicadas of the United States and Canada East of the 100th Meridian".  (Note:  I can't get links to work properly in this part of the post, for some unknown reason, but you can type the title into a Google search and the site will show up at the top of the list.) 

Like birds, each different species of cicada has a different song to help it locate a mate of the proper species.  Apparently it is sometimes easier to identify a cicada from its song than from its appearance...for humans, if not for cicadas. 

It's amazing!  When I go outside now, I feel like I'm experiencing an entirely new layer of awareness.  Suddenly, my mind tunes into the specific rhythm and tone of the cicada songs I'm hearing, on top of the familiar bird songs, the visual beauty of the leaves and flowers, and the feel of the wind on my skin.  I'm astounded at how much richer my outdoor experience has suddenly become!

Here are some of the various cicadas that I have identified in our yard.  If you go to the above page with its cicada songs, you can hear the different song for each of these species.  (Sorry, I tried to link each song below the photo, but a couple links worked and the rest didn't.  It seemed less confusing to just send you directly to the page itself, which is very easy to navigate, than to have some functional links and some dysfunctional ones.)  

Shown above, the bush cicada, Tibicen dorsatus, that I talked about in my last post, has a long, loud monotonous drone.

On the other hand, another cicada that I see fairly frequently, the superb prairie cicada, Tibicen superbus, has a song that is generally quieter, interspersed with louder rattles that almost give a wave-like feeling to the sound. I find that the song of this cicada is one of those iconic sounds that transports me outside to a hot summer day, no matter what time of year it is!

I don't have a photo of the next species, but when I went out early yesterday morning to take the trash out to the curb, the scissor grinder, Tibicen pruinosus, was calling from the honey locust hedge.  Here is what it sounded like (and probably looked like, if I had been able to see it!)  Note:  this is not my recording.

A fourth cicada species that I've found in the yard is the Plains Dog-Day Cicada, Tibicen auriferus, (shown above in a somewhat unusual color pattern).  The Plains Dog-Day Cicada's song has the pitch of a metallic buzz saw to my ear.

The fifth species that I've identified, so far, is the Whitened Dog-Day Cicada, Tibicen dealbatus. To me, it's song sounds like 2 insects combined into one body:  a droning cicada and a cricket, fighting it out inside the cicada's abdomen.

As a side note, in cicadas, only the males sing.  Unlike grasshoppers or crickets, male cicadas do not stridulate, or rub various parts of their body together to produce their song.  Instead, male cicadas have paired membranous structures in their abdomens called tymbals, which vibrate rapidly, the sound resonating within the body of the cicada.  Some cicadas sing so loudly that their song could cause damage to the human ear if the insect were singing right beside it. 

It's going to be an interesting challenge now to see how many different cicadas I can learn to identify from their calls!  It'll be fun to match up photos with calls as well, helping me to determine just exactly which different species I'm sharing our land with.  The more I learn, the more I realize I don't know.

Bush Cicada: A 2+" Sign That I'm On the Right Track

According to the reading I've done, restoring prairie is very much an art.  In fact, it's as much or more of an art than it is a science.  For example, the steps you should take depend, first of all, on whether you are starting with a plowed field or an overgrazed pasture.  Even with that determined, the process is highly experimental.  After all, for over a century we've been far more concerned with breaking up prairie lands, to plant crops, than we've been concerned with restoring agricultural lands to prairie.

It's almost always easier to destroy something than it is to create it...or to re-create it.

Therefore, even the very first step of restoration was in doubt when I decided I wanted to try to return tallgrass prairie to our 10 acre "homestead", with its 5 acres of overgrazed pasture.  Should I plow up the existing vegetation and/or use Roundup to kill it all off before planting prairie seeds?  The seed I used would supposedly establish more readily that way.  Or should I try to overseed into the existing vegetation? 

I didn't see a lot of vegetation that was worth saving during that first summer we lived here.  The Back Five was filled with redcedars, western ragweed, Baldwin's ironweed, poverty grass, brome, green antelopehorn, and a little bit of yarrow - hardly an inspiring mix.  My instincts, however, told me that plowing it all up or applying Roundup would set the return of the prairie back a lot.

"Following my gut" (to quote Gibbs on NCIS), I started the next year with a spring burn.  I reasoned that it wouldn't hurt and it might help me see if there were other, more desirable, plants being hidden by their assertive neighbors.  It took us two tries, but we did get the Back Five burned that second spring.  Over the summer I watched it carefully to see what showed up.  Fresh growth took several weeks to begin emerging, as that spring turned out to be cold and dry, but eventually the temperatures started to rise and the rains to fall.

What a difference a burn makes!  Oh, there was still a lot of "garbage" vegetation, but I also found white prairie clover, a couple lead plants, wild alfalfa, dotted gayfeather, and (best of all) FIVE spring ladies' tresses.  There was no way that I was going to plow up or Roundup that 5 acres!

So I decided to overseed.  Over the last 5 years, I've scattered seed, usually in the mowed trails, and I've watched for more hidden gems to emerge from the seed bank in the soil.  As with most natural systems, progress has seemed slow.  Prairie plants put down roots first, significant leaves next, and flowers - the most visible sign that a plant has established - last of all.  It can takes years before a newly establishing perennial or grass plant blooms, which means that it can take years before you know that your seeding has been successful.  Overseeding is especially slow, since far fewer of the seeds will be able to outcompete the already established plants on the site.  Severe heat and drought over the last several years have further impeded any progress.  Finally, though, I feel like the prairie is beginning to peek out through the overgrazed pasture it's been hiding under....

The poverty grass has become a much smaller component of the flora in the last 7 years.  Whereas it used to be impossible to walk through the Back Five without getting many of its painful seeds in my socks, these days I have to search the area for a while to find any obvious stands of it.

There are swaths of tall dropseed now and well established patches of side-oats grama.   The dotted gayfeather has spread from a scant dozen plants in one, well confined area to dozens of plants, scattered in several large, beautiful patches throughout the Back Five.  Whorled milkweed has started to form graceful colonies from single plants that were easy to overlook at first.

Meadowlarks nest each summer.  I've seen a jackrabbit several times, and coyotes regularly leave signs that they, too, are enjoying the area.

Compass plants have shown up, as well.  While I scattered some seed four or five years ago, several of the first plants that I noticed, a year or two later, were already large enough that I suspect they were actually holdovers which had survived the many years of pasturage.   Now there are a couple dozen compass plants;  6 of them put up flower spikes this year.

Which leads me to my latest promising sign of the return of the tallgrass prairie.  Last Thursday, on my latest walkabout, I photographed, among many other plants and animals, a large cicada making itself at home on the compass plant flower stalk above.  Large cicadas aren't unusual around here, so I almost didn't take this individual's photo, but having one so nicely posed on the compass plant stalk was a little different, so I spent the few extra electrons and minutes to record the image.

Over the weekend, I edited my photos and decided, somewhat on a whim, to send this image in to Bug Guide to see which cicada species this individual actually represented.  Some insects I seem to be able to identify without too much trouble.  Others, like cicadas, I have yet to learn enough about to reliably name.  Every other large cicada image I've sent in to Bug Guide has turned out to be Tibicen auriferus, the Plains Dog-Day Cicada, in one color variant or another.  This one didn't look like that, but I'd been fooled before.

This morning I received my answer from the Entomology Gods:  my large cicada is a Bush Cicada, Tibicen dorsatus. 

Why am I doing a happy dance?  Why does it matter to me which species of cicada this is?

Well, I'm probably over-reacting here, but on the Bug Guide information page about the Bush Cicada, it states, "A beautiful species that now exists in scattered isolates across much of its former range. Although listed as "secure" (i.e. "not threatened/endangered"), many populations, particularly those isolated in more developed areas, should be monitored and conserved."  I take that to mean that the species is on the decline, overall, and my little 5 acres of restoring prairie may be helping it to maintain a slightly healthier population.

Helping a potentially declining species to retain a healthier population is one of the big reasons why I garden, and definitely why I garden the way I do.   In a nutshell.  Or in a cicada cast, as the case may be.

Oh, my Bush Cicada?  Another common name for it is Splendid Prairie Cicada...and I think that's a perfectly splendid name.

An Uncommon Little Beauty: Olive Juniper Hairstreak Butterfly

These small winged beauties won't catch your eye from across the garden, but close up they are one of the prettiest butterflies I've ever seen.  The first year we lived here, I saw one but I haven't found another in the seven years since...until two days ago when I caught a brief glimpse of one in the vegetable garden, on the other side of a large clump of brown-eyed Susan, Rudbeckia triloba.  What butterfly am I talking about?  The olive juniper hairstreak butterfly, Callophrys gryneus.

This one didn't stay around for very long, but luckily I had my camera with me and I was able to grab a couple quick photos before it disappeared.

After I did a little research, I realized why it's so hard to find these cuties:  they don't nectar at flowers very often and their larval food plant is juniper.  Around here that means Eastern Redcedar, Juniperus virginiana.  Juniper hairstreaks are rarely found far from one.  In fact, one of the more reliable ways to see this butterfly is apparently to shake cedar trees and look for the males to fly.

Hmmm.  I haven't shaken any redcedars lately.  No wonder I haven't seen many juniper hairstreaks.  Have you ever seen this little beauty in your yard?

Death Comes For the Grasshopper(s)

Not surprisingly after 3 hot, dry years, there have been a lot of grasshoppers around this summer.  Grasshoppers and hot, dry weather go together like bread goes with peanut butter and jelly.  I've been noticing a few things that bode a little better for next year, though, and I'd like to share them with you.

The beginning of the summer started with literal hordes of grasshoppers, especially newly hatched nymphs.  The photo above shows a phalanx of said nymphs on a soon-devoured broccoli leaf.  It wasn't uncommon to have hundreds of tiny grasshoppers flying up with every step through grassy areas. 

Now, towards the end of July, there are still a lot of grasshoppers, but the numbers seem to have declined a bit - dozens fly up at every step instead of hundreds.  Sometimes only a few fly up.  I haven't sprayed or made any effort to curb their numbers, so what has happened?

First of all, the weather has been cooler and wetter than during the last 3 or 4 summers.  Cooler, wetter weather is good for plants, but bad for grasshoppers.  Newly hatched grasshoppers can be killed by cool, wet weather.  Truthfully, I'm not sure we were cool enough or wet enough for this to happen this year, but I'm mentioning it anyway.  However, warm, wet weather can also have a negative effect on grasshopper populations....

During warm, wet weather, there is a naturally occurring fungus, Entomophthora grylli, which infects grasshoppers and causes them to climb to the top of vegetation and grasp the stem with their legs, then die.  I've been seeing quite a few grasshoppers seemingly mummified like this.  The best news is that, as these grasshoppers dry out, the fungal spores spread on the wind to other grasshoppers, infecting them as well.

So not only is there one less grasshopper reproducing for next year, but each one that dies like this has also potentially caused other grasshoppers in the area to die as well!  Rather nightmarish...but effective.

Predators have been playing a role in decreasing grasshopper numbers, too.  Just in my ramblings with camera in hand, I've caught shots of several wheel bugs eating grasshoppers. 

I've got a large population of wheel bugs this year;  after such an abundance of prey, I suspect I'll have an even larger population next year!

Spiders, too, eat grasshoppers.  This photo of a black and yellow garden spider eating a grasshopper was actually taken last October, but I'm sure that the spiders I'm seeing this summer are taking out quite a few grasshoppers as well.  (My garden spiders aren't this big yet, but they will be!)

Birds, not surprisingly, eat grasshoppers as well, although I haven't been lucky enough to get any photos of that happening.  Bluebirds, quail, pheasant, meadowlarks, lark sparrows, and lots of other birds are known to eat grasshoppers.

I occasionally see great golden digger wasps around the yard, as in this rather out-of-focus photo from about a week ago, hunting (in this case) on Bradbury beebalm.  If these beautiful, big wasps aren't feeding themselves with nectar and pollen on flowers, they are actively prowling for grasshoppers to sting and paralyze.  Once the grasshopper is paralyzed, the female wasp takes it back to her nests as baby food to lay her eggs on.

The long and the short of it is that grasshoppers are grazers on plants, and a lot of animals eat them.  With bison no longer freely roaming the prairie, I understand that grasshoppers are actually the primary herbivore for this important ecosystem!  Because grasshoppers are so mobile, it's hard to kill them with insecticides.  Ironically, it's much easier to kill the insects that prey on grasshoppers - so any time you spray an insecticide, even an organic one, you are probably helping to increase grasshopper populations, in the long run, by decreasing their predators.

Speaking of spraying insecticides and accidentally killing off insect predators, the last grasshopper predator I'm going to show you today fell victim to some actions Greg and I took several years ago before we knew any better.  While we didn't actually spray, we did kill enough of these predators that their population declined around our yard and gardens for a few years, so we've actually had more grasshoppers than we would have had if we hadn't tried to solve a "problem" we were sure we had.

The first summer or two that we lived and gardened here, we started our vegetable garden.  Despite the tall grass that we encouraged to grow on much of the property, we didn't see a large number of grasshoppers.  Some, yes, but not enough to cause noticeable damage.  Generally, our garden plants did superbly, although the tomatoes, in particular, attracted large numbers of black blister beetles.  A few grey blister beetles came too.  Not only were these insects a little creepy looking, but they ate the tomato leaves and made the tomato plants look really ugly.  I still harvested more tomatoes than I could possibly use and there weren't enough blister beetles to defoliate the plants, but definitely there were enough to make the plants look ratty. So I started to handpick the blister beetles, dropping them in soapy water to kill them.  Each morning I would do this, and it wasn't unusual for me to dispatch 50 or 100 each day.  It definitely lessened their populations over the course of the summer.

Even after I learned that blister beetle larvae ate grasshopper eggs, I continued to handpick the blister beetles, reasoning that I was seeing plenty of blister beetles, so it shouldn't be a problem.

In June, 2011, we came back from a trip to San Antonio to find several masses of hundreds of striped blister beetles writhing on our front lawn, presumably in an ecstasy of mating.  Our only thought was how to dispatch them as quickly as possible before they, too, started to eat the leaves of our tomatoes and other plants!  So we put soapy water in our shop vac and vacuumed most of them up.  Problem solved.

By later that same summer, I was seeing very few blister beetles...but hordes of grasshoppers.  As you may remember, the summer of 2011 was horribly hot and dry.  We had 53 days over 100 degrees F. and almost no rain.  By late July of that year, our althea had been defoliated by the grasshopper hordes.

For every adult blister beetle you see, an average of 27 grasshoppers don't get born.  What had we done?

For several years now, we've had so many grasshoppers that by early summer most of our vegetable garden is gone.  Once the grasshoppers hatch out, they devour the spinach, kale, broccoli and cauliflower within days.  Then the onion and garlic go.  The asparagus stalks become dried brown sticks with all the green gnawed off.  Over the course of the summer, all the iris leaves get whittled down to nubs.  Thankfully, 2011 was the only year our althea were entirely defoliated, but their leaves have been severely chewed each summer since then.
 

This year I'm finally seeing black blister beetles on the tomatoes and a few other plants again.  Mind you, I'm not seeing them in huge numbers, but they are there and they are reasonably common.  This year I'm NOT picking them off and killing them.   I'll share my tomato leaves so that, hopefully, the black blister beetle larvae will be feasting on grasshopper eggs over the winter!

The more I learn, the more I realize that I don't know very much.  A blog post I read over the weekend was talking about tangleveined flies as a grasshopper predator.  That's a new species I don't recognize, so now I want to learn more about them and see if I have any of those grasshopper predators in the yard.

There is an incredibly complex web of plants and animals that will generally keep each other in balance and keep the Earth healthy, if we leave enough of them alone to "do their thing."  We humans, though, get pretty cocksure of ourselves and start killing plants and animals off, thinking we know a lot and can surely manage better than Mother Nature does. 

We're not as smart as we think we are.

Hopefully my yard is getting back into balance a bit better again.  Ah, the gardening spirit never fails, does it?  Next year will be better.....

What's the Point of Gardening? A Gardening Ethic for Our Times

Why do you garden?

If you're like me at all (and I suspect that many gardeners are), you probably have several reasons you garden - several passions that gardening feeds - several functions that gardening performs in your life....

I garden because it makes me feel good to see flowers blooming around my home.

I garden because it's a form of exercise that I enjoy and it gets me outside, in the fresh air.

I garden to increase our property value (I hope).

I garden to provide some good, chemical free food for us to enjoy.

I garden because plants and animals fascinate me in their infinite variety.

Most of all, though, I garden because it's my way of doing something very concrete, very local, and very specific to make the world healthier and more ALIVE.  I garden, and I garden the way I do, because it's my way of helping to heal the life force on our planet, which seems to be in serious danger from the increasing human assaults on it over the last 100 years or so.

"Okay, Cynth, " I can almost hear you sigh.  "What brought this up?  Can't we just look at pretty pictures and move on?"

Well, of course you can.  But I read something the other day that really got me thinking about my role as a gardener.  Ben Vogt of Nebraska, who blogs at The Deep Middle, posted a commentary that struck a deep chord with me:  "Is There Any Difference Between a Land Ethic and a Garden Ethic?"
Hmmm.  Is there?  Why DO I garden?  Why do most people garden?

Ben started his thought-provoking post by quoting bits and pieces from Aldo Leopold's wonderful statement about developing a land ethic, as written in A Sand County Almanac.  Leopold finished writing this small, but important, three part book in 1948, just before he died.  The book was published a year later.  I think the most concise statement of Leopold's land ethic is actually written in Leopold's own forward to this book, "We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.  When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."  (My italics)

Filling the last 25 pages of A Sand County Almanac, the entirety of Leopold's "The Land Ethic" is certainly too long for me to quote here, but it's well worth reading...and rereading.  In it, he moves from showing how we humans have developed our ethical codes, first working on the relationships between individual humans and later developing codes such as the Golden Rule and democracy for how the individual relates to society as a whole and how society relates back to the individual.  Now, Leopold believed, it had become necessary to develop another layer to our ethical codes to govern how humans related to the land and to the plants and animals that shared it with them.  Otherwise, in Leopold's words, "There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man...."

Aldo Leopold wrote in 1948 and presumably developed his ideas even earlier.  What would he say about the way we treat the land, and the plants and animals on it, now?  I'm rather glad he's not around to see what we've done and, even worse, what we're in the process of doing.

Because I am around to see what we've done and what we're currently doing, I try to treat our little 10 acres according to Leopold's Land Ethic, adopting this ethical code, to the best of my ability, as my gardening ethic.  I try to treat our land, with its associated plants and animals, with love and respect, thinking of it as a community that I belong to rather than as a resource to maximize.  Realizing that communities - like most complex things - are healthier when they have all of the parts that they should have, I am trying to reintroduce plants that have disappeared over the last 150 years while this parcel of land was being extensively and intensively farmed.  I'm hoping that, as the plants reestablish, many of the smaller animals will find their way back too.

My goal is to have as stable, as healthily functioning, a prairie community on our 10 acres as I possibly can.  Someday, perhaps, the plants and animals that remain on this tiny piece of land will serve as a source to move back out into the wider landscape as a whole, helping to heal it as well.

Towards the end of "The Land Ethic," Leopold talked about a schism among folks who work with and on the land - he called it a cleavage - that divided people into 2 camps which deeply affected their relationship to the land they worked with:

In all of these cleavages, we see repeated the same basic paradoxes:  man the conqueror versus man the biotic citizen;  science the sharpener of his sword versus science the searchlight on his universe; land the slave and servant versus land the collective organism.  Robinson's injunction to Tristram may well be applied, at this juncture, to Homo sapiens as a species in gelogical time:

Whether you will or not
You are a King, Tristram, for you are one
Of the time-tested few that leave the world,
When they are gone, not the same place it was.
Mark what you leave.

As a gardener, which cleavage do you belong to:  the conqueror or the citizen?  Is your garden your slave and servant or a community that you belong to?  When you are gone from your garden, what will you leave for the future?  What mark will you have made?

Spiders Galore

Usually I think of late summer and early fall as "The Spider Time of Year", but I'm seeing quite a few spiders around the yard right now, in what I would consider mid summer.  What's even more interesting is that most of these are a little different from the spiders I tend to see later in the season.

For starters, I'm seeing a lot of the black and yellow garden spiders (Argiope aurantia) already, but they are comparatively tiny.  Mind you, I've always known that black and yellow garden spiders were out there all summer long, growing from tiny spiderlings to adult size, but I don't normally notice them until they get huge and hang their webs outside the kitchen door, around the compost pile, or between the beds in our vegetable garden.  I'd say the average one I'm seeing right now has a slender body whose length is right around 1/2", which is a far cry from the inch long (and almost as wide) female "monsters" more common in September.

On July 6th, I was lucky enough to catch a glimpse of this large spider (I'm guessing a wolf spider) molting in the tall grass.  Because I always worry that I'll disrupt an animal in a detrimental way if I hang around too long during a vulnerable period in their life span, I didn't stay around to watch the molting process, but I did grab a couple of quick photos.  Molting is amazing, when you stop to think about it.  You can see every minute external structure of the animal in its shed exoskeleton.

The last few days have been especially rich in spider sightings.  For example, despite glaringly obvious webs, I've only been able to capture glimpses of funnel spiders before.  Yesterday, however, I was able to get a pretty good look at this Grass Spider (Agelenopsis pennsylvanica) on its rain spotted funnel web, located in a clump of Husker Red penstemon in the back courtyard.

Four days ago, this cute little guy was hiding in the leaves of one of our bur oaks (Quercus macrocarpa) out behind the back courtyard.  I've never seen a spider marked in quite this way, but my spider book tells me its a male jumping spider (Hentzia palmarum), the Common Hentz Jumper.  The female looks quite different, basically a drab brown with spots.  I could very easily have seen her and not remembered it.

In the flower gardens, I'm frequently seeing little crab spiders on Echinacea blooms...which obviously tax their camouflage abilities beyond capacity.  The yellow or white coloration that works so well for them on goldenrod, sunflowers and other blooms doesn't hack it on Echinaceas, but evidently the little crab spiders are still able to catch what they need.

Last, but most certainly not least, I've been seeing quite a few wolf spiders.  Big wolf spiders with really pretty, textural patterns on their abdomens.  Again utilizing my spider book, I've figured out that they are Rabid Wolf Spiders, Rabidosa rabida.   How's that for a name?  (As if large spiders didn't have enough of a P.R. problem?!)  Were they given their name because their large size made people act mad (rabid) with fear?  Or did their quick movements made them seem rabid?  One site listed the latter hypothesis, but I suspect it's the former.

If you're the sort to worry about such things, you'll be happy to know that, despite their size and although their bite IS painful, rabid wolf spiders are not poisonous to humans and the pain from the bite will rapidly subside.  Personally, I just wouldn't pick one up!  That moves the chance of getting bitten to just about zero.

I love seeing spiders around the yard.  They help maintain ecological balance by capturing and eating a wide variety of insects and, occasionally, other spiders. While I'm not overly excited about accidentally running into spider webs, especially face first, most of the spiders I'm seeing right now either don't make webs or they don't make webs that I'm likely to run into.  Even the black and yellow garden spiders are spinning their webs deep down in the middle of perennials right now, rather than high up across pathways.  Have you seen any interesting spiders in your garden lately?