The other morning, Kate was headed out for the early-morning walk with The Dog, then came back in to tell me I should come and see a moth on the front porch. I was editing a story and grunted that I was busy. After the walk, she came back and showed me a picture of the creature hanging on the wall near the front door. Yeah, it was striking. So I grabbed my camera to go take a look.
What we didn't know was what sort of moth it might be. Thanks to the amazing World Wide Web, I found a site that included a species identifier that, after four or five clicks, drilled down to five candidate species. No. 4 on that list was Hyles lineata, or the white-lined sphinx. I don't recall ever seeing one before, though I readily find a reference to a recent appearance in Alameda, less than 10 miles from here.
According to one of the links above, this species is a fairly benign presence in our environment (especially when compared to the more widely distributed Homo sapiens).
And unless their numbers are excessive, they're unlikely to pose a significant worry for gardeners or orchardists. "Sometimes they might nibble a little bit along the way, but they will have little effect on those plants," he says. The caterpillars have fed on a wide range of plants — purslane, portulaca, wild grape, and a host of weeds and various desert shrubs; they tend to stick with low, shrubby plants.
In an uncertain world, there's one thing you can count on in Berkeley every late winter and spring: Oxalis pes-caprae, also known around town as oxalis, Bermuda buttercup, yellow wood sorrel, "some kind of shamrock," and sourgrass. "Sourgrass" because the stems are edible and tart, and both our kids, as well as lots of their friends, occasionally picked the grass and ate it when they were little.
On one hand, the plant is not unattractive--the blooms are almost iridescent in the right light--and was once something that gardeners planted ornamentally. I have a neighbor who says he likes to let the plant have its day, seeing how pretty it is for a few weeks every year.
On the other hand, the damned thing's a nuisance. It's ubiquitous, showing up in garden beds far and wide. Once it arrives, it's virtually to get rid of. Pulling it up, you discover it has little white translucent tubers that seem to have something to do with how it spreads. You also occasionally find miniature bulbs from which the plant grows in the fall. Since it's an alien (it's native to South Africa) and invasive, it's more than a headache for gardeners. Here's what the University of California's Integrated Pest Management site says about Oxalis pes-caprae:
Bermuda buttercup was first noted in California in the San Francisco Bay region and has since spread throughout most coastal counties, the coastal range, and into the Central Valley. In the last 10 years, this plant has invaded native coastal dunes and natural areas along the coast, leading to the demise of native plants. It is a troublesome weed that is more competitive than is assumed from its general appearance.
Due to its extensive occurrence in yards and gardens, Bermuda buttercup has the potential to rapidly spread via the production of bulbs and the movement of contaminated soils into adjacent natural areas. Because it is practically impossible to eradicate infested soils of this weed, take care to prevent Bermuda buttercup from invading wild lands.
And here's what the site says you're in for if you're really dedicated to the cause of eradicating your personal patch of oxalis:
The best control method for this pernicious weed is prevention. If new infestations are spotted and controlled early, it is possible to eradicate small populations. Large populations are difficult to control and will require multiple years of diligent control efforts.
Small infestations can be controlled by repeated manual removal of the entire plant. Repeated pulling of the tops will deplete the bulb’s carbohydrate reserves, but these efforts will take years to be successful. Repeated mowing also will eventually deplete the bulb. Cut Bermuda buttercup before it flowers and forms new bulbs. Repeated cutting or cultivation is necessary to reduce plant numbers. The soil from which plants are removed should be carefully examined or sifted to remove bulbs and bulblets, an extremely time- and labor-intensive process. Before planting in an infested area, use soil solarization to further reduce Bermuda buttercup populations.
Exotic fauna of Sutter County: a zebroid on the hoof (click for larger images).
We're in the bittersweet last day or so of our joint spring break (Kate from the demanding world of public education, me from the somewhat less demanding world of public broadcasting). At the beginning of the week, we went on a mini road trip to see a relatively little-visited natural wonder I'd read about in the paper a few weeks (Feather Falls--more on that later). We wound up spending a day driving up to one of the state's big reservoirs, Lake Oroville, a day hiking, then another day winding our way back down to the Bay Area.
There's a certain part of the Sacramento Valley I've gotten to know from riding a bicycle through it--generally the area on the southern half or so of the valley, from the state capital up to about Chico. The most striking visual feature of that part of the state, almost everyone would agree, is the volcanic remnant rising up from the floor of the valley, known now as the Sutter Buttes. Someone sometime in the distant past--probably Ripley's Believe-It-or-Not, probably in the 1940s--designated the buttes, which rise to a maximum elevation of just over 2,100 feet and cover about 75 square miles, "the smallest mountain range in the world."
One thing about the buttes: though a piece of the central buttes is now public land, access is across private land and thus only possible by appointment--either on a pre-arranged tour or with researchers (a public-radio colleague, Molly Samuel, got in a while back with some biologists studying an animal I had never heard of before: the ringtail). So what the public gets to do, generally, is drive around the perimeter. So Wednesday, that's what we did, retracing a path I've ridden a few times in the past. West of Yuba City, just outside the little town of Sutter, we had our own exotic animal encounter.
Passing a farmyard, Kate called out, "Is that a zebra?" I missed whatever she had seen, but when I looked over, I saw a couple of llamas (more and more common on ranches here) and, very uncommon, a camel. A camel? A zebra? I turned around to take a look.
The "zebra" was pretty clearly a hybrid of some kind--probably a cross between a zebra and a donkey. She, or perhaps he, certainly looked like a donkey and had the docile, inquisitive nature of a donkey, coming right over to the fence to check out Scout (a.k.a The Dog). We checked out some of the other animals on the premises--some odd-looking goats, a pygmy donkey of some sort, the llamas, a few horses, the aforementioned camel, and a pack of furious dogs that seemed to contain at least one labradoodle.
Wikipedia says zebra/equine hybrids--known generally as zebroids--have a long history and even drew Darwin's attention. The names for the crosses are many, including zonkey, donkra, zedonk, zebonkey, zebronkey, zebrinny, zebrula, zebrass, and zebadonk. I came up with my own term: variegated ass.
I was just visiting one of my favorite news picture sites, The Atlantic's In Focus blog, and came across this storm image. The caption reads: "This nighttime satellite image of Hurricane Sandy was acquired by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite around 2:42 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, on October 28, 2012. (Suomi NPP, NASA, NOAA)."
I never cease to wonder at the beauty of these images captured from space, even when they're images of a phenomenon that we experience as unimaginable power and violence when it comes ashore.
A black-crowned night heron, one of several we see hanging around the ferry dock at Jack London Square in Oakland. We usually spot two hanging out on the rocks right at the water line south/east of the dock. They are in the midst of some pretty heavy human traffic, but they are still skittish when they detect you getting close. Over the past half-year or so, a great blue heron has been frequenting the same area. Last night it was roosting on the dock next to the USS Potomac, FDR's presidential yacht.
Our friends Jill and Piero have a place about 5,000 feet up in the Sierra, in Calaveras County. The western yellow jacket, known taxonomically as Vespula pensylvanica and popularly as the Sierra meat bee, is their constant companion during the summer. The prevalence of these wasps has given rise to a variety of home-made solutions to keep them at bay (including some very low-tech ones). To deal with his crop, Piero has bought some traps that use some kind of chemical attractant. The wasps find their way in but can't find their way out, and they die. When we were up there over Labor Day weekend, the traps had just been emptied into a white five-gallon bucket; there were enough of them that they covered the bottom of the bucket maybe an inch deep. That's a lot of insects.
One of the Tweet-worthy current events items I've come across in the last couple of days is news that climate scientists say the Arctic ice pack has reached its lowest extent since the satellite records began in 1979. The National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado says the Arctic sea ice appears to have reached a season minimum this past Sunday, September 16, of 3.41 million square kilometers (1.32 million square miles). That's half the average seen in the years 1979-2000 (and above, that's a graphic from the NSIDC showing the sea ice extent for September 19).
What does it mean? Here's a decent summary of the basic thinking from today's PBS NewsHour:
The ice is younger and thinner than it was in the 1980s. Of the ice surveyed this summer, the majority was one to two years old and three to five feet thick on average. That's down from 10 to 13 feet thick in 1985.
Losing sea ice also has immediate impacts on Arctic wildlife. Walruses that normally rest on the ice while hunting ocean fish moved ashore by the thousands last year. Arctic seal populations have already declined as a result of disappearing ice. And a 2009 United States Geological Survey estimated that by 2050, the world could lose two-thirds of its polar bears as their ice-dwelling food sources disappear. The ice is also home to delicate microorganisms, which, if lost, could upset the entire Arctic food chain, Meier said.
Ted Scambos, senior research scientist at NSIDC, said that changes in the Arctic's ice and snow are making the Arctic warmer, which may mean major weather and climate changes for the rest of the planet. Sea ice reflects the sun's rays, which helps regulate the planet's temperatures, especially during the summer. Losing the reflective ice surface causes temperatures to rise. If the North Pole is not as cold as it used to be, that has the potential to change wind and weather patterns throughout the Northern Hemisphere.
"But a wider impact may come from the increased heat and moisture that the Arctic is adding to the climate system," Scambos said in a press release yesterday. "This will gradually affect climate in the areas where we live...We have a less polar pole--and so there will be more variations and extremes."
Having read some of the accounts of the sea ice retreat yesterday, I went looking for images of what the Arctic looks like. A favorite resource: NASA, which publishes a bunch of cool images of various Earth features every day. One of the services, called MODIS(MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer), includes daily mosaics of the Arctic snapped by NASA satellites. Every time I see these images of Earth from space, the thought that seizes me--or maybe it's more of an emotion--is what an incredibly beautiful place this planet is.
Looking at the Arctic day to day, I wondered whether I could turn the images into a "movie." Well, I could, sort of. I downloaded 185 days worth--from March 20 through September 20--then turned them into a slideshow, saved that as a movie, and uploaded it to YouTube. Here it is:
I will say up front that while the view is breathtaking, the Arctic weather screens the view of precisely what's happening with the ice. It's not as stark as you might expect (and of course, this is just one season we're looking at; there's nothing here to give a comparison to how this scene unfolded 30 years ago).
One note of orientation and explanation: The North Pole is near dead center in the images. Greenland is clearly recognizable at the lower left; Iceland is at the lower center, and Scandinavia and the northern coast of Russia are at the lower right. Siberia dominates the right side of the map (these images show weeks of heavy smoke from fires there). At the top margin, the Bering Strait, where Siberia nearly meets Alaska, is just left of center. Alaska appears inverted at the left, with the Gulf of Alaska at the top left corner.
Above, it's the California Sister (Adelpha californica). We spent the weekend with our friends Jill and Piero in that part of Calaveras County where the foothills turn to the mountains, on a ridge south of the Middle Fork of the Mokelumne River. On Sunday, we walked down to Blue Creek, then walked up the stream a short way. This butterfly was hanging out and posed while I tried to get a picture.
Back at base camp, also known as Casa Della Montagna, a construction project was under way. Piero and Jill were building a small deck for a wood-fired hot tub. The underlying framework was a beautiful, asymmetrical web of beams and joists. I commented on the workmanship, which I always find impressive. Piero seemed to see it as more of a rough-and-ready carpentry job. He said, putting a new spin on an old proverb, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the done!"
Kate and I spent the afternoon watching and occasionally lending our hands as Jill and Piero measured angles, cut planks, and screwed them into place. They were done by dinnertime.
KTVU ("There's Only One 2") News is very excited about NASA's upcoming landing attempt on Mars. It did a little item on the Curiosity mission a couple nights ago. The graphic accompanying the piece was attention-getting. Never has the Red Planet looked so ... moon-like. That's because instead of using an image of Mars, whoever produced the graphic used a picture of Earth's moon during an eclipse. Hey--it's a round thing out there in space, and it looks red. Isn't that close enough? (See this image for a comparison to the one in the graphic. Below is a 2001 Hubble Space Telescope picture of Mars, one of thousands of Mars images available from NASA. And yes--you're allowed to ask whether I don't have anything better to do with my time.)
While the rest of the world reacted to today's Supreme Courthealth care decision, we were witnessing the miracle of insect sex here in North Berkeley. To wit: Kate has been raising silkworms as part of her science teaching. We had a little plastic storage container that has become home to about a dozen silkworm cocoons, and today, silkworm moths emerged from two of them. Amazingly, or perhaps because these creatures have evolved to give themselves the best chance of procreating (or both), the two emergees were a male and female who immediately found each other and went to work mating. We'll have some exciting video later (the picture above catches me shooting Kate recording the event with her iPad), but I have to say how impressive it is to see how quickly, purposefully and efficiently these pale, flightless creatures attended to their business. The male, the smaller of the two moths, fumbled around a little amid bouts of love grappling, but then hooked up (literally, it looks like) with his female friend (the female is at left in the photo below). Now, about an hour later, they're quiet but still connected.
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