Chuck's Blog

    I like trees.  I like seedlings, saplings, mature trees, grand stately trees, and malformed little runt trees.  I love 'em all.  There is something interesting about every tree.  One of my favorite old English proverbs is: "He who plants trees loves others beside himself*."  Yet I am fully aware of the dynamics of forests--of birth, growth, and death in the natural world.  It's probably good in my business not to get emotionally attached to any one tree (or bush or bird or any one creature).  In the course of our very diverse habitat management tasks here at the Refuge, we (collectively) grow and nurture many trees, but we also cut some down, trim some up, and generally watch over the health of our woodland stands.  That said, there probably aren't many individual trees that we would fuss over.

     On all 23,000+ acres of this Refuge, we know of just one naturally occurring Bald Cypress tree (Taxodium distichum).  I believe it was originally discovered by one of our former colleagues, one of the "Oak Wilt Boys", either Bill Reiner Jr. or Eddie Hertz (with apologies if I have misstated that).  It was first noted when it was a wee sapling barely 3 or 4 feet tall, on the edge of Post Oak Creek, just about 200 yards from the Refuge HQ.  No one takes credit for planting this tree; it probably derives from a seed which floated in on one of the Lake Travis floods of the 1990s which pushed water (and Bald Cypress cones) over FM 1431 and up Post Oak Creek onto what would later become the Refuge's New Salem tract and the Refuge HQ.  Over the 6 or 8 years since its discovery, we have watched it grow into a strapping young tree of nearly 15 feet.

     I'm still in the practice mode with the new camera, but you can already tell that I am enamored with the macro capabilities of the little machine.  In spare moments today, between exciting emails, pulling weeds, and ducking out of the cold drizzle, I managed to take a couple of close-up shots of moths which had sought shelter on the Refuge HQ building.  Here they are:

     This buffy little moth is an easy one to find.  It is the Armyworm Moth, Mythimna unipuncta (formerly Pseudaletia unipuncta).  It is one of the "LBJ's" of the moth world (little brown jobs), about 1 inch long.  The slightly two-toned buffy color of the forewings, with just a dull dark stripe through the middle and a couple of vague pale spots are the basic marks to help identify it.  It is a common moth, distributed worldwide, and a member of the largest family of moths, the Noctuidae, which has about 20,000 species worldwide and nearly 3,000 in North America.  Charles Covell (see below) describes this species as a major pest of many plants, including alfalfa, corn, other grains, vegetables, young fruit trees, etc.  He mentions further that "armyworms are named for their feeding habits--they feed in fields by the thousands at night, then migrate in large groups to new areas when their food supply is exhausted" (Covell, p. 105).  There's no telling what the caterpillar of this moth might have been eating around the Refuge HQ.  (A search for information on this moth on Google even found 15 blog postings about the critter!  I guess I'm #16.)

     Next up is a little jazzier critter but again quite common:


     The intricacy of the patterns on the wings of many moths can be endlessly fascinating--and endlessly confusing--to anyone who takes the time to look closely.  This is the Bent-lined Carpet Moth--and, no, they don't eat carpets.  This is another smallish moth; it's wingspan is barely an inch.  The scientific name is Orthonama centrostrigaria (more recently placed in the genus Costaconvexa).  It is a member of the second-largest moth family, the Geometridae, or "geometers".  The larvae of moths in this family are the familiar "inchworms" which make their way along twigs or leaves with their funny looping crawl.  This species is distributed over much of North America; the larvae feed on species in the Knotweed family such as the knotweeds and smartweeds (Polygonum and Persicaria spp.).  It might also feed on dock (Rumex sp.), one species of which occurs as a weed in the lawns around the Refuge HQ.
     Identifying this Carpet Moth wasn't quite as straightforward as the Armyworm.  I had a hunch it was in the Geometrid family because of the triangular forewings and the multiple wavy lines across the wings...but that just narrowed it down to one of several thousand species.  Even though this species is illustrated in Covell's field guide, I identified this the hard way: My favorite moth photo resource is the Moth Photographer's Group, maintained by the Mississippi Entomological Museum at Mississippi State University.  It's not for the faint of heart; you kind of need to know what family or families of moths to begin looking in.  Even then, thousands and thousands of species are illustrated.  But the good news is that they present crisp, coordinated "plates" of illustrations that are easy to rifle through--much easier and more complete than any of the published field guides.  I was getting pretty bleary-eyed after having looked through hundreds of species of geometer moths on that website when I finally stumbled upon a match.

     There are just a few good general guides for identifying moths, most of the North American moth literature appearing in rather technical publications.  (See, for instance, this introduction to moth publications on the Moth Photographer's Group website.)  The best known book is Charles Covell's "Moths of Eastern North America" in the Peterson Field Guide Series published by Houghton Mifflin (1984).  Much harder to find and much sought-after is W. J. Holland's "The Moth Book", originally published by Doubleday in 1903 in a hardbound edition and subsequently reprinted in paperback in 1968 by Dover Press.  A very good reference list of moths for the Austin area was compiled by James Gillaspy at the University of Texas's Brackenridge Field Lab on Lake Austin Boulevard.  You can find an introductory (read: meager) list of the moths of Balcones Canyonlands NWR--as of 2008--in this pdf document.  That list is already out-of-date; it doesn't have either of today's moths!

     Let the record show that when it comes to cameras and photography, I am certainly no Karen Kilfeather, John Ingram, or Greg Lasley with their skills and top-of-the-line equipment.  Yet I am no Luddite; I don't oppose technological progress.  I'm just slow to catch up with new things.

     I still play records occasionally.

     I've never done anything on eBay and I just looked at something on YouTube for the first time a few months ago.  It even took quite some persuasion, coaxing, and coaching to get me blogging here.


     I didn't get my first cell phone until about two years ago.  The only thing I do with it is call people--imagine that!  I don't want to check the latest sports scores or look up the tides in Galveston on it.  (I admit it: I've given up wearing a watch--that's the other thing I use my cell phone for.)  I certainly don't need it to take pictures or video.







     Which brings me back to cameras.  In many respects, I'm a low maintenance, low-end kind of guy*.  I was still using slide film long after Greg switched to digital photography.  Along with much of the rest of the world, I was skeptical of digital technology being able to reproduce the crisp images of my beloved Kodachrome.  One day, Greg was playing around with his first digital camera and he sent me a nice close-up pic of a water strider which he'd found at Doeskin Ranch:

I was impressed, but I jokingly said: "I really can't identify your water strider to species unless I can count the bristles on the front foot."  He called my bluff and just a few minutes later, sent me an enlargement showing the bristles on the front foot of his critter!

     Despite that demonstration, I've remained low-end in my photographic abilities and equipment, preferring to leave the heaving lifting (literally and figuratively) to the aforementioned professionals.  A few years ago, Realty Specialist Nancy Unbehaun had graciously loaned me an older, small point-and-shoot camera to nudge me gently into the digital world.  Since that time, I've taken thousands of new images all over the Refuge with it and it has satisfied my needs quite well.  (I'll talk about "documentation" of things on the Refuge in a future blog.)  However, by circumstances which I won't reveal (to protect the innocent and the embarrassed), the need recently arose to replace that little digital camera (which, it was determined by accident, does not make a very good seat cushion).

     Which brings me to my new toy.  I went out and plunked down $199.99--which happily coincided with the exact number of pennies I had in my pocket that day--and bought myself a new digital camera which might be described as a "high-end, point-and-shoot" thing.  I won't reveal the brand since I can't endorse anything here, but this camera has a 10 megapixel image density (Did I say that right?) and has a 10X zoom.  It has image stabilization, which means a clumsy oaf like me can take a reasonably crisp picture of a subject which may be in motion for one reason or another.  It has more icons on the controls and LCD screen than I can keep track of.  Luckily, it has an "Easy" mode for shooting simple pics.  I like Easy; it suits me.

     This is not a technology blog, nor a brag about my new-found photographic abilities.  The latter have not improved noticeably since Tuesday.  I guess this just falls into the category of, "Holy Cow!  Look what this new thing can do!"  So without further ado, here are some first-day images taken with my new toy.  These cropped, reduced, web-sized images don't do justice to the high density originals, each of which is about 2 to 4 megabytes, but you...ahem....get the picture.

A Tachinid fly (perhaps Archytas ~apicifer) on Cowpen Daisy...and its bristly back (a.k.a. thorny thorax). (The adjacent Cucumber beetle was the focus of a subsequent picture, not included here.):



A Common Checkered-Skipper...and its scaly body and wings.  Note the bristles on the seeds (achenes) of the Shrubby Boneset on which it is perched:



A little lichen, about 3/4" across...and a closer look at its fruiting bodies.  I expect that lichenologist Taylor Quedensley at U.T. can help me identify this one:



A cold and unhappy Texas Spiny Lizard (courtesy of David Maple)(...that is, David was responsible for making the lizard unhappy, not for bringing the cold weather):



Oh, yeah.  The pic of Old Glory up at the top of this blog was a test of the camera's ability to stop the action of a flag flapping in a 15-knot North wind...at 50 yards away, zoomed in just a little.

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"Below the line":

     * I assert my right to high-ended-ness when it comes to choices of breakfast cereals, brands of peanut butter and jelly, and TP....the important things in life.

     Regardless of the outdoor task at hand or the purported focus of a given field trip, any jazzy insect will quickly catch my eye.  Near the end of a long hike up Post Oak Creek in the backcountry of the Refuge on Friday afternoon (Nov. 13), I was bedazzled by a couple of very large longhorn beetles which were hanging out on the flowers of shrubby boneset.  I had stopped to admire the numerous butterflies on the flowers when this jeweled critter caught my attention.  It was new to me.

     This turns out to be the "Texas Stenaspis" or, as Mike Quinn terms it, the "Red-headed Beauty", an apt common name.  Mike's webpage for this species indicates that Travis County is at the northern limit of the known range of this species of south Texas and Mexico.  The scientific name is Stenaspis verticalis ssp. insignis.  It is a member of the longhorn beetle family, known as the Cerambycidae, which includes some of the larger beetles of North America.  This Red-headed Beauty is about 1.5" long with antennae that are even longer than the body.  I plucked one of the critters off the flowers--more on that later--and transported it to the office to take better pictures and get a solid identification.  (I released it on some of the shrubby boneset flowers at the office; the beetle was happily feeding a few minutes later.)

     If you are having some trouble identifying an insect, the BugGuide website has become a major online resource.  This is at the top of everyone's list for useful insect identification sites.  It was created in 2003 by Troy Bartlett and is presently hosted by Iowa State University's Department of Entomology.  Innumerable professional entomologists (bug people*) and insect enthusiasts have posted thousands of useful photos and are there to offer ID help.  You have to register and sign-in to post images but you don't get bombarded by pop-ups or solicitations on this site.  As an example, here is a link to BugGuide's page on the Texas Stenaspis.

Further Information
     The proliferation of information on the Internet puts any compilation of insect links beyond the scope of what I might offer here.  A Google search for "insect identification websites" yielded 112,000 hits.  Below are some links to a few useful insect identification resources on the internet.  In future blogs, I'll include my favorite sites to specific groups such as butterflies, moths, etc.

Texas Entomology:
http://www.texasento.net/index.html
     An absolute "must" for anyone searching for information on Texas "bugs".  Mike's web pages are well researched, well organized, and very informative.  He has links to many other useful sites related to Texas invertebrates.  Mike has roots in the Lower Rio Grande Valley but is presently based out of the Austin area.  He did his graduate research on the invertebrate foods available to the Golden-cheeked Warbler.  He is co-owner of the TX-Butterfly and TX-Ento discussion lists.  Mike is also a premier insect photographer, as you'll see when you visit his pages.

Texas A&M University's portal to Insect Identification Methods:
http://insects.tamu.edu/extension/insctans/identification/
 
Insect Identification on Backyard Nature:
http://www.backyardnature.net/insectid.htm
     This site has a good list of further links at the bottom of the page.

InsectIdentification.org:
http://www.insectidentification.org/
     A lot of good basic info and quite a few pics, but I found their "Bug Finder" identification section to be of very little help.

What's That Bug?
http://www.whatsthatbug.com/about/
     A collection of blogs and user-submitted ID requests with responses and comments; world-wide in scope.


* * * * *
"Below The Line"

  * I realize that the ambiguity of the phrase "bug people" might...well, bug some people.  I meant it as an adjective-noun phrase, not as a verb-object....although professional entomologists may be annoying to some of us at times.  And by "insect enthusiasts", I don't mean to imply that insects have hobbies...well, maybe they do, I don't know.

     English has become my second language.  I have no first.

      I rather suspect that no songbird has ever been the subject of a Sesquicentennial Celebration, but it seems very appropriate to celebrate the discovery of one of our cornerstone species at the Refuge, and to offer as my first substantive contribution to these "Notes from the Canyonlands" a review of that discovery.
(Golden-cheeked Warbler photos by Greg W. Lasley; used by permission.)





     Who first encountered a Golden-cheeked Warbler?  I have to believe that some curious, observant Tonkawan youth[1], encamped near a headwater spring in a rugged canyon of the Edwards Plateau, would have noticed by sight or sound the bright little black and yellow bird singing from the top of a nearby juniper some March or April morning.  He or she probably realized the tiny creature wouldn't make much of a meal, nor could they fashion much of a headdress or other ornamentation out of its feathers.  But we do presume that native Americans were well-tuned to details of their surroundings.  Did the Tonkawa, analogous to my musings in Ro Wauer's book on the "Heralds of Spring"[2], recognize the Golden-cheek as a signal of the changing seasons?  Despite what we have learned to date about the haunts and habits of those early inhabitants of what would later become Texas, it is a tragedy of history that we have no record of such detections.

     The first Golden-cheeked Warblers in recorded history were encountered by an English naturalist in Central America, on the species' winter range.  On November 4, 1859, Osbert Salvin was riding on horseback over a wooded tropical ridge en route to the village of Tactic, in the Guatemalan province of Alta Vera Paz, where he intended to spend the evening.  He mentions that "two birds attracted my attention, and I secured both.  They, on examination at home, proved to belong to an undescribed species."[3]  He and his colleague Philip Sclater described the species new to science the next year in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London[4].

     Osbert Salvin (1835-1898) had received his education at Cambridge University.  Soon after graduation, he made several exploratory journeys to collect biological specimens, including trips to North Africa and Central America.  The 1859 expedition was his first visit to Guatemala.  Salvin is not well-known in North America except to a small handful of researchers who may have studied the 19th Century history of biological exploration in Middle America.  Nonetheless, his explorations, collections, and publications were very substantial, including his editorial role in the encyclopedic Biologia Centrali-Americana, with Frederick D. Godman.  They were sufficiently appreciated in Great Britain to garner for him membership in the prestigious Royal Society of London.  A nomination to the Royal Society needed to be accompanied by a write-up of the nominee's accomplishments and a collection of signatures of existing members who would provide witness to the worthiness of the candidate.  Among others, signatories on the nomination of Osbert Salvin included:

     Thomas H. Huxley - known as "Darwin's Bulldog" and a staunch defender of evolution.
     John Gould - a collaborator with Charles Darwin and the namesake for perhaps the gaudiest bird in the world, the Gouldian Finch.
     Richard Owen - eminent paleontologist; described Archaeopteryx and many dinosaur species.
     Charles Darwin - This might be the equivalent of me, in my application to join the Texas Ornithological Society, gaining the endoresement of perhaps Roger Tory Peterson or Carl Sagan.

     Even as Osbert Salvin was exploring Guatemala, major rumblings were afoot back in London.  On November 24, 1859, just three weeks after Salvin collected those Guatemalan Golden-cheeks, Charles Darwin published the first edition of The Origin of Species [5], another sesquicentennial being celebrated this year.  To be sure, the short note by Sclater and Salvin in 1860 was not earth-shaking news and they may be forgiven if their brief three-page note was over-shadowed in the scientific literature of the time!  Nonetheless, among the other interesting neotropical species described new to science in their article were the Ruddy Crake, Brown-hooded Parrot, Russet Antshrike, Stub-tailed Spadebill, Yellow-bellied Tyrannulet, White-lored Gnatcatcher and Brown Schiffornis.  I have had the opportunity to see some of these species in Central America, but I can't say that I'd recognize a Brown Schiffornis if it bit me in the binocs! (see below)

     New to science and collected far across "The Pond", the Golden-cheeked Warbler remained poorly known for several years after its discovery.  There was considerable confusion in those early years since the plumages of the various ages and sexes of the related Black-throated Green, Townsend's and Hermit Warblers were still being sorted out.  The mis-identifications and re-identifications of these Dendroica warblers in some of that earliest literature at times reads like an ornithological version of the comedy routine "Who's On First?" by Abbott and Costello.

     In a future entry, I'll talk about the discovery of the Golden-cheeked Warbler closer to home--here in Texas!

Footnotes and Further Reading:

     Note 1:  I include external links from a variety of sources, with no particular rhyme or reason--just whatever strikes me as particularly useful for a given tidbit.  I gravitate towards .org, .edu, and .gov sites where available.  No endorsement of any particular website, organization, company, product, etc., is intended.  They are included here for educational purposes only.
     Note 2:  This blog entry is based in part on my presentation of "The Origin and Discovery of the Golden-cheeked Warbler", delivered to the Highland Lakes Birding & Wildflower Society, at Marble Falls, Texas, September 3, 2009.
     Note 3:  A collection of much of the early literature on the Golden-cheeked Warbler is maintained in a couple of repositories in the Austin area including at the HQ of Balcones Canyonlands NWR and at the offices of the City of Austin's Balcones Canyonland Preserves.

[1]  See this map for the home ranges of early Native Americans in Texas and the possible candidate tribes for the earliest warbler-watchers!

[2]  Ro Wauer, Heralds of Spring in Texas, Texas A&M Univ. Press, College Station (1999), pp. 164-169.

[3]  Osbert Salvin.  1876.  Dendroica chrysoparia (The Yellow-cheeked Warbler).  Pp. 181-184, In: George D. Rowley (ed.).  Ornithological Miscellany, Vol. I, part III.  Trubner and Co., Ludgate Hill, E.C., London.

[4]  Philip L. Sclater and Osbert Salvin.  1860.  Character of eleven new species of birds discovered by Osbert Salvin in Guatemala.  Proc. Zool. Soc. London 28:298-301.

[5]  See an excellent discussion of the publication of The Origin of Species on Wikipedia at:
     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_of_Darwin's_theory.

* * * * *

     Speaking of old dudes...If anyone was curious, that picture at the bottom of my first blog page (Oct. 28) is my handsome great-great grandfather Sexton, illustrating two things: (a) what I look like on a bad hair day, and (b) what my wife has to look forward to in another 25 years or so.  Here's a more recent picture of me, in typical habitat, flanked by a Brown Schiffornis, a.k.a. Thrush-like Mourner or Manakin.

     I thought I would start this blog-record with just a little more background on myself--some lesser known facts from my bio that might help explain or put some context around what I will write about in future entries.

     While my origin in Southern California is fairly well documented, I should add that I grew up on a “huge” half-acre in rural Orange County...although “rural Orange County” is today something of an oxymoron.  That spacious back yard allowed me room to roam and I explored every nook and cranny in my formative years.  My earliest memories of plants, butterflies, and birds come from the confines of that wild place, long before I began stretching my wings and exploring nearby Upper Newport Bay, the remainder of Orange County, and the rest of the western U.S.

     As well, I am very “Disney-fied.”  Not only did my father work at nearby Disneyland, thus making it my second playground, but I was also heavily influenced by many of the early Disney shows.  Most relevant to the present topic is Disney’s classic short film “Nature’s Half Acre” (1951).  For a brief intro to this Oscar winning film, see:


     The parallel to my childhood setting should be apparent.  The Internet Movie Database page explains: “The variety of wildlife in a meadow - particularly insects and flowers - is observed over the course of a year, through the use of microphotography and time-lapse photography.”  It was a seminal nature film that influenced no small number of budding naturalists, myself included.



     I am also a surfer, though I haven’t surfed regularly in decades.  Surfing--to spout clichés--is more than a sport; it is a way of life and it instills in its adherents a distinct perspective on the world.  Aside from all the trappings and idiosyncrasies that have been parodied ad nauseum by Hollywood, surfing gives a person a feel for the movement of energy in time and space through the natural world.  Quite literally, becoming a better surfer depends in large part on recognizing and responding to the flow of energy in the ocean.  The periodicity of the waves, their seasonality, their origins, their dissipation on the shore--all this can be extrapolated to much grander topics in the functioning of ecosystems--to which I will return in future posts.

     And finally, most obviously, having grown up in Orange County in the 1950s-1970s, I witnessed some of the most rapid and complete transformations of natural ecosystems that the continent has suffered.  My boy scout camping spots were paved over to make way for the financial capital (in both senses of the word) of the West Coast.  Places where I made my first wildflower collections can no longer be found.  No small number of SoCal plants, butterflies, and birds that I came to know as a child share space on that narrow ledge at the brink of exinction with our own Golden-cheeked Warbler and Black-capped Vireo.

     So, I confess to being a nature-loving, energy-flow conscious, urban-escapee surfer who made it to Austin "as soon as I could" (1974).  I hope you enjoy my forth-coming offerings, framed by my well of experiences over the most recent decades and shaped into these "Notes From The Canyonlands".