Painted Spring

Varicolored Spring is, of course, simultaneously chewed, wilted, infected, injected, stained, and blighted in brindled ways as spectacular as the apparent perfection of completeness.  Below are a few images of the blackberry vines on their way to becoming incomplete.

Septoria Leafspot (fungus – Mycosphaerella rubi)

The theme nowadays...

Harlin sent us this note and the next several images:

I have a book with many pages of drawings of bee fly wings. Whenever I take a picture of a bee fly I thumb through those pages in the manner of looking at mug shots, and I found a couple of pretty good matches for the pattern. Not so much as a smidgen of exact science was involved, but the illustrated fly’s wings change in several different directions and so it makes an interesting puzzle to search for a pattern that is close. I found two which seemed like good candidates. One of them was for a basically African genus which eliminated that one. The other had several species which occur in Texas. In fact, Poecilanthrax lucifer is very close in terms of shape, color, and various kinds of fuzziness. Here are some examples:

http://bugguide.net/node/view/100421

But maybe “bee fly” is close enough.

Lemon Beebalm (Monarda citriodora)

Lemon Beebalm (Monarda citriodora)

Checkered White (Pontia protodice)

Great Purple Hairstreak (Atlides halesus) 

And here's a video clip of a great purple hairstreak dining on a black eyed susan (and that's indeed a chicken coop and shed being constructed from old pallets there in the background).

The larvae of this butterfly feed primarily (exclusively?) on our mistletoe plants which themselves feed largely on our hackberries, cedar elms, mesquite, and juniper. Herein is part of the web in which we find the lives of butterflies, parasites, and ourselves beautifully caught.

And a random spider.

Silver Longjawed Orbweaver (Tetragnatha laboriosa)

Harlin wrote us this:

As you can see from the scans these plants can be pegged as Plantago from the moment you lay eyes on them. However, at crouching-down-beside-them distance they start to look like two different things. And then when magnified a little Plantago wrightiana has four translucent petals and silky hair on the sepals of each flower, and P. rhodosperma has dried-up looking yellow petals which stick straight up and course hair on the sepals. In fact, at close range the Wright’s plantain might even be generally regarded as something to see.
So far the seeds have not been mature on the P. rhodosperma, and I would like to make sure they are indeed “red seeds” to verify that I have the name correct.

Wright’s plantain (Plantago wrightiana) 

Wright’s plantain (Plantago wrightiana) 

Redseed plantain (Plantago rhodosperma)

Redseed plantain (Plantago rhodosperma)

Close-up of some pepper-grass (Lepidium)

Harlin wrote us today (April 28, 2012) that pepper-grass makes it onto the Plant List as number Two Hundred Eleven.

Flight

Carol flies over the Creek and takes the photos below

Extensive swath of drought-decimated juniper above the house

Evening fly fishing for carp and gar 

     And I was thinking about spring and rain....

Craft 

Everything I relinquish but this poem 

that stands for storm winds before dawn, 

for chinaberry and catalpa blossoms 

strewn purple and white across wet grass, 

and for a moth warming frayed wings in the sun. 

I wake to a washed world, 

yet I do not know where to begin again. 

In this poem, spring is not the metaphor, 

for I am tired, and I am very, very mortal. 

But I have died already in the night to most 

all I once held true and worthy of death. 

Now I cannot commit. 

What has happened since yesterday 

when life had no end and 

hope meant another world bought on faith? 

But today I am smaller and 

this reborn world so much larger. 

Now I must craft a poem of limited lines, 

of images bought with these two eyes. 

So now do I trade the house for 

a horse or maybe a motorcycle? 

Do I don new shoes and follow 

spring on its hike to the north country? 

I’ve a mind to tear out even this page 

and roll in it sweet black tobacco 

that burns to a balanced ash and falls. 

But this new poem I won’t write 

with words out of the old lexicon, for 

all the conveniently forced symbols 

dissolved in last night’s rain so that now 

a blossom will be a blossom 

though the flower wilts by noon.

Yellow sap of  the Texas prickly poppy

Concerning his photograph above, Harlin wrote:

I decided to try to clear up some cognitive dissonance. The Peterson field guide to beetles by Richard White has a section called “Yellow Marked Bupestrids” and is subtitled “Subfamily Acmaeoderinae”. That subfamily includes the genus Acmaeodera and it says that nearly all of the species in it have yellow elytral markings. Well, that me wonder since the beetles in the beetle picture I sent the other day sure look like they have white markings. I checked the color temperature and I couldn’t get a reasonable setting which would make the spots look yellow, so I looked for some more pictures.

I found there are many white spots depicted in bugguide.net and the descriptions actually say white spots. Here is one from Texas:

http://bugguide.net/node/view/266878/bgimage

And here is a whole series of which many have white spots: http://bugguide.net/node/view/2933/bgimage?from=0

I attached a picture from last year of a similar beetle which I called a “Bupestrid”, and, well, in that photo the spots actually are pretty much yellowish or at least off-white.

I also found a very old drawing of Acmaeodera which shows the range of spots across the different species. As I’ve mentioned before, meeting one interesting creature sets the stage for nature watching with one’s mind which you obviously like to do also. We have photographs of two beetles which are “the same but different” in almost the same location. However, maybe the differences are just variation within a single species. But the images inbugguide.net and the drawings below show many species which implies that nature is trying out the variations on a theme on a larger scale. In this way we are nature watching across the landscape in a way that we could never do by just seeing with only our own eyes.

And, with this data, we can formulate wisdom imparting new pronouncements: not only does nature run through many different patterns, it also gets tired of having all the spots be yellow.

The drawing below is from Revision of the Species of Acmæodera of the United States.

Author(s): George H. Horn
Source: Transactions of the American Entomological Society and Proceedings of theEntomological Section of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Vol. 7 (1878/1879), pp. 2-27