NATCHEZ NATURALIST
NEWSLETTER:
September 21, 2003
BOWL-AND-DOILY WEATHER
For about three weeks most nights have been almost chilly, making perfect sleeping
weather. This week even the days were relatively cool. On Tuesday morning my thermometer
read 57° (14°C), which was so cool that I wore a shirt during breakfast and heated my
breakfast water for the first time in months. The morning dew numbed my toes as I walked
through it. The days, with temperatures seldom breaking 85° (29.4°C), and a deep blue
sky with abundant sunlight making crisp, black shadows, were perfect.
The dews these morning are spectacular, and you know how pretty spiderwebs can be on
dewy mornings. Especially next to the barn where dense Loblolly saplings form a green wall
20 feet high, a vast community of webs among the pine boughs shows up brightly against the
dark green background.
Most of the webs there, as well as among the goldenrods in the field where the pines
thin out, are spherical, grapefruit-size constructions consisting of seemingly randomly
arrayed silks, inside which are built horizontal sheetwebs shaped like shallow bowls.
These special kinds of webs are made by the Bowl and Doily Spider, FRONTINELLA COMMUNIS.
You can see a fine picture of such a web, taken by my neighbor Karen Wise, at www.backyardnature.net/websht2.jpg
As this spider's Latin name suggests (F. communis), this is a very common species
throughout eastern and central North America. In bowl-and-doily webs, the male and female
often hang upside down under the horizontal sheet inside the construction. If an insect
gets entangled in the sheet, the spider bites it from below, pulls the prey through the
sheet, and wraps it up. In Karen's picture you can see that sometimes a second sheetweb is
built below the main one, which apparently helps shield the spiders from predators
attacking from below.
The main prey I'm finding snared in these webs is winged aphids. I'm glad the spiders
are helping keep these aphids out of my turnips and mustard greens.
Bowl-and-doily Spiders are mostly black, with conspicuous white or yellowish-white
markings on their abdomens. From the side, the markings look like a scrawled
"mc" -- an upside down "mc" when the spider hangs upside down, as is
usually the case. The "c" opens toward the spider's front. I can't find a good
picture of this species, but if you find a web looking like Karen's picture, and the
spider in it has an "mc" on its abdomen, you have a Bowl-and-doily Spider.
*****
SCREECH OWL WHINNYING
These cool nights are invigorating not only to me but also for an Eastern Screech Owl,
OTUS ASIO, who most nights can be heard calling. Especially with the moon bright and the
fog moving in, as has been the case most nights this week, this owl's call is eerie and
evocative. You can hear a WAV file of one of its calls at www.cheekwood.org/nature/audio/screech/screech.wav
I often hear the owl "whinnying" as portrayed at the above link. However the
main call it's making now is a one-tone, pulsating sound. I'm not sure what the difference
is in terms of what the owl is communicating. I read that Screech Owls are poorly studied,
so maybe no one knows.
Cornell University provides a fine Screech-owl page at http://birds.cornell.edu/birdhouse/bird_bios/speciesaccounts/easowl.html
There you'll see that Eastern and Western Screech Owl species are recognized. A map shows
the distribution of both. In the East, two "color morphs" exist -- owls are gray
in the north, but rufous, or reddish, in our area.
Their mating habits are interesting. Males tend to be monogamous, but some take on more
than one female, and thus are "polygynous." The degree of polygyny in a
population depends on food availability and population density. Bonds are lifelong, but
individuals take on a new mate if the other dies. Nests are typically found in natural
cavities, abandoned woodpecker holes, and hollow stumps and limbs. Screech owls don't
migrate, and they usually stay alone except during the breeding season.
That explains why I'm just hearing this one owl, and occasionally see it at dawn
silently winging alone from among the Loblollies near my trailer.
*****
IVY-LEAVED MORNING-GLORY
Suddenly the fence along Liberty Road is pretty enough to stop and look at. That's because
sections of it are overgrown with a morning-glory vine in full blossom. The thousands of
flowers are 1.5 inch across (3.5 cm), mostly pinkish violet but in some places pure white,
with other hues ranging toward blue, the hues mingling with one another along the fence.
Flowers are funnel- shaped, flaring widely at the mouth, and leaves are deeply 3-lobed,
like little fig leaves. In some places the much-branching, slender, twining vines climb
seven or more feet up telephone poles and guy wires, and in such places the bright flowers
against a background of dark green leaves and blue sky beyond is spectacular.
The vine causing this show is called the Ivy-leaved Morning-glory, IPOMOEA HEDERACEA.
There's a great page all about it, with several photos, at www.missouriplants.com/Bluealt/Ipomoea_hederacea_page.html
Blossoms on the above-mentioned page are bright blue instead of our predominant
pinkish-violet to white. Flower color in most flowering plants is pretty stable, so having
a species whose flower color varies so much is special. The species' leaf-shape also is
variable, for occasionally you find plants with nothing but heart-shaped leaves. This is
just a free- spirited plant.
Ivy-leaved Morning-glory has been a close acquaintance of mine ever since I was a kid
on the farm in Kentucky. I didn't much like it then, because every year it was an abundant
weed in our tobacco patches. The plants tended to emerge from the soil so close to a
tobacco plant's stem that you couldn't just chop it with a hoe, but, rather, hundreds of
times each day you had to bend over and pull it up individually. Moreover, if you just
yanked at the vine's stem, you were bound to shred a big tobacco leaf, and then you could
just feel a nickel disappearing from your pocket. I was a very fat, rather lazy kid, so
many hours of this life I have spent fuming over Ivy-leaved Morning Glories. Who'd ever
have thought that as a white-beard, I'd be singing their praises?
*****
BUTTONWEED
Many plants are destined to speak and act modestly, in the shadows of other grander
plants, or simply to be overlooked in jungly jumbles. The Buttonweed I'm thinking about is
like that. It's such an unpresuming plant that even its English name, Buttonweed, is
shared by several other equally modest species. Only botanists make an effort to
distinguish them, using details most wouldn't notice or care about. The Buttonweed I'm
thinking about is the one in Latin known as DIODIA TERES. It's a member of the mostly
tropical Madder Family, the most famous member of which is the coffee tree. There's a page
with very nice photos of this particular Buttonweed at www.missouriplants.com/Blueopp/Diodia_teres_page.html
These days I'm thinking about Buttonweed because often down in the tangle of grass in
neglected lawns, along weedy roadsides -- just about anyplace where the soil is much
disturbed, dry and maybe sandy -- it's flowering. You've probably seen it, too. The flower
is white to pink, with four petals or lobes, and about the size of a pea. When you see its
picture I think you'll say "Oh, I've seen that a lot," but you won't remember
where.
The Buttonweed represents a whole world of nice but understated and usually
underappreciated things that make up the bulk of our everyday experiences.
*****
WEDNESDAY MORNING GALAXIES
Each morning I conduct a certain ritual. This ritual is a statement to myself that at that
moment I am consciously and decisively stepping from my life as a gardener, naturalist,
and general land-based hermit into the realm of cyberspace. One moment I'm a sweaty fellow
wearing soiled clothing and with itching fire- ant sores on my ankles, and the next I'm
the producer of the world's largest Web site devoted solely to the promotion of very
small-scale, locally produced ecotours worldwide (www.earthfoot.org),
as well as a nature-study site currently averaging 3,500 page-hits a day (www.backyardnature.net), and various other sites.
Thing is, as a gardener, the pleasures of moment-to-moment living are enough for a
person to simply accept life as-is. But, to spend long hours in Cyberspace, with the body
rebelling and the eyes glazing over, one needs more. What's needed is a spiritual context.
During those transitional moments in front of the dark computer screen I sit calmly,
compose myself, and summon up the remembered feeling that occasionally flashes through me
during those brief moments when I glimpse the majesty of The Creation, and a hint of my
position in it. It's more a feeling than a definition, formula or explanation, though at a
certain level it serves the purposes of those things. The feeling works in a similar
manner to when you call up the memory of someone you love, when you need a reason to keep
living from one moment to the next. If I begin the day's cyber-work visualizing myself as
a certain appropriate blossoming in a majestic universe that has order and evolves with a
definite spirit, my work takes on meaning.
As an aid in this perspective-gaining, each morning as soon as I am connected to the
Internet I visit NASA's "Astronomy Picture of the Day" at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html.
On Wednesday the day's offered picture was at first disappointing, but as I read about the
image on my screen my perspective crystallized dramatically.
To understand what happened with me on Wednesday, first an appreciation is needed for
what a galaxy is. A galaxy is a massive gathering of stars. Usually galaxies are portrayed
as swirling, whirlpool-like structures suspended in space, though spirals represent only
one galaxy type. Our sun is an average star in an average position in an average galaxy.
Our sun is about 26,000 light years from our galaxy's center. With light traveling about
671 million miles per hour, it takes light some 80,000 years to pass from one side of our
galaxy to the other. The number of other stars within 50,000 light years of us is about
200 billion. A galaxy is a mind-boggling thing. You can see a representation of our galaxy
(known as the Milky Way) along with sky charts and various celestial data at www.anzwers.org/free/universe/galaxy.html
Last Wednesday the NASA picture was at first disappointing because it appeared to be
nothing more than an image of thousands, if not millions, of stars. What took my breath
was learning that most of those points of light before me were themselves galaxies... You
can see that perspective-challenging picture at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030917.html
And, imagine, it can be assumed that planets orbit many or maybe most of the stars in
each of the Universe's almost-innumerable galaxies, and that there is no reason why life
would not find it just as easy to develop and evolve on many of those planets as it did
here on Earth. Just think about it.
When years ago I myself began thinking about it, at first I was overpowered with a
defeating sense of insignificance and irrelevance. But now I understand that by feeling
awe for this grand Creation, and by loving what little I know of it, I somehow become part
of it at a more significant and spirit-sustaining level than if I had no perspective
beyond my everyday Earthly living. Once we become mature individuals, the more we struggle
to understand, to see and to feel, the more our spirits shift into harmonizing with the
majesty of the Universe.
If you view the above picture and want your mind and soul bent even a little more, you
might try the number-crunching, Big-Bang-focusing, "Cosmology for Beginners"
page at www.biols.susx.ac.uk/home/John_Gribbin/cosmo.htm#Groping
*****
MY YEARLY VISIT TO KENTUCKY
Each year around this time I visit my family in Kentucky, where I stay with my Grandma
Taylor in Calhoun, a little town in McLean County, in the western part of the state.
Grandma is about 92, and she's my closest living relative, but I have lots of aunts,
uncles and cousins in the area. My next Newsletter, in which I'll tell you about the trip,
may arrive a little later than usual. |
