May 3, 2018
BECARD NEST
In recent years in the Yucatan the rainy season has arrived later and later. This year it appears to have begun unusually early, occasional rains falling for the last month. In early May last year the landscape was wintry looking -- parched crisp and brown. This May begins with most trees green with enlarging leaves, and many herbs greening the ground. Insects are emerging and birds have begun nesting.
In fact, in the papaya orchard right below the hut, a female Rose-throated Becard is building her nest these days. You can see her just arrived to add a small leaf tatter to her nest, which is about 15ft (4.5m) up a Cedro tree, at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180503bb.jpg
She looks like a flycatcher, but notice her thick beak and oversized head with a modest crest. Becards are closely related to flycatchers but are grouped in a different family, the New-World Tropics Cotinga Family, the Cotingidae. You can see the female a few seconds after the above photo was taken, now about to add her leaf shred to the nest, and better showing how broad her black beak is, at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180503ba.jpg
The nest was so large and messy looking compared to the little bird that I wondered whether she might not have taken over an old squirrel nest. However, in A Guide to the Birds of Mexico and Northern Central America, Steve Howell says that becards, genus Pachyramphus, produce nests that "... are bulky globular masses of fine dead leaves, fibers, moss, etc. with entrance near the bottom, slung from or wedged among outer branches at mid- to upper levels."
And that describes perfectly what's atop the Cedro tree down below the hut.
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MATING POLYDAMAS SWALLOWTAILS
One afternoon a couple of mating butterflies landed in a tree right in front on the hut. You can see them at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180503sw.jpg
They were so darkly silhouetted that I feared being able to get an identification, but when I tried for a second shot, suddenly the female turned away preparing to carry her smaller male to another perch. You can see her at that moment, revealing some markings on her wings' upper sides, at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180503sx.jpg
That picture is interesting in that it shows how when the front, or upper, wings are brought together -- from the blurring on one side I'm thinking the wings are on the upswing -- the back, or rear, pair blouses out. It looks like air is being forced downward and then toward the rear, maybe giving the butterfly some jet propulsion sending it forward. That's just my thinking, though, for I've not read about this elsewhere.
Volunteer identifier Bea in Ontario recognized these as Polydamas Swallowtails, who are fairly dark butterflies even when there's plenty of light, as seen on our page for the species at https://www.backyardnature.net/yucatan/polydam.htm
Polydamas Swallowtail caterpillars feed on pipevine leaves, genus Aristolochia, whih is fairly common here. The vines are issuing new leaves now on which caterpillars can feed, and on which the newly impregnated female in our pictures can lay her eggs.
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STIGMAPHYLLON VINE FLOWERING
Dangling from a Habim tree near the garden, a woody vine with broad, rounded leaves opposite one another on the stems was producing pretty clusters of yellow blossoms, like those shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180503st.jpg
Up close, the flowers displayed very distinctive features, shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180503su.jpg
Note that the petals' broad, yellow blades are on slender stalks, or "claws." The style produces three broad, "hooded" stigmas that bend away from one another, and the ovary, instead of being neatly egglike surrounded by stamens, appears to produce thin wings or flaps that hug the petals' claws. A glimpse of the above flower's underside tells us immediately what plant family this vine belongs to, as seen at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180503sv.jpg
With such greenish pairs of egglike glands situated between the petals' claws, we just have to have a member of the tropical Malpighia Family, the Malpighiaceae. Moreover, we've already seen a vine very similar to this, as you can confirm on our Stigmaphyllon ellipticum page at https://www.backyardnature.net/yucatan/stigmaph.htm
However, if you closely compare the pictures on that page with the above, you'll see that the flower petals of Stigmaphyllon ellipticum are finely toothed, while petals of this week's vine are irregularly toothed, but not finely. Also, leaves of Stigmaphyllon ellipticum are smaller and more elongated than our current vine's. Is this week's vine just showing a variation of Stigmaphyllon ellipticum, or is it a closely related species? At the CICY Flora de Yucatán website I found listed a second Stigmaphyllon species, STIGMAPHYLLON LINDENIANUM, looking just like our current one. So, here's a second Stigmaphyllon species, and I do enjoy seeing another "variation on the Stigmaphyllon theme."
At the bottom of our Stigmaphyllon ellipticum page you can see that each flower on the vine produces three winged, samara-type fruits. Seeing those, the wings hugging the claws of our Stigmaphyllon lindenianum petals start making sense. It'll be interesting to see what kinds of wings Stigmaphyllon lindenianum fruits produce. Our flower pictures suggest there might be six of them, while the Stigmaphyllon ellipticum fruits show only three.
Stigmaphyllon lindenianum is native from Mexico all through Central America to Venezuela. CICY reports it as both flowering and fruiting every month of the year. Probably I've seen it before, just didn't notice its differences from the other species.
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COYOL/ COCOYOL PALMS FLOWERING
At https://www.backyardnature.net/mexnat/coyol.htm we've admired the common, attractive and very spiny palm which we learned to call Coyol elsewhere, but which the Maya here call Cocoyol. This week I got a close look at that palm's flowers. First of all take a look at the tree's crown from which numerous fronds arise, at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180503ci.jpg
Amid all that visual clutter, notice the cigar-shaped, pale item whose tip points at the image's top, right corner. The big cigar is a very tough, cylindrical sheath or "spathe" surrounding a collection of immature flowers, an inflorescence . Maybe you can discern at the picture's left a dark, scraggly, immature inflorescence in the process of shedding its spathe. The spathe is buckling and partly wrapping around the dark inflorescence, which consists of many slender branches bearing flower buds. When the flowers mature, the inflorescence no longer is dark, scraggly and hard to see, but rather spectacular and handsome in its own way, as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180503cl.jpg
In that picture the vast majority of tiny, yellow flowers covering the fingerlike inflorescence divisions are unisexual male flowers. A close-up of many closely packed male flowers with their pollen-producing anthers held outwards on slender filaments is shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180503ck.jpg
In that picture, the oval items at the tips of the spikes are flower buds, each with an immature male flower inside. You can see unisexual female flowers nestled at the bases of the same yellow spikes bearing the male flowers, at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180503cj.jpg
The female flowers are the greenish, spherical items, each of which is topped with three short, slender, divergent, dark-brown stigma lobes. You can see that female flowers are vastly outnumbered by male ones, but in the end enough female flowers will develop into persimmon-sized nuts to produce the impressive, dangling, two-ft-long fruit clusters shown on our Coyol page.
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MORMON TEA IN COAHUILA
During my recent camping trip, a month ago on April 5th, I started out hiking on a valley floor, then climbed a small mountain that was grassy and scrubby at its base, but forested on top. About halfway up, at ±7000 feet in elevation (2100m), where trees were just starting to appear, I found an old friend from my days of wandering the western US's highland deserts. It was what's known up north as Mormon Tea, and you can see a healthy bunch of it, the intensively farmed valley and some tree yuccas in the background, at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180503mm.jpg
Mormon Tea, genus Ephedra, of the Mormon Tea Family, the Ephedraceae, looks like a lot slender, green, leafless stems crammed too close together. Up closer there's not much to change that impression, as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180503mn.jpg
Up north, especially at the edges of streams and other wetlands, we have something similar looking, called horsetails, genus Equisetum, but the similarity is purely coincidental. Horsetails are spore-produces, like ferns, while Mormon Tea is a gymnosperm, like pines and firs. You might enjoy comparing the above pictures with those of some horsetails we've seen in Texas, at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/x/equisetm.htm
Five or six Ephedra species are listed for Coahuila. Though an excellent treatment of Ephedra species in Mexico is available online, without having mature female cones I'm unable to say which species appears in our photographs. Our plants did bear immature cones, shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180503mp.jpg
Supposedly the Mormons once brewed tea from the Mormon Tea bush. When I was camping in Nevada's highland deserts, I made tea from the bush, too, and it was good on a chilly morning. Later I learned that the genus Ephedra is famously medicinal. The earliest uses for Ephedra species for specific illnesses date back to 5000 BC, and even today in China three Ephedra species are grown commercially as sources of pharmaceutical compounds.
Traditionally the compound was used for symptoms of cold and flu, including nasal congestion, cough, fever, and bronchitis, as well as for hay fever. I stopped drinking Mormon Tea when in 2004 the USFDA banned over-the-counter supplements containing the compound ephedra, derived from Ephedra plants. Until that time Mormon Tea had been sold as an herbal energy booster, weight-loss supplement and athletic performance enhancer. Lab tests are inconclusive about the compound's effectiveness, but it is known that products combining ephedra with caffeine dramatically increase the chances of adverse side effects such as strokes and heart arrhythmia.
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DEATH OF A DUCKLING
At dawn, some kind of commotion was going on in the duck pen, the Muscovies bowing, hissing and raising their crests they way they do when disturbed. The cause was easy to see: An old drake held the head of a two-day-old duckling in his beak, shaking the poor thing's body back and forth as if determined to break its neck. He must have done so, for later one of the workers found the body.
I averted my eyes and walked on. For one thing, by the time I'd seen what was going on, the duckling already looked mortally injured; for another, in Nature, infanticide often occurs when population numbers are too high relative to the local environment's resources. Adults can always produce more babies, while having more mouths to feed can weaken or endanger the whole community.
And this duck pen was indeed overcrowded, the new family of wide-eyed, yellow-fuzzed, funnily waddling ducklings having been greeted with a groan by the owner. The order had been "no more Muscovies," but this mama had hidden her nest well.
The next day, all the new ducklings were missing, and there seemed even fewer adults in the pen. I didn't ask questions, thinking that probably a worker who liked duck stew recognized the overcrowding and did something about it. I felt bad about the whole thing, and still do.
At this time my daily mood also was affected by a current article in England's online The Guardian. It was an interview with an 86-year-old senior fellow emeritus of the Policy Studies Institute, the article entitled, "'We're doomed': Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention", by Patrick Barkham.
I linked the duckling incident with the Hillman interview because Hillman is a social scientist, not a climate expert. He studies how environmental stresses affect human communities. Overcrowding in the duck pen induced infanticide, so what changes in human society will global warming produce? When Hillman says "We're doomed," he's not saying that Homo sapiens will perish, but rather that humanity will be transformed in ways that we today might find hard to accept. You might be interested in an article on one aspect of the matter at the PsychologicalScience.Org website, entitled Global Warming and Violent Behavior.
Already social stresses are causing big changes in many societies. Certain nations that in the past welcomed international refugees now make it harder to enter their countries. "Let them drown," some officials urge. Once the land of "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses... " now the US has democratically elected Trump with his wall, his vulgarity and narcissism .., an old drake having his way in a population only slightly stressed, relative to what's coming with Hillman's "doom."
And yet, that morning of the duckling's death conjuring thoughts of "doom" turned out to be a fine one for me personally. The early rainy season was greening the landscape day by day, frisky songbirds were building nests and singing, and yellow butterflies darted across the green garden. At noon, over the campfire I cooked a good-tasting, nutritious meal, and during the hottest part of the day on my Kindle I read from books I've wanted to look at for years. In the afternoon I wrote, and read some more, and when the sun went down I enjoyed a solid night of uninterrupted sleep.
So, here's a comforting thought as human society faces Mayer Hillman's "doom": The growing societal stress and dysfunction is all human doings, but the Universe as a whole continues as mysteriously, perfectly and beautifully as always. In that context, certain individual people always will be able to find peace and fulfillment by focusing on their spiritual growth -- their "passage from a less to a greater perfection," as Spinoza framed it.
This doesn't mean that as "doom" approaches we need to disengage from humanity, because humanity's doings -- including Trumpism and species going extinct -- are part of the Nature/God Unity as much as everything else in the Universe. What's necessary is to bring one's dealings with other people into balance with one's spiritual quest, the "passage from a less to a greater perfection."
And it's been my experience that making this passage isn't hard, except that it needs to be attended to constantly. To make the passage, we simply must pay attention to the world around us, including humanity, by trying to understand what we ourselves feel needs to be understood better, by meditating on the meaning of what we come to know, and -- here Spinoza and Aristotle came to the same conclusion -- to "know thyself."
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Best wishes to all Newsletter readers,
Jim
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