August 2, 2018
CRACKERS BENEATH THE NEEMS
Our Neem trees are dropping yellow, fleshy, cherry-like fruits these days, and beneath each tree there's a flurry of butterflies supping on the ripe fruits' juices. Maybe 90% of the butterfly species are "crackers," the English name for species of the genus Hamadryas, the name referring to "cracking" sounds made as they fly, like clicking fingernail tips against one another. You can see a typical cracker congregation at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180802ck.jpg
While taking the above shot I happened to notice a cracker very slowly, methodically, and wobbly, climbing up the spiky blade of a Mother-in-law Tongue plant beneath the Neem. You can see it at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180802cm.jpg
It seemed to be a cracker, but which one? I'd never noticed a cracker with such a large, tawny spot on the hindwing's undersurface. The butterfly's colors were so vivid, and it was so weak that the slightest breeze caused it to flop back and forth, that I thought it might have just emerged from its chrysalis and hadn't yet had time to gather its strength. As this was being figured out, the wind blew the creature to one side, and the wings were slightly opened, enabling a peep at their upper surfaces, which you can see at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180802cn.jpg
This picture shows that as our cracker gathered strength, his proboscis uncoiled and recoiled several times, as if loosening it up before flying off as a full-fledged adult and needing it to sip nectar or juice from fallen Neem fruits.
I've seen such a conspicuous, black-bordered, orange S on the Guatemalan Cracker, HAMADRYAS GUATEMALENA, identified by volunteer identifier Bea in Ontario, shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/yucatan/mariposa/butt022.jpg
When I started looking for the butterfly's shed "skin," or exuvia, remaining when its chrysalis spit open and this freshly minted adult emerged, it was found attached to the Mother-in-law's Tongue's blade surface right next to the butterfly, on the other side in deep shade. You can see it with the blade twisted around so sunlight illuminates it, at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180802co.jpg
A close-up of the exuvia showing some interesting details is at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180802cp.jpg
I'm surprised that the parts from which the butterfly's antennae were withdrawn are pancake-shaped at their tips, and so broad at their bases. Maybe the antenna tips were coiled within the pancake part.
Among the dozens of crackers flitting around beneath the Neem, none displayed such conspicuously tawny-colored patches on their underwings. Probably the tawny color fades soon after the first flight.
Of course I sent these pictures to Bea in Ontario, who agreed that our emerging butterfly was "most likely" a Guatemalan Cracker. Indicating the difficulty in separating Guatemalan Crackers from similar Variable Crackers, she passed along someone's remarks that in our pictures "... a relative uniformity in the pupil size is evident... The pupil size in Variable Crackers usually decreases in size from the costal to the anal HW margin."
Seeing other cracker pictures taken beneath the Neem tree, Bea also says that it's a mixed gathering, with at least one other species present, the Gray Cracker. It's worth noting that Neem trees are native to India, and the Mother-in-law Tongue our emerging adult was clinging to is from southern Africa, so our crackers didn't evolve to seek out these plants, but are flexible enough to use them. And flexibility is adaptive in frequently disturbed environments.
*****
SPREADWING OVER THE PIT
The previous evening a small shower had moved through, so at dawn the next morning vegetation all around the hut sparkled with wetness. As I sat munching on my granola breakfast, something looking like a vertical needle being carried on frail, fluttering, silvery wings slowly rose from the deep pit beside and below me, and attached itself to a leaflet of the Whiteseed Manga tree spreading its limbs across most of the pit. You can see the creature at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180802sw.jpg
We're accustomed to seeing delicately constructed damselflies, but wings on resting damselflies fold over their backs, while here the wings are held outwards, as with dragonflies. However, I'd never seen such a fragile-looking dragonfly, and one with such a slender abdomen that was kept more or less vertical. Thinking I might have a job identifying my visitor, I took the best wing picture I could, since wing venation often is important in dragonfly identification. You can see the picture at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180802sx.jpg
On the Internet, only dragonflies of the genus Lestes, seemed to match the delicate pit-visitor. A good amount of searching failed to turn up a Lestes species matching ours. It's very similar to the female Antillean Spreadwing, Lestes spumarius, but I can't find that Caribbean species listed for the Yucatan. A number of Caribbean species of various kinds of organism do occur in the Yucatan and not in the rest of Mexico, so it's possible that this is indeed an Antillean Spreadwing, just that it's not listed as from here. We do have a spreadwing species that might occur here, but it's blue where ours is green.
So, this was a fine observation, and we'll just have to leave it to an expert to elucidate the matter.
*****
A WHITISH SILKY ANOLE
Two months ago we looked at a splotchy, brownish Silky Anole who frequently roamed around the hut, that report being at https://www.backyardnature.net/q/s-anole.htm
This week on a Manila Palm trunk in the garden another Silky turned up but this one was much paler, shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180802an.jpg
He didn't want to move at all, so a nice head close-up was possible, shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180802ao.jpg
That darkish bar extending across the top of the head from eye to eye seems to be fairly constant within the species, even as other features come and go. In pale individuals, the short lines radiating from around the eyes also seem consistently to turn up.
*****
MANUEL'S SKIPPER AT DUSK
During my recent camping trip to southwestern Campeche state, on July 3rd as evening was coming on and a storm threatened rain, I was in my tent in the forest not far from Becán on the highway between Chetumal and Escárcega. From my vantage point looking up through the tent's see-through mosquito-net webbing, several dark, skipper-type butterflies could be seen on the undersurfaces of leaves all around me. One of those skippers is shown below -- the picture's background grossly overexposed so that patterns show in the heavy shade -- at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180802sk.jpg
Volunteer butterfly identifier Bea in Ontario pegs this as a Manuel's Skipper, POLYGONUS SAVIGNY SAVIGNY, widely distributed from Argentina through northern South America, Central America, the Caribbean area, to northern Mexico, and rarely straying into southern Texas. The translucent window spots at the top of the forewing, and the reddish-brown areas on the hindwing's underside, are important field marks helping Bea with the ID. The skipper's caterpillars are reported as feeding on shrub legumes, of which there were plenty in the forest there.
On one leaf beside the tent something worth noting was observed. A Manuel's Skipper had positioned himself on a leaf's undersurface, near the leaf's drip-tip, and facing toward the leaf's stem or petiole, with its wings spread so that their tips extended on both sides of the leaf beyond the leaf's margins. In this position, the wings' translucent window spots were visible from above the leaf, on both sides of the leaf. With the leaf's drooping tip forming a V, and brightly translucent spots on both sides of the V, it almost looked like the face of an owl with bright eyes. Was this a behavioral adaptation for scaring away skipper-eating birds? It certainly was neatly done, the spots exactly where they should be and equidistant from the leaf's margins, just as in a face.
However, beneath other leaves Manuel's Skippers could be seen aligning themselves randomly. Maybe someday a researcher will find that a certain percentage of individuals in any resting gathering of this species do align themselves as described above, just enough to keep skipper-eating birds in the area nervous.
*****
JUNKPILE SOLAR COOKERS
At https://www.backyardnature.net/j/solardsh.htm you can see a variety of solar cookers I've built and used at different locations, mostly from junk acquired for free. Lately I've had access to different kinds of junk, and have been using different kinds of cookers.
With my vegetarian diet, I'm concerned about getting enough protein. Over the years I've found that if I eat two eggs each and every day, protein is no problem, and by taking a daily multivitamin I receive enough of the B vitamins and other nutrients vegetarians need to pay attention to. Therefore, my first solar cooker effort here was one for providing hard eggs. I don't say "hard-boiled eggs," the usual English expression, because I'm not boiling them. However, an egg doesn't have to be boiled to turn hard. My hard-egg cooker, with all parts from the local junk dump except the blue-handled mirror, is shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180802so.jpg
Two Muscovy Duck eggs reside inside the black tin can inside the upside-down jar. The tin can is open at the top, so atop it, serving as a cap, is a slightly larger, shallow can, turned upside-down. The cans originally weren't black enough, and they must be black to absorb the sunlight, so I smeared them with very thin layers of petroleum jelly and rubbed in soot from the bottom of my campfire skillet.
The glass jar over the cans is necessary for taking advantage of the greenhouse effect. The black cans absorb sunlight, heat up not only the large can's contents, but also the air around them, and the glass jar keeps that hot air from escaping. Air inside the jar just keeps getting hotter and hotter, making it easier for the can's contents to get even hotter. Everything sits atop a sheet of Styrofoam, which is a good insulator keeping heat from escaping into the ground.
The big mirror, being junked, is so old that it doesn't reflect very well, but it does enough. The hand mirror is a good reflector, but needs to larger. However, the systems works. At first I put the eggs in water inside the tin can, because I'd always boiled eggs in water. However, when I thought about it, I did away with the water and the eggs seemed to cook even better. With these inefficient mirrors and the partly cloudy skies we have nowadays, it takes about five hours to produce hard eggs.
Once this cooker was functioning OK I found some junk foam rubber and -- since soot-blackened cans are messy to deal with, and I prefer fried eggs to hard ones -- developed another cooker for my handleless skillet, shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180802sp.jpg
Skillets with their handles broken off are common enough in junkpiles, so I'm using two of them. One is sunk deeply into the foam rubber, and the other, of the same diameter, is turned upside-down atop it, serving as a top. In the lower skillet, eggs are frying. In two or three hours they're done, so this system is more efficient than the other, and it's the one I use habitually, unless it's a cloudy day.
This design also depends on the greenhouse effect. The transparent covering keeping heat surrounding the black, sunlight-absorbing skillet is the weak point here, because instead of clear glass all I could find was a sheet of Plexiglas that fogs, reflects back too much sunlight, and warps with too much heat. Sheets of unbroken glass are of value here and don't turn up in junkpiles. Anyway, the system works, and works beautifully.
*****
ATMAN
I just finished reading Hermann Hesse's 1922 classic novel Siddhartha, about a man in India 2500 years ago searching for meaning, talking with the Buddha, but, instead of donning a golden robe and becoming a Buddhist, continued on searching for his own personal enlightenment. The book reminded me how similar my own beliefs have become to a core belief of Hinduism.
Years ago in India I saw that over the centuries Hinduism has strayed from its earliest pure teachings even more than have Christianity and Islam. Though I went there thinking I might find spiritual guidance, the boisterously kaleidoscopic, bizarre-to-me world of cults and philosophical schools encountered were no more engaging than what I'd seen in other cultures. Religions are like Christmas trees: People kill the tree, set it up and ornament it in eye-dazzling ways that send opposite messages to what the living tree had taught.
And yet, from books I'd learned that at the heart of Hinduism lies the concept of Atman. The New Oxford American Dictionary installed on my Kindle defines Atman as "The spiritual life principle of the universe, esp. when regarded as inherent in the real self of the individual." The word is derived from the Sanskrit Ātman, which literally means "essence" or "breath."
When I sit at the hut's door looking into the woods thinking thoughts often expressed here, I see it all as "spirit-turned-into-forest-and-old-man," something outrageously beautiful and mysterious, spontaneously gushing from "the spiritual life principle of the Universe," or Atman.
This concept keeps me from becoming too cynical about life when I reflect, for example, that our human thoughts and feelings are inventions of our bicameral brain-computers, in which one side of the brain registers a jumbled harvest of sensory stimuli, while the other side invents or borrows stories and explanations to "make sense" of what's being perceived. Moreover, our brains are predisposed to interpret our perceptions one way or another, depending on our genetic programming. It's all mechanistic, and somehow depressing, even devastating, if the thinking stops there.
But, at the hut, I don't stop there. I keep in mind that the genius of equipping humans with bicameral brains, and having the brain's predispositions programmed in our genes, are circumstances gushing from "the spiritual life principle of the Universe," from Atman. I don't despise Bach's fugues because they're played on mechanical pianos or electronic synthesizers. It's "the spiritual life principle of the Universe" expressed in those fugues that's important to me, that gives them and me meaning and beauty. What's around me right now, and I myself, are piano-like gushings out of Atman, and we all make a fugue. The neat thing about being a thinking, feeling human on Earth is that we can be both part of the fugue, and listen to, too.
I suspect that it's not incidental that the Atman concept arose in India, with her Himalayas and hard-to-reach foothills. In isolation at high altitudes where daily life distills into dazzling sunlight, crystalline fresh air, broken jagged peaks, and all-expressive clouds above, below and around, thoughts soar, thoughts refine, and one doesn't care what those in the dozing, simmering lowlands do and think, and so eventually one begins to know Atman. At least, that's how I figure it.
Here at the hut I lack high physical elevation vividness, but at age 70 I'm approaching a decent metaphorical altitude, plus I do have a good view of the sky out over the Papaya plantation below the slope, and right beneath the porch there's a deep pit at the bottom of which lies a confusion of meaningless shattered rocks, and all around, all through the year there are plants and animals as expressive as any passing cloud, if you really pay attention.
*****
Best wishes to all Newsletter readers,
Jim
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