Nature Tidbits

Fall is a great nature viewing time. All the animals getting ready for winter...   I've seen so many interesting sites lately, I wanted to write some of them down, let I forget.

Rose-hips collected in Hiller Park.   Tea sounds good!

Plover Prints.
At the beach the other day, Gloria and I walked alongside deep tracks that Ber and I made in the sand the day before.  Picture a straight line of hoof prints, and in each hoof print  is nestled a Snowy Plover, hunkered down below the wind with just the top of a head poking up to keep watch.  As I walked, the shadow of my head passed over each bird, causing it to hunker down even further. Some birds flew off to evade my shadow, hopping into hoof prints further down the beach. As my eyes adjusted to the pattern, I saw more and more plovers, in other rows of hoof prints made by Ber and other horses.  Tiny shelters from the storm.

Photo from Mendocino Coast Audubon Society Web Page.

Raven's Tutelage.
Pulling off the freeway exit the other morning, I looked up at the light pole to see a Raven perched above the light.     Along the arm of the light, like a line of students, sat about 20 small light-grey birds.  Looked like raven and little birds were together, but they couldn't have been.   Quite striking, the black bird, the almost white steel of the pole, and the grey line of birds.

Glow Worm!
Has been 30+ years since I last saw a glow-worm.  I remember late summer/early fall walks in the evening spent looking for them. We'd find patches of them, and I imagined how long they had been living, growing, and reproducing in that small area.  When I walk in the evening, this time of year, I think about them.   And last night, Gloria and I saw one!  At first I thought it was a bubble of dew reflecting my flashlight. Except it glowed when my light was turned off!  Sure enough, it was a fat, scaly glow worm.  It was the only one in the area, so I can only hope it has friends who were just hidden.  Because I'd like this patch of glow worms to keep going...  Here is a link to information and photos of glow worms, though the author states there are non in the Americas. Good pics, though.  

Photo from Flickr Album. 

Orb Weaving Pumpkin Spiders
In a plum tree by my house, there is an industrious, ambitious pumpkin spider. I first met her one morning when I walked right through her web.  Ugh!   The next day, she rebuilt it, with reinforcing tensioners going down to the ground. I like imagining how she did that...brave spider!    Each night, she builds a new web after the ravages of insects destroy them, one after the other.  At first, each web was bigger than the last, until she was taking up a 2'x2' area with her web. 

This is one of her largest webs. It takes up the whole picture, though hard to see in the dark.

One day I spied a male spider courting her, something I have never seen in all my years of watching spiders. He had a strand of his web running parallel to one of her supporting strands. He would run down the strand to where she was sitting in a corner of her web.  She was in a submissive pose, with all her legs hunched up around her. The male would run up, dapple his front legs all over her, like a blind man trying to figure out what was in front of him.  Then he would run back to his branch, picking up his web behind him. He repeated this several times, getting braver and braver with his tap-ity-taps.  Finally, she stood up, severed her support line that he was using--sending him hurling into space--and raced back to the center of her web.  Luckily he had his line, which he crawled up. 

That evening, I saw bundled up in the middle of her web a corpse that looked quite similar to the male spider. And since the day of the courtship, her webs have gotten steadily smaller, including the removal of the ground-tension line, until they are more the size of a dinner plate now, and are tucked up higher in the branches. She seems to be slowing down, and I keep looking for her egg sac.

The spider is now using this bunch of lichen for her resting space. This is new, and I am willing to bet she lays her egg sac in this lichen nest.

At Hiller park the other day, we saw several bright orange spiders, the ones I think of when I think of pumpkin spiders.  My neighbor spider is nondescript--she blends in perfectly with the lichen and grey-brown tree bark.  But the true pumpkin spiders, they look like rose-hips that have fallen into a web!  Just today, my landlord/neighbor gave me a cartoon from the Northcoast Journal.  A cartoon my mom  would have loved:

"Fall is the best time of year in Humboldt County...Except for the pumpkin spider facials!"