Photo Essay
Nature Trail Tour - August, 2009
Take a virtual tour of the Sibley Nature Tour!
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Ector County Independent School District teachers extraordinairre Charlotte Burke and Sandra Elms photographed the August 2009 virtual trail for the Sibley Nature Center. Both are also members of the Llano Estacado Chapter of the Texas Master Naturalists. Charlotte also prepares Publisher documents for the Sibley website on the field trips of the Master Naturalists, while Sandra is constantly presenting her innovative educational ideas to science teachers across the state, and going on exciting educational field trips in Big Bend.
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Trailing allionia, or hierba de hormiga, is a common summer wildflower, but look closely at its unique flower and the arrangement of its stamens and styles. Is it three flowers in one, or…?
Although a plant list has been kept by Sibley staff for 29 years, Sandy and Charlotte found a species not previously on the list. Balsam apple, with its dissected leaves, is a vine that clambers on everything, including yucca. Underground is a spherical root the size of a basketball.
The dark orange beefly was common this summer at Sibley.
Sunflowers always attract a great variety of insects.
A large gray beetle carefully placed eggs on a lote bush, but this is not the species that caused the damage seen in the June 2009 virtual trail.
Bird poop fungus appeared again, two weeks after the long wet spell in late July.
Box turtles roamed the grounds for several weeks after the rainy spell.
This male box turtle is probably the dominant turtle in his territory, for his legs are brightly colored.
The scutes on the plastron of every box turtle have different color arrangements, allowing for the potential of keeping records of where the turtles are and what they are doing.
When held, the turtle extended its neck, revealing a soft leathery skin.
The new growth of broomweed is covered with tiny glands that exude resin.
A bumblebee tried to land on a sunflower that did not have its ray flowers extended laterally to the disc flowers (which were in full bloom).
The buttonbush at the pond attracted a bumblebee, too.
A chocolate daisy had a leaf that was almost white – a mutation, or evidence of a disease?
Crematogaster ants swarmed a very fresh bird dropping. The ground was quite wet from a shower a few hours before Sandy and Charlotte visited. This species of ant normally specializes in feeding on honeydew exuded from leafhoppers, aphids, and larval caterpillars.
Cryptogamic crusts are a common feature of arid land soils. (Type cryptogamic soil in the website search engine to learn more.) The recent rain had caused sheetwash erosion to deposit sand on and around the cryptogamic crusts.
The bloom of desert holly is hard to find, for it only lasts a few hours in the morning. It is a daisy without ray flowers.
Desert holly leaves last for months after the first frosts of winter, and finally in August, only a skeleton is left.
Devil’s bouquet will have a bright red blossom about 2-3 inches across, followed by seed capsules that are often empty, but sometimes seeds are produced, resulting in seedlings like this one.
Devil’s bouquet leaves are striking, with mottled green splotches. The sprinkling of sand on the leaves is “backwash” from the rain the night before.
Hundreds of cowpen daisy seedlings dotted the Sibley landscape in August. One in the shade still had rain droplets on it.
Tarantulas cover their holes with a web after they have eaten their fill, and then sand blows over the webbing to hide the nest. Here, a chunk of dirt had fallen as a result of the rain.
Why was the crematogaster ant investigating the tarantula hole, and why was part of the webbing removed? Had a tarantula wasp investigated the hole, too?
A harvester ant and two dung beetles were processing predator dung left early in the morning before the rain.
Notice the arrangement of the new stems on the ephedra – they are arranged in whorls at the nodes, but the closest whorl had more than the usual amount of new stems.
Euphorbia lata grew quickly after the rain. It has a white sap that can irritate soft tissues, and cause photosensitivity (where the sap dries, the sun can cause blisters quickly.)
The red ripe mesquite beans were knocked onto some ephedra by the heavy driving rain of the night before.
A fox stopped and scratched the ground while it urinated.
In very moist soil, the fox left a good footprint.
Something scared the fox, for the next footprint was just an imprint of its claws.
Goathead blossoms are normally yellow
Gray grasshoppers normally hide on the ground and are camouflaged.
Green grasshoppers normally hide on grass to be camouflaged, but this one forgot.
What dug in the ground and piled dirt to one side?
One of the old elms at the pond had many holes in its old wood.
This horsecrippler cactus probably has a large beetle grub in its tissue, for it did not swell up and lift a little ways up out of the ground, like...
...this one. Notice all of the fine sand that circles the plant, where it has washed off of the cactus after it swelled with the rain.
A jackrabbit walked about on open ground.
It found one of its fresh droppings and ingested it, to further digest the food.
Then it stretched out, enjoying the morning.
Another one came near, so it got up
And in a little while, both of them slowly walked away.
Lichen grows on mesquite.
Mercury is a small non-descript ground cover with a long woody taproot. The blooms are the tiny balls that are visible.
A small mesquite pod was knocked off the bush it grew on by the heavy rain.
A mesquite seedling poked out of the ground that morning, and had not had time to become green with the sunlight.
These mesquite seedlings had germinated several days before, and several were putting on their first set of true leaves. They had been deposited in that location by the sheetwash erosion from previous rains.
A spider ant was protecting a mesquite bean that had already been partially processed,
By other spider ants that were busy carrying away the seeds.
Charlotte and Sandy found another species of plant that was not on the Sibley list. This is Mollugo verticillata, also known as chickweed (like several plants). It is normally found in very sandy soil.
The two found a number of different mushrooms.
Is this an older version of the previous one?
Is this a shaggy mane, or a poisonous amanita?
Puffball mushrooms were in several stages – just poking out of the ground like this one,
Or swollen even further like this one,
Which Sandy and Charlotte found dug up and turned over.
After a previous rain, a recently mated queen harvester started a hole, and laid eggs. This is her first set of young, busy enlarging the hole. Notice the termite castings forming a tube over a nearby twig.
Sugar ants also dug after the rain.
This might have been a new crematogaster ant hole.
Near it were pieces of crematogaster ants. Many species of ants have graveyards where they dump dead members of their nest.
Another crematogaster ant hole was further along in its construction. Underneath the mound is probably some old mesquite roots, for they often use the roots for extra protection.
Spider ants were busy cleaning out their holes. Aphanogaster is their genus, but kids call them spider ants. They do not sting, and cannot bite. Use the website search engine to find out what other creature lives with them and protects them from their enemies.
A spider ant and a crematogaster ant investigated where termites had been at work. On the right side is one of the termites that had been exposed by the disturbance.
A crematogaster ant investigated around another termite tube – do termites exude (defecate) a liquid they like?
Do termite casings play any role in the formation of the cryptogamic crusts?
Do earthworm castings play any role in the formation of the cryptogamic crusts?
Do dung beetle piles play any role in the formation of the cryptogamic crusts? Scientists have not answered these questions!
Termite casings covered many old pieces of woody plant life, including an old yucca pod.
Some termite casings covered living plants, like this tasajillo.
A tasajillo that had somehow died back to the ground was covered with a hundred new shoots – an usually growth form for tasajillo.
A tasajillo branch had broken, which made the green fruit on the broken branch begin to ripen.
Panicum grass had germinated and grown to the seed stage in the three weeks since the beginning of the rains.
The portulaca grew quickly and formed carpets – check out the June and July 2009 virtual trails to see the seedling stages.
The tunnel just under the surface of the soil might belong to a wireworm, the larval form of a click beetle. It crossed an area where sheetwash had deposited lots of fine sand grains.
The detritus carried by previous rains had formed a dam. The rain on the morning of the visit broke the dam, and some of the fine sand was carried further along.
Some of the detritus dams can be several inches across, and rabbit pellets, mesquite seeds, and many other elements of detritus can be found in the dam.
Behind one of the dams, bubbles in the water formed and caused the sand to be deposited in little circles around the edge of the bubbles. The bubbles might have been filled with air, or possibly a gas like methane from termite holes, or even carbon dioxide from creatures below the soil surface, like the one that left the crater of soil after the water disappeared.
Along the edge of the fine sand deposited by the sheet wash were several places where critters had emerged after the rain, or had dug after the rain.
A seedling mesquite had not quite broken out of the soil.
In another location, thousands of small seedling had germinated. Most will die as the strongest grow fastest.
Sida physocalyx, or cheeses, is a common perennial ground cover in the mesquite habitat.
Sleepy daisy is also common in the habitat.
Vervain greened up from roots waiting underground for the moisture from the rain.
The yucca pods began to turn dark in August. The one on the center right reveals the exit hole of the yucca moth larvae. It lowered itself to the ground with a silk line.
Old yucca seeds on the ground revealed what the moth larvae does to 10 percent of the yucca seeds in each yucca pod. Since the yucca moth is the only thing that pollinates the yucca, it is a fair trade for the moth larvae to use such a small percentage of the seeds for food.
An old yucca crown, long after the plant had died. The larvae of the giant yucca skipper had probably killed that crown of the yucca, for their larvae feed on the roots.