Barred owl in my urban backyard

Funny, just recently I was listing off all the animal friends I’ve seen in my urban backyard (here's the yard), because I discovered a ground hog is living under the shed (don’t tell my landlord! except I think he’s subscribed to this blog…):

• ground hog
• squirrel
• bunny
• mole
• raccoon
• possum
• blue jay
• dove
• white-throated sparrow
• tufted titmouse
• cardinal
• European sparrow
• starling
• red-bellied woodpecker
• downy woodpecker
• ruby-throated hummingbird
• Carolina wren
• robin
• brown thrasher
• crow
• cowbird
• garter snake
• butterflies X many
• cicada
• slug
• snail
• all other insects

So, the blue jays reliably gang up and yell when cats wander through, but when there’s something more sinister they are much louder! Usually it's a hawk that I only see flying off and can't get a good look at, but at 10:00 this morning they were really going at it, at the back of the yard next door, and I went out to see if I could tell a cat to lay off, but I didn’t see anything even though I was only about 10 feet from the blue jays, and then a BARRED OWL took off from right over my head! I mean like FIVE FEET over my head!

Those things are BIG!

I hurried inside and grabbed my camera and he had conveniently relocated to a tree in my back yard. He was maybe 15 feet up.


Sorry about that leaf in his face.

The gang of blue jays were hysterical, and not in the good way. They were perched pretty dang close to the owl, mere feet away, shrieking and screaming and bouncing all over the place. If I was an owl, with exceptional hearing, and those jays were screaming 2 feet away from me, I’d be hard-pressed not to just leave, but he didn't.

When I made tiny squeaky noises, he’d look down right at me. He really didn’t seem too concerned about any of us.

Anyway then one of the blue jays just couldn’t take it anymore, and took a swipe at him:



You can see his nictitating membrane as he reflexively closes his eyes! That’s what made his eye look hazy blue. They have 2 sets of eyelids, the nictitating one moves horizontally. It protects their eyes and they can still see through it.  I hear they have voluntary control over them. They close them when feeding their chicks, to protect their eyes from all that beak action. All kinds of animals have them—dogs-cats-polar bears-all birds-camels-aardvarks-most reptiles-amphibians-sharks…one source says that owls close them when flying at high speeds, so their eyes stay moist and clear, so they don’t miss anything. Peregrine falcons blink them repeatedly during their famous 200-mph dives.

It’s also called a “haw”.

(By the way, this was a completely lucky shot. I was using a point-and-shoot, with no tripod, on full zoom, just clicking and clicking…I had no idea)




Well, after that, I guess Owl was finally fed up, and he launched himself off to another tree (only about 15 feet away), and I got THIS awesome shot, which I also didn’t know I was getting until I looked at the pics later. Those feet can tear your face off.

I looked at him some more, and he looked at me some more.

This made my morning.

*Edit: he was there later in the evening, around 6:00, and I called a friend who came and looked too, and she noticed there was a hummingbird having a go at him! Flitting at him, then landing a foot away, buzzing him again, etc. 
Hummingbirds are pretty fearless, maybe because the whole world moves in slow motion for them.

Brood XIX—the famous 13-year “Great Southern Brood” Magicicada emergence!

Yes, yes, it’s a mushroom blog, but I keep finding other marvels too, and I take pictures and then I have to post about it.  And sometimes it’s just in-between mushrooms.

I’ll stall a little to give you a chance to leave, if you’re not into big close-ups of bug faces and bulging red eyes (especially the very last image) and waving bug legs, and worse, because that’s what’s coming up here. I even heard some “Bleah” and “Ew” from people who aren’t all that squeamish and “love nature.” I got a little squirmy about some of this too. But I did it anyway, even after telling myself not to get all swept up in this crazy Magicicada phenomenon because half the internet was going to be filled with images of emerging cicadas, so why should I make pictures of the same thing? But I couldn’t resist, once I saw it.
It was nuts!

(Last chance—leave now if you’re not into giant bug faces)

So, let us begin.

Mid-Missouri (and many other states) just experienced the emergence of millions of 13-year cicadas. There’s “annual” cicadas and “periodical” cicadas, and the broods are made of periodical cicadas, and Brood XIX is Magicicada with a 13-year life-cycle (there’s four in the genus, I don’t know which one we had, could be more than one).

Periodical cicadas have 13- or 17-year lifecycles. The "annual" ones actually have 2-to-7 year cycles, depending on the species (there’s not really a one-year model) but some come out every year. They’re not synchronized, so even though a species may have a 3-year cycle, some come out one year, and another group comes out the next, kind of leap-frogging. The "years" refer to time spent underground as larvae, quietly feeding on sap from tree roots. Broods are named for life-cycle length, and region, and the fact that they’re periodical, and synchronized so they all come out the same year. Brood XIX only comes out every 13 years, and in a particular area. It’s also the biggest brood (numbers-wise), showing up along the east coast to the Midwest, in about 15 states! All at once! Pretty much! Depending on weather and soil temp. I can’t tell you how long it took me to get this straight. I hope I have it right.

I’ve never caught the familiar dog-day cicada molting (well, once, but years ago, and no camera), but there were so many of these (let me stress that—SO MANY) that it was hard to miss. For at least a week, you could just walk outside and see them all over the trees and walls and fences around the house, before they took to the trees and started singing and looking for mates. Pretty much everywhere. I took pictures over several weeks, so some are on fences, and some are on trees, and some are in state parks and some are in my front yard, etc.

Here we go!

          

Cicadas busting out of their shells (things that make you go “bleah”)



Their best option is to be vertical. After they split their shell (“eclose” from their “exuvium”) they stick out horizontally for a while, with the end/tip of their abdomen still in the shell.



(From above--the camera’s aimed towards the ground)



I like their little orange armpits.

Nobody talks about how their tiny empty feet stay grabbed onto things.



Above, that’s one of my favorites…



They just hang there for a couple hours, doing whatever secret things they do. Their wings start to un-crumple.

What happens next is they wiggle all the way out of their shell and grab onto it (or a tree or whatever) and hang vertically, as their very delicate wings take shape and dry. If they’re not in the right position when they come out of their shells, things don’t go right. Sometimes they can’t get into the right position, sometimes because there’s so many other cicadas in the way, but their sheer numbers (hundreds of thousands per acre) compensate for the ones that don’t make it. I skipped pictures of problems. Big fat “ew” there.

There’s billions total in this brood, no lie.

They start out pink and tender (just like soft-shelled crabs!) with tomato-red eyes and two dark patches.

I wonder if they saw me looming over them in their most vulnerable state and thought, “Oh sh*t oh sh*t oh sh*t”…sorry!

Here’s one (below) in an in-between stage, starting to darken…



Above left, dozens of cicadas and shells on bushes in the backyard      
Above right, hundreds on bushes at the edge of the woods

Here’s five of them marching along a blooming rose bush, really lush colors all around, fresh cicadas, after a spring morning rain


Let’s see what else we have here--

Fresh cicadas


Mating cicadas!


They lay their eggs in slender branches, near the end, by cutting a series of slits in them, and laying a bunch of eggs in each slit. I didn’t catch them laying eggs, but I did find all kinds of evidence of this. First I saw crazy numbers of branch tips all over the place, which I thought was just an odd result of some recent violent storms. They were everywhere, for weeks. These branch tips had a lot of people scratching their heads! Eventually I understood that the branch ends must have been weakened by the slit-making, making it easy for storms or wind to tear them off the tree.




Above, a torn-off branch. If you click to enlarge you can see many slits along the broken end.

Below, cicada egg-laying slits.
 

Here’s one with my finger for scale:


Then I got even more curious, and started messing with the branches, and broke one open, and there were the eggs (sorry)!


They look like little grains of rice. They lay 24-28 eggs per slit.

Shortly, the eggs will hatch, the nymphs will burrow into the ground (oh, how I wish I could have found some newly-hatched nymphs!), and spend 13 years underground, sucking sap from roots and not doing much of anything else, as far as I can tell. Occasionally molting as they get bigger. That’s really all.

So, over about six weeks, mid-May to the end of June, this whole 13-year cicada thing happened.

Bonus: I noticed that shiny black cars with their brake lights on looked like Magicicadas!

The red light of their eyes goes out when they die:


And this, below, turned out to be my all-time favorite image capture of the whole crazy phenomenon:



I owe a lot to these websites that helped me untangle the facts:
What's that bug?                                                                              
Cicada Mania                                                                            
Magicicada

The end!

Morels from April

Okay, yes, I found morels, it was two months ago, that’s how far behind I am because if I don’t post in a timely manner I just keep hiking and taking more pictures and this is what happens.

Everybody who hunts mushrooms and/or takes nature pics and/or has a blog has probably posted about morels, so I'm under a lot of pressure to think of how to make it interesting, but I did capture a few images that I thought were worthy of taking up space on the internet.

Here is the tiniest morel I’ve ever seen:

I went back a few days later, expecting it to have shot up to “beer can” size (apparently that’s an industry standard for describing how big your morel is), but it had hardly budged. So I got curious, having seen many other mushrooms grow at a furious rate in mere days (like they're known for), and I found some things like a pretty bad YouTube time-lapse video of some morels growing (bad because it was really a slide-show, which is cheating, with clever, spinning “fun” shots sprinkled in, and many shots with nothing to compare the size to, and there was goofy music), but appreciated nonetheless because I hadn't taken the time to do that, and I sure didn't know morels take up to a month to get full-sized…

*Edit*  Soon after I posted this, one of my faithful followers, the wise and lovely Maxine Stone, kindly took the time to email me this:

"Hi Lisa:
I think this is a Morchella deliciosa.  These are small morels and the ridges are more like lines that go up and down as you can see in the pic.  They are usually grayish but this one looks old."

So I thought this was just a very, very young Morchella esculenta, but it is, in fact, a different species. These don't ever get "beer-can sized," they top out at about 3". And besides the ridges having more "verticality," for lack of a better word, I would probably notice the stems, which seem to be generally more slender, and less gnarly than the common M. esculenta.

I sure am glad that people who have been at this a lot longer than me are actually reading this blog! Thanks again, Maxine.

Here is the most beautiful morel I found all season:



These are called “greys” on the street but it’s a “Classic North American Yellow Morel”, Morchella esculenta (near as I can tell, from this site). I loved how the pits were so dense, making it extra-crinkly, and the luminous moon-color around the dark pits. This would eventually turn blonde-yellow.

Even though this morel almost looks black-and-white, which seems like it would show up easily against new green growth and last year's brown leaves, it was very, very hard to see. Because it was a morel. And they just pop into this dimension when they feel like it. Sometimes it seems like they’re made more of shadows than solid matter.

 
The beautiful grey again, and a blonde and grey in hand. Same species.


Above, some morels that have offered themselves to me to eat, waiting patiently.

I hiked many, many times this spring, found enough morels to share, and one night fried a whole bunch of them in seasoned breadcrumbs and couldn’t stop eating them as soon as they were cool enough to put in my mouth so they never filled the plate and then I felt a little sick, but I think it was from eating too much, and not me developing a sensitivity to them (which can happen with any food), which would be fine with me because there’s a lot of anxiety around morels, everybody trying like hell to figure out what triggers their arrival and where’s the best place to find them, and all this protocol and etiquette and stories and legends (and sometimes bad feelings), when chanterelles are so plentiful and easy to find and sweet and delicious and can come up for months. But, it’s usually cool and pretty out when you go morel-hunting, and there’s all the other small waking-up forest citizens around, so all is well.