Tag Archives: Critters

In which I discuss the particulars of some bugs being completely awesome, and others being annoying little buggers that need to die

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Last night I was out in the garden checking for beetles (more on that later) when I saw a tiny spider traversing between a cauliflower plant and a stick I’m using to tether a growing pepper plant. Anyway, this spider, it was traversing on a line of webbing, and it was carrying what I thought at first was a fly. On closer inspection it turned out to be a shiny droplet of water, like those that collect on the edges of some leaves at night as the air cools. It was carrying a droplet of water! When it got to the stick, it perched near the tip and sat still with the droplet, and as I watched, the droplet slowly grew smaller. Did you know that spiders did this??! I did not know that spiders did this! Carry water droplets?

Watch, observe, question, and get your mind blown every day!

In a bit of quick research, I haven’t been able to find out if this is common or not (I assume it is, and I’ve just never seen it) as a spider behavior. I know some spiders carry bubbles of air underwater, and lots of bugs use surface tension to their advantage… but it never occurred to me that spiders might do this, even though I know that some spiders need water beyond what they get through their prey. Some drink from puddles, others drink when they consume their webs in the morning with dewdrops on, and some drink from dewdrops. It makes perfect sense that a spider might take its drink to a safer location, but I didn’t know, and wow, neat.

It might be like that time I was walking through a graveyard at night and saw hundreds of worms sneaking out of their holes, stretching, reaching for each other. I thought, whoa! I didn’t know about this! How cool is this! What if I’ve discovered a new behavior?!?

And then I thought, oh. Earthworms. Nightcrawlers. Right.

But it was still a cool experience!

…

So, that was neat. But then I had to get back to my now nightly routine of beetle-hunting.

I planted our garden 3-4 weeks ago. Cucumber bushes, capsicums of different types, cauliflower, zucchini, an heirloom tomato, and some strawberries. These will all go very nicely with the forest of basil I’m cultivating in containers. I also have a small patch of oregano and thyme in there, but the basil gets to rule the place because, c’mon, duh. There’s feral rosemary growing by the back shed.

Our strawberries were doing well! We got two delicious berries from the largest plant. And then the flowers died. And some leaves fell off. The hell? It looked like the stems were being broken by something. No hail… no violent raccoons… And then some leaves developed holes. Aha! Bug attack!

I’ve patrolled for slugs and snails and seem to have conquered that problem, so this must be something new.

Ben went out that night to take a look and reported a couple of beetles. I took a vial out and came back inside with 20 or so tiny shiny obnoxious beetles that I was really quite unhappy about. They weren’t easy to see because they liked to perch just underneath leaves and quickly fell down into the mulch when disturbed. There seemed to be two similar but different types of beetles.

A bit of research and lots of looking through my watch glass led me to tentatively identify the less common type as Strawberry Root Weevils.

 

The other, more, shall we say abundant (teeming? seething?) type I think is the Strawberry Rootworm. They’re shiny, whereas the others are dull. They have shorter snouts. They are both really freaking annoying.

Images from bugguide.net

So now this is my routine: Go outside with a headlamp once it gets dark, examine every inch of the strawberry plants, get bit by mosquitoes, collect beetles, rant upon returning indoors. Repeat 3-4 more times before bed.

This is the majority of my haul over the last three nights. I left one vial outside and they baked in the sun. Not sorry.

The first night I came back with over fifty. Subsequent nights have had massively reduced yields, thankfully. They will attack other plants, but I have found them primarily on the strawberries. Sadly, they have been reduced from something about half as large as this:

Healthy older plant across the yard

To (there are [were] THREE strawberry plants here):

&#(%&

I’m certain two out of the three will live, but I’m not expecting any more berries this year.

Conclusion? In the future, plant strawberries in containers using potting soil. In lieu of going back in time, however… well, none of the websites I’ve found suggest any treatments other than “give up, replant next year at least 300 feet away.”

Je refuse! We will carry on, little berry plants, and see what we might accomplish!

Let’s all toast to the stubborn drive to spend at least one hour with the skeeters each night hunting bugs. They are going DOWN. At least I get to find things like water-toting spiders!

Gull Gull Gull Gull DUCK

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Today Ben and I went to an IMAX showing of The Last Reef. The film isn’t an important component of this post other than to say that if any of you ever have the chance to see amazing sea life up close and huge and in 3D you should absolutely do so. Wow! Also, I suppose I should add re: the film itself that it was a nice version of the whole “humans are destroying the world and should stop and it’s awful and depressing” in that it actually made a case for individuals changing their behavior and gave examples of how they could do so. Much more impactful, I feel.

Anyway, we were going downtown to this showing and we stopped at a Woolies (Woolworths, a grocery store. Ozzies shorten EVERYTHING) and picked up some french fries because, well, hot crispy delicious potato, duh. And also it was lunch. Shut up, mom, we ran out of time! The movie was an hour earlier than I thought! And I had a salad for breakfast! We walked the couple of blocks from the train station/grocery store to the waterfront where the theater was located and found a nice shaded stone bench to have lunch on.

Shortly after we sat down a seagull arrived and loitered, pacing in front of us while we ate. Conversation wandered but kept coming back to the seagull. We wondered how brave it would get, and how close it would come. Ben was going on about how terrible it is that humans teach wild animals to beg and did it just keep watch for anyone who came by to sit down and eat? So of course I had to throw a bit of potato to it. How could I resist? The seagull leaped into the air and gracefully caught the potato, and halfway through Ben turning to glare at me three more seagulls arrived. And the original seagull growled at them! Have you ever heard a seagull growl?? It was snaking its head up and down, bringing its head back into its body and fluffing its feathers and growling at the other birds.

I fell over laughing. It was so vicious! So commanding!

Eventually the other birds retreated enough that the seagull calmed down and stayed silent. So I threw it another potato.

I had to!

Ben took the fries away.

…

I really wish I’d taken video of the gull doing its thing. I figured it was hilarious and common enough that it would be easy to find on a birding website or on youtube, but I’ve just spent the last two hours trying to ID the gull and find an example of the sounds we heard.

I believe it was probably a Silver Gull, a very common species around Australia. Or a Red-Billed Gull which is more common to New Zealand. It’s main identifying feature was its dark red feet.

I can’t find any recordings of a territorial or aggressive or any call that matches what we saw. Oh well.

Avoca Slugs

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Periodically, these past couple of weeks, I’ve felt like I’m back home in Ann Arbor walking down State St. on a football Saturday. Because Ozzies are CRAZY for footie (rugby, didjaknow). We got off the train downtown at Central Station one night to look at a scrap metal dragon…

(aside: it was there to advertise for an art festival of agricultural art, or art by people in agriculture, or something. We fully intended on going but when we told Viive and Ian about it and told them where it was (just past Wagga Wagga!) they told us that it was 8 hours away. So, no, not going. But we still got to see the dragon!)

… and were greeted (terrorized?) by a roar of chanting and clapping, shouting and singing. Nearly everyone was dressed in either red or blue, and most wore scarfs broadcasting their allegiance. Grown men stood by ticket turnstiles handing out tiny pennant flags. It’s footie finals! GET READY FOR THE FEVER! The bulldogs were playing the swans that night, and that, folks, is what I thought about when I wrote this title. The Avoca Slugs? The Avoca Sea Slugs? The newest rising star in the world of footie! I’m having fun imagining it, anyway.

So, we had a neat wildlife sighting when we went to Avoca Beach. A lovely little sea slug in a tide pool! I wish I could change shape like that. It could curl up into a tiny racquet ball, or stretch out to the size of a small fruit bat.

I know slightly more than nothing about sea slugs or how to ID them, but it is mostly black/dark brown, with some speckles. It was unwilling to unfold its skin flaps to fully reveal its gills, but they were there. Perhaps Dendrodoris nigra?

I think it has quite a nice grin.

Arrival in Oz. Challenge: stay awake. Strategy: fuzzy animals.

Link

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first glimpse of Australian dawn; southern hemisphere stars

Our flight arrived at 6:30 in the morning, Sydney time. I believe that’s around 4:30 in the afternoon back home. I slept a fair amount, I suppose. Ben slept very little. He kept saying his butt hurt. I can’t blame him, really, after 20-some hours sitting.

first glimpse of land

We arrived, deplaned, evacuated orifices, passed immigration, picked up luggage, changed money, and met Viive and Ian at the airport. Viive was waving a UM football seat cushion around to catch our attention.

It turns out that Sept 2 is father’s day in Australia. Happy father’s day! Viive and Ian had big family plans for the afternoon, so after showering, dumping our bags, and settling in a little (Ian made me a latte. Apparently Ozzies are coffee snobs, by their own admission. yum), Ben and I got dropped off at a kind of daycare while they did family stuff. Where the daycare was The Coolest Daycare Ever (™), otherwise known as the Featherdale Wildlife Park.

We pet wallabies, a koala, an echidna, emus, kangaroos, and wombats! I even accidentally fondled a wallaby’s testicles! What did YOU do today?

If you’re curious as to how you accidentally fondle a wallaby’s testicles, you pet a friendly wallaby all over, feeling its ribs and its paws and its tummy fur when you notice something on its stomach, which you then touch because the wallaby is letting you pet it all over, and then you realize you are holding your very own set of wallaby testicles. That’s how it happens.

If you were wondering what kangaroo wallaby testicles look like, well, they’re rather extraordinary.

Fun fact: koalas sleep 16-20 hours a day. If they’re asleep they don’t care what you do, and if they’re awake they’re far more concerned with munching on leaves than with how psyched you are to touch them.

what jet lag? KOALA

Like many small animal parks, you could buy treats to feed the animals. These were in the form of ice cream cones filled with alfalfa and food pellets. The brilliant part of this, for me, was that families would buy six of these for their kids who would then spill the food and drop broken cones in in cages where the animals were too well fed to care. This meant that I could then come along and scavenge armfuls of cones to feed various animals that most of the patrons ignored.

too full to care

Once I figured this out and we had already seen most of the park, I had a never-ending source of entertainment! Most people wanted to feed the warm and fuzzy and adorable wallabies that freely wandered the park with the people and the peacocks and the pigeons and the egrets and the ibises. Given the ratio of small children with generous parents to wallabies, the wallabies did not particularly want more food, being well stuffed and content to loll in the sun. They did, however, appreciate a good scratch.

they’re soft. really really really soft.

(Sidenote: the male that was attempting to mount a female already with joey did not appreciate me offering his intended a good scratch)

push off, yank

At one point I spent ten minutes with a rock wallaby which really seemed to appreciate my pets. (The rock wallabies were in their own sealed enclosure with holes in the fence just large enough to stick a hand through.

The animals that were most fascinating to feed were the birds and other critters mostly ignored by patrons.  The park housed two emus in an enclosure with several red kangaroos who, like the wallabies, were more interested in sunning than begging. The emus on the other hand wanted food BADLY. The problem was that most people are somewhat intimidated by a five foot tall bird, and while they all wanted their pictures taken with one, they were wary of feeding them. Let’s just say I made two very good friends who didn’t mind me stroking their necks or scratching their large feathered bodies.

kinda like cookie monster

The cassowaries were also interesting to feed. I was quite timid at first, having heard much of how dangerous they are, but the thing about metal fences is they can’t kick you through them, and they loved being fed bits of cone through the fence.

We know we kick people to death, but really we just want some ice cream cone…

The park also contains several hundred parrots, cockatoos, cockatiels, parakeets, lorikeets, and on and on. It was interesting to try feeding different species and different birds within a species bits of food pellet and cone. Some were much more interested than others, some were much more dextrous than others, and some were much more intelligent than others. The red tailed black cockatoos were the most interesting and varied in how they ate the bits of cone. Some would bite with their beak and lets most of it drop to the ground, most would grasp it with one foot while taking small bites with their beaks, but one, oh, one! This cockatoo at first seemed to be having trouble eating the cone at all, as it took two pieces from my fingers and dropped them to the ground. But after I stopped giving it pieces, it worked its way to the ground by beak and claw, whereupon it picked a piece of cone up and walked over to its pool of water. It dunked the cone in the water and then ate small bites. Sometimes it would re-dunk a piece if it wasn’t wet enough. It repeated the process with each piece of cone I gave it. After this discovery I gave pieces of cone to every ret tailed black cockatoo I could find, but none used this particular method of consumption. Cool bird.

There was also another red tailed black cockatoo that I’m fairly convinced fell deeply in love with Ben, but I’ll let him tell that story.

The Tawny Frogmouth is an amazing and hilarious looking bird that fluffs its feathers such that it looks like a really cranky peace of rock.  I kind of want one.

Kookaburras look like large fluffy kingfishers and cackle like packs of orangutans. Truly.

After four hours of watching, peering, feeding, petting, scratching, feeling, and walking, we were picked up, packed partly catatonic into the car, transported home whereupon we left for dinner at a “rather nice pub” called the Windsor. Worry not, there were no zombies.

It was a WEIRD pub experience. Nice atmosphere, but very odd service. You sat yourself, got your own menus, went up to the register to order, picked up your own food when your buzzer went off, and bought your drinks at the bar. The food was tasty but unremarkable. Lots of meat. I asked Viive if there were usually vegetarian options at restaurants and she said, yeah, I mean, there are salads. Oh well. We might be eating more meat here when we go out.

After returning home and fighting to stay awake during the car ride we lay down in our cold room under lovely covers on a mattress with a heating pad under the sheet. And this was not just ANY heating pad, this is a SPLIT SIDE heating pad! I cranked my side up to a three, Ben left his side off, and we slept like the dead from 8pm-7am.

This is how we felt.

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Summary: after traveling for 27 hours, young couple reaches new country, pets animals, and manages to stay awake until a somewhat reasonable hour. Go young couple!

Plus, we got to see this from the air.