Anita’s Blog — There’s Always Something

Discovering a pile of scat is like being visited by something in secret, and just to prove it came and went unnoticed, it leaves a trace of itself for you to find.

I found a most unusual splotch on the driveway one morning that didn’t relate to anything I recalled ever having seen. It was either scat or up-chuck, but it had form. I photographed it and uploaded it to iNaturalist.org.

The substance covered a larger-than-normal area of yard-scat finds — larger than the size of my out-stretched hand.

iNaturalist gave a list of choices. I chose Armadillo, as I know we have one in residence. The observation reached Research Grade within a couple of days.

Not to be odd, but if you compare the scat to the shell of a nine-banded armadillo, remarkably, there’s a similarity — a clue for your future finds: if the scat has bands like an armadillo shell, chances are its armadillo scat. Here, you decide:

The fall Parks and Wildlife Department, Texas Pollinator BioBlitz 2020, was deemed a great success, even if my insect-eating armadillo scat might not have been counted. The challenge included pollinators, nectar-producing plants and pollinated food crops.

I uploaded the scat photo anyway, after all, the end result — no pun intended — is a possible fate of certain pollinators, the armadillo diet includes insects, beetles, grubs, worms and other invertebrates.

I always enjoy a bioblitz. They offer an opportunity to focus, which in turn provides opportunities to discover intricate and intimate bits of the interesting nature that lives around and amongst us.

Results from the October 2 – 18 bioblitz can be viewed here: https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/TXPWD/bulletins/2aa1bb9

Following are some of my fun finds this year. I’ve had a banner year for Texas spiny lizards. The young ones seem to be more curious. Lizards eat insects and, sadly, butterflies.

Other notable finds this fall included — after a noticeable three-year absence — a Mexican bluewing butterfly which flashed across my vision and zipped off into the boughs of a mesquite, out of sight and certainly out of reach of the phone camera.

One spent the night in the garage where I found it dozing the next morning — flat out on a white plastic lid of a spray can of window cleaner.

I was confident it would be back, and it has been, but only to tease. This dark purple/blue, white-spotted wonder is considered a periodical stray in the lower Rio Grande Valley.

Jeffrey Glassberg’s “A Swift Guide to Butterflies of North America,” notes that Mexican bluewings are not attracted to flowers. Other references state that their adult food is rotting fruit. I’ve placed a few plantain fruits on a mesquite trunk in the hopes of enticing the Mexican bluewing to land for a photo op.

I interrupted its sleep on another morning outing. It was hidden in the depths of a bamboo palm. It flittered away before I could get an open wing photo. Butterfly books describe the folded wings as looking like tree bark.

The only known larval host in the U.S. is Vasey’s Adelia, Adelia vaseyi (Euphorbiaceae); in the tropics, Mexican bluewings feed on plants in the genus Dalechampia. The caterpillar is smooth and green. It has rows of spiky tufts and evenly spaced yellow spots.

Another thrill was two-fold. I was happy to see the native plant frostweed, Verbesina virginica, was pretty high on the Most Observations list at number eight with 248 observations throughout Texas. I love this plant. It’s touted to be a grand magnet for butterflies. I’ve had stands of frostweed in several places in our yard for about four years — the blooms, untouched by butterflies. This year was different — it was coveted by butterflies and other insects. Not only that, they brought the return of the beautiful sickle-winged skipper butterflies that I’ve missed for a couple of years.

Southern Texas is the top of the range for these velvety butterflies. The male sickle-winged skipper is so chocolatey-brown as to have a blue-purple hue in the sunlight. The female is lighter than the male.

A new-to-my-yard butterfly was the tiny silver-banded hairstreak that’s been spending several weeks around the blooming common balloon vine, Cardiospermum halicacabum — its host plant, as a matter of fact. I’ll be searching for caterpillars.

Still another surprise happened the other day — not in time to use in the pollinator project. The surprise was my fault for having assumed that the baby rats the cats bring in are just that — baby rats.

As a lark, I snapped a shot of what I call, cat gumdrops, just to see what kind of rat these babies grow up to be. According to iNaturalist, it’s not a baby, but full grown, and unlike rats, it’s not a rodent at all, but considered an insectivore — it’s a Northern American least shrew. They eat insects and other small invertebrates like caterpillars, beetle larvae, earthworms, centipedes, slugs and sow bugs. Its behavior is interesting — check it out at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_least_shrew

As a matter of interest, I don’t often upload photos of plants and critters that I’ve covered during a bioblitz. I learned something this week that will change my thinking in that regard. John Brush, Urban Ecologist at McAllen’s Quinta Mazatlán World Birding Center and avid advocate and contributor to www.iNaturalist.org, advises that it is perfectly acceptable by iNaturalist standards to add observations of the same areas after a city nature challenge or bioblitz.

“An observation represents an occurrence of an individual species in space AND time, meaning that adding an observation of a plant, and then going back and adding another observation of the plant when it later blooms, is absolutely valid and valuable,” Brush said.

In regard to that, my contributions of the new-to-my-yard silver-banded hairstreak, and the reoccurrence of the Mexican bluewing and sickle-winged skippers to the property are important as they establish a different flavor to the local habitat during different years and different times during the year.

Tell us about your interesting finds lately or favorites from the fall pollinator bioblitz.