So, on Monday, June 3, 2019, I was just coming out of Swift’s Hardware downtown when I heard a duck quacking loudly somewhere nearby. So I looked around, and across the street I saw the two people who had come out of the hardware store just before me, watching a female mallard duck standing there making a fuss. So I crossed the street to see what was going on. By the time I got across the road, the reason for her fussing had appeared: her ducklings had caught up with her.
When I spotted this moth on the wall of the building I work in on May 24, 2019, I unfortunately only had my cellphone camera available. And since it was about the size of my thumbnail, the pictures didn’t come out quite as sharp as I would have liked. But anyway, here it is:
While I was pushing my bike up the hill on May 13, 2019, I almost stepped on this good sized black beetle. So I popped him in a plastic box and brought him home for pictures.
He was kind of a handsome beetle, black with brassy iridescent highlights, and large, glossy mandibles.
Sandy and I were walking in the pine woods behind the house on May 17, 2019 when we saw a number of these kind of lumpy, fungal masses:
They were pretty big and substantial, as you can see comparing this one to Sandy’s hand.
Here is one of the reasons why I haven’t been posting bug or plant pictures lately. As of May 1, 2019[1], it looked like this outside:
While that melted within a couple of days, it never really got warm. And as of today, (May 9), it looks like this:
Ok, I just got back from snowshoeing in the woods today (April 7, 2019). The snow is still pretty deep [1], so it will be a while before I get much in the way of new critters or plants to photograph. But, the upper layer of snow has melted away to expose what is underneath. And much of what is underneath, is animal droppings.
These, for example, appear to be from a grouse.
On December 4, 2018, Dale took us to the Zuhl Museum at New Mexico State University. The Zuhls were dealers in mineral specimens, particularly petrified wood and other fossils, and they donated their extensive collection to NMSU in 2003.
The first thing you see at the museum is this giant petrified sequoia log outside the front entrance. Petrified wood figures heavily throughout the whole museum.
The Organ Pipe Mountains are just outside of Las Cruces, and Dale took us up there on December 2, 2018.
We didn’t get up into the mountains proper, but we did spend some time hiking around in the foothills. While doing this, we found this good-sized spider (her legspan was probably about the diameter of a quarter):
The previous two postings were creatures that we found on December 4, 2018 on our way hiking to and from the Prehistoric Trackways National Monument. So, today, let’s have a look at what we found when we actually got there.
This entire part of New Mexico was evidently a section of ocean floor that, during the Permian period, was gradually elevated to a shallow, swampy sea that was ultimately cut off from the ocean. It then dried up to form the local evaporite deposits during the Triassic period. As we hiked up the dry streambed to get to the trackways site, we were starting in older seabottom sediments, with characteristic oceanic fossils like these Brachiopod shells (not really clams, but similar),
While heading up the Permian Trackway on December 4, 2018, there were a few interesting creatures that I only managed to get single good shots of. The best one was probably this Cricket Hunter wasp, with the paralyzed cricket that it had just caught and was carrying home to lay eggs on:
