Rattlesnakes and Jewel Bugs

Blackfoot Daisy (Melampodium leucantham)

The Silver Creek area of Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge

So, what makes a desert? Lack of water, right? But why exactly do deserts lack water? There are a few possible explanations. Firstly, the simple fact of being far from the ocean, which is where most of the world’s atmospheric moisture originates, can cause aridity. As humid air moves inland, precipitation occurs, and the further inland that air goes, and the more precipitation events that stem from it, the less available moisture there is for those inland, landlocked areas.

Apache Plume (Fallugia paradoxa), with its feathery styles swaying like lavender tinsel in the breeze

Another cause of desertification (which can result in deserts actually being on the coast, right next to the ocean) can be the presence of cold water just offshore. This is explained by the phenomena of condensation and evaporation, and can be attributed simplistically to the notion that warm air can hold more moisture than cold air (holding isn’t actually the correct way to describe this, though it is commonly stated as such; it really has to do with temperature affecting the speed of the water molecules and influencing their tendency toward a gaseous or liquid state; see http://www.usatoday.com/weather/tg/wevapcon/wevapcon.htm ). Water evaporates in the middle of the ocean, raising the moisture content of the air above it. As this humid, warm air moves toward land, it passes over the relatively cold coastal seas, where much of it condenses as rain or fog. By the time this air mass makes land, it has lost much of its original moisture, and as it warms over land and its relative humidity decreases even further (because warm air “holds” more water), the chance of precipitation is slim, and voila, you’ve got an arid coastline.

The Sierra Ponce cliffs rising 1,500 feet above the Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park

 Another “desert cause” involving condensation is the rain shadow effect, which you’ve probably heard of (of course, you could have very well heard of, and understood better than I, all of these mechanisms I’ve so long-windedly described to you). As warm, humid air moves inland from the ocean, it hits a mountain range, forcing it to rise, cool, and ultimately dispend much of its moisture as precipitation along the range’s sea-side slopes. Once our air mass clears the peaks and begins to descend, it warms, lowering its relative humidity (as in the previous example) and making for little chance of rain in the forecast for whatever unfortunate souls reside inland. It is this mechanism which causes the aridity of the Chihuahuan Desert, which is sandwiched between the Sierra Madre Oriental range to the east (blocking air from the Gulf of Mexico) and the Sierra Madre Occidental range to the west (blocking air from the Pacific).

Evapotranspiration rates are also very important in determining desert aridity, but I won’t go into that. No, really, please, you don’t have to thank me. Basically, it gauges the water lost from a landscape based on a combination of surface evaporation and plant transpiration. As you could probably guess, these rates are VERY HIGH IN DESERTS.

In mid-September we traveled to the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, about three hours north of Las Cruces, where we were put up in very posh, new research housing. Compared to our usual accommodations of rocky desert ground, with lechuguilla, prickly pear and dog cholla threatening impalement on all sides, this was a real treat, indeed! (To be completely honest, I do sleep better outside, but having a kitchen and shower was extremely convenient.)

Greeting us when we first arrived at Sevilleta, this Blister Beetle (Genus Cysteodemus) is a true desert jewel

The Juniper grasslands of Sevilleta underneath the dramatic cover of a building thunderstorm

One Sevilleta spring emerged in this spectacular limestone canyon

The Refuge system was started by Theodore Roosevelt in 1903 and is tasked with protecting the nation’s fish, wildlife and plants. As told to me by a Refuge employee: whereas the National Parks system is, “people and recreation first, natural resources second,” a Refuge’s mission is, “natural resources first, people second.” Of course, with the ever needling fingers of politics and bureaucracy this goal is not always realized, but the principle of the idea is a good one and, I like to believe, often realized. Many Refuges are open to limited recreation such as hiking, hunting and fishing, but Sevilleta is maintained mainly as a research and conservation reserve, with little public access. Thus, it was especially exciting to visit!

Bordered Plant Bug nymphs (Largus sp.) feeding on Horsetail Milkweed (Asclepias subverticillata)

A Giant Whipscorpion (Mastigoproctus giganteus), about 7 inches in length and incredibly creepy

While scoping out a spring at Sevilleta, I crouched down to pass under a dead tree limb and almost stepped on the rattle of my first rattlesnake! 

I froze (well, I did have to get a picture...), he (she?) turned to look at me for what seemed like about 60 seconds but was probably 5, and then slithered under an evergreen sumac. Later I identified it as a Mojave Rattlesnake (Crotalus scutulatus), which has the distinction of being one the most venomous snakes in the New World. While most rattlesnakes carry a hemotoxic (tissue-destroying) venom, one variety of Mojave possesses a strong neurotoxic venom that can cause severe paralysis and nervous system damage. I'm not sure if this individual happened to be of that variety, and I'm glad I didn't find out. I carefully sidestepped the sumac bush and continued along the brook, and promptly came across my second rattlesnake 10 feet downstream! 

This one was completely unperturbed by our sampling and did not move a centimeter for the entire duration of our workday.

The next tour took me once again to Big Bend National Park, where I got my first taste of the Chisos Mountains.

Sun rising over the Chisos

Scarlet Bouvardia (Bouvardia ternifolia) paints brilliant splashes of red along the paths of the Chisos, and is a hummingbird favorite

Trans-Pecos Spiderwort (Tradescantia brevifolia). I did not place the feather there.

A Christmas Tree cholla (Cylindropuntia sp.) in bloom

Cacti such as the cholla above possess a unique metabolic pathway called Crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) that is specially adapted for arid climates. Here's how it works: plants have small openings / pores in their leaves called stomata (singular: stoma), which they open and close as needed to assimilate and release gases like carbon dioxide. However, when a plant opens its stomata to suck in some CO2, it loses water through transpiration. This is, of course, a problem in the desert, but CAM plants have a workaround. When water is scarce, they open their stomata only at night, when transpiration rates are much lower. But obviously, this means that no sunlight is available for photosynthesis. So what CAM plants do is to take the assimilated carbon dioxide and combine it with an enzyme called PEP carboxylase, forming malic acid. These four-carbon molecules are then stored in the plant's vacuoles (plant storage closets), which in succulent plants like cacti are especially large and able to dilute the potentially damaging accumulation of acids. The next day, with the stomata safely closed, the plant "disassembles" the four-carbon molecules back into their constituent parts and uses the resulting carbon dioxide to proceed with photosynthesis. 

Chocolate Scented Daisy (Berlandiera lyrata)

A Metallic Borer Beetle (Acmaeodera sp.). The "Jewel Beetles" of this family (Buprestidae) have been used historically in jewelry making and Victorian art. Thanks to the folks over at whatsthatbug.com for their help in identifying the insect species in this post.

Creosote Bush (Larrea tridentata) is a characteristic shurb of the Chihuahuan Desert and one of its most remarkably well-adapted species. Most plants cannot survive dehydration to less than 75 percent water content; Larrea can go below 50 percent. Like many other desert species, it has very small leaves that allow the plant to stay cooler (due to a smaller boundary layer) and reduce transpiration rates. The leaves are also covered with a waxy cuticle that protects against water loss, and are partially drought-deciduous, meaning that as summer approaches Larrea can drop some of its leaves if water resources are too scarce (less total leaf area = less water loss) . As you can see in the pictures above and below, it covers large expanses of desert, with the individual plants spaced apart so evenly it almost looks like they were planted. There are a few theories to explain this, one being that Larrea's incredible efficiency in water uptake simply prevents other seeds from germinating in the soil around it. The regular spacing could also be caused by allelopathy, or the plant's ability to restrict the growth of other organisms in the micro-environment immediately surrounding it through chemical means.

Next post will be mountainous -- up in the Chisos of Big Bend and the Mogollon Mountains of the Gila Wilderness.

cheers,

john

A Rich Sparseness

“Water, water, water…There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount, a perfect ratio of water to rock, of water to sand, insuring that wide, free, open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.”

- Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Going to the desert to study water might at first glance seem strange, but where else would this study be of more use? The springs strewn so sporadically across the “wasteland” of the Southwest are literal oases, hotspots of biodiversity in the desert landscape and home to many rare, endemic species. And as the dense human populations of the arid states grow ever denser, causing the water tables to drop lower and lower, the fate of these life-sustaining water sources is increasingly uncertain.

I made my way out to Las Cruces, NM in August to begin work for the Chihuahuan Desert Inventory and Monitoring program, a National Park Service Directive. The I&M program tracks the state of natural resources within the park system, initiated by an Inventory of these resources, and followed with regular Monitoring surveys continuing indefinitely. 

Hiking to a spring in Big Bend National Park.
Note the bright patch of green above the crew's heads. That's the spring.
(There's a smaller spring to the right.)

A variety of floral, faunal, climatic and geologic I&M surveys have been instituted, but ours is concerned with water sources (springs, wells, seeps, etc.) found in the Chihuahuan Desert. Still in the initial inventory phase, we are preparing a database of information to guide future monitoring programs by collecting vegetation, aquatic macroinvertebrate and general habitat data.

For the purposes of the program, the Park Service has divided the park system into 32 ecoregional networks (see map above). The Chihuahuan Desert Network is composed of seven parks, including Carlsbad Caverns, Guadalupe Mountains, and Big Bend National Parks. (The network has also been contracted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to conduct sampling in some National Wildlife Refuges in the Southwest, so we get to go to those, too!)

Not all of the springs are remote -- one of our springs in the San Andres NWR used to be quite the popular picnic area back in the '40s and '50s. A big draw was surely the spring-fed swimming pool shown above, which was built by the CCC. 

The Chihuahuan Desert

The most biologically diverse desert in the Western Hemisphere and the largest in North America, the Chihuahuan Desert ecoregion is over 270,000 square miles and straddles the border between the United States and Mexico, reaching from just south of Albuquerque to just north of Mexico City. The multitude of habitats occurring within its extent – high elevation oak-pinyon-juniper woodlands, mid-elevation grasslands, low desert scrub, the gypsum dunes of White Sands National Monument— contributes to its startling diversity and makes it a veritable playground for the wandering amateur botanist.

A Fishhook Cactus erupting into spectacular bloom

Considered a “high desert,” much of the Chihuahuan lies above 4,000 feet, though it ranges from 1,000-10,000 feet across the whole expanse of the region. This high elevation (relative to other deserts like the Sonoran) means that winter temperatures drop below freezing fairly often, but trust me, the summers are still HOT, especially at low elevations. In fact, many of the springs we’re sampling now were not done during the past field season (spring and summer) because temperatures in Big Bend were simply too high to send crews out in.

Our camp at Big Bend was near the white house in the center of the frame. Note the large green patch on the right. Yep, that's a spring. They're quite easy to spot in the desert, if they're not dry (which many of them are).

My first few days of real work were in the beautiful San Andres National Wildlife Refuge. Due to the Refuge's location adjacent to the White Sands Missile Range (which houses, among other top-secret sorts of things, a NASA Test Facility), we had to be escorted to our sites and one day even acquired security clearance badges. (I'm pretty sure some of those jack rabbits were robots, too.) But any hassle was quickly forgotten once I got to my first desert spring. After a long, incredibly bumpy ride amid miles of desert scrub, a short hike brought us to a small brook where Flame Skimmers darted playfully among us, and cattails stood a stoic guard on their swampy feet. 

Flame Skimmer (Libellula saturata)

Golden Spur Columbine (Aquilegia chrysantha)

Once us newcomers got familiar with the protocol, and had learned enough of these new plants to get by, it was off to the Guadalupe Mountains to finish up training week. You might not think that the desert could offer that much of a botanical challenge, but I was learning new plants (and still am) at a rate that only heat, spines and job security could dictate.

Skyrocket, Scarlet Gila (Ipomopsis aggregata)
in the Gila Wilderness

I don't get creeped out by too many insects, but this centipede, at about 7 inches long, made me look around extra carefully before I sat down to eat lunch that day. It's a Scolopendra,
I think the species is polymorpha

This job has taken me to places few ever visit (or are even allowed to, in the case of the Wildlife Refuges), and has really given me a sense of the importance of these springs in a desert ecosystem. And aside from their integral ecological role, many of them are incredibly beautiful.

Wandering in the heat
One pace only gets you so far
And nowhere, really

Ashes of the mountains
His discarded progeny
Litter the ground and make violent attempts
To enter eye and mouth

A break in the monotone frame
A flash of green, too verdant to comprehend
And the ground grows softer
The spines sparser
The trickle of life sounding so sweetly on the ear
Amazed to see a shadow longer than your own

Sarcostemma sp., a twining member of the Milkweed family

My first real tour was in Big Bend National Park, in Texas. There is really no other adjective that could rightly be a part of that name. It is, first of all, literally massive. Over 800,000 acres. But beyond this quantitative measure, Big Bend is simply expansive, grand in every sense of the word. A harsh place to live, yes, where summer temperatures at low elevations are regularly over 100° F and water is scarce. But climb atop a ridge or mesa, or better yet, hike into the Chisos Mountains, and the vista painted before you is unequaled in splendor—beige plains stretching into the distance, interrupted by rocky arms and hands reaching for the heavens; red canyons carved into the bedrock, worn smooth by a million years of obstinate water; the 1500-foot Sierra Ponce cliffs that lie on the parks southern border, at whose feet meanders the Rio Grande, marking the northern edge of Mexico. (I know, you're saying, "Well where's the picture?" I have yet to capture a satisfactory shot that really would show you what I mean...still trying, though.)

Looking down on a particularly massive spring system in Big Bend. (Those are very large trees, it's just that I'm very high up.) You can see evidence of drying in the patch of dead cottonwoods downstream.

Not all of the water sources we inventory are natural. A good number of them are man-made or have had their flow altered by ranchers and other folk trying to make a living in the desert. We come across many windmill-powered wells like this one, with large holding tanks at their bases. Studies have shown that these anthropogenic repositories of water are very important to wildlife.

At this old (and dry) well site, a bereaved ranch hand painted his steed's epitaph on the side of this holding tank in 1950.

Next time we’ll head to the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, explore what exactly makes a desert a desert, and look at some of the remarkable adaptations desert organisms have that allow them to persist in such a harsh landscape.

A horny toad spotted in the Gila Wilderness

Cheers,

john

The Southern Appalachians

Common Milkweed, Asclepias syriaca, is at first glance merely another pretty roadside wildflower making those long drives a bit more bearable. Growing up to six feet tall, it stands above the jewelweed and Monarda, showing off its spherical umbels of pink-purple blooms as if they were tiny planets orbiting the stem. It even emits a pleasant fragrance, beckoning one to bend and take in its perfume. It is truly one of our most captivating native wildflowers, one of the many Asclepias plants found along the East Coast.

But this showy, seemingly benign plant is in fact quite deadly, with an arsenal full of anti-herbivory weaponry. Firstly, the milky white sap (from which the plant derives its name) is full of glycosides, compounds which are poisonous to many mammals and herbivorous insects, thus deterring them from feeding on the plant. But a few select species have played the “arms race” game with A. syriaca, and thus have evolved to specialize on these plants without experiencing the usual negative side effects. Monarch butterflies, for instance, feed exclusively on plants in the genus Asclepias while in their larval form. As a result of the Milkweed toxins accumulating in the caterpillars, adult Monarch butterflies are poisonous to predators (expect for a few specialists). The bright coloration of Monarchs is thought to serve as an “announcement” of their unpalatability. In addition to its toxicity, the sap of Milkweed contains latex, which functions as a “glue” that traps small insects piercing the stem with their feet or mouthparts, eventually killing them if they cannot pull themselves free. (Both the U.S. and Germany attempted to harvest Asclepias’ latex during World War II as a domestic rubber source, but apparently without much success.)

Asclepias flowers hide yet another deadly secret. All plants in this genus have an unusual method of pollination: unlike the majority of Angiosperms, which spread their pollen via “dust-like” grains released/carried from anthers, milkweed pollen is contained in “sacs” called pollinia, within a structure called a pollinarium, which is contained behind two modified anthers.

Between the two white petals, the two narrow, white modified anthers (here oriented horizontally) create the slit which traps insects' legs to facilitate pollen transfer. At the top of the slit is the pollinarium gland, and inside reside the pollinia.

When an insect visits the flower to obtain its nectar, a leg may become caught between the two modified anthers, trapping the insect at the bloom with the pollinarium gland attached to its leg. If the insect is strong enough, it will pull the pollinarium from the flower, and upon visiting another Asclepias bloom the structure will be “received” by a special receptor on the flower’s stigma. But many smaller insects cannot pull free. It is thought that this adaptation of Asclepias serves to attract spiders and other predatory insects to the plant, thus deterring damaging, herbivorous insects from visiting the foliage. In the video below, you will see an insect struggling to free itself from an A. syriaca bloom in Buladean, NC.

Nature, in the midst of all her beauty, hides many processes that would pass unnoticed without closer inspection, many of which may at first seem “cruel” or unsavory to those who wish to see the natural world as a peaceful, bucolic scene of wild harmony. But it is not our place to judge the “deviousness” of a flower or the “wickedness” of a spider; we can only observe these as yet another wonder oiling the gears of this great Earthly machine. In this blog I hope to introduce you to some of these wonders (or remind you of them), because even though the beauty of a flower upon first sight will never be bested, once we understand the processes affecting and being affected by this plant, and get a sense of the role it plays in its environmental context, we will have an appreciation that extends to a different, perhaps more meaningful or complex level. And it is with this appreciation and knowledge that we might be able to heal some of the damage that has been done, and hopefully foresee effects of future enterprises before it’s too late.

But a disclaimer: there will still be plenty of pictures simply showcasing pretty flowers.

Catesby's Trillium; Trillium catesbaei

The rare Large Purple Fringed Orchid; Platanthera grandiflora

Here you can see the devastating effect the hemlock woolly adelgid has had on Eastern Hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis) throughout the Appalachians; only the gray skeletons of these trees remain. This small, sap-sucking bug was accidentally introduced from East Asia during the 1920's and has killed massive numbers of hemlocks all along the East Coast. The dense evergreen foliage of these trees provide shelter for many species, and their year-round shading of mountain streams maintains the cool water temperatures that trout require. Efforts are underway to stem the tide of this infestation, but pesticide applications are expensive, and biological controls are slow to take hold and have yet to be proven effective at large scales.

Since mid-May I have been working as a field technician in the Southern Appalachians, employed by Dr. Allen Hurlbert at UNC-Chapel Hill. His study is looking at bird communities at sites along a latitudinal gradient, investigating how insect resources and vegetation structure affect species richness and composition. It has long been known that species diversity is spread unevenly along the Earth’s latitudinal gradient, with both diversity and richness generally increasing as one moves from the poles toward the equator. Many theories have been proposed as to why this might be (energy availability, climate harshness, evolutionary rates, etc.), but there is as yet no consensus. Dr. Hurlbert is looking at this phenomenon at a regional scale and hopes to find out whether the amount/diversity of insect food resources and the structure and diversity of vegetation is affecting bird community composition.

Pink Lady's Slipper; Cypripedium acaule

This lovely native orchid does not produce nectar to entice pollinators, but rather lures bees and other insects in with a strong perfume and showy blooms. The oddly shaped flower has a large tapered hole in its pink pouch, through which the pollinator enters, only to find it cannot exit through the same fissure. In order to escape, they must squeeze through a small hole at the base of the flower, and in doing so first brush against the stigma (built like a comb to remove pollen in case the insect has visited another Slipper) and then against a sticky mass of pollen on the flower's anther. Duped, they exit the flower bearing a burden but no reward. The unusual fertilization strategy of this plant results in relatively low pollination rates, with fewer than 5 percent of flowers maturing fruit. This, coupled with very exacting environmental requirements, make Lady's Slippers fairly rare. (Though admittedly beautiful, they almost never survive transplanting, so please do not attempt it.)

The even more elusive Large Yellow Lady's Slipper; Cypripedium pubescens. This bloom was past its prime, but still very exciting to spot!

Our sites are in Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. Our “home base” is in the quaint, if touristy town of Highlands, NC, at the Highlands Biological Station. As we are trying to describe the insect resources of each site during different periods of the summer (since there can be “pulses” in food availability, sampling only once would not give an accurate picture of the resources available), the five other crew members and I move around very frequently and are never in one place for more than two nights. In Highlands and our Smoky Mountain sites we have actual beds, but otherwise we are camping.

Making supper in Virginia

My first Walking Stick Insect! Order Phasmatodea

A "true bug," Order Hemiptera

Fly Poison; Amianthium muscitoxicum. Containing toxic alkaloids, this plant's bulbs can be crushed and mixed with honey or molasses to attract and kill houseflies. Following pollination, the flowers turn green, as seen on the lower, older flowers in this photo.

Until two weeks ago our efforts were focused on arthropod (insect) sampling and bird counts (done by the bird folks, Katie and Chuck), and now we have started classifying vegetation. Since the vegetation at these sites is changing at a much slower pace than the insect availability, our schedule has calmed down a bit lately, as we only have to visit each site once to describe the forest structure and composition.

Pushing through the dirt like nodding zombies, Indian Pipe (Monotropa uniflora) is always an interesting find. This epiparasitic plant contains no chlorophyll and does not photosynthesize, but rather leeches nutrients from a nearby green, photosynthesizing plant via a "bridge" of mycorrhizal fungi.

The only other plant in the genus Monotropa, Pinesap (M. hypopitys) obtains nutrients by the same method as Indian Pipe, via a mycorrhizal bridge.

Bear Corn (Conopholis americana) is specialized parasitic plant, obtaining nutrients solely from oak trees. It is a favorite food of bears.

If I’ve learned one thing about working on bird projects, it’s that you have to wake up very early. We’re finished with bird counts now, but for most of the summer we needed to arrive at our sites at 6:30, as the birds are most active (an therefore easiest to hear and see) just after sunrise. Depending on where our camp was, this meant waking up anywhere from 3:30 a.m. to 5 a.m. It took some getting used to, but seeing the sun rise over the Great Smoky Mountains is definitely worth it.

The National Park Service has begun to reintroduce elk into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park; here you see a female spotted near the Blue Ridge Parkway (that's a radio collar around her neck). Once native to the region but driven to extirpation by over-hunting and habitat loss, the last North Carolina elk was thought to be killed in the late 1700s. (Read more about the NPS project here: http://www.nps.gov/grsm/naturescience/elk.htm)

Below is a more technical description of our sampling protocol. I realize it may be a bit dry for some, so consider yourself forewarned


Our sites were split into three parallel transects, spaced 250 meters apart, with six sampling stations arranged along each transect. Arthropod sampling consisted of litter, bark, leaf and branch surveys. For litter and bark, we surveyed about a half square meter of ground/bark for five minutes, recording the number of insects we saw and which order they belonged to. (Due to the incredible diversity of North American insects, we only identified these to order and not species.) For leaves, we simply surveyed 50 leaves of any shrub-height plant occurring at the sampling station. Low and high branches were surveyed by capturing a 3-4 foot section of branch in a plastic garbage bag, then at the end of the day we went through the bags, weighing leaf/woody mass and recording any insects we found.

A large millipede (Order Diplopoda), about 9cm long.

One of my leaf surveys included this mass of tiny Arachnids.

Can you spot the Lepidoptera hidden on this tree bark? 

In vegetation surveys we’re interested in recording all woody species occurring at the site, and also getting a sense of the structure of the vegetation – i.e., how much vegetation is at each forest level, from canopy down to shrub, and what species each layer consists of. It has been shown that the structure of forests, sometimes even more than the species comprising them, is very important for birds. In order to get a picture of the structure of a site, we record vegetation heights at 8 random points along 4 transects, at six different stations within the site.

Fire Pink; Silene virginica

Looking down at Chuck from near the top of a hemlock. Sometimes you just gotta climb a tree.

Crimson Bee Balm; Monarda didyma

We also perform a relevé at each station, which is a commonly used method for getting a quick, overall view of a plot’s vegetation; maximum tree height and diameter, canopy openings, elevation, species composition at each vegetation level, and herbaceous cover are a few of the characteristics we record.

Mountain Wood Sorrel; Oxalis montana

Chuck and Annemarie working in a Rhododendron thicket

One of the most amazing (and largest) moths I've ever seen, the Tulip Tree Silkmoth (Callosamia angulifera)

It’s all very interesting stuff, and I’ve learned to identify more plants and insects in six weeks than I have during the rest of my 23 years. The biological diversity of this part of the country is astounding, mostly due to the age of the Appalachians and their topographic diversity. It is the oldest mountain chain in North America and supports communities of flora and fauna at a spectrum of elevations, from Spruce-Fir forests down to Chestnut Oak communities. These factors make the Southern Appalachians one of the most botanically diverse regions in the temperate zone, with more than 2000 species of vascular plants. It is also a hotspot for salamander diversity and hosts a startling number of other species. I honestly see a new plant every day I’m in the field.

Lesser Daisy Fleabane (Erigeron strigosus) being visited by what I think is an Orchard Bee

Pygmy Salamander; Desmognathus wrighti. This is an adult!

Our first Black Bear of the season

The dainty Mountain Saxifrage, Saxifrage michauxii

The flower racemes of Galax urceolata

Neighbor Moth; Haploa contigua

Jack-O-Lantern Mushroom; Omphalotus illudens

Tiny fungi; note acorn for scale

You never know where you will see new species. The two moths and dobsonfly below were photographed at a Shell gas station outside of Marion, VA.

Regal Moth; Citheronia regalis

Pandora Sphinx Moth; Eumorpha pandorus

Male Eastern Dobsonfly; Corydalus cornutus. Quite the scary looking insect. There were dozens of these on the outside wall of the gas station.

Rosebay (Rhododendron maximum) is often an obstacle during our workdays, forming dense thickets that are almost impassable. But its blooms make it a little more bearable. "Rhodo hells" became more widespread in the Southern Appalachians following the Chestnut blight (an Asian fungus accidentally introduced in 1904) which killed many American Chestnuts (Castanea dentata), opening up large swaths of forest for Rosebay to colonize.

I have no idea what species this is, but it would take a very brave bird to try and eat this caterpillar.

I recently took a day hike on the Bartram Trail, just outside of Highlands. Named for William Bartram, a Philidelphian naturalist who traveled the Southeast during the 1770s, it runs about 100 miles through NC, but also winds through South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee, following (approximately) Bartram's journey from March 1773 to January 1777. The fungi on my trek were incredible; you can see some of them below. (Unfortunately, they aren't identified; I'm not too good with my mushrooms yet.)

Well, this has been a very long post; I apologize for my procrastination. I'll leave you with some photos of Flame Azaleas (Rhododendron calendulaceum). Their range of color is spectacular; it seems almost unnatural to come across one of these in the middle of the forest.

Til next time (which will be from the Chihuahuan Desert in New Mexico),

john