Our nature journaling trip to Santa Cruz Island was cancelled by the transportation company due to strong winds. Instead, we climbed the Sulphur Mountain Road Trail and journaled frogs, jumping spiders, mutant acorns, wood rat nests, and more. I saw my first northern harrier! What a lovely day with kindred spirits.
Found this chewed fungus in the middle of a track at the Park; left by whom, I wonder? I think it’s an earth ball, Scleroderma verrucosum, but I am no mycologist.
Large milkweed bugs are seed-feeders; their main diet is, not surprisingly, milkweed seeds. So I’m not sure what this lady was doing on the sweet potato vine.
The cabbage whites (Pieris rapae) are all over my brassicas, of course, but I’m also seeing them in the Park and on ornamentals in the neighbourhood. They seem to especially like purple lantana flowers. Do they also lay their eggs on the plant? Do their larvae eat the leaves, as they do my kale?
On the subject of lantana, it’s highly invasive where I‘m from. It covers an estimated four million hectares in eastern Australia, often to the exclusion of wildlife, people and livestock. So it’s taken me a long while to get used to seeing it as a cultivated garden plant here in Southern California.
Eat up, cabbage whites—lantana not kale!
The papalo I planted two months ago has grown to about half a metre tall, and is flowering. It’s an annual, so I’d better eat more of it before it dies!
Nature journaling very tiny things, with the help of a microscope. I was interrupted by the grosbeak strike, so got no further with this page.
White-breasted nuthatches (Sitta carolinensis) eat insects and large, meaty seeds. They get their common name from their habit of jamming nuts and acorns into tree bark, then whacking them with their sharp bill to “hatch” out the seed from the inside. They nest in holes in trees (either created naturally or excavated by woodpeckers) and are most commonly found in deciduous woodland. I was very happy to meet this one today.
It’s been a long while since we had a bird collision. The shelf outside the kitchen window, complete with tall plants, was doing the trick. But yesterday a black-headed grosbeak flew into a gap in the foliage and crashed. The saddest part was that we had only just seen her at the bird bath a day or two before — grosbeaks are not common visitors here. So freaking sad.
It’s fun to come across living organisms in unexpected places.
I looked up this beetle when I got home from our nature journal meetup. Turns out, this is one of the most widely distributed eucalyptus leaf beetles in Australia, but it was only discovered in the US (here in Los Angeles) a year ago.
Paropsis atomaria is considered a pest in eucalyptus plantations in Australia and is reported to cause defoliation, decreased growth and wood quality, and sometimes tree death. Both larvae and adults feed on the foliage. Development from egg to adult takes approximately one month and there are up to four generations per year
So this cute little beetle is quite the eucalyptus scourge. I bet there are many California native plant supporters who are not unhappy that it has reached our shores — eucalyptus species themselves being invasive around here.
hashiworks 