Black-and-yellow Argiope

Having just returned to Habitat Home from a long vacation in the Colorado Rockies, we found this spider waiting (for us?). It has established its web in amongst the flowers along the front entryway sidewalk where it is sunny but not too windy. We stood and watched for awhile as many innocent flying butterflies and insects fluttered by barely missing being trapped and eaten. These spiders will eat just about anything smaller than themselves. Spiders taste with organs on their feet. The end segment of the leg has several holes containing taste and smell organs. This spider is common in most of the United States but it is not common in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

Grayhead Coneflower

Ratibida pinnata, a native coneflower, is making quite a show this year. I scattered seeds several years ago. Those seeds germinated, grew and produced abundant seed. The self seeded plants are now growing in the meadow, the savanna and the prairie. It is growing tallest in the prairie where it competes with big blue stem and Culver's root. This plant at the top of the photo is reaching upwards to 6 feet. The plants in the drier savanna area are only about 4 to 5 feet tall. The flower heads start off green then brown and finally mature turning gray and the bright yellow petals fall off. Seeds are eaten by some birds, the flowers are a source of nectar and pollen for many insects and the leaves are browsed by some mammals.

Black Swallowtail

Is it my imagination, or that blogging makes me more attentive, or are there actually a lot more butterflies about this year? I'm thinking the latter. The cone flowers in the back have been loaded with multiple tiger swallowtails, monarchs, red admirals, and these guys, black swallowtails (Papilio polyxenes), essentially non-stop, dawn to dusk. It wasn't until I examined the image that this was actually a black swallowtail and not a spicebush swallowtail, as I had originally thought when observing them. But the two are very similar. They both mimic the pipevine swallowtail, whose larvae store aristolochic acid from their host plants and pass it along to the adult stage, making them toxic or at least bad tasting to predators. The mimics don't share this toxicity, but trick predators into avoiding them by their close resemblance to the pipevine swallowtail. Click on the image below to view it at full resolution, a quite different and closeup view of these beautiful insects.

Culver's Root

Veronicastrum vriginicum is an interesting native plant, especially now that it is blooming at Habitat Home. The plant shoots straight up, produces lovely whorled leaves and then flower spikes in great abundance. The abundance helps attract many insects; bees, butterflies, wasps, and bumble bees seem especially fond of the flowers. The common name comes from Dr. Culver, a physician in the eighteenth century who popularized the use of the plant for digestive problems and constipation. The plant grows in partial shade but it is also found amongst the tall grasses in our mesic prairie.

Phoebe Family Feeding

By Friday, the phoebe nest (see Phoebe Nest Compendium post) was on the ground and there were no birds to be seen or heard. I wished them well. Then this morning, out the bedroom window (no, I wasn't climbing trees, at least that early) I saw a phoebe-size bird fly off the deck and out onto a nearby tree branch. Sure enough, also on the branch was one of the little guys. The adult made a couple more quick visits over a ten minute period, and the camera managed to catch one of the transfers of an insect to the hungry kid. Guess the adults aren't finished caring for the family yet, and we're glad to have the flying "mosquito collectors" still in residence. I may tend to anthropomorphize everything, but doesn't Mom look a little haggard here, at least compared to four weeks ago?

Barn swallows

Habitat Home does not have a barn, but our neighbors do. We were over visiting our farm neighbors this morning and they showed us these wonderful nests that have been built in their barn. The barn swallows will return to the same nest site every year, repairing or rebuilding the nest. They eat mostly flies but they also eat beetles, bees and wasps. All taken on the wing. There were two other nests in the barn. The male and female were quite busy feeding this brood and did not seem to mind having visitors about.

Thanks Tom and Sue for sharing your barn and birds with us.

Phoebe Nest Compendium

For those of you who can remember (through the recent avalanche of flower and plant posts here) and may have been watching for a follow-up to the story on the pair of Eastern Phoebes who built a nest above my den window, I'll sneak a synopsis in here. The last post (Nesting Continues) showed that after a lengthy courtship, the phoebes finally got down to business at least three weeks after the nest was complete, and were rewarded by June 14 with four white eggs.  Almost two weeks later, on June 27, there were four hatchlings as seen here.

Last week, on Thursday (July 1), after watching from the den window as both parents worked very hard at gathering insects for the chicks, I made an attempt to photograph the parents doing a feeding. This is made difficult by the location of the nest immediately under the deck where there isn't much light. So I strung up a shop light with a 100w incandescent bulb, and although this allowed me to actually see a feeding, the results were not too clear photographically. You can see her pushing that insect way down the gullet of the chick. It was not clear from the photos that day how many chicks had survived.

After almost a week of procrastinating and getting involved in other projects, I realized it was now or never, so today I finally did the right thing, setting up my studio strobe light under the deck and running the sync cable down the hill to the camera.  This provided much more light and gave much better results.  Unfortunately, I could only see and photograph three young ones waiting for their mom or dad to show up with something to eat.  Apparently one of the chicks had not survived. But wow, they are big and continually move around in the nest, standing up on the edge, switching positions, etc.

I sat quite still, and finally the pair of adults returned and made several visits to the nest. I watched and took photos, but their repeated visits seemed to be very short (five to ten seconds) and did not seem to involve feeding.

Seen with their mom here, they sure look almost fully grown.  Perhaps she was trying to tell them something.  Although I'm sure she always looks like this when flying away from the nest, you want to imagine that she is trying to show them how to do it!

Anyway, I watched the adults make five visits to the nest, all apparently without food.  So I wrapped up the shoot, took the camera and tripod into the house and came back outside to take down the strobe and its tripod, which was on the patio about 8 feet from the nest.  There, under the tripod, was brother (or was it sister?) number four, apparently the adventurous one.  Or perhaps his brothers and sisters kicked him out?

He just sat there and looked at me while I collapsed the tripod.  When Joan came out a few minutes later to see him, we started to approach and the little guy took a couple hops away from the house and took to the air, in more or less a climbing flight, down the hill and about fifteen feet up into a tree.  Success!