Whatever Happened to the Sphenopsida?

This and the previous post are on Edition #13 of Berry-Go-Round, the plant carnival, hosted this month over at Watching the World Wake Up. Watcher has put on a great show, so go check out the rest!

Not long ago, I was shocked to discover that some of my old college pals had disappeared. Not just the Sphenopsida, but the Psilopsida were gone, and the Lycopsida had become virtual strangers. (If you’re not conversant with Old Style Plant Classification, you may want to check the review at the previous post. Also note: The Nostalgia Alert invoked in the previous post is extended in full force to this one.)

Way back in the Dawn of Time, between the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment, back when the atom had been split but not yet fractured, between the advent and the breakup of the Beatles, I wrote a college paper called A Description and Discussion of Early Vascular Land Plants. At the time, it seemed no one was quite sure what to do with these guys, but I fell in love with them. They were the psilophytes, and a more rowdy, diverse, and exciting bunch was hard to find in 1969. Young and blinded by infatuation, I failed to see the clues... they wouldn't stick around long.

Here's Psilophyton, the ringleader (aka type genus) of the group. Look at the dichotomous branching, the cute pairs of terminal sporangia... Psilophyton princeps here represents the genus described by Sir William Dawson in 1859, but not accepted at the time. From the Lower Devonian, it was among the earliest vascular land plants, and several species are now known. The spine-like emergences on the lower stem have no vascular tissue, but the stem has a small central stele. Where did Psilophyton go when the gang broke up?

Priscilla (the Phylogenist) did not spare my feelings for old friends. She said: "Nobody seems to have come up with a good term for whisk ferns + ophioglossid ferns, but the phylum Psilophyta is defunct now. Ditto several other plant phyla. Although whisk ferns certainly don’t look like they have macrophylls, their close cousins do, so their ancestors probably did. Both extant groups have reduced root systems, whisk ferns more drastically than ophioglossid ferns."

The whisk fern she's talking about is Psilotum, a living representative of the entire group these days. (Or, classification being what it is, perhaps not even related anymore to this ancestral group.) I'm still trying to figure out why whisk ferns (or Psilophyton) are linked with grapeferns (ophioglossid), or ferns for that matter. Is it the horizontal rhizome? The circinnately coiled tips?

Continued help from Priscilla: "Monilophytes refers to the fern clade – whisk ferns, horsetails, lepidosporangiate ferns. I’m feeling lazy, so here’s a link to a reasonable listing on Wikipedia." The horsetails and their relatives were once known as the Sphenopsida, so now we know what happened to them—they got absorbed by the Monilophytes. Elsewhere, they're known these days as Equisetopsida. [Or were, on December 7th when I first downloaded this tree; now the Equisetopsida are gone too—having been converted into the Polypodiopsida. Compare the cladogram in the previous post. Plus c'a change, eh?]

A couple of the boys turned up elsewhere; you'll be glad to know they've done well for themselves. One source tells me “The Asteroxylales were originally included under the Protolepidodendrales, but they are a much more primitive lineage and have been given their own taxon (of ordinal rank). They stand midway between the Zosterophyllopsida and the more developed lycophytes.”

Judging by name recognition, I conclude that my old friends Asteroxylon and Zosterophyllum have now found good homes hanging out in and around the Lycopsida. At least by the classification scheme below:

Class Lycopsida ("club-mosses") [this list from Palaeos]

• Order Drepanophycales (ancestral types)
• Order Protolepidodendrales
• Order Asteroxylales
• Order Lycopodiales (Club "mosses")
• Order Selaginellales (Spike "mosses")
• Order Lepidodendrales = Lepidocarpales (Scale trees)
• Order Miadesmiales
• Order Pleuromeiales (intermediate forms)
• Order Isoetales ("quillworts")

I can easily believe a lycopsid affiliation for Aster; you could almost lose him in a patch of Lycopodium lucidulum; except for those frilly tops, he'd blend in quite well. He's a Scot, though, from the Rhynie Flora of Early or Middle Devonian age (400 million years ago, give or take). He and two other genera (Rhynia and Horneophyton) were described by Kidston and Lang in 1920.

As you can see, Zosterophyllum looks nothing like his pals, especially Asteroxylon, above—not surprising, as he comes from the other side of the planet. Zoster is an Aussie, a member of the Baragwanathian Flora of Late Silurian age. I think he and his cohorts, Yarravia, Hedeia, and Baragwanathia, were the earliest land plants known back when I drew these mug shots. Zoster was, as you see here, then interpreted as having an aquatic habitat. The sporangia were 3.5 cm across, distributed radially on a terminal spike. Baragwanathia, however, could pass for a long-lost brother (or grandfather, given the age difference?) of Asteroxylon. [Details here and here. Speaking of Dr. Cookson, it was this color picture of Cooksonia that got me started on this nostalgic trip in the first place. Thanks, Phytophactor!]

Just to complete the story, here's the "plant evolution" diagram I included in my paper (Fuller & Tippo, 1954, apparently my college botany textbook—how scary is that?). There at the bottom are all those other algal and fungal divisions that made up the "Thallophytes" in the classification post; and there, in a central spot, are my wonderful Psilophytales, giving rise to the ferns and gymnosperms, and anchoring plant life on land for the first time. So, though a lot has changed in the phylogenetic world since then, here's the end of my paper:

The Psilopsids are the group that best demonstrates the attainment of the necessary characteristics that enabled plants to conquer the terrestrial environment, and make possible a whole new sequence of evolution.

Defunct or not, they deserve to be remembered.

My Kingdom for a Domain to Stand Upon

Nature mocks at human categories. —Harold Bold, 1961

Nature’s mockery, however, doesn’t stop us from sorting things into boxes (classification), naming them (taxonomy), or trying to arrange them in logical order (phylogeny).

Nostalgia Alert: This will turn out to be a historical look at certain aspects of botany I’m no expert on; I’m just trying to make sense of one of the revolutions I’ve lived through. When confusion overwhelms, I’ll try to point you to more authoritative sources.

The Basic Concept (Old Style Classification)
Once upon a time, all things were organized into two boxes: Life and Not-Life. Those in the Life box became the domain of biologists, those in the other box were studied by physicists, geologists, chemists, and other scientists, and all was neat and tidy.

Similarly, in this simpler time, everything in the Life box fit neatly into two boxes known as the Plant Kingdom (Plantae) and the Animal Kingdom (Animalia). All was neat and tidy, more or less, for a few hundred years, and the people were content.

Of course, there were many, many living beings to be studied, so more boxes were created within each of the Kingdoms, making a nice neat nested structure like this:

Kingdom Plantae – Plants
Phylum (in plants it's called Division)     ends in -ophyta
  Class     ends in -opsida
   Order     ends in -ales
    Family     ends in -aceae
     Genus     no specific ending
      Species     no specific ending

Complexity ensued, and it soon was found necessary to break up this neat nesting by adding new categories (each with its own distinctive suffix) like subphyla, superclasses, suborders, and subfamilies. Great fun was had by all.

But What about Plants?
Okay, here's how the "nested boxes system" worked for Plants. Once there were the Embryophytes (plants with, well, embryos; that is, Land Plants) and Everything Else. Embryophytes were a subkingdom-level category. "Everything Else" included seven divisions of algae and three divisions of fungi (which were, of course, then Plants).
If we opened the Embryophytes box, we found a box of Tracheophytes (division) and a box of Everything Else, in this case Bryophytes (in the broadest sense). The root trache- means pipe, but in this case, it's water pipe (not air pipe as it is used in animals). So Tracheophytes are the vascular land plants, those with piping.
If we opened the Tracheophytes box, we found four new boxes. These were the four classes: Psilopsida, Sphenopsida, Lycopsida, and Pteropsida!—corresponding roughly to early land plants (mostly extinct), horsetails and their relatives (mostly extinct), clubmosses and friends (pretty uncommon), and all the green leafy things we ordinarily call plants, i.e. ferns and seed plants (Spermatophytes). The latter include all the Flowering Plants (Angiosperms) and all the Piney-Looking Things (as Watcher would call them; or Gymnosperms).

Then What Happened?
The invention of cladistics changed this whole scheme. Instead of nested boxes or graceful arching trees, we were given clade diagrams, gene-mapping, and all the new relationships technology could uncover.

In a way, cladistics isn't that different; you just turn the tree on its side, and make sure every branch splits into two parts, each of which splits again and again in a nested series. A branch is One Thing and its sister clade is Everything Else; they share a common ancestor and differ by some significant new invention. Every time it branches, the cladogram splits off a single layer of the Onion of Life. Oversimplifying again, here's a clade diagram of sorts for the Embryophyta, based on the more detailed one at Tree of Life:

If we color it to match our nested box scheme, it looks like this:


More Kingdoms
Eventually, people grew troubled by the things that didn’t quite fit properly in the two original boxes. It was true that some things had been jammed in without giving full credit to their distinctiveness, and this became especially obvious after the invention of the microscope. Someone decided we needed a third Kingdom, and now, by one scheme, we have Five Kingdoms (courtesy friend Priscilla at Big Picture Science): Plants, Animals, Fungi, Protists, and ProKaryotes. But see also: Eukaryotes for a different view of things; even more trees here.


In Summary:
It's a very exciting time in plant (and all life) science, now that classification has moved beyond mere morphology and into molecular biology. As fascinating as it all is, I'd rather be out there looking at living things and figuring out their relationships on the ground. Maybe by now, you see why I'm sort of a cynic about classification—there are just too many ways to go! Take your pick; just remember this post only talks about the tip of the iceberg.

Here's another rub: It's tough work getting genes out of fossil plants; the morphologists usually get to keep those extinct groups. That often leaves entire lineages out of the cladistic accounting (though Tree of Life has done a pretty good job of including them; 10 of the 17 clades on their Embryophyte tree are extinct). We'll talk more about them in the next post.

I'm thrilled, really I am, that classification now recognizes the important fact that bacteria run the world and gives them their just place at the root of the tree of life. (See Microcosmos by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan.) It's just that I'd like the shifting sands to sit tight long enough for me to catch up!! But see Domains for evidence that's not likely to happen anytime soon!

——
For a more definitive account (and even better diagrams), please visit the American Journal of Botany's special 2004 issue on the Plant Tree of Life.

Who’s at the base of land plants?—A major controversy in land plant phylogeny concerns the base of the tree (Fig. 2). Traditionally, land plants have been divided into two groups, vascular plants and bryophytes. Although vascular plants are strongly supported as monophyletic based on both DNA evidence (e.g., Nickrent et al., 2000) and morphology (Kenrick and Crane, 1997), bryophytes are now generally thought to comprise a grade of three monophyletic lineages (mosses, liverworts, and hornworts) of uncertain relationship to each other and to vascular plants. ... In our view there is as yet no clear answer, and therefore we show the base of land plants as a tetrachotomy.

THE PLANT TREE OF LIFE: AN OVERVIEW AND SOME POINTS OF VIEW
JEFFREY D. PALMER, DOUGLAS E. SOLTIS, AND MARK W. CHASE
American Journal of Botany 91(10): 1437–1445. 2004. (give the pdf 10-15 seconds to load)

Coyote Morning...

Just got home from the Big Box store, and Husband said "there's a coyote barking out there"... Sure 'nuf! Only took a minute to find him/her with the binocs!

Finally, coyote pictures to go with my stories!! Only minutes old as I post these... (Foreground pines and fenceposts are in our yard; the junipers behind him/her about 200 yards/meters beyond.)

Bee Lady says the coyotes are gone from Red Rocks; nice to know there's still at least one around.

The dogs were inside, fortunately, but clamoring to get out. A week or so ago, a woman in the Denver metro area was attacked by a neighborhood coyote.

Wait for dark—maybe you'll get lucky and find a fresh hen! (Thank goodness it's cold, and the cats are inside!)

For the Record: 2008

[This is one of those "blog-keeping" posts that's likely to be of interest only to yours truly. Feel free to peek and yawn, or to move on to something more interesting.]

According to Blogger, I’ve posted only 69 times on Foothills Fancies in 2008, not a terrific record for what’s supposed to be my “primary” blog. Twenty-seven of those posts have been written since Watcher nudged me to get going again in November, and 42 were in the first half of the year. I love blogging, but on the whole, it’s been mostly a winter sport to date.

However, in my defense, I have been active on other blogs, and this year I’ve written almost as many posts for other purposes (91, half of which were for work) as I have for my own (103). In 2006, I took to blogging with gusto, and set up blogs for every reason I could think of, eleven in total. Some of them never really took, and today four of them are completely dormant, with no posts since 2006. Two of those were set up for time-specific purposes and have run out, e.g., a trip blog that began and ended in 2006 with a respectable 68 posts, 55 of which were written by me. Other attempts at team-blogging have proven unproductive; no one I’ve invited takes to it quite like I do, but I keep having high hopes. (I even invited Cat Woman to help here at FF, but so far she’s resisted successfully.)

2007 was a highly dormant blog year, with only 51 total posts written for six blogs, including two new ones I created for nonpersonal reasons (Lariat Loop and Mountain Parks, see sidebar).

In 2008, three new blogs were created. One, a memorial blog for a friend who died last summer, seems to have run its course but remains as a static tribute. Another is a project blog that has yet to truly catch on. The third is a place blog that I will get back to someday. The memorial blog took off briefly in June and July, concatenation of the project and work blogs created a substantial spike in August, and the work blog continued strong in September.

So, rather than the 5-month hiatus apparent from the post record here at FF, there has been no true lull, and only two slow months, April and October. I'm doing better than I think! It's a bit slow starting this year, so far, but stay tuned, hope springs eternal...

Care to take a Dip?

Mountain streams are icy this time of year, but that doesn't matter to the Dipper. He's a plucky little bird unlike any other in this—or any—neighborhood. So nondescript in coloring that he's hard to spot (or she, the females look the same), but a delight to watch if you find one. Can you spot this one? If not, click to enlarge, that might help a bit.

On my walk by Bear Creek a couple days ago, I saw two dippers chasing each other along the stream, chattering all the way, but they were too preoccupied to sit still and be photographed. (Is it mating season already? A territorial chase between males, perhaps?) I prefer their alternate name, Water Ouzel; has a ring to it, don't you think?

Yesterday, with camera along, I found just one that was willing to demonstrate their unusual lifestyle. I wish this little sequence of photos could capture the Dance of the Dipper—constantly bobbing up and down on his rock, then popping into the stream where he walks around underwater looking for shiny morsels of food. He can also fly underwater. Moments later, he pops out somewhere else. These little guys are absolutely unwettable. Like a cork with legs, he suddenly appears on another rock, upstream or down, and begins the dance again. Dippers mostly forage underwater, but sometimes they stand on a chosen rock and pick insect larvae with only their heads under the water. They can forage on the bottom of streams so fast and deep a person could not stand.

Dippers, Cinclus mexicanus, are the only birds in their family found here in North America. They naturally nest on wet mossy cliff-faces, but have benefited from new nest sites under our bridges and other streamside structures. The effects of pollution have been less beneficial, reducing their food sources, which are similar to those of trout. Healthy dipper populations, then, are indicators of high-quality mountain streams and good trout habitat.

More on dippers at the Cornell Bird Guide. The local Audubon group, the Evergreen Naturalists, has named their website and newsletter after this delightful little bird.

——
This one goes to Life Photo Meme, which publishes on Thursdays. I have trouble finding things that match their themes, but I love their concept! This week's theme is "Shiny"... Maybe the water is shiny enough?

Audrey and the A Plants

Audrey is not well… I gave her a new big pot last year, and she thrived (throve?) outside all summer, under shade cloth. But since coming inside last fall, it’s clear she’s unhappy. Audrey is a big Philodendron selloum, adopted from a friend who was moving out of state—about six years ago, I think. So Audrey and I have done well until recently. As she drops one after another of her huge leaves, I’m thinking it must be overwatering (because of that bigger pot) and I’ve been trying to dry her out.

It’s an “A” day over at ABC Wednesday, and it occurred to me to list all the plants I know personally that start with A, in no particular order but without resorting to any external aids. Maybe it’ll bring back other memories of the A-list plants in my life. A stream-of-consciousness look at phytodiversity. (Haven’t gotten far yet; this could take a while.)

A Plant Alphabet for A

Araucaria, agave, aloe, avens, Acer, Acanthus,
Anemone, apple, ash, alamo, Agapanthus,

Abies, Asclepias, Acacia, Aglaonema, Aeonium,
Artemisia, Aletes, Astragalus, Allium,
Alopecurus, aster, Androsace, Asplenium...

Amorpha, Andropogon, Agrostis, Achillea
Alyssum, Argemone, Actaea, Aralia, Aquilegia...

Amanita, Acarospora, Agaricus...

Okay, that last line is cheating a little, but fungi were plants when I grew up in botany.

(Can't believe I missed Amaryllis... but Granny Smith caught it! Please let me know your favorite A plants if I missed them—or share a story about one!)

——
Thanks to Chuck Pyle for this concept, which I’ve barely executed at this point, but I might get back to it. Chuck played a song Saturday at the Arvada Cowboy Poetry Celebration that listed all the small towns in Colorado (under 3,000 in population). It was a tour de force that had the audience spellbound. Very melodious, too; it was amazing how many town rhymes he found! He calls it Little Town Tour—check it out!

By the way, the previous post also started as a bit of an "A" post, so you'll find more "As" there.

Amazing Plants

Plants, as a group, display such a variety of incredible qualities and, yes, behaviors, that it would be impossible to list them all! One of the things I enjoy about the internet is its connectivity, and we could easily explore that quality in plants as well. Last week, though, in two clicks, I found myself at a delightful homage to the wonders of the Plant Kingdom. (Yes, I know that's old fashioned terminology, but you do know I'm stuck in the past, right?) And it reminded me of these photos I want to share with you.

Today's quality to admire in plants is resilience. To me, perhaps few demonstrations of the power of life over death impress the senses the way a plant (or entire plant community) recovering from adversity can. Adversity can strike plants in many forms, but these photos tell a story that most of us don't encounter in person: recovery after burial in volcanic ash.

Here's the caption, from the USGS website where these photos from the public domain are available free of charge.

New vegetation breaking through ash deposits along North Fork Toutle River. Cowlitz County, Washington. 1980.

The new vegetation, in this case, is a plant of fireweed (presumably Epilobium angustifolium or another species; the genus is now Chamerion), something that looks like Oxalis, and a robust-looking fern.

This little tree (a fir perhaps?) is one of the lucky ones.

USGS caption: Vegetation, blast area, Clearwater Creek, east of Mount St. Helens. Photo shows new growth on scorched evergreen. Skamania County, Washington. July 16, 1980. Photo by T. Casadevall.

July 16th, the day the photo was taken, was just two months after the catastrophic eruption on May 18th.

Historical aside: I was writing that week to an uncle of mine, a Baptist minister, and I called it "the geologic event of the [20th] century" in a rambling philosophical letter that noted the eruption was less damaging, in terms of human lives lost, than the race riots that were keeping Miami police busy at the time. (Later, the eruption's death toll outdistanced Miami's.) Uncle Art and I conducted a lengthy correspondence in 1980-81 debating the value of Nature vs. Humanity. It was a wonderful meeting of minds, neither of which were permanently altered. We agreed, in the end, that it was a Good Thing different people had different priorities.

These trees were not so lucky. No ash slowly suffocated the life out of them; their demise was instaneous. It's been more than 28 years, though. The forest, we can hope, was more resilient than the trees. It would be nice to see what it looks like today. (I really recommend you click on this one for a closer look.)

USGS caption: Within a few minutes, hurricane-force winds from the May 18 lateral blast of Mount St. Helens transformed vast stands of evergreen forest into drab tangles of giant matchsticks. The trees were stripped of their branches, toppled, and "combed" into patterns. The logging roads shown here are about 12 feet across. This view is near Elk Rock looking east. Photo by A. Post. Cowlitz County, Washington. June 30, 1980. Figure 34, U.S. Geological Survey Professional paper 1249.

What happened to that "delightful homage" I mentioned? Okay, now you can go check it out and be amazed at the abundant adaptations apparent in the world of our green friends, the plants:

Botany Without Borders, brought to us by Love Plant Life.

Atmospheric Phenomena

As nothing is very visible out there today (another whiteout), please enjoy this photo from last Thursday. The colors at sunrise made these lenticular clouds exceptional, as did the "stack of pancakes" effect of their layering.

Because lenticular clouds (you may call them altocumulus standing lenticularis if you prefer) form in the lee of mountain ranges, we see them quite commonly. Rarely are they so colorful, usually just "shades" of white.

Find great photos of lenticular clouds here.

More about them at Wikipedia.

An entire fleet, seen at NCAR in Boulder, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, where they pay attention to such phenomena.

A Year Round the Berry-Go-Round

As this plant carnival marks an entire circle round the sun this month, welcome to Edition #12 of Berry-Go-Round! Enjoy...

What’s better on a cold winter day than a pot of potato soup? Alas, the
potato world is poorer with the loss of economic botanist Carlos Ochoa, who said potatoes “are like children: you name them, and in turn, they give you a great deal of satisfaction.” Robert’s link-heavy post at Agricultural Biodiversity will take you on a journey of potato exploration, and, thanks to Carlos’ work, potatoes will continue to satisfy our need for nourishment.

Sarcozona promises “depressing news every Thursday” at Gravity’s Rainbow, so tune in for this week’s dose on Extinction Thursday to learn more about a plant that’s gone extinct lately—and why!

Alex is the Watcher at Watching the World Wake Up (aka WTWWU), and his watchful eye detects a lot of botany while he's out riding the mountain bike trails of Utah (and sometimes elsewhere). He recommends St. George, Utah, because "first, it's an area with really, really interesting botany that isn't well known. Second, it's largely snow-free with interesting and accessible plants in the cold months. And third, if any plant-oriented readers are thinking of a warm-weather getaway in the next 3-4 months, St. George is great destination." His three rides, each in a different life zone, start on the desert floor and work up.

As a new convert to botany, Alex gets passionate about stuff on the trail and the details of coevolution of red squirrels and pine cones. I've really enjoyed his in-depth approach, as evidenced in another three-part series on hybrid oaks, including new discoveries. (Watcher's amazing graphics are a highlight of his posts!)

Join Ian for a look at "Gumbo Limbo," aka Bursera, trees and a lesson in speciation, with Evolution and conservation in Mexican dry forests from Tropical ecology notes.

A visit to Walking Prescott from GrannyJ's daughter, who lives in darkest Alaska, mandated "a warm sunshine fix," she says. "So we drive 40 miles downhill from our town at 5400 ft. elevation in the mountains to a nearby desert river, where I surveyed the cactus scene and found wonderful nursery trees/shrubs." Stop by for a fabulous assortment of Sonoran desert cacti to brighten our winter scenes.

Here at Foothills Fancies, we've revisited an old friend at Coyote Semilla, which is, alas, my only plant post this entire month! Whatever happened to Plant of the Week? Ah well, that's what resolutions are for, right?

What's a "Peepal Tree?" I can almost hear you asking. Not a lot of botany in this post, but it does bring us a Peepal tree and a very cheerful look at Nagaraja Temple in bright and warm and Admirable India. If
you're looking to escape snow and cold, check it out!

A late and welcome entry comes from Tai Haku, who stumbled across a fertile (and perhaps futile) female of the cycad persuasion recently. Vasquez pollen donations are welcome at Earth, Wind, & Water, where another handy post collects all of Tai's cycad posts for the true enthusiast.

Lastly, two posts gleaned from bio-bloggers also brighten the winter scenery. Chris at Catalogue-of-Organisms fills us in on core eudicots and weird rhubarb, great background for future discussions of plant classification. Nina at Nature Remains visits Seibenthaler fen out Beyond Xenia, providing excellent photos and finding color in winter botany.

Have a Happy New Year, all, and be sure to join Alex the Watcher for the January edition, first of the brand new year, to be posted end-of-month at Watching the World Wake Up.

Greetings of the Season!

Wishing everyone all the wonders of Nature and the joys of this winter season, as we begin to notice and appreciate the return of longer days again. The chickens, new ones at least, have already noticed and are providing golden drops of nourishment in the cold of the year.

This guy's been coming around of late, I think he's developing a taste for sunflower seeds, which he finds under the bird feeder. Or he likes our "Baby Doe," the female of his species, who's been visiting for years. Perhaps both.

We are holding hope for the New Year and being grateful for the small wonders we find daily all around us. May you share the peace of Nature this season and all year through!

BGR Deadline Revised

Submissions for Edition #12 are trickling in, though I'm sure there'll be a flood of them after the holiday tomorrow! I'm extending the deadline to Sunday, December 28th. Please send links to your favorite recent plant posts to ffnaturalist AT gmail DOT com. The new edition will be posted here before the end of the year, marking one complete circle round the Sun for our plant carnival!

NOTE: After Dec 25, please use the email address above instead of the carnival submission form to ensure your submissions get included this month! Thanks!

Many thanks, and have a Merry Yule!

Tracking a Mystery

Yesterday seemed to be a perfect day for tracking, perhaps because even the wind was frozen. When I went to the mailbox, I found several stories written in and next to the driveway, including one little mystery.

Cottontails abound, so to speak, around here these days. One friend suggests local coyote populations have been drastically reduced, perhaps by disease; we don't hear them as often as we used to. That leaves these guys as our most ubiquitous and visible mammal. So here's a good classic bunny track, including one with even front paw marks showing.

Loosely related: Speaking of wild canids, I saw one just the day after I wrote this post. At first glance, I thought coyote, of course, but looking closer I realized it was a foothills resident I'd never encountered (alive) before: The Grey Fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus). Alas, no camera, but my what a stately critter! Needless to say, I was thrilled!! (Expect a post in the future.)


Next up, near the top of the drive, a small rodent (?) ran or hopped perpendicularly across the driveway, from one weedy rough over to the rabbitbrush, where the shelter was perhaps better.

Then came a set of bird tracks, or rather marks. Definitely not walking around, more like alighting, poking under the snow, and leaving with a distinctive wing burst. Hope he/she found whatever was being hunted. I like the long scratch marks on this one, suggesting a Rufous-sided Towhee (as they used to be known; now Western Towhee I believe). I was starting to be intrigued by the different colors the camera caught from the same snow.

This better bird print reminds me of the fossils from Solnhofen, Germany, with a more complete splay of wings and even a suggestion of body and tail. A nice takeoff... See more fossils at this gallery.

Okay... here comes the mystery. This little guy(?) made a neat row of tracks all along the driveway, but they ended abruptly halfway up. Hmmm. No sign of struggle, what could it be? I noted that it was traveling next to the DH's tracks as he left for work this morning.

Coming back, I traced it in the other direction, beginning to suspect the truth this last photo confirms. Even the inanimate (if snow is such) can leave traces of its existence, often more regular and predictable than those of the living. Another nature mystery solved, another track decoded!

For the Record

It's bitter... 5 below zero... this morning (that's
-21 C; sounds more impressive that way, doesn't it?). Too bad the photo didn't capture the white glaze of hoarfrost on the branches of the ash tree. Snow crunching underfoot when I stepped out (ever so quickly!) for the photo.

I haven't let the chickens out and doubt they'd come anyway. They'd probably appreciate some oatmeal though! (Corn meal mush yesterday, though warm, didn't seem to be a hit, much to my surprise.) DH set up a heater in the coop last night, so I hope they're comfortable—more than they would be without it, at least!

Our chicken adventure started twelve years ago, and my first impressions are recorded at Small Wonders. It's amazing how many of my predictions have come true since then!

Coming Soon: Berry-Go-Round #12

Good morning, plant lovers! Just a quick note to remind all that the next edition of the plant carnival Berry-Go-Round will be hosted here at the end of the year. Submissions are due December 27th; please email them to me at ffnaturalist AT gmail DOT com or use the magic submission form. Thanks!

With a Northern Hemisphere bias imposed by my locale (sorry, can't shake it!), here's a theme suggestion for anyone who needs one:

Storms and Winter Weather
Bring Plants and People
Close Together!

If you like, consider blogging about plants in storms, plants weathering storms, or even holiday house plants you're getting reacquainted with! All plant-related posts are welcome, of course, especially from those in the Southern Hemisphere, where it is, we trust, warm and springlike! We northerners will appreciate reminders that life and flowers go on despite our cold or snowy weather. And should hyphal impulses strike, remember that BGR still allows fungi to be included.

Thanks—I look forward to hearing from you!

Balance of the Day

Our daily view seems to concentrate on the mornings, as in yesterday's post. Here's the other end of yesterday, to balance things out. What's left of the sun is coming through the valley of Bear Creek to strike the western faces of the Red Rocks outcrops for a change. This is about all we get of sunsets; our view west is blocked by the first range of foothills.

Compare above with this sunrise view from January 2006, as yesterday we couldn't see the sunrise. (I know this is in a post somewhere, but I just can't find it yet.) I do more sunrises because I like the way the rocks are reflected in their long shadows stretching westward. Here's another.

Already approaching 50 degrees (10C) and it's only 7:15 a.m. This snow will be gone before the next storm hits this weekend.

World of White

Waking up today to a changed world, all in white. This is a marvelous gift, still drifting down in scattered flakes this morning. Most of our annual moisture comes from big snows like this one, and stocking the soil with some water for plants helps get them through the winter. So, a good thing, all in all, especially if you don't have to go anywhere. (One of the blessings of working at home.)

After a weekend in the high 60s, this storm pussyfooted in quietly yesterday. The sky was lowering darkly all morning, but when I looked out mid-day, I saw this new development slithering down the valley from I-70. And watched as it engulfed us, slowly, gradually, trailing soft flakes behind... In a matter of minutes, the deed was done, and the gray day was gone.

Here are two closeups of the snow moving in over Red Rocks Park.
Just back now from shoveling my way out to the chicken coop, then making a second trip with food and water. The girls (and roosters too) have not ventured out of the coop yet, even though a snow-free patio awaits them. For the weather record, it's 25 degrees out there (-4C, after 67F/20C over the weekend), and, I'd say, up to a foot (30 cm) of light, fluffy white stuff.

Everyone out there has breakfast and a snack, so we're set for the time being. Loverly day!

Swinging with the Sun

As Winter Solstice approaches again, the sun slides back into its winter-morning spot at the south end of the hogback. This morning, it provided this glorious view from the direction that doesn't usually get photographed around here.

The Sun is part of my winter timekeeping system, described further on Small Wonders in one of my first-ever essays (outside of school). There's another Solstice sunrise waiting for you there. For some reason (too early perhaps), I rarely capture summer sunrises.

Coyote Semilla: Plant of the Week

In my head I still hear the pronunciation given by the 8-year-old Latina I encountered long ago in Arizona, who authoritatively informed me of this plant's name the first time I saw it.

At the risk of exposing my linguistic inadequacies, we'll do the name first. The word coyote simply must be given the proper 3-syllable twist she gave it (perhaps reflecting the original Aztec): coy-oh-tay. The 2-syllable American (ki-oat) and its monosyllabic Texas variant are as unacceptable here as the longer American ki-oh-tee. Now if only I could wrap my tongue around it as smoothly as the child did.

Semilla, though, is Spanish through and through, as far as I know, and derived from the Latin. It means seed (English speakers, think "seminal"). When you see a baseball-sized dry fruit all over the prairie, you have encountered this plant. When green, it might resemble a small watermelon, but in that state you're more likely to notice the leaves before anything else. They will be bright blue-green, almost a foot long, and arrayed on vines that sprawl widely, carrying those coyote seeds hither and yon. And they, the leaves, will smell to high heaven (hence the species name). In all, a very impressive plant.

Kingdom Plantae – Plants
  Subkingdom Tracheobionta – Vascular plants
   Superdivision Spermatophyta – Seed plants
    Division Magnoliophyta – Flowering plants
     Class Magnoliopsida – Dicotyledons
      Subclass Dilleniidae
       Order Violales
        Family Cucurbitaceae – Cucumber family
         Genus Cucurbita L. – gourd
         Species Cucurbita foetidissima Kunth
         aka Missouri gourd, buffalo gourd, calabazilla, wild gourd

That's one reason, I guess, why we were discussing it at First Friday the other night, when several botany geeks I know get together for pizza and chat. Yesterday, Bee Lady and I went on an expedition to try to gather a fruit from the only place I know of in our county where this plant grows wild. We found the shriveled vines and leaves, and but one fruit. We took a few seeds, and left the lone gourd to finish rotting in peace. In such moribund condition, the plants weren't even worth a photo.

We chatted Friday night about how or whether the plant was used by native peoples (yes, it was!), and the Chemist reported that the rind of this fruit contains the most bitter substance known to humankind. Doesn't sound too appetizing... After we left our wild patch, we hied on over to his house to gather wildflower seed from his excellent native garden. He has gourd plants, too, but without fruit. Why not? Bee Lady speculated that, in town as he is, he lacks the appropriate pollinator. Could be—the nearest reported distribution for Coyote Gourd is several counties away to the south or the east.

We are somewhere under the red triangle. So how did it get here? A little botanical mystery. The plant site is near an old townsite, which may or may not have overlapped an earlier Indian site ("evidence" for which comes from spirits by way of psychics, but that's another story). So it could have been brought here, planted even, by humans. Or it just could be that the database, which includes only formal records (e.g., herbarium specimens), is incomplete—the plant simply hasn't been collected and reported to those who keep track of such things. Or both.

——
Photo credit: Patrick J. Alexander @ USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database
USDA, NRCS. 2008. The PLANTS Database (6 December 2008). National Plant Data Center, Baton Rouge, LA 70874-4490 USA.

Stormy Weather...

Postponing my errands yesterday turns out to be a bad idea. It's far worse out there today. Ten (6C) degrees colder than yesterday's 26 (-3C), snowflakes getting bigger and bigger by the hour. And no suet to share with the feathered friends. A day to make warm oatmeal for the chickens, and work up the ambition to go out and feed them soon. (I should have known it would be bad; THREE Steller's Jays in the yard yesterday.)

The cold weather is bringing out the birds; it's clear that winter weather brings birds and people close together, at least around here. All perches on the thistle feeder are occupied by Pine Siskins, most upside down, with more waiting in line on the chain of the adjacent birdbath. One of my favorites; click to see how many I caught in the air! Juncos are everywhere, and several Magpies, but only a few Red-winged Blackbirds have ventured out today.

A sassy new guy has also moved in of late; can you see him in the top photo? Sign of the times, as we never used to see these. Fox Squirrels (Sciurus niger) are going from occasional to regular; I think this one has set up shop somewhere in the yard. (Here's a closer view.) They are invasive, moving west along the tree-lined riparian areas of the Great Plains, setting up a stronghold in Denver's urban forest (Tree City USA), and now, growing more common in the foothills even outside riparian areas. Curiously, the distribution map at Nature Serve implies they belong in Colorado, but are exotic in Wyoming and other western states. Click on "Distribution" and scroll down to see a map with that distinctive finger reaching into Colorado along the South Platte River system. Apparently they haven't progressed as far in the Arkansas Valley. NatureServe suggests they're even vulnerable (to extinction, or rather extirpation) in Alabama, North Carolina, and New York states.

It's a good sign, I suppose, that our yard is arboreal enough to support these little monsters. I'm a softie, of course, so have thus far used no repellents or deadly force against them. We see no more than one at a time, and each has moved on in its own time, perhaps finding better pickings elsewhere. But today he's hungry, as is everyone else out there, and the sunflower seeds are too tempting, so he strikes a "cute squirrel" pose to convince me he's just part of the local ecosystem. And maybe he is.

NatureServe, by the way, is a handy reference to plant and animal distributions and taxonomy. For plants, I often use the USDA Database as well. This morning, while googling an obscure fungus, I discovered another repository of biodiversity information, the ZipCodeZoo. Pretty neat idea, but currently soliciting donations to prevent its own extinction. Drop by and see what you can learn about your own neighborhood; this site is rich in data, references, and links. (But use with caution: I've yet to see a Basking Shark or Pawpaw here in Colorado.)

In a closet somewhere in this house is a half-completed needlepoint sampler bearing the message Storms and Winter Weather Bring Plants and People Close Together. I think I'll propose this as a theme, at least in the northern hemisphere, for the upcoming edition of Berry-Go-Round. (Okay, so in my younger days I had illusions of being creative and skilled in domestic crafts, so what? We're all trying to figure out who we are here...grin)

Before leaving this a.m., the DH (bless his heart!) laid a fire for me in the woodstove, using his "new" upside-down technique. Works like a charm—10 minutes after lighting it, I had this lovely fire going, taking the chill off the house.

Berry-Go-Round #11 is Up

Drop in at Catalogue of Organisms for an enjoyable stroll through this month's carnival celebrating the green and the not-so-green. Christopher has assembled a fine harvest of botanical delights for your perusal.

The next Berry-Go-Round will be hosted here at Foothills Fancies, so please send in your own submissions or nominate posts written by others! Email me at ffnaturalist AT gmail DOT com.

Thanks!