The presumed male shrieking from the top of a loblolly pine on May 5
The red-shouldered hawks that built a nest beside our driveway in April are still here. With the deciduous foliage now completely mature, it is very difficult to see the nest, but we occasionally see the adults coming and going. On June 1, I saw the presumed female leaving, and I could hear soft chirping coming from the nest. I moved around and eventually found a small window in the foliage through which I could see the nest. As I suspected, there was a chick! It was very wobbly and seemed to be having some trouble holding its head up, so I suspect it was quite young.
The hawk chick on June 1
Today, the male swooped down and spent about five minutes sitting on our concrete bird bath with its wings partially spread as though mantling prey. After it left, I went over to refill the bath and found a depression in the mulch under the bath. It was lined with rabbit fur but appeared to have been disturbed. Perhaps the adult hawk has been harvesting cottontail rabbit kits for its chick. I can only hope so, because an army of young cottontails is the last thing I need in the garden.
The presumed male above the empty rabbit nest today. He has partially spread his wings, similar to the way that hawks “mantle” to hide their prey.
Examination of the hawk nest through binoculars this afternoon showed that the chick is still alive and much larger than it was two weeks ago. It still has a few tufts of down, but it is mostly feathered at this point. I’d guess it won’t be too long until it is fully fledged.
Memorial day is past, and spring is slowly but surely drifting into summer. So far, the weather has been fairly mild, with only one or two days at 90 F (32 C), but I expect the hot weather will be here soon. Six on Saturday this week consists of four plants and two animals. The last photo is slightly gruesome but, I think, quite interesting.
1. Asclepias variegata (redring milkweed)
I love the tightly packed flowers of Asclepias variegata, which give the appearance of large knobby balls at the top of a wiry stem, and I waited about a decade to see them in my garden. A. variegata is the holy grail of eastern North American milkweeds. Unlike some species, it does not spread by creeping rhizomes, and it seems somewhat tricky to pollinate. Nurseries that offer it for sale sometimes sell out in minutes. I first saw it flowering in the wild in 2012, but it wasn’t until 2023 that I managed to get hold of three artifically propagated seedlings. One of them is flowering now.
2. Verbena bonariensis (purpletop vervain)
Verbena bonariensis is a very common garden plant, beloved for its attractiveness to bees and other pollinators. It has a tendency to naturalize in the wild, but it does not seem to be seriously invasive; it’s so open and spindly, it would be hard pressed to choke out any native species. Although plants survive from year to year in my garden, I have not noted any volunteer seedlings yet. Perhaps the heavy layer of mulch on most of my flower beds is not conducive to seed germination.
3. Lysimachia alfredii ‘Night Light’
‘Night Light’ is a newish clone of this Chinese species. It supposedly forms a low ground cover in part shade and flowers all summer long. This is my first year growing it, so we’ll see.
4. Lychnis chalcedonica (Maltese Cross)
A garden classic. I bought two smallish seedlings last year from a vendor at the local farmers market. Both made it through the winter and are starting to form small clumps. L. chalcedonica is related to the larger Lychnis senno and Silene virginica that also grow in my garden.
5. Hyalophora cecropia (cecropia month) hindwing
The giant silkmoths are some of the most beautiful nocturnal visitors to the garden. I have see luna moths (Actias luna) on several occasions, but this is the first evidence I have seen of cecropia moths. Something, maybe a bat, must have caught one, because I found this single hindwing on the driveway. It is still beautiful, and at 6 cm long, evidence of the amazing size of the cecropia moth.
6. Haplotrema concavum (gray-footed lancetooth) eating an eastern worm snake
Haplotrema concavum is a predatory snail that feeds mainly on other snails. I was amazed to find this one eating a dead worm snake. I suppose it must be scavenging, because there’s surely now way a snail could run down a snake.
Jim at Garden Ruminations is the host of Six on Saturday. Head over there to see his Six for this week and find links to the blogs of other participants.
Recently, I noticed that the Liparis lilifolia in our woods is flowering again. I have discovered that photographing small plants at night helps to separate the subject from the background leaf litter, so I went out on Tuesday night, May 14, to take some pictures. It had been raining and was fairly warm, 65 F (18 C). As I walked through the woods, I heard frogs calling from the little wetland, really a flooded oxbow of our local creek, that is just across the lane from the south end of our property. I didn’t recognize the species (sound recording is here), so eldest offspring and I took our cameras and headlamps, and went to have a look.
A male Scaphiopus holbrookii calling for a mate
The noisemakers were eastern spadefoots (Scaphiopus holbrookii). We saw perhaps thirty of them, inflated with air and slowly circling the little pond as they called for a mate. In among the calling males were silent spadefoots that we assumed were females. I stayed for about thirty minutes, but eldest offspring texted his college room mate, another herpetology nerd, and the two of them spent several hours watching the spadefoots. They reported that by the time they left at about 01:00 am, most of the males had found females. I have long assumed that the eastern spadefoots use the oxbow as a breeding pool, but this was the first time I have heard them calling. It is nice to be proven right.
A pair in amplexus
Conditions were much the same on the night of May 15, but there was not a single spadefoot to be seen. Instead, a number of Cope’s gray treefrogs (Hyla chrysoscelis) were making a racket along the edge of the water and on the trunks of nearby trees. This little oxbow is clearly a very important site for the amphibians in our neighborhood. It retains water all summer, even when the main channel of the creek dries up, and it does not have fish that would eat amphibian eggs. In addition to the spadefoots and tree frogs, it is a breeding pool for marbled and spotted salamanders (Ambystoma opacum and A. punctatum), pickerel frogs (Lithobates palustris), chorus frogs (Pseudacris ferianum), bullfrogs (Lithobates catesbeianus), and probably other species, and it is home to one large snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina).
Male Cope’s gray tree frog calling from the trunk of a loblolly pine on May 15. A young bullfrog at the edge of the oxbow pool on May 14 Resident snapping turtle has hauled itself (herself?) out of the oxbow pool on May 3, 2015.
Magicicada nymphs. In the next few hours, the nymph exoskeleton will split along the back, and the adult cicada will emerge. All Magicicada species have red eyes, while the larger annual cicadas have dark eyes (but see the last photo below).
After a thirteen year wait, the periodical cicadas (Magicicada species) are here again. We are in the range of Brood XIX, the Great Southern Brood, and it is exciting to see the big, bumbling insects and hear their loud, incessant chorus.
I first noticed emerging nymphs on the evening of April 25, when I saw three outside the local high school, about five miles from our house. Over the next few days, I started to see occasional adults around the garden, and I found one nymph on April 28. Then, on the evening of April 30, they emerged in force. At sunset, we could hear rustling in the leaf litter and see constant slow movement as nymphs dug themselves out of the ground. The trees and bushes were festooned with cicadas breaking out of their nymph exoskeletons and hanging motionless as their new bodies and wings hardened and darkened. Interestingly, my notes say that we noticed the last emergence when we awoke on the morning of May 1, 2011, so the brood was right on schedule: thirteen years to the day!
Adult cicada squeezing out of its nymph exoskeleton. The newly emerged adults are pale, with unexpanded wings, and their only color is in their eyes and the black patches that resemble Groucho Marx eyebrows.
Over the next few days, there were many nymphs emerging each evening, but the numbers slowly decreased. I saw only two nymphs on the evening of May 7 and none since then. Interestingly, the early stragglers that I saw last year showed up on April 28 and 29, so they were almost precisely one year early.
Another new adult that has completely emerged from its nymph exoskeleton and has expanded wings.
The noise started on May 2 (about two days before that where I work, 20 miles to the southeast) and has been slowly increasing in intensity. The drone of millions of cicadas sounds a bit like a flying saucer from some 1950s science fiction movie or, as a coworker put it, ten thousand Teslas all backing up at the same time. Over the last day or two, the predominant sound seems to have shifted to a slightly lower pitch. I wonder if that indicates that one species started calling earlier and another species has now joined the chorus.
An adult cicada that has darkened to its mature color. The dull orange patch immediately in front of the wing suggests that this is Magicicada tredecim. M. tredecassini and M. tredecula lack this feature.Another adult.
There are many web pages that describe periodical cicadas (e.g. at the University of Connecticut, where most of the information below is derived), so I won’t try to describe everything about them. I’ll just list a few facts that I find amazing–that their timekeeping is amazing goes without saying, but that’s not the only interesting thing about them:
1. The genus Magicicada contains several groups of sibling species where one species is a 17-year cicada and its sibling species is a 13-year cicada. Genetic analysis has shown that on the rare occasions when the 13-year and 17-year emergences coincide, hybridization between the sibling species can occur. For instance, 13-year M. tredecassini could potentially hybridize with 17-year M. cassini.
2. A group of cicadas on the same emergence schedule is called a brood, and a single brood can contain several species that all emerge at the same time. For instance, Brood XIX in our area contains Magicicada tredecim, M. tredecassini, and M. tredecula, all on the same schedule. Elsewhere, Brood XIX also contains M. neotredecim.
3. A Magicicada species can occur in several broods. Brood XXII also contains Magicicada tredecim, M. tredecassini, and M. tredecula, but it lacks M. neotredecim. The emergence time of Brood XXII is three years off from Brood XIX, so cicadas of the same species in the two broods will never have the opportunity to mate. A possible exception might be if stragglers emerge three years out of sync in the correct direction, but stragglers tend to emerge 1 or 4 years off-schedule.
These insects are deeply weird.
The last two nymphs that I saw. Oddly, the nymph on the right has brown eyes. It is too small and too early in the year for an annual cicada, so I suspect this is a Magicicada with aberrant eye color.Making cicadas for 2037. I hope I’ll be here to see the next emergence.
Blue-eyed grass, Sisyrhinchium species. I suspect this is either S. angustifolium or S. mucronatum, but I am not sure which.
Many people consider blue-eyed grass to be a pesky lawn weed, but I prefer to think of it as an ornament. Despite the name, blue-eyed grass is a member of iris family, Iridaceae, not a grass. Several species invade lawns in North Carolina, and their violet flowers look great along with other flowering “weeds” like yellow-flowered false strawberry (Potentilla species).
Tiny Sisyrhinchium rosulatum (fairy stars, annual blue-eyed grass) is short enough that the flowers often escape the lawnmower unscathed.
Sweetgum and Pines 