Brisbane River from pedestrian walkway on Eleanor Schonell Bridge

Christmas is high summer in Brisbane. The skies are blue, the breezes warm and the birds often raucous. Barbies are more common than traditional Old World feasts, but some insist on sweltering away in the kitchen to produce the ham, turkey or roast they remember from childhood. The native Brush Turkeys have nothing to fear, though, although reputedly they aren't such bad tucker. Well, nothing to fear from cooks, but gardeners are likely to chase them out of the veggie patch when they try to turn it into a mound of compost.

Male Australian Brush Turkey

Surprisingly, although Australia boasts 38 genera of cicadas (32 endemic), and cicada-season runs most of the year (August through June), the City days have been free from the intense droning that I remember from field work in the nearby scrub. That's quite likely because it has been dry and many cicadas do not emerge until after the rains have commenced. Each evening at dusk, however, for about 15 minutes the air fills with the trilling of cicada, one of the Small Bottle Cicadas and probably Chlorocysta vitripennis (Westwood, 1851) or a closely related species. 

Female Small Bottle Cicada

The cicada's common name comes from the bloated and empty bottle-like bodies of the males: the females are more sleek and apparently less likely to escape the attention of young proto-entomologists in the morning. 

At this age insects are still a wonder and not a yucky bug

If you'd like to learn more about Australian Cicadas, then Lindsay Popple maintains an excellent website at:
http://sci-s03.bacs.uq.edu.au/ins-info/index.htm

Bugger, the mozzies are back too!

They are back and they are hungry, and not just this nearly invisible  crab spider

A few weeks of warmth and the Home Bug Garden is bursting with blooms and starting to fill with green. Bugs, beetles, spiders and flies all seem to be racing to catch up with the late Spring. Alas, even the snow-melt mosquitoes have shown up.

Aedes vexans - one of my least favourite flies

I've been too busy swatting them to take a picture and they are a bit on the small side for my point-and-shoot anyway, but here's one of the more common ones from a previous year (arrow = proboscis). That week or two between the first warm days and the first brood of mosquitoes that breed in the shallow, grassy pools left by the melting snow, is always so pleasant, and ephemeral.

Monsella Double Early Tulip - rather late in May this year

 Great time for bees and the blossoms they prefer too. Especially scenic are the white rosaceous fruit trees and shrubs, the cherries, apple and saskatoon.

Bombus perplexus queen providing a service to our apple crop

The apple seems to be especially attractive to the large bumble bee queens, but not so attractive as the Golden Willow (Salix alba Vitellina), now rather dowdy with its orange twigs covered in things that look more like green baby corn cobs than flowers.

Bombus perplexus queen in Golden Willow

The earlier flowering willows are very important food sources for bumble bee queens when they first emerge from hibernation. In the early spring, the willows have little competition for pollinators, but now they must have something very special to be able to drag the bees away from the more showy flowers.

White-throated Sparrow migrating through

The birds are back too. Although the Robins have been around for weeks, other migratory song birds did not make an appearance until this week. Most will just pass through, as with the White-throated Sparrow above, but Chipping Sparrows always seem to find the Home Bug Garden a good place to raise a family.

Chipping Sparrow (male) freshly bathed after its long trip north

Well, a great place for a bath and a reasonably secure place to forage. Our one surviving cat is now allowed to waddle in the backyard without a leash, but she is too old and fat to be much of a threat and should help keep out the lean and mean neighbourhood wanders.

Chipping Sparrow Clay-coloured Sparrow probably just passing through

Ah warmth, it has been sooo long!

Adventures in Spider Misidentification: The Ravenous Ravened

A young orb weaver is more than a match for a Ravenous Leaf Beetle

I think this is a very young orb weaver, but I could be wrong. The web looks more crosshatched than orb-like, but I think I see radiating strands. In any case, the body sorta looks right (but remember the title of this series). I'm more sure about the victim, having spent much time and effort sorting it out: a Ravenous Leaf Beetle Orsodacne atra (Knoch in Ahrens, 1810).

3 pairs of Orsodacne atra being a bit excessive in a saskatoon flower

The colour patterns in Orsodacne atra vary quite a bit, but all are now considered to represent one species. The common name seems a bit off, but presumably somewhere some species in this family voraciously plunders a plant that people value. Orsodacne atra has been reported from birch and willow, but more as a curiosity than a pest. The adults, however, do seem to 'raven', i.e. devour voraciously, the reproductive parts of flowers, especially in the Rosaceae. 'Raven' and 'ravenous' come from the Old French raviner - to take by force, via the Latin rapina, from which we get several terms for unfettered excess.

A pair of Australian Ravens (Corvus coronoides) up to no good

Surprisingly, though, the crow-like bird called a 'Raven' (Corvus corax

Linnaeus, 1758) comes to use from a different origin: Old High German, Middle Dutch, and Old English equivalents of raban, the name for a big, black bird. So, even though ravens are known for plundering, Danish Vikings flew a raven flag, and many cultures fear ravens as bearers of ill omen, the similarity in words is a coincidence. The Raven is one of the few large birds to brave the Alberta winter and when they start moving into town from the countryside (once the Crows [Corvus brachyrhynchos] have moved south), you know winter has arrived.

American Raven with classic wingspread and boat-tail

Winter Interest in the Home Bug Garden

Cattails and rushes adding interest to a winter landscape

As the Home Bug Garden has become re-enwhitened over the last few weeks, and the illusion of a short, mild winter went the way of other illusions, the 'winter interest' in the Garden has again come to be appreciated. In general, it can be difficult to distinguish between winter interest and lazy gardening, but in a naturalistic garden one does want to look, well, natural.

'Winter interest' is also known as dead plants

Snow is a very good insulator (think igloo). If a thick enough layer of insulating snow (10-20 cm) develops then, no matter what the temperature of the air, the temperature under the snow stabilizes near freezing - warm enough for the decomposers in the soil to continue to work all winter. The vegetation under the snow becomes the food of the subniveal (under-snow) fungi, bacteria, arthropods, and worms. Although we don't see it, a significant portion of the carbon budget in boreal systems is processed under the snow during what looks like a period of dormancy.

Winter interest on its way to decomposition

But what sticks out above the snow gives some structure to the garden and some interest to all those who live above the layer of snow (I suppose that would be the 'supraniveal' fauna). This afternoon I noticed some of our winter interest falling, stalk by stalk. A White-tailed Jackrabbit was working through the remains of last year's Rough Oxeye (Heliopsis helianthoides). Well, better that than the cherries (unfortunately hares love cherry twigs). When the snow melts, all the little rabbit pellets that were once 'winter interest' will join the decomposer system too. I suppose that is better than a spring clean-up and lugging to the compost bin.

Large wings and small feet meet in the snow