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By Ben, on July 27th, 2010
This morning I was able to get organized early enough to go for a bike ride with little e before breakfast and work. After each ride, there’s usually a decompression session where we play outside–him in the dirt, me with a camera if there’s something I can see. And this morning I saw, for one of the first times I can recall, the phenomenon of a butterfly “puddling.” There was a Fiery Skipper (Hylephila phileus) on the hood of my car, drinking up the fallen dew:
H. phileus is a widespread species in North America, most common in the South, but it also occurs as far north as New York, and as far west as California, as our trip to the Page Museum and the La Brea Tar Pits last summer bears out:
According to the species account on Butterflies and Moths of North America, its larval host is Bermuda grass, crabgrass, and St Augustine grass, all three of which we have in abundance here in Boca. I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered its caterpillar, but now that I’ve done my homework, I can keep my eyes peeled. The species is also distinguished by an asterisk in Allen, Brock, & Glassberg’s field guide to caterpillars, which means that “if you live within the range of this species and have the appropriate caterpillar foodplant in your garden, there is a good chance that you will find the caterpillar in your garden.” To which I might add, “if you look!” Particularly given the note in the species account: “Nest is horizontal, at the base of the host and difficult to locate; a good way to avoid caterpillar hunters and lawnmowers!”
I suppose some would consider a caterpillar that feeds on your lawn a pest, but the butterfly is really quite charming. And you shouldn’t have a monoculture turf lawn, anyway. Break up the monotony with some bunch grasses; sprinkle in some wildflowers; sow some shrubbery. Be natural, people!
References
Allen T.J., Brock, J.P. & Glassberg, J. (2005). Caterpillars in the Field and Garden: A Field Guide to the Butterfly Caterpillars of North America. New York: Oxford UP.
Glassberg, J. (1999). Butterflies through Binoculars: The East. A Field Guide to the Butterflies of Eastern North America. New York: Oxford UP.
By Ben, on July 26th, 2010
Since I work from home again, my observatory is right outside my office door, and I can run out between emails and phone calls and see what the sun is doing. Today, there is a sunspot grouping called AR11089 (AR=active region; this numbering scheme was started by NOAA in 1972) that is visible enough for me to focus on with my P&S camera through the spotting scope:
The image itself isn’t all that spectacular, is it? Even when I blow up the region itself, it leaves a little to be desired:
White-light imaging through a homemade Baader filter without even a parasol for shade? This is classic low-budget observing. But for all that, you can make out the sunspot, can’t you? If you want to see more beautiful images, like this one of the same region taken two days ago, you really need to have some specialized equipment, using some gear that I’ll never be able to afford. But barring an unforeseen lottery windfall, I’ll just have to do the best I can with what I’ve got. I know I’ve got a good parasol around somewhere, for example, and I bet I could set up my CG-5 mount for better stability… Now where did I put that duct tape?
By Ben, on July 25th, 2010
It’s been said so often, and not just by those who dabble in astronomy, but perhaps especially often among those who do: patience is a virtue. After waiting up two hours past my normal bedtime for the summer moon to come out from behind the clouds, she finally did:
Last night’s insurance photo, all warm and fuzzy as it is, really isn’t in the same league. Part of the issue, I’m convinced, is that if I’ve already been asleep, I have a much harder time coaxing focus into my eyes. And on a difficult subject like the full moon through a point and shoot camera’s digital viewfinder, having “awake” vision is critical. So, here’s the Summer Moon 2010, taking its rightful place among the moons of 2010:
Success has its compensations: Tonight’s warm and humid night doesn’t seem nearly so awful as last night’s. The night-blooming jasmine smells particularly sweet, but not too cloying; the crickets are chirping pleasantly, not too aggressively. Everything seems brighter and clearer now that the moon has come out from behind the clouds.
Hope you’ve had a pleasant evening as well.
For those who are interested, the moon was officially full at 9:35 p.m., but this is as close to full as one can reasonably hope to catch her; she’s usually rather inconveniently located at the precise moment. Tonight, she was low on the horizon and behind a rather rude thundercloud.
By Ben, on July 25th, 2010
This morning at 2 a.m. it was still over 80 degrees outside, and, it being 2 a.m. and all, I found it hard to focus. Not just mentally. Literally. See the picture below if you doubt me.
 Summer Moon, 25 July, 2010, 2:10 a.m. EDT. What we have here is a fuzzy shot of the Summer Moon, taken on a warm and sleepless night here in south Florida. I only took the shot because I couldn’t get back to sleep after giving Eric his middle-night bottle (he’s sick. again. and needs his comfort food), for fear that tonight’s Summer Moon (9:35 p.m. EDT) would be clouded out or too low on the horizon for me to shoot while I’m still awake, etc. etc. So it’s an insurance shot, with strong hopes for a do-over, although the clouds outside my window right now make me glad I’ve got this one in the image bank, so to speak.
So, a warm and fuzzy summer moon to you all, and I’ll hope for a sharper image tonight.
By Ben, on July 23rd, 2010
The scarlet hibiscus (Hibiscus coccineus) is one of six species commonly found in Florida wetlands, and is probably the most commonly grown native ornamental hibiscus in the state. The one in our back yard is an interesting little story. It’s a perennial plant that is so hardy it can be mowed when it’s done flowering for the season. The stems/stalks are very long, over seven feet tall in the peat tub that it shares with our pond apple tree and some purple flag lilies, and they resemble bamboo in their lightness and stiffness.
The stems aren’t segmented like bamboo, but they are long, skinny, and rather rigid for their light weight (nowhere near as strong as bamboo, either, so perhaps the comparison isn’t very good after all). Other species of hibiscus (family Malvaceae) are as tall as small trees: H. tiliaceus can grow as high as 40 feet!
They’re a lot of fun when they’re flowering or preparing to flower, though:
They are obligate wetland species, but they do fine in a plain old “moist” location. And once they’re done flowering for the year, as long as they’re not in a peat-filled pond surrounded by rocks like mine, you can just mow right over ‘em and wait for them to come back next year! Word of warning, though: Roger Hammer points out that, due to the deeply lobed 5-part leaves, when this plant is not in flower it can resemble marijuana!
References
Hammer, R. (2002). Everglades Wildflowers. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot.
Tobe, J.D. et al. (1998). Florida Wetland Plants: An Identification Manual. Tallahassee: Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
Wunderlin, R.P. & Hansen B.F. (2003). Guide to the Vascular Plants of Florida, 2nd ed. Gainesville: UP of Florida.
By Ben, on July 22nd, 2010
This spring, I started an occasional series of posts on the palms of Palm Beach County. Probably the most complete post was the one about our state “tree,” the Sabal Palmetto (Cabbage Palm). But, as any writer knows, the more you strive for comprehensiveness, the more you realize you are doomed to failure. Case in point: the palms are blooming right now, and I didn’t include any pictures at all of the blooms in that post! Here are a couple that I took today, while on my lunch break (I’m working from a home office again, so I’m able to get out a little bit more into the “wild” of the urban back yard):
Each individual flower may be unimpressive—according to Tobe et al., “bisexual, small, white, clustered on lateral branches of the large (typically longer than leaves) inflorescence stalk—but when taken in their entirety, that is, on their large stalk, they are quite worthy of a bee’s business.
In this shot, you can get a better idea of just how large the inflorescence stalk is. The tree is about 20 feet tall, and those stalks overpower the telephone pole and wires that appear in the background:
Not exactly something to sneeze at. Unless, of course, you’re allergic to the pollen, in which case, Gesundheit!
References
Tobe, J.D. et al. (1998). Florida Wetland Plants: An Identification Manual. Tallahassee: Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
By Ben, on July 18th, 2010
Even though the summer sun can be quite hot here in Boca, in one respect we don’t have it nearly so bad as people who live farther north. Our maximum temperature is usually quite a bit cooler than the maximum in places like Washington, D.C. or New York. We may get warm sooner, and stay warm longer, but for us a killer heat wave is the mid-90s.
As Henry, Portier, and Coyne describe it, the average annual maximum temperature in southern Florida is 5° less than “most areas east of the Mississippi River and south of the Great Lakes” (7).
That said, June was an extremely hot month. And July hasn’t started off much cooler. So we’ve gotten in the habit of going to the beach early in the morning (by early I mean the crack of nine, not the dawn patrols of my misspent youth) on the weekends. That gives us plenty of time to enjoy the beach before the madding crowds arrive.
Eric loves the water, particularly when it’s as calm as it was last weekend. Glassy water, bright but not yet punishing sun: a recipe for fun!
This weekend, though, the winds were out of the east, and the ocean was quite a bit rougher. We still had fun, but the waves even in the shallows were stronger, and we didn’t last nearly as long. One of the last waves rolled us over and we got a dunking that took a bit of the fun away. Home time!
Mommy and Daddy got a good bird sighting out of the rough conditions, though: a Magnificent Frigatebird, fairly uncommon in Palm Beach County (image from Wikipedia, as I rarely take my camera to the sand and salt of the beach):
 Female frigatebird (Wikipedia) Our bird was traveling incognito, though, with neither white on the throat (female field mark) nor red throat sac (male field mark) visible. I assume this means it was a male with its throat sac hidden, because females and juveniles always display the white.
It was definitely a frigatebird, though; there’s no mistaking that wing shape or the piratical air, or the ease with which it plies its trade in the breezes over the beach. It owes this last trait to the fact that it has “the greatest ratio of wing surface area to body weight of all living birds. This fact, together with the bird’s very long, deeply forked tail, makes the frigatebird aerodynamically unrivaled for soaring and maneuvering” (51). (I would say that the Swallow-tailed Kite puts on a pretty good show, but for all its grace it is noticeably “heavier” on the wind than the man-o-war bird.)
Stevenson and Anderson’s map shows only spring and winter sightings from Palm Beach County; nevertheless, I’ve seen them often enough in summer that I’m not in any rush to report this sighting. (Our Palm Beach County Checklist of Birds lists them as unusual in spring, fall, and winter, and Rare (even rarer than unusual) in summer).
References
Henry J.A., Portier K.M., & Coyne, J. 1994. The Climate and Weather of Florida. Sarasota: Pineapple Press.
Hope, B. 2003. Palm Beach County Checklist of Birds. Audubon Society of the Everglades.
Stevenson, H.M., & Anderson, B.H . 1994. The Birdlife of Florida. Gainesville: UP of Florida.
By Ben, on July 8th, 2010
While much of the northeast has been experiencing triple-digit temperatures, south Florida was in the balmy 80′s this past holiday weekend, with large bouts of rain thrown in. At our weather station we got more than Π inches of rain, which kept me from getting out and doing much in the way of shutterbugging. But here on our front porch, right in front of the overflowing rainbarrels, was Randia aculeata, white indigo-berry in flower, thus demonstrating part of the reason for its name:
This is a nice shrub with a fairly distinctive growth pattern of opposite stems angled away from the main stem. It’s a nectar plant for Schaus’ swallowtail and some other butterflies that occur in Florida but that I’ve not seen in my yard. According to Dan Austin’s invaluable (and too expensive for my budget!) Florida Ethnobotany, the edibility of this fruit is described as “variable and some think the fruit a last resort. . . . The related species R. echinocarpa has been described as bitter and overly sweet…, and that pretty much sums up R. aculeata” (562).
But it’s certainly got a nice little flower that’s not at all out of place on a rainy Independence Day when the fireworks are soggy.
By Ben, on July 4th, 2010
Tonight at approximately 11 p.m. EDT, the Earth reaches aphelion, that point in its orbit when it is furthest from the Sun. Being July, one might wonder why it’s so dang hot (at least in the Northern Hemisphere, where the majority of Earth’s population resides on the majority of Earth’s land mass) if we’re farther from the sun than we are at any other time of the year.
The answer, as many of you know, is that Earth’s seasons are not caused by its distance from the Sun. Instead, they are caused by the tilt of its axis. It’s easiest to visualize with a picture:
Earth is always tilted 23.5 degrees from the plane of its orbit around the sun, which means that for any given part of the year, one hemisphere is tilted toward the Sun, and for the other part of the year, it’s tilted away from the Sun.* When your hemisphere is tilted toward the Sun, your day is longer; when it’s tilted away, it’s shorter. Longer days mean more time for the Sun’s rays to heat the atmosphere, the ground, the water–everything! The slight (<5 million km) difference in the Earth–Sun distance between aphelion and perihelion is negligible in terms of the planet’s heat budget.
Why is it hotter later in the summer than at the solstice? Well, that’s because the Earth’s surface stores heat; the shortening of day length after the solstice isn’t enough to overcome the storage of heat from the long days that preceded it. Which is why, even though June was a Very Hot Month this year in Florida, our hottest days are probably still ahead of us (sigh!).
*It’s important to realize that this doesn’t mean we flop back and forth in space on our axis, sometimes 23.5 degrees to one side, sometimes straight up and down, sometimes 23.5 degrees to some “other side.” The Earth’s axial tilt is constant. We do not flop back and forth over the course of six months.** It’s just that sometimes we are on one side of the Sun, and at other times, we are on the other side, so the sun appears north of the equator sometimes, and south of the equator at others.
**The Earth is wobbling slightly, but this effect, known as precession, is felt over thousands of years, not a few months.
By Ben, on July 1st, 2010
There’s some nice scenery in south Florida in late June, for those who can brave the heat and the humidity. In our front yard, our live oak trees (Quercus virginiana) are throwing up some very nice little acorns, after having borne some lovely flowers this spring:
It’s hard to tell scale in a close-up photograph, but since the leaves of this young tree are less than 3 inches long, that ought to give you some idea of how diminutive these acorns are at this stage.
Live oaks are among the most useful and prettiest trees you can grow; our neighborhood has some decent ones, but one of our nearby neighborhoods has some truly lovely specimens, even after the prunings by hurricane of 2004 and 2005. Whenever we can, we try to ride our bikes through these lovely tree-lined streets.
In the back yard, the scarlet hibiscus (Hibiscus coccineus) was preparing to bust out in flower this past weekend:
And then on Monday, the promise of the buds bore fruit (or should I say, flower?):
And, last but not least for today’s post, there’s a shot of the fruit of Annona glabra, the pond apple. Native to Florida and the West Indies, and even Central and South America, this is the northernmost representative of the large tropical genus in the family Annonaceae. The fruits are an important food for wildlife, although they rarely seem appetizing to even the most hardcore Florida naturalists. I have smelled one ripe fruit, once, that sounded like it might be something I could try to eat, but I never did try to eat it. Gil Nelson calls its fruit “edible but not particularly tasty”; even Steve Bass, who has probably tried to eat just about everything ever described as edible mentions obliquely, in his write-up of the species, that “there are several tropical species in the genus Annona which have tastier fruits.”
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