The Urban Pantheist

I love thinking of names of pubs.


This great egret is snacking on a baby turtle.


This beautiful metallic scarab beetle is a pest known as the green June beetle. Larvae feed on plant roots, adults on ripening fruit--breeding appears to take place in the nests of leaf-cutter ants. Pretty awesome, even dead.

The JN "Ding" Darling National Wildlife Refuge is a protected estuary on the barrier island of Sanibel on the gulf coast of south Florida. It's something of a birder's mecca, with wide mud flats allowing for amazing visibility, and a resource-rich habitat attracting a variety of birds, including tropical migrants. It is named for the man who did much of the work to get the land protected.

Ding Darling was an editorial cartoonist and conservationist. He was often very critical of the policies of then president Franklin D Roosevelt in his cartoons. FDR was aware of him, and eventually asked him to be the first head of the agency that became the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Often on this visit to Southwest Florida I was struck by how hard the conservation fight seemed to be here. And yet the beauty and biodiversity are so omnipresent you would expect people would be clamoring to protect it. It's a shame the state wasn't discovered by westerners 500 years later than it was.

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At one point I figured we'd seen about all that we could in the botanical garden, but my dad wanted to keep walking. We found this little pond, and there was a couple on a park bench by it. Just a couple feet in front of them was another (maybe the same?) great egret. This was a pretty imperturbable bird! We moved quietly closer, and saw that there were also ducks and at least one gallinule near the couple. They were eating, and tossing some bread crumbs to the birds. The ducks and gallinule were happily eating the bread. They tossed some near the egret, which took a predatory pose and struck, and came up with a big fish! When my snapshot alarm went off I set the self-timer so that I could get a shot of my dad and myself, with this story in the background.

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My dad likes lighthouses, so I found one on the map: Punta Tuna. We followed yet another tiny winding road to a locked gate: the lighthouse was closed for the holiday week. A rough footpath through some scrubby woods along a drainage ditch seemed to go in the right direction, so we took a chance and went. A short while later we found ourselves on a beautiful beach, with this lighthouse overhead.



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Heron and umbrella.

This street in St. Johns (Antigua's capitol, a small and dense city of 20,000 people) shows a central drainage ditch. The water ends up in a small brackish swamp in the harbor. The oily mud is full of fiddler crabs, and you can see lots of white herons in the bushes when you drive opposite that part of the harbor. Actually getting to that part was a little tricky, involving crossing two vacant lots and attracting strange looks. When I spoke my intention to get down there, my mother in law warned me "It's horrible!" Well, I've seen worse. I'm glad I went there, I saw...( Read more... )

Boat-billed heron Cochlearius cochlearius

Herons, including egrets, are instantly recognizable by their shape: their coiled necks, long wader's legs, and sharp spear-heads of bills. Except for the boat-bill. This odd-looking heron is found in the neotropics, from Mexico to Brazil. It roosts in the safety of high places in trees in the swamp by day, and hunts for small water animals by night. Because of its strange bill shape it was long assumed that it hunted in some unique way, the way that the bill shape of a flamingo, a spoonbill, or a avocet suggests its particular feeding method. One study stated that the large bill was apparently filled with nerve endings that helped the nocturnal bird catch shrimp and fish in the muddy mangroves. A few years later another study claimed that the boat-bill feeds on the same prey in the same areas as the yellow-crowned night-heron, with the large bill serving no unique feeding function. Perhaps the boat-bill's courtship displays, full-contact bill clattering, explains the adaptive purpose of this bird's strange appearance.

This boat-billed heron is in the swamp exhibit in the Bird's World building in Franklin Park Zoo. I was trying to take pictures of other birds (who wouldn't stop moving) for 10 minutes before I noticed it perched on a high platform.

On this day in 365 Urban Species: Leopard slug, another favorite.

Urban species #110: Cattle egret Bubulcus ibis

The cattle egret, unlike its swamp-dwelling relatives, like the great blue heron, is a creature of grasslands. It is an African bird, originally, that associates with hoofed mammals, including (obviously enough) cattle. It follows these animals around as they forage, stirring insects out of the grass, and feeds on these insects.

Over the past millennia, every so often some cattle egrets would cross the Atlantic and visit South America. Some time relatively recently, the egrets discovered that some of the forests had been cleared, and replaced with grasslands full of the kind of insects they liked to prey upon. They even found that humans had performed the great service of bringing cattle, of all things, to this new continent. Some egrets didn't return to Africa, and over time a permanent South American population of cattle egrets developed. Inevitably, they spread into the vast, cattle-filled landscape to the north.

In Antigua, the cattle egrets have their choice of livestock to follow around: Cattle (including at least two herds of African zebu), horses, sheep, and the ever present goats. The most efficient disturber of the grassland insects, however, is the power mower. Adaptable as always, the cattle egret follows these strange creatures as naturally as any cattle herd.

( larger numbers, brighter sun )