The Urban Pantheist

Well, the internet connection was a bit uneven on the trip, so be prepared for the deluge of pictures now that I'm back in Boston, procrastinating away my buffer day!


A female Anolis wattsi, which I'm calling the Antiguan anole but wikipedia is calling "Watt's anole." I believe that juveniles are colored like females and then the males change as they become sexually mature. I saw some small intermediately colored specimens on this trip. The tiny ones are too fast to photograph in most cases.

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Wow, what an unexpectedly wonderful day for urban nature!  As most of you know, I work at a zoo in a major northeastern city.  I was in an area that used to be a waterfowl exhibit that's now closed, treating the water features for mosquitoes (biological controls, insect growth regulator, and pheromone traps).  Almost immediately I encountered the garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis) pictured two posts ago.  It slithered over a stick, so I was able to pick it up without it biting me, or worse, musking on me.  It struck as fiercely at me as a timber rattlesnake, despite being a pencil-sized predator of slugs.

I delved further into this jungle of concrete and weeds, and found a mallard family with four nearly grown chicks.  They were clearly shocked to see a human in their sanctuary.  It was surely safer for them in an unused part of a zoo, a hundred feet from thousands of people and cars, then it was in any of the nearby city parks.  I found one of my pheromone traps, blown by the wind into the artificial pond, and fished it out.  A plastic container the size of a large mayonnaise jar, it had an amazing array of life within it.  Four water boatmen had swam into it, hunting smaller insects.  I could make out the tiny swimming forms of water mites, and even copepods carrying double saddlebags full of eggs.  I dumped out the creatures into the pond and brought the empty trap back to storage.

On the way I walked through a landscape decorated with huge white spheroids, ranging from the size of softballs to those the size of deflated soccer balls.  These are giant puffballs, Calvatia gigantea.  If they were allowed to grow to maturity their insides would turn into billions of spores, which would puff out of tears in the mushroom's leathery hide when struck by raindrops.  I harvested two of them, for research purposes for the mushroom classes I'm teaching at Drumlin Farm in the fall.  Some of my research will include slicing up one of the mushrooms, frying it and eating it.  I must ask, lizblackdog and gwenhyffar, how do you cook and season these beasts?

Finally, as I went back to my storage area, I moved some equipment and turned up a yellow, white, and black striped caterpillar.  Such a striking and beautiful thing, but it was on a piece of metal.  "You belong here, little one," I said, as I lifted it up and placed it on a milkweed plant growing out of a crack in the asphalt.

Location: Price Road, Allston.

Urban species #160: Black swallow-wort Cynanchum nigrum

Tiny star-shaped flowers , so dark purply-brown they look black, are the primary charm of this weed. Later in the season it develops pods that release seeds that float on silken parachutes (similar to, but more restrained than, cottonwood). It twines up chain-link, putting glossy dark green green foliage on ugly fences. Its attractiveness cause it to be introduced to North America as an ornamental. Unfortunately, there is little else that is positive about this plant, at least as it exists outside of its native range of Eastern Europe.

It is strongly invasive, and has several deleterious effects. Like other members of the milkweed family, it is poisonous. So when it crawls in among crops or pasture fields, it makes mechanical harvesting impossible, and whole pastures unusable by livestock. When it invades grasslands, there is a population drop among birds that nest in such areas. Monarch butterflies recognize it as a milkweed, and lay their eggs on it, but their larva are unable to feed on it, and starve. It joins garlic mustard and Japanese knotweed on the "least wanted" list, for New England native plants enthusiasts.