Alligator Lizards in the Air

    Saturday afternoon I helped my son, James, stack half a cord of wood.  James lives on top of Livingston Mountain, just north and east of Vancouver, Washington at an elevation of about 1500 feet.  At my advanced age, I was pleased to be able to engage in some genuine physical work, but after an hour I had shed my outer garments and I was looking for any reason to take a break.  So I was both fascinated and relieved when James announced that there was a lizard harboring under the last of the wood.  

Southern Alligator Lizard, Vacaville, Ca. 

    Although it had been foggy when we walked down the hill, through the pasture to the barn, it was now bright and sunny, albeit still below 50 degrees.  There in the grass, looking up at us, was a surprisingly stout lizard with a formidable head.  The shape of his head, with its elongated snout, lead me to believe this was an alligator lizard.

     Pretty much all I knew about alligator lizards was that they flew through the air in that pleasant ballad from the early 70s, Ventura Highway.  One has to assume that the song writer, Dewey Bunnell, had some personal experience with alligator lizards, although we are told that he was evoking clouds in the sky as his father changed a flat tire near Vandenberg Air Force base on the Southern California coast.  (Dewey grew up in an Air Force family.)

     Suffice it to say, its a long way from Ventura to Vancouver. I think Paul Simon might have included that fact in one of his collaborations with Art Garfunkel.  For me, at least that period is a bit fuzzy, so I might have got it wrong.  Was it Berkley to Carmel, Kalmazoo to Saginaw? Anyway, with this limited bit of knowledge, ie. Ventura Highway is where you see alligatior lizards, I had never presumed that they would exist in Washington State. As it turns out there are several species of alligator lizards.  B

Northern Alligator Lizard 

oth northern and southern alligator lizards may exist in the vicinity of both Ventura and Southwest Washington, although for the southern they just make it across the Columbia River.  Northern Alligator Lizards extend all the way up into Central British Columbia. Probably what we saw was the northren..

   The lizard just sat there.  Perhaps he was too cold to slither off, or possibly he was relying on the cryptic coloration of his hounds tooth coat, figuring if he didn't move we wouldn't see him.  There is a third possibility, that being that if we attempted to molest him he would inflict a painful bite.  Take that, you hippies!   There are several pictures on the internet of alligator lizards biting a human finger. 

   Neither James nor I had brought a cell phone to the wood stacking, so I'm including a couple pictures from the internet so you can get an idea of what I saw, a stout lizard of about eight inches with a formidable set of jaws.   

   Those of us in the north, still in the grips of a cold spring, can look at the clouds and dream of a warm Southern California highway. 

jeff

The Truth About Northwest Butterflies

     Yesterday Sandra and I went for a walk along the Columbia river.  We had discovered an area preserved as a meadow, with daisies and lupine, fronted on the river side by a fine stand of cottonwoods.  This area, in what is becoming suburban Washougal  is under development.  The new cement walkway, which extended for about a half a mile, may soon be the termination of a bike trail  extending all the way to the I-5 bridge in Vancouver, almost twenty miles away.  In the meantime, it provided some relatively undisturbed grassland and forest.

So which one is the sasquatch?

   Early in our walk, Sandra spotted a bald eagle high in the cottonwoods.  Everynow and then an osprey would circle the eagle and they would talk to one another.  Half a mile further we encountered an area under development with lights, a small slide and a sasquatch toiling against a cable.  That hairy ape, according to my son James, gives its name to this area,  At this stage it is locally known as Sasquatch Park.  

   Just beyond the sasquatch, Sandra spotted what is so far the best bird for our trip.  She had discovered a house wren singing in a small tree.  If you look over the apes right shoulder you can see the tree. 

    The wren was extremely cooperative, giving us several minutes of song from a distance of about twenty five feet.  So cooperative was this diminutive songster that I was able to nab the picture you see here with my point and shoot camera.  

   I have a long and varied relationship with house wrens.  They are one of several wrens that occur west of the Cascades,  Bewick's wren, with its rufous coat and bold black eyeline was my first wren, seen in my parent's yard.  What we used to call Winter Wren, now split from its East Coast cousin, to become the Pacific Wren, is a tiny bird that sings its heart out in the moist coastal forest.  Finally, the Marsh Wren (you can guess where this furtive bird lives) makes up the other wrens found west of the Cascades.

The House Wren sang his heart out.

    Thirty years ago, house wrens nested behind a board in our house in West Salem.  After a couple years I made a bird house which they used for several more years.

    Three years ago we visited my nephew Andrew and Shawn in San Rafael, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge.  They had a charming duplex, the back yard of which was a dry hillside.  Deer, coyotes and a variety of birds would appear at times on that hillside.  One day I noticed a family of house wrens living in a pile of dried sticks.  Two days later the owner had the hillside cleared, presumably to protect against a brush fire.  While this may have made good sense, it was a bummer for the house wrens.

   Which brings us to this happy songster.  While the wren was the best bird for the day, the main point of the outing was to look for butterflies.  Although we saw two species of bumblebees feasting on the lupine, and there were daisies and dandelions in abundance, we saw no lepidoptera.  If this field wasn't tailor made for nectaring, what was?   In my disappointment, I wrote to Daniel Rubinoff at UH Manoa, my go to butterfly source.  Daniel wrote back,

Bumblebees flocked to the lupine, but their were no butterflies to be seen.

 "Yeah I think that Teh Portland area is even worse than foggy Berkeley where I grew up!  The combination of cool weather and conifers doesn't help much... down by the river, where there is open space you might have better luck."

   Well, not so far!  But  a few chirps from a house wren is a good tonic.  And Daniel's advice will undoubtedly lead to an expedition into the mountains.  What could be better than that?

jeff

Tiger Cowrie in the Night. Or was it in the Morning's Light?

     For the last ten days we have been living on the right bank of the Columbia River, in that nouveau riche village of Camas.  Once a paper making town, Camas has been transformed by its proximity to burgeoning Portland combined with the tax incentive of living in Washington.  They still make a little paper in Camas, but the economy is 99% white collar.

Weatern Tiger Swallowtail, courtesy Greg Dean

    I had been hoping to find  some  butterflies. in the Pacific Northwest.  In my previous life as a bird watcher I seldom saw a butterfly.  I had hoped that this was because I wasn't really focused on seeing butterflies.  In search of Lepidoptera, we have gone to several parks and gardens, including an enterprise ten miles north of Vancouver called Naturescape.

  I had high hopes for Naturescape, which boasts butterfly and bird gardens.  In actuality it turned out to be about three acres of trees and cultivated wildflowers plopped in the middle of a cow pasture.  There were a variety of attractive plants that, if there were more of them, might attract birds and butterflies.  It could be that this project is aimed at selling these plants, but there was no one there to sell them and no obvious source of stock, as one might expect to find in a nursery.  It was a lovely day and we enjoyed an hour in the garden, recording our first black cap chickadee for the trip.

   We have remained vigilant and recorded a fleeting Western Tiger Swallowtail in the parking lot of Mccuddy's Marina on Hayden Island.. 

   We are hoping that the butterflies will appear with the migratory birds in two weeks.

Money Cowrie with extended mantle and siphon

   While we have been here, spending the majority of time with our children and their progeny, our house exchangers,  Gail and Martin DeLuke,  have been minding the fort at Casa Ono and snorkeling in our stead.  Two days ago, while on a baby sitting assignment, I was greeted with a text from Gail, which included pictures of a cone shell hermit crab, a Christmas Tree Worm and a bristle worm.  But hold the presses!  Her fourth picture was of a cowrie that I could not readily identify.  As far as I could tell, it was almost black with a bit of lighter mottling and a myriad of white spots. 

   This resulted in a flurry of trans-Pacific text messages which ceased when my cell phone died.  As Gail was, at this point in her evening,  was equally interested in ono tacos, mango margaritas and marine biology, the best information would come later.  Suffice it to say, it can be frustrating for us scientific types to deal with normal people, no matter how well intended.

   It wasn't until the following morning, back at Chateau DeLuke,  that I transferred her picture to the

Reticulated Cowrie, Kailua Pier 2012

computer.  Once we had a better look, it was apparent that the cowrie was covered by a dark mantle which was projecting a panoply of short white papillae..  

   Suffice it to say, I was dumbfounded.  Fifteen years ago I captured a money cowrie and kept it overnight in our aquarium at Alii Villas.  An hour or so after dark, it extended a white mantle with amazing fimbriated papillae. That was the one and only time that I have seen a cowrie with its mantle extended.

   (It was with this picture, that you see here, that I seduced the winsome Marta De Maintenon,PhD who has been our go to invertebrate zoologist lo these many years.  You have to admit, its quite a picture, especially when you consider that our aquarium was a large mayonnaise jar and we were shooting through the plastic.) 

   The key concept in all the above is "after dark".  As far as I knew, cowries always retracted their mantle before first light.  I had not known that our friends swam at night, so as soon as it became 0630 in the land of the swaying palm trees I gave my correspondent a call.  Her field notes, now liberated from the intoxicating influence of ono tacos, were this:  The cowrie was seen at about 0730 at Kahalu'u in roughly four feet of water.  It was huge...she thought six inches.  At this point I recalled an scrub nurse telling a critical surgeon, "But doctor, the boys always told me this was six inches." 

Tiger Cowry with extended mantle, Kahalu'u 2021 Gail DeLuke,

    I gave poor Gail a lecture on how you have to be careful with measurements underwater, stating the the reticulated cowrie was probably the biggest at Kahalu'u,  reaching a maximum size  just under four inches.

   With this new information in hand, I went back to the computer.  Gail had forwarded a video of a Tiger Cowrie extending its mantle.  I found it, as well, and had to admit that it looked very much like what she had photographed.  Here is a video with lots of great information about Tiger Cowries along with a look at the mantle. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PO2HxtQWRk

   Tiger Cowries grow to 6 inches in Hawaii and are among the world's largest.  Due to their large size, they have been prized for arts and crafts.  That is one of the reasons they are now uncommon.  If you are lucky enough to see one of these behemoths, please do not take it home.   And if you happen to see Gail DeLuke, tell her I'm sorry I doubted her.

   I do not have this species on my list.  We will check with Kathleen Clark to see if it is on her list for Kahalu'u.  While Wikipedia says that this animal lives below 30 feet, other internet sources put it at deeper than 10 feet.  With Ms. DeLuke's excellent picture in hand I believe we can reduce that further to four feet.  

    When we return to the Land of the Coqui Frogs we will definitely take a few swims just after sunrise in hopes of seeing a cowrie with its mantle extended. In the meantime, where the heck are all the butterflies?

 jeff 

A follow up note. 

    Kathleen Clark, who does regular surveys of Kahalu'u. reports that she sees large Tiger Cowries occasionally.  The last was in August of 2021.  On the other hand, Bob Hillis, who spent a heck of a lot of time both in deep and shallow water, before moving to Utah a few years ago, never saw a Tiger Cowrie in shallow water.  He did see them on walls in places like City of Refuge. You have to trust me...in his prime Sr. Hillis was an astute and indefatigible observer of the shallows.  

   I feel a bit like Carl Linnaeus, whos sat in his chair at Uppsala University, sending out his young proteges around the world to find new plants and animals to add to his taxonomic lists.

    On the other hand, who would you rather be,  Linnaeus or Peter Artedi ?  Those of you who are students of the blog, or possibly the science of ichthyology, will recall that Artedi was a colleague of Linnaeus, who was strictly a botanist. Linnaeus never left Scandinavia, while Artedi and others traveled widely discovering and collecting.  Artedi was the prime collector of marine animals.  He died while collaborating with a famous Dutch collector in Amsterdam, falling into a canal on his way home and drowning. 

    Following his death, his observations were co-published with Linnaeus as  in "Ichthyologia sive opera omnia de piscibus ..."  However, when it came time to publish the seminal work,  Sistema Naturae,  old Carl shamelessly took credit for his friend's work. There are no fish attrbuted to Peter Artedi.  Quid pudor est.

    So here's to Peter Atedi, Bob Hillis, Gail DeLuke and Kathleen Clark (for I am but a hmble scribe.)  Enjoy the toast, but try not to fall off a bridge on the way home.

jeff