Chickens, Vicariously

Gerty of the gimlet eye.

We are taking care of a friend's daughter's poultry operation for a few days this week. That is, four hens. Plus a few fish, a tankful of walking-stick insects, and a hermit crab. I learned only this morning that the supposedly sedate hermit crab is a trickster in disguise. Apparently, in the past, a gang of hermit crabs escaped their tank and managed to scrabble to all corners of the house; one got into the washing machine, another turned up in the dining room, and just one lily-livered hermit crab scuttled under a bed in the same room as the tank.

But I digress. Fortunately, the chickens did not escape their pen while on our watch. They were, on the whole, most cooperative, save for one stubborn gal who would not join her sisters in being gently herded into the coop for the night. She couldn't be allowed to wander her pen after dusk because raccoons as big as VW Beetles roam the neighborhood at night and would be quick to make a meal of her. After the other three hens had already settled in for the evening with gentle, satisfied clucks, this bird would flit to the farthest corner of a pen that was accessible to humans only by way of a gap under a guillotine-type wooden door that was about 2 feet high.

You can imagine my delight at having, finally, to creep through this gap like a commando through a layer of hay and chicken muck to grab the stubborn thing.

Fortunately, we didn't have to repeat this maneuver the next night because we knew the way to a chicken's heart is through its stomach. Or gizzard. Or whatever. A piece of bread crumbled into a corner lured the three cooperative hens immediately and eventually won over Miss Suspicious, too.

A very, very, very small part of me would like to keep hens. I do love the sound of a contented chicken's cheerful prattle, not to mention the glorious, fresh, warm eggs containing plump, carrot-orange yolks. Actually, very much of me would like to keep hens, but nothing in me wants to clean chicken coops.

When I was little, I spent one glorious day anticipating the arrival of a pet chicken. I was playing with my toys when my mom wandered through the room and I idly asked, "Where's Dad?" She replied, "He went to get a chicken."

I didn't say anything, but this news certainly brightened my day. A chicken! How nice. Being only four years old and safely believing that adults, unlike children, lived in a world where they just did whatever they pleased without rhyme or reason whenever they wanted, I didn't even think to ask "Why?" or "Since when?" If my parents had suddenly decided to procure a chicken, well, OK then. It was no stranger than their suddenly deciding to, say, buy a new living room chair, or a sink, or baking soda.

By evening, however, no poultry was in evidence except for the one being prepared for dinner. I had to ask my mom "Where's the chicken?" a few times before she figured out that I'd misunderstood her and explained that she'd meant Dad had gone to the grocery store.

What else could I say but "Oh"? I was slightly dismayed that we weren't getting a new pet. But chicken was my favorite dinner. So there really wasn't anything to complain about.

Foghorn Quackhorn and either Henny or Penny

Before chicken-keeping became so popular in my city, we did get to dabble in all the fun of poultry without any of the work each summer for a few years, when we'd pack up the car and head for central Washington to spend a week or two in the little town of Manson, near Chelan. The owners of the cabin we rented had a glorious chicken yard: a large area where a flock of 20 or so birds wandered freely, scratching in the dust, snapping up insects, and dozing in the shade of a tree. At night, they tucked themselves into a decades-old coop.

Every morning and evening, we'd visit the chickens--a big thrill for my then two-year-old daughter. We tossed corn to them and sometimes fresh fruit, which drove them into a frenzy of feeding. Their passion for fresh fruit caused them to rain pecks on my daughter's red-painted toenails peeking out from her sandals. Fortunately, she thought this was pretty funny and not cause for panic, though we took care to put her in sneakers for future visits.

These chickens had great lives--even the young roosters, despite the fact that only one of them was slated to rule the roost and the others were all named "Fajita." The winner of this lottery was the rooster who proved himself to be a wise and noble leader who wasn't rude to the hens and who was also capable of refraining from attacking human visitors. The hens roamed all day and dreamed feathery dreams at night in the safety of their nest boxes.

The only two casualties we knew of were two hens who flew the coop: little Broody Hen, always picked on by the other birds and who, we like to think, went on to better things after she left, and a big Barred Rock hen with beautiful black-and-white zigzagging on her plumage who didn't make it more than 20 feet from the chicken yard before being eaten by a coyote, leaving only a small oval of feathers.

This little band we're minding consists of Henny and Penny, a pair of Barred Rock (I think) hens--one of these twins is the aforementioned suspicious bird, and the other isn't exactly in love with us; a big brawny Buff Orpington named Foghorn Quackhorn; and a clever Rhode Island Red (I think) named Gerty. Gerty follows us around telling us what to do and to do it quickly.

I think that Gerty is the only one able to read the inside of the coop door, which is covered with henny pennings.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

As it is currently the Year of the Tiger, I would love to be able to say that this big, fat caterpillar I found in my garden is the larva of a western tiger swallowtail, one of the few species of butterfly that flit through our neighborhood. But I'm afraid that would be a lie. A tiger swallowtail caterpillar is club-shaped and has eerie eyespots on its back that make it look like a creepy little snake lurking in the leaves, a perfect disguise for scaring off a hungry bird.

(Or a prying kid. I can still remember clambering through shrubs in our Long Island backyard as a kid and suddenly coming face to face with a hideous lime-green Something with enormous yellow-and-black eyes bulging from its head. I screamed and ran. Two decades passed before I figured out it was nothing but the caterpillar of a spicebush swallowtail butterfly.)

No, the sad truth is, I have no idea what this caterpillar is. I thought at first it was the young'un of the cabbage butterfly (also called the cabbage moth, even though it isn't one; in that sort of mood, you might as well call it the cabbage frog, or the cabbage gnu, since it isn't a frog or gnu, either). But that plump larva apparently has yellow stripes, not white.

Not that many of our cabbage-butterfly larvae (known as cabbage loopers) ever survive to become yellow-striped green teenagers. Last year, we planted lots of broccoli, collards, and kale in our garden, so our little vegetable patch promptly became a mecca for fluttering crowds of cabbage whites ready to lay eggs on suitable host plants for their young. When I discovered hordes of little green caterpillars inching and munching their way through the crop, I looked for good ways to dispatch them--and there are many--before settling on a most excellent one: hire your money-hungry kid to find and collect them at a bounty of 10 cents per larva.

Our resident bounty-hunter amassed a fortune in this enterprise and even enlisted her cousin for an afternoon. The caterpillars went on to become snacks for a friend's chickens.

This one, however, wasn't gobbling up our crops. It clung to the stem of a perennial in a planter, a tall purple-flowered spike known as veronica or speedwell. (I fully intend to name a character Veronica Speedwell in that novel I fully intend to write one day.) So it was left unscathed.

We're guessing it might be the larva of a yellow Clouded Sulphur butterfly. But there are an awful lot of caterpillars that meet the description of "green with white stripes." If I had a dime for every species whose larva fit the bill, I'd be almost as rich as my daughter.

Dragons in the Garden, Part II

This dragon-like little creature lurks in a shrub outside my front door. I've seen others of its kind skulking in the garden, and have witnessed adult humans yelping and shrinking away from them. But these insects are not only completely harmless to people and plants, they are also a gardener's best friends.

Because these menacing mini predators are none other than the babies of that scourge of aphids, a ladybug.

In this insect family, it's the adults who are endowed with all the features that make people say, "Awww." They're pudgy. They're round. They come in Gummi-bear colors. They often have polka-dots. They trustingly walk on your arm. Sometimes they forget to completely fold their wings underneath their wing cases and potter around looking like church ladies with too-long petticoats or little boys who've forgotten to tuck in their shirt tails. What could be more charming?

(OK, they also ooze foul-smelling yellow fluid from their joints if alarmed. Nobody's perfect.)

The larvae, however, won't be winning any Beautiful Baby contests anytime soon. Upon hatching, they look a bit like deer ticks (minus one pair of legs). They grow into elongated little black alligators, eventually acquiring bright orange, red, or yellow markings. (Thus far I haven't been able to determine whether lady-beetle larvae are as foul-tasting to birds as the adults are and if these colors serve as fair warning to them.)

Mama lady beetle considerately lays her eggs on a leaf in a veritable smorgasbord of aphids, so when the larvae hatch, they blunder into a feast. I imagine that'd be like waking up in the morning surrounded by chocolate croissants. The babies tuck into the meal about an hour or two after hatching, stabbing aphids right and left with hollow mandibles and slurping them up like milkshakes.

Then they probably enjoy a nice aphid-dinner mint.

A typical larva with a good appetite may gobble up 30 to 40 aphids a day over the course of four or five weeks. (According to many sources, "the convergent lady beetle may eat its weight in aphids every day as a larva." This sounds like an awesome statistic until you realize that you don't know how much a lady-beetle larva or an aphid weighs. Still, that's a lot of chocolate croissants.)

But wait, kids! It's WORD PROBLEM TIME! According to a 2007 scientific paper, "Molecular sabotage of plant defense by aphid saliva," a typical adult aphid weighs approximately 1 milligram. If an aphid weighs 1 mg, and a lady-beetle larva stuffs itself with 40 aphids, how much does the larva weigh?

Adult lady beetles consume a lot of aphids too, but they're not as voracious as the growing youngsters, plus they can fly away if your garden runs out of aphids and other small chitin-clad snacks. The larvae can't.

I once watched a lady-beetle larva approach a cluster of fat aphids on a stem--so delighted with its find that it was nearly rubbing its hands (if it'd had hands) together with anticipation like a cartoon fox in a henhouse--only to be met by a hostile ant that was guarding the aphids; ants tend to little herds of aphids so as to enjoy the honeydew they produce. The ant was ferocious; the larva seemed surprised; the aphids were oblivious. The ant won the gladiatoral event, but sort of by default--the larva did what looked like a pratfall, falling off the stem in astonishment, actually a very effective "I'm outta here" reflexive response. This time the ant was the one to dust off its virtual hands, satisfied with a job well done.

Dragons in the Garden, Part I

Every flower in my garden sparks pleasure and satisfaction in me when I see it, but the ones that plant themselves and spring up seemingly out of nowhere to shout "Surprise!" are my favorites. In this category of "Best Impromptu Performance," the award would definitely go to the snapdragons.

I've purchased and planted snapdragons in the past, but in recent years there's been no need to do so, because their descendants send up spears of color every spring not only in the pots that held their parents, but also in the most unlikely corners and dry spots in the yard.

And what colors! Snapdragons blaze in sunset colors of orange, yellow, pink, red, purple, and red-purple. And lavender, melon, ruby, and crimson. You can also cleanse your palate (or "palette," in this case) with snapdragons as white as cumulous clouds. Any of these may also boast fringes and highlights in other colors.

My current crop of snapdragons tend toward the cooler colors--there's a lavender, a pink-purple, and a nearly-black purple snapdragon growing in the front yard as well as one crisp white plant. Recently a yellow and plum snapdragon snaked out from the rockery wall over the driveway.

Snapdragons range in size from petite six-inchers to tall three-footers; mine seem to top out at about two and a half feet. The shortest one grows in a pot outside the door. It's about 18 inches tall but makes up for its short stature in bulk: this plant is a five-headed dragon, with each flower-bedecked raceme curving in a different direction.

Some of these 'dragons may actually be springing back to life in the manner of a phoenix, because snapdragons (which are native to the Mediterranean) are actually perennials, though they are generally regarded and sold as annuals in the United States. My growing zone in the Northwest, however, is often likened to a Mediterranean climate (though without the spanikopita, ouzo, and endless-summer "Shirley Valentine"/"Mama Mia" romantic atmosphere).

Did I know they were perennials because I'm, like, a totally know-it-all gardener in touch with Earth and all her children? No, I did not. I had to look it up. In the process, I learned the following:

The snapdragon's scientific name is Antirrhinum majus. "Antirrhinum" is derived from Greek words that come together to mean "like a nose." Since "majus" means "larger," this poor flower's name basically means "big schnozzola." Fortunately, its common name "snapdragon" comes to the rescue here. Gently squeeze the sides of a snapdragon flower to see it snap its jaws, and you won't be in any doubt as to how it acquired this evocative name.

And not just any insect can come along and dip into a snapdragon flower's largesse of nectar. Oh, no. Only one of the right size, with enough heft to make the flower's lower lip drop, will be able to burrow into the blossom. This lucky insect is typically a bumblebee (honeybees are apparently too light to tip the lip).

The flower welcomes this pollinator by providing a landing platform complete with "conical epidermal cells" (what you and I would call by the more technical name of "tiny little bumps"). This provides traction for the bee, a no-slip grip mat to help it get a foothold. Studies show that bumblebees shun mutant flowers that lack these cells.

But other studies show that some naughty bees don't live up to their end of the bargain, either, and drill into the flower from the side so as to nab the nectar without doing the work of burrowing and thereby getting daubed with pollen. Very bad bee-havior.

In other snapdragon news: In Europe, the flower was believed to repel witchcraft and other trickery. The Victorians, those wacky purveyors of fun who created a whole language of flowers, labeled snapdragons as symbols of presumptuousness (Who would one send a bouquet of snapdragons to, in that case? To a presumptous suitor who sent you a dozen red roses?). And like many plants, it's found its way into dishes, though please take heed that I am not suggesting you do so; I've merely read that its seeds were used to make cooking oil and its petals and leaves to make tea. (One book I found online will even tell you how to whip up a dish of Pan-Fried Pork with Snapdragons.)

A snapdragon that manages to avoid being brewed, stir-fried, or pressed will no doubt be glad to hear it has not only dodged being known as the Giant Nose Plant but also that "snapdragon" is unlikely to yield to such other common names for the plant as toad's mouth, dog's mouth, lion's mouth, rabbit's lips, and lion's lips.

Oh, and incidentally, even though snapdragons may seed themselves freely in the garden and aren't native to the Pacific Northwest, they're not considered invasive--unlike the dalmatian toadflax that looks a lot like a yellow snapdragon and sometimes passes itself off with the alias "wild snapdragon," but is really a very distant cousin in a completely different genus that the snapdragons would prefer you not mention at all.

No iPod, but lots of isoPods

Memorial Day weekend brought gray skies and extra-low tides to the Puget Sound area. The conditions were excellent for beachcombing at Carkeek Park--foul weather kept crowds at bay, and the low tides revealed all sorts of squishy, squashy, scuttling, and secretive seashore creatures.

Ochre sea stars in neon orange and purple clung to the undersides of rocks amid a welter of barnacles and mussels. Also nestled among the rocks were a multitude of green anemones and what looked to be a painted urticina (a red and green anemone that can live for up to 60 years). A red-orange blob of what might have been a reclusive octopus lurked deep inside a crevice. If you stood close to a big rock, you could hear the clicks and whispers of barnacles scrabbling inside their shells.

Life in the tidal zone is packed tighter than a subway car at rush hour. The first photo shows a limpet, which clings to a rock; tiny barnacles, in turn, cling to the limpet.

I especially liked the teeming zoo I found under a looseleaf-sized thin slab of red slate. It was dense with tiny mussels, hermit crabs the size of peas, and weird worms that I think were sand or pile worms. (A field guide suggested gently pressing the worm behind its head to cause it to evert its "sharp black pincers," a suggestion I found it easy to ignore.)

The best critter hidden under the slab was a rockweed isopod, a marine cousin of the pill bug and the sow bug (those little gray army-tank minibeasts that live in your yard and are sometimes called roly-polies or potato bugs). This one, as you can see, was bright olive green.

Apparently the isopod wears this color most frequently but can also be black, pink, or tan, depending on what color its background is. It's also called Vosnesensky's isopod. Which is a lot of name for a little guy like this to tote around, even if it can grow to be 2 inches long.

Vosnesensky was some Russian guy who studied marine isopods on the west coast in the mid-1800s. And he got to have one named after him. Some people have all the luck.

Apparently there is a similar species in the southern regions of the coast that looks much the same but has "round eyes instead of kidney-shaped" ones. Remember that if you ever go eye to eye with an isopod.

The birds were out in force, too. Crows poked and probed at the rocks, as did gulls, feasting on the bounty laid out by the extra-low tide. A bald eagle circled over the beach. The song of a Swainson's thrush spiraled up from the woods, and this cheerful song sparrow piped away in a shrub near the entrance to the beach.

Tough Little Plant

Every year, just as it seems as if spring will never really make itself at home in our drizzly part of the world, this tough little plant blooms in a crevice between the sidewalk and the wall of a building a few doors down and around the corner from us. I think it is a dwarf purple alyssum, a pretty carpet of lavender blooms that doesn't ask for much in return for its charms. The Sunset guide to western plants notes that this plant, with its Mediterranean origins, thrives in "poor, rocky soil." It loves full sun, is heat tolerant, and is happy with a splash of water now and then.

It's an annual, but don't tell that to this particular plant--or at least the particular patch of soil that it sprouts from. It pops up every year in this hardscrabble spot, and if the new blooms are really those of its scrappy seeds, so be it--it's still a dogged little thing.

I was surprised to learn that it's in the Brassicaceae family, kin to broccoli, cabbage, and the like. If the plants in my vegetable garden as well as the dwarf purple alyssum and the white "snow crystal" alyssum plants in my yard had an attention span,  I'd lecture them about their brave cousin around the corner and how it blooms despite receiving no attention, scant water, and (when summer finally arrives) nothing but direct sunlight glaring off the pavement all day long. And how they really should be thriving given their optimal locations, well drained soil, and admiring gardeners. But you know plants. They pretend they don't hear you.

So I'll just continue to detour now and then while walking the dog to check on how this plant's doing. It's terribly obvious how this surprise bouquet functions as a symbol for so many themes (Resiliency; Nature's Restorative Powers: Adversity, Courage in Face of [see]; et cetera) so I won't belabor that point. I'll simply hope that the building's owners don't get the notion one day to zap the little metaphor with Round-Up like a crabby English professor reading the 127th essay of the day.

The Lady of No Spot

I found this little ladybug on the top of the yard-waste bin when I went to put the trash out over the weekend. Its elytra were so vividly red, it looked like a droplet of blood. The lack of spots made it look quite exotic, though I think it belongs to a species fairly well represented in the Pacific Northwest. I'm not a coleopterist (nor do I play one on TV), but it appears to be a Western Blood-Red Ladybeetle (Cycloneda polita polita).

This possible identity came up in an Internet search. My field guides weren't much help in identifying the little beetle. Granted, there are about 350,000 known species of beetles ("on Earth," many sources like to add, suggesting the possibility that beetles abound on other planets--but with beetles being so abundant, who knows?). And there are more than 450 species of ladybugs just in North America. So that would be one heck of a fat field guide if it listed all the possibilities. Instead of boosting toddlers up to table height with a phone book, parents could use a Ladybug Field Guide to do the job.

The field guide did suggest one spotless species, the ironically named Spotless Nine-Spotted Ladybug. But the shield behind the head did not look the same, much to my relief.

Right after I snapped this picture of the ladybug, a spittlebug toddled past her. A spittlebug is a nymph; when it grows up, it's known by the equally wonderful name of froghopper. Spittlebugs are not generally regarded fondly. They're condemned as pests, and a quick Google search turns up many sites suggesting how to eradicate "infestations" of them. They're particularly loathed by growers of alfalfa and other crops.

But I still harbor a fondness for these little creatures. I remember, as a kid, learning that the weird blobs of foam I saw on plant stems were made by tiny bugs hidden inside them, merrily spewing bubble fluid out of their hind ends and whipping it into a foam with their legs and bodies. The first time I poked a grass blade into one of the little foam homes, I encountered a tubby bug with big brown eyes that looked like a cartoon character. It's hard to shake first impressions. My infestation of spittlebugs quietly resides on the stems of the Canterbury bells in my garden, and both seem to be thriving.

After I loaded the images onto my computer, I noticed what looks like an aphid moseying about in the background. As aphids are the ladybug's main prey (a ladybug may chow down on 5,000 aphids in a lifetime), you'd think it would steer clear, but it was quite unconcerned. Perhaps, like a gazelle on the savannah stepping lightly past a recumbent lion, it knew the ladybug was sated. More likely, it's just completely oblivious. (OK, you probably can't be partly oblivious.)