Year in Nature Photography – Day 128

Day 8 of Arizona backyard photography.

Final day, leaving Tucson. Captured a full moon behind a saguaro the night before. The prickly pear cacti looked rather wrinkly when we first arrived but after the rain the plumped up storing what water they could get. One last picture of the bird of paradise bush. It’s quite remarkable how much life there is in the desert, though in the high parts there is less diversity than in the lower parts and we were in a city. However, as you can see from the aerial pictures, farming is still possible, with lots of circular fields for easier irrigation. I hope to get the chance to head back sometime and maybe see other parts of the desert in this country or elsewhere in the world.

I hope people enjoy the expanded information I’ve provided with the posts from this trip. I’m quite backlogged at this point so the next bunch of posts will not have as much information to them in order to get caught up. I’ve also grouped this trip in a separate sub-category so they can be found again and edited if I learn more.

Year in Nature Photography – Day 122

Day 2 of Arizona backyard photography.

For today we have another silhouetted animal, this time a lizard. Caught another lizard feeding on some rotting watermelon. These lizards are quite skittish and even movement at this distance will scare them off so I had to do some long distance ID for this one. Based on the color of the head and some of the patterning I’m guessing it is a desert spiny lizard which can have some quite brilliant scale coloring. The linked source indicates that females will have reddish/orangish heads during breeding season. Also apparently they can change color from light to darker to aid in the absorption (dark color) or reflection of light (light color).

In the deserts of Arizona most of the little rainfall they receive comes during the monsoon season. I’ll post about this later but this season brings out the paloverde root borer which is a member of the longhorn family of beetles and one of the largest beetles in North America. As the common name suggests, the larvae (grubs) feed primarily on the Mexican palo verde trees but will feed on other non-native trees as well. Despite their rather fierce looking mandibles (jaw, mouth parts) they seem to be vegetarian.

Cacti can be as difficult to identify as most other plants. A lot of details such as the number of folds, number of needles, how the needles are clustered, etc. distinguish different species. If you manage to catch it in flower you’ll have an easier time, unfortunately I seemed to have missed that event. All that aside, I’m pretty confident that I have a picture of a saguaro cactus with a hole in it. Saguaro’s can live for up to 200 years and many reach over 40 feet in height. They start producing flowers around the age of 55, which are borne at the tops of the ‘arms’ and main stem. The flowers bloom at night and are pollinated by birds, bats, and other insects. Some may have holes in them that may have been created by birds such as Gila Woodpecker and the Gilded Flicker for nesting. I’ll have more on cacti in later posts, but you can also see a fruit of a prickly pear type cactus.

Hole in a what I’m pretty sure is a Saguaro (Carnegiea gigantea)

Lizard in silhouette

Prickly Pear Cactus bud (Opuntia sp?) Could be the cow’s tongue again

Difficult to know for sure but guessing a Female Desert Spiny Lizard (Sceloporus magister)

Paloverde Root Borer (Derobrachus geminatus)

Gambel’s Quail (Callipepla gambelii)