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 Rattlesnake
A Pacific Rattlesnake….. There are many species of wasps… locally the ones that bother us are the yellow-jackets…. they are meat eaters and like to swarm over any injured animal…. they also will swarm when they feel their home is under attack… that’s when I have issues with them… I’ll be in the brush cutting away and get too near their house… they will quickly rally and send investigators out to chase me away. In this area we have one type that makes these hives from chewed cellulose from trees and bushes (and houses)… they then mix it with their saliva to make a substance they can form into their little house. It’s really a remarkable substance and technique…. and their social structure is similarly amazing.  wasp nest
This is a nest placed alongside a creek, above the water level, but in a spot that will get late afternoon sunshine…. I suppose the humidity from the creek is a consideration, as well as any cooling the water might give on hot days….. Notice this next nearly touches the ground, hanging from a few bush twigs, on the side of a cliff on a creek bank……
 wasp nest Closer view…. the wasps are starting to come out and look…..
 wasp nest
This is as close as I was going to get…..  Ladder-Backed Woodpecker This is either a Ladder-Backed Woodpecker… or a Nuttall’s Woodpecker…. the two species are known to hybridize, and their area overlaps near this point. They like to hop around cactus and other desert brush looking for grubs, ants and other bugs…. sometimes they will supplement their diet with cactus fruit. They like to nest in trees, but will also use large cactus.  Ladder-Backed Woodpecker The photo above shows a young ladder backed woodpecker in our cactus… from this angle we can see the fine patterns defining the horizontal bands. This is a little video I made of this woodpecker hopping around the cactus. They are fun to watch as they make many acrobatic moves……  Woodpecker nest in an Agave stalk A few years ago, our neighbors had a pair nest in this agave stalk……
 Woodpecker nest in an Agave stalk Here we can see the hole they constructed in the side of the agave stalk… the nest opening faces northwest in this case….. one hole is about four feet over the other one.. both openings facing the same direction……
Ladder-Backed Woodpeckers range through most of Mexico, and much of the US Southwest…. but actually, they are not supposed to be this close to the coast….. but they do seem to like it here.
 Alligator Lizard This is an Alligator Lizard… they are very common here…
We have problems with western pocket gophers…. they eat the roots and stems of our cactus plants…. they can go down a row of cactus taking out a new plant each day…. to trap them I often have to dig up several plants nearby in order to effectively place the traps…. I don’t keep figures because it would make me sad… but I suppose we lose a couple hundred plants a year… and the accumulated production of those plants in the years they would have been productive….. so even though I think these are amazing little creatures, that I have a GREAT deal of respect for….. I cannot abide them roaming around the plants…..  Our onion patch The gophers also cause us havoc with our home vegetable garden….  An onion pulled into the gopher hole I say that I like gophers… and it’s true. I admire anything that can get by so well and easily…. these gophers will often come up from below a plant they want, and eat it from below, pulling it into the ground as they eat it… or in the case of some of our large cactus, they will actually burrow up into the heart of the cactus, living in the protection of the plant while they tunnel it to death….
 Bottom half of the onion eaten off Here I’ve pulled the onion from the ground, and we can see that this is probably a days worth of food for a half kilo animal…  Digging into the gopher tunnel Here I’ve dug into the spot where I’ve seen recent gopher activity. There are two main types of tunnels… one is access tunnels used to find food sources, and the other is the deeper transit tunnels they use to move from place to place safely…. those tunnels will often be used by generations of animals…. the feeding/access tunnels are used to access temporary food sources…. these may not even be connected to the main tunnels…. I suspect this critter is going to come back to this area if I open this access tunnel…. he’ll feel the draft and will want to plug the damage…. but I will have to continue digging until I’ve gotten past the ”plug’ of soil he’s put into the access tunnel to block it off while he sleeps through the day deeper down…. I’ll often dig down trying to find the plug… it is usually a bit softer than the surrounding soil…. if the animal is planning to return, he’ll not pack it too tight.. I found this one easily enough…..  gopher tunnel grand opening! Once I find the opening and get past the plug, I try to clean it out and open it up using a stick, so I don’t get human scent all over the opening… also I don’t want an angry gopher biting my fingers… they are vicious little animals with HUGE yellow ugly and scary teeth! At this point you set the trap, and then press it hard against the sheer wall created by the shovel… you then cover the joining of trap and soil with more soil to exclude ALL light except for the tiny hole open at the end to lure the animal to investigate. The main tunnels will give better success… but they can be so deep that they require a larger hole, destroying more plants… for now… I want to just stop THIS gopher from eating onions. I’m not on a warpath to eliminate all gophers… just the ‘problem animals’ that are causing us verifiable damage.  we had to destroy the onion patch in order to save it During my digging to find the hole, I had to dig up a couple of neighboring onions…. I used to try to save plants by not removing them… sometimes that meant I did not place the trap as I did not want to destroy plants… but the gophers would eat them later anyway…. so I’ve learnt to just destroy anything I need to to kill them when I get one I can trap. Mostly though, I am sure the snakes, cats, bobcatrs, foxes, owls and hawks kill hundreds of times more than I kill…. I only bother with the ones that are in something I don’t want them to eat…. like food and cash crops. They can eat the landscape plantings and such…. that doesn’t cost us money or food….  trap set and baited I use these new-fangled box traps…
 onions removed in order to set the trap Here’s a couple of the onions I pulled when I set the trap… if I didn’t take them out to set the trap, the gopher will likely eat them soon anyway…. this way I get them. we have moles also.. but they don’t eat crops, and their little tunnels don’t bother the plants… so I don’t worrry about them….
 an onion half pulled down Unfortunately the gopher plugged that trap (happens to me perhaps 1/3 of the time)…. and the next day he ate this onion… so I dug it out and placed the trap there…. then he plugged that one, and ate another onion.. and another….. each time I rest the trap in another onion hole….. day after day.. then after about five days… I finally got one of the most wily gophers I’ve had troubles with… if it was indeed the ‘problem gopher’..  half an onion Yeah, gophers…. he ate a few onions of this size.. and a couple smaller ones….. One of the days that I was trying to get him… I heard him chewing on an onion in the morning…. he was underground.. but I grabbed a shovel and plunged it into the ground around the onion… but still missed him… they can back through a tunnel as quickly as they can go forwards…. a most amazing and specialized animal.
After posting this, a new product was brought to my attention… and I think I will give it a try. Spain is a very pretty country. In so many ways it reminds me of California, with a wide range of ecosystems from sea-coast, to semi-desert, to alpine conditions. Spain is also blessed with a wide range of wildlife, that they have done a reasonable job of protecting in recent decades. Ibex grazing on a dam face Spain also has some interesting geological and architectural features and attractions. This is a concrete dam in the Pyrenees in Spain. These photos were sent in an e-mail by a friend… I thought them interesting enough to share. Ibex grazing on a dam face When I saw this photo above, I wondered why the builders went through the detail of statues of animals inserted in the concrete facing. But anyone who’d build a concrete dam faced with stone is liable to do anything! And heck, if you build statues into such a structure… you’d space them nicely and in some pattern, right?
 Ibex grazing on a dam face Oh, here’s the real deal… sure-footed Ibex… they are a type of goat. You can see these guys on TV, and marvel at their abilities to move about on steep or sheer faces…. but this is ridiculous. They are browsing the rock faces for lichens. Sparse grub for the amount of energy they must expend. But I guess with their supreme adaptations, this is almost a walk-in-the-park…. meanwhile, nothing else is going to be browsing this area…. so they have this food resource to themselves.
 Ibex grazing on a dam face See the salts precipitating out? They are after those also. So it’s a mineral resource also.
 Ibex grazing on a dam face Anything is cute when it’s a baby… even a potato bug…
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