Phenology, Tortie Tuesday, Hurricane, Poison Fallout, and an Undeserved Blessing

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Trigger warning: here comes another somewhat sad chronicle of the continuing effects of allegedly "safe" herbicides near the Cat Sanctuary. It wasn't only on Route 23, as I'd hoped. A storm took out our power line, among others, and although the American Electric Power and Asplundh crews' smooth teamwork was a beautiful sight to see...trees had toppled other trees for a solid half-mile, and they removed trees and spliced the wire in less than four hours...at some points along the line, some idjit sprayed more of that evil Monsanto product this web site would like to see banned worldwide. "Roundup" is not safe. It affects different individuals of the same species in enough different ways that tests don't show one consistent way it harms humans and the animals we care about, but harm it most definitely does.

Recap: I was seriously ill for about a week after the poisoning. Bruno, the kitten we adopted from the former Cat Sanctuary down the street, died immediately. His sister Boots died slowly, in agony. Jenny Wren died, apparently in pain, after laying one viable egg and one or more defective eggs in a nest she'd chosen to put right in my face--in the hedge nearest the porch, where she could grab mosquitoes attracted to me. My friendly paper wasps, Polistes fuscatus, have disappeared. Several human friends have been ill with different symptoms, most of which they described as things they've had before "but not this bad--I'm getting 'old'," though age probably has less to do with it than the amount of poison they inhaled. The cats stopped drinking from the stream near the power line, and currently rely on me for bottled water when they're not drinking rain water. Heather showed effects of poisoning twice, but responded promptly to treatment with charcoal. Last week I reported that two of Heather's own kittens died, that I'd given one of them charcoal and she seemed to be surviving, but it was still touch and go...

So then...she went. Heather fed and groomed and loved the one surviving kitten. I called her Aster, after the late summer flowers that are often clear light blue like the kitten's eyes. She responded to her name and snuggled in my hand when given charcoal. She had begun to see and hear and explore the world outside the nest box, slowly, on flimsy baby-kitten legs. One morning after Heather had left her in the nest box and gone out on her own cat business, I heard a faint sigh and saw the kitten roll over in the box, and lie still in a suspiciously less than comfortable position. I went into town on human business. When I came back, Heather nonverbally said that something was wrong--Aster wasn't squeaking for attention--and sure enough she was still in that awkward position, stiff and dead. But at least she looked like a healthy kitten rolling over in a pleasant dream.

About charcoal: No, you don't just go out on the patio and munch a briquet, or force your pet to swallow a bit of burnt wood out of the fire. We're talking about carefully prepared, food-quality-clean-and-pure, powdered charcoal, available as a powder or made into tablets or capsules, sold in some pharmacies and "health food" stores as a "supplement." Warning: it's not a supplement in the sense that vitamin pills are supplements! What charcoal does, inside the digestive tract, is "adsorb," meaning mop up incredible quantities of many things that harm the body. It's a fast, safe cure for chemical or bacterial contamination from food or water, if given before contaminants are absorbed into the blood. Occasionally it can be a safe remedy for gas and indigestion from eating something that disagrees with you--it belongs in every traveller's first aid pack--but it's not for everyday use. In addition to mopping up poisons from the digestive tract, charcoal will also "adsorb" nutrients the body needs, so using it regularly could in theory make a person sick, and some pharmacies won't sell it for that reason. Nevertheless, one teaspoon of powdered charcoal stirred into one cup of water is a standard dose for accidental poisoning in humans, and proportionate quantities for the species in question are a safe first aid treatment for accidental poisoning in domestic animals...five cc for a cat, one cc for a kitten, a bucket for a cow...

Heather and her litter mates had a rough time when they were little. Heather's mother, Candice, adopted the kittens Candice's mother, Bisquit, left behind when Bisquit slowly succumbed to what was probably glyphosate poisoning from eating poisoned insect-eating birds, so one year-old mother cat was trying to rear Heather, Shellie, Iris, Irene, Ivy, Inkblot, Little Mo, and Beech. (Beech's sibling Sandy died before Bisquit left her kittens in Candice's nest.) From the fact that this web site has rarely mentioned Shellie, Inkblot, or Beech, you may know that...Shellie was the one who stayed in a coma for four days, her body processing charcoal treatment but never fully recovering. Beech was the one Candice buried. Inkblot died suddenly; I found and buried him. But for two full weeks, around the time they started eating solid food, all eight of those kittens were given charcoal daily--intensive emergency treatment, because they'd also been exposed to flea-borne bacterial enteritis. Bisquit's sister Grayzel taught the kittens to line up on the porch and take their medicine. And five of the eight have lived reasonably long, healthy lives.

So Heather knows about charcoal; she recognizes both the word and the special black ceramic cup in which I mix it, and if I ask her whether she thinks she needs it, or a kitten does, she knows how to tell me yes or no. She also knows that it saves lives...only sometimes. She and I spent part of this weekend huddled together in that "At least we still have each other" routine grieving people sometimes do.



It was a sort of pleasant weekend, in southwestern Virginia. Thursday's rain had sent us more cool, mild weather, instead of the usual oppressive heat and humidity that indicate the edge of a weather disaster a few hundred miles away. Still, there were times when the air and light had that edge quality...I'm not sure which, if any, of my conscious senses detect it, but somehow sometimes the air in among the protective mountains just feels like the edge of very nasty weather passing over flatter land.

Well, if your e-mail is anything like mine, you received a few dozen headlines about Hurricane Harvey. This means that if you watch TV or listen to radio on weekends, you've probably been hearing hurricane stories day and night. This web site heaves a heavy sigh. We would like to be able to support disaster relief efforts, which are the legitimate purpose of that urge to make donations that always feels so good when you're able to do it. We will note that, in addition to all the usual suspects, Mercy Chefs, the fiscal conservatives' disaster relief charity (no left-wingers admitted to the board to steer this organization astray), is active in Texas:

https://grassfire.com/devastation/

Although there are more convenient places...when anything goes wrong in Houston, one specific resident of that city has a standing invitation to visit either Grandma Bonnie Peters or me. She knows who she is. She knows where we are. If by any chance she didn't know, she's hereby urged to pack a van with as many neighbors as will fit into the van; they should bring their own money and sleeping bags; they can pile into the older part of the house, or pitch tents under the trees in the orchard, as they prefer.

Now the phenology that's of actual scientific interest...I don't think glyphosate poisoning had anything to do with the hibiscus leaf caterpillars. They're a rare species here because, like the Hibiscus syriacus, they're non-native; it took them almost twenty years to find the Rose of Sharon, and now they have. But I'm quite sure glyphosate poisoning is the reason why Fall Webworms moved into my privet hedge and box elder bushes. In fact it's rare, and happens only in years (like this one) when we've had an unusually mild winter and "early spring," that we actually see these animals as Fall Webworms. Older gardening books describe Fall Webworms looking different from Spring Webworms but mine do not; normally they're different local populations of one species, and mine look just like the Spring Webworms I saw in box elder bushes in the neighborhood this spring.

The caterpillars' original host trees were defoliated by poison, so the caterpillars migrated to mine. The ones that formed webs on the privet did not appear to be thriving. You can't overprune privet--the plant actually thrives, and forms a thicker, prettier hedge, when it's aggressively pruned--and privet clippings also make great tinder for a cooking fire, so I pruned off the ugly-looking webbed ends. The contents of the webs were mostly frass and shed skins, but a few live caterpillars crawled out, twitching feebly in an instinctive threat display that seems unlikely to work on any larger predator. (Like tent caterpillars' instinct to climb onto anything that touches their backs, webworms' squirming display may confuse tiny predatory insects.)

A few sassy, glossy mud-dauber wasps, whom the paper wasps normally keep in their place down near the creek, apparently smelled the caterpillars' distress and buzzed around, nonverbally saying "If you're not going to eat them yourself, you might let me have them!" I backed away and watched; they really wanted to snatch those caterpillars from the fire, but didn't quite dare. Exposure to fire, or even to hot pavement on a ninety-degree day, kills insects so fast it has to be considered a humane method. Mud-daubers have always seemed stupid to me (they take weeks to learn to recognize friendly humans and stop making threat displays that nature has not even equipped them to carry out, and although they don't form colonies and protect their eggs themselves, they don't spread out their eggs to protect them from predators) but they did have enough sense to stay out of the fire.

The Wikipedia post for Trypoxylon politum says these wasps are "generally pleasant to have around." They are useful predators, but they lack social instincts and are much harder to "tame" than paper wasps; I find them annoying, and wish the paper wasps were chasing them away from the house. However, their seemingly incessant threat displays are mostly bluff--this species is not known ever to sting in aggression, and packs so little venom that when it does sting it's more of a protest than a fight. Photo by Judy Gallagher, http://www.flickr.com/photos/52450054@N04/15562217250/ , donated to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_pipe_mud_dauber . This one, shown killing a spider, is female. Males are much smaller; females often carry their mates about.)

The webworms on the box elder, I left alone. I'm leaving the box elder alone for non-ecological reasons, neither encouraging nor discouraging it in any way. Besides, I saw clear evidence that nature was taking care of the caterpillars in its own way.

Image donated to Wikipedia by Sandy Rae: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0

Stinkbugs really are bugs--suckers, not gnawers--and they drain the sap from corn and cotton and sorghum, and the juices from cucumbers, squash, and melons, in the garden, so they can be considered a pest. The best thing about seeing stinkbugs near crop plants is that, although they're highly resistant to poisons, they are big and slow enough to be easy to kill. However, another good thing about them is that they also drain the "blood," or ichor, from other insects. The ones I saw--both native green stinkbugs, like the one in the picture, and the super-annoying Brown Marmorated Stinkbug that like to hibernate in houses and befoul humans' clothes, books, and furniture--were aggressively chasing down those Webworms. I'll be greatly surprised if even one Webworm lives to become a moth on my box elder.

Only a few insect species have evolved to a point where they have very few or no natural predators (e.g. cockroaches) and really need to be killed by humans. Most of them are vulnerable to relatively safe, stable borax or diatomaceous earth (thanks to +Ruth Cox for mentioning diatomaceous earth--I've never tried it, but many Granola Greens swear by it). The others are big and slow enough that humans can be effective predators, not poisoners. 

Don't you just haaate when Brown Marmorated Stinkbugs get into your house? I do too. Not so much the odor--for about half of this month I lived with the odor of Wrymouth Possum, whom I cremated before burying to protect Pally Possum, and if you can stand the smell of a burning possum carcass you can stand anything; I've spent days in Kingsport. I hate the way the odor of the inevitably crushed stinkbug body attracts other stinkbugs, so if it's on your clothes the horrid little animals swarm around you. Not if I can help it, they don't. I scoop those things up and burn'em. 

But if they're not attacking crops or invading your home, then even Brown Marmorated Stinkbugs may be making themselves useful as predators on other insects. Their small size and insect senses make it easy for them to hunt down insect pests that we humans can't see or reach. They're a new immigrant species and therefore a major nuisance...but they're natural creatures, and have their place in nature.

Poisons are what don't have a place in nature. Those Webworms wouldn't have infested my privet if foolish humans hadn't destroyed the plants that were obviously better food for them. They are an example of how trying to "control" any species with poison actually produces irruptions of that species, first as displaced individuals migrate to infest places they would not normally infest, then as natural predators eat poisoned individuals and die. 

Stinkbugs are one predator that can survive eating poisoned mosquitoes, poisoned caterpillars, poisoned Japanese Beetles--and they do eat those. 

So, if any lazy stupid fools in your neighborhood have poisoned the neighborhood with glyphosate, you want stinkbugs. They're not as loyal and lovable as paper wasps, much less as pretty (and totally harmless to humans) as dragonflies or as amusing as mantids, but they're one animal that can safely consume the insects the glyphosate has poisoned. Few other creatures want to eat them...

It probably takes a poisoning episode to make anyone react to any kind of stinkbug this way, but as I saw those Brown Marmorated Stinkbugs racing with the native stinkbugs to devour the displaced webworms, I thought, "Carry on, little friends, and Blessed Be." For the first time in my life I understood why God created stinkbugs.

I've seen other insects that don't normally come close to the Cat Sanctuary this weekend. Other caterpillars in the "Bears that grow up to be Tigers" family, the Arctiinae, most of which haven't even acquired complete web pages of their own yet. (Generally, these caterpillars are nicknamed "bears" because they have thick hair and hibernate; they're the only caterpillars in our part of the world that are normally found in winter, when they may be dug up in the garden or seen crawling around and gnawing on grass during a thaw. Woolly Bears, with their familiar black and brown bands, and Black and Brown Bears, all one color, are as common and familiar as Webworms. I've seen a few other species, including the little bright white ones.) An Orange-Striped Oakworm, Anisota senatoria, moving away from the area of poisoning, looking sickly; I wouldn't expect it to turn into a moth either.

And that undeserved blessing? Although Jenny Wren died, Johnny Wren is alive. Tiger mosquitoes, the ones that positively prefer my blood to anyone else's, are active and hungry in the morning (when native mosquitoes are asleep), and Johnny swooped out of the hedge and nabbed a mosquito that started to follow me down the private road this morning. He nonverbally said he intends to stay at the Cat Sanctuary, and try to attract another mate...and I say Heaven speed the day. I had noticed fewer mosquito bites than the last couple of weekends.

If only Johnny Wren survives eating all these poison-displaced insects...The cardinals scolded him for flying out at the mosquito, but I always used to suspect that our resident House Wrens liked living near the house in defiance of the cardinals. They spent a lot of time bickering but never harmed one another. Anyway, both species look cute, and their territorial yelling and fussing at each other sounds sort of musical, to humans.

This male cardinal is saying "Touch me and I'll bite!", but to humans, even if he did nip a finger in his strong little beak, even that would seem adorable. Photo donated to Wikipedia By Dakota L. - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32827839 )