Category Archives: Natural history

Spring in Georgia

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Spring weather may be variable in Georgia, but one thing is going to be pretty consistent — pollen.

I walked around in the front yard on Tuesday. Later in the evening, when I was sitting with my feet on a pillow on our coffee table, I noticed some yellow smudges on the pillow. It was pollen off my socks. This is what my shoes looked like. I brushed the pollen off my left shoe for comparison.

The pollen count here was 3336 particles per cubic meter, high, but nowhere near as high as the record. Atlanta’s highest recorded pollen count was 9369 particles on March 12, 2021.

They say that tree pollen is the highest contributor now. That’s mainly pine and oak. Around here, it’s mainly pine that produces the billowing clouds of fine, yellow particles that coat everything. I have to rinse my truck windshield with a hose every time I go anywhere. We park our car in the garage, so it stays relatively clean, but an hour outside leaves a fine layer of yellow particles over the entire car.

It’s really quite annoying. A locally well-known gardening expert recommends avoiding painting outside from mid-March to early April. It’s early April right now, and I wouldn’t paint anything outside that I didn’t want yellow.

Most of the pine pollen should be gone by May. I hope.

Little lizard

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Mollie brought this little lizard into the house Saturday afternoon.

It’s small, probably only about an inch and a half long. I have seen a few young lizards like this on the driveway. It was only a matter of time until Mollie caught one.

This one seemed unharmed. I scooped it up and took it outside. I released it on an old oak stump not far from the house.

It’s an Eastern Fence Lizard. I think it’s probably a male, and probably only weeks to a couple of months old. Adults are around four to seven inches long.

They have a fairly large range, from northern Florida to New Jersey and New York in the north, and from the Atlantic coast as far west as Colorado and Wyoming.

They are arboreal, although they are so well camouflaged that they must be hard to see on a tree. The imported fire ant can attack and kill these lizards as well as their eggs. I hope my usual practice of killing every fire ant nest I find helps these little creatures.

Cicada song

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It’s cicada season here in Georgia. They are everywhere in the woods. Their song is loud, droning and constant during the day. At night the crickets take up the task of constant song, and the cicadas do intermittent solos. If you are the kind of person who needs complete quiet at night, you can’t sleep with the windows open.

As for me, their sound tends to fade into the background, and I mostly don’t notice it. When I walked the dogs on Sunday, we went all the way down the mountain and then back to the top before I suddenly woke up to the sound. It was hard to believe that I didn’t notice it before. I recorded this video strictly for the sound.

The buzzing was amazingly loud. What you can’t tell from the video sound is that the buzzing seemed to circle around me. There was a constant sound all around, but overlaid on that was a louder buzz that seemed to circle around us. I don’t know whether it was real or an illusion.

The cicadas this year are almost certainly the annual type. I think, based on the images here, that ours are Southern Resonant/Great Pine Barrens Cicadas. Georgia also has 13-year and 17-year cicadas, none of which were due to emerge this year.

Cicadas spend most of their lives underground, eating away at grass and tree roots. When they emerge, they climb up a vertical surface and moult, leaving their exoskeletons behind to be picked off the bark of pine trees by little boys.

They die soon after mating. We occasionally find one in its death throes on the driveway. The dogs are fascinated by them. They nose them and then when they start buzzing, they want to eat them like crunchy little treats. Mollie the cat also sometimes brings them in, usually unharmed. Then we have to push the dogs out of the way so we can scoop them up and toss them back outside.

A beautiful visitor

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This beauty stayed long enough for a few good shots on Monday.

As far as I can tell, it’s an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, but I’m no expert. It was perched on the flowers of one of our crape myrtles.

Many of the butterflies of Georgia have names that are appropriately charming. A sampling of names: the Baltimore Checkerspot, Banded Hairstreak, Common Buckeye (a real beauty I have never seen), Coral Hairstreak, Diana Fritillary, Dreamy Duskywing, Falcate Orangetip, Fiery Skipper, Great Spangled Fritillary, Hackberry Emperor, Mourning Cloak, Pearl Crescent, Red-Spotted Purple Admiral, Sleepy Orange Sulfur, Zabulon Skipper, Zebra Longwing, and not the least, the Monarch.

Check here for photos.

“Fritillary” is a Eurasian plant of the lily family, with hanging bell-like flowers, or a butterfly with orange wings checkered with black. The word originates from the Latin for dice box. The flower and butterfly names apparently come from the checkered pattern, but I’m not sure I get the reference. “Falcate” means curved like a sickle, from the Latin for a sickle.

With the names of the butterflies being so appealing, the name for their study seems unfortunate: Lepidopterology, from the Greek “scale” and “wing.”

Fly times

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Pretty much everyone in the world knows what a horse fly is. We certainly have them here. Horse flies, deer flies, and yellow flies. They all look somewhat different, but they are all the same pest. They don’t sting like a yellow jacket, and they don’t insert a proboscis like a mosquito. They use their sharp cutting mouth parts to draw blood, and then lap it up.

So, for me, that means I will kill one any time I see it, if I possibly can. The dogs don’t care much for them either. Zoe seems particularly upset when they fly around. Sam not so much. Zoe twirls around, jumps up and snaps at them. I have seen a dog actually kill a horsefly that way, but so far Zoe has not had any luck.

I don’t snap at them, but I do try to smack them if they land on my bare skin. I have hit them a couple of times lately, but they are tough. I didn’t manage to kill them, or even stun them. I had hoped to do just that so Zoe could finish it off. I may have mentioned before when my old Doberman Bella heard one she ran as fast as she could for home. Once I hit a horsefly on her back and it fell to the pavement. She bit it with her front teeth. I wanted Zoe to have that chance.

They are more than just a pest. They can cause livestock to lose weight, and they can transmit diseases from one animal to another. One source said that in 1976 losses due to biting flies was estimated at $40 million.

That’s sufficient reason to want to control them, but there is apparently no good way to do that.

One suggestion was to wear a blue cylinder coated with sticky material on top of a cap. It attracts the flies and they stick to the trap. They say that can be effective at reducing populations in limited areas. I doubt that I’m going to do that.