fiery skipper ~ 09/11/10 ~ Monterey

female fiery skipper on lantana
Hylephila phyleus on Lantana sp.
Verbenaceae

Finally, there's some color to my blog! We had so many days of drippy, wet fog here for more than a month that my mood has been in the damper, as evidenced by my infrequent and grumpy posts as of late. There are several activities going about town this weekend. After our respective morning runs and power walks, we pumped up the air in our bicycle tires and tootled around to check out the Triathlon at Lover's Point, Cherry's Jubilee in Cannery Row, and the Festa Italia in Monterey's Custom House Plaza. Sigh, it was a good day.

I guess I should comment about the skipper and flower. I'm 90% sure of the lepidopteran ID. Like crescent butterflies there is much variation within skipper species, not to mention sexual dimorphism. As for the lantana, while we have a couple native species according to Calflora, this one was in a container and so it goes under my * garden flowers label. It's apparently a very popular garden plant to attract butterflies and the like.

Hope you're having a good weekend, too.

about festivals and traditions

Festa Italia bocce tournament

Custom House Plaza, Monterey, CA

In the past many weeks, we attended the Turkish Arts & Culture Festival (Jul 31 - Aug 1), Congregation Beth Israel's Jewish Food Festival (Aug 29), Monterey County Fair (Sept 1-6), Monterey Bay Greek Festival (Sept 4-6), and Festa Italia (Sept 10-12)... and not to mention a family reunion in Fresno, CA.

Apologies, checking links and will finish writing later. To be continued...

ps 09/14/10 - I had thoughts to write about why I love cultural festivals and to relegate stories of my first generation grandparents (Norwegian, German, Armenian, French), while I hail from Korea. Am I in the proverbial melting pot or a chopped salad? Writing about this felt like it was becoming a dissertation, so I'll leave well enough alone.

habitat ~ 09/02/10 ~ Harkins Slough

Harkins Slough

September 2, 2010

Unless I suddenly decide I don't mind hauling around cumbersome equipment (heavy cameras, big phallic lenses, tripods, etc...), I doubt I'll ever get a decent picture of the American white pelican (Pelecanus erythrorhyncho). Yep, those white blobs in the first two pics are white pelicans mixed in with a bevy of gulls. My friend I was visiting had a massive scope, which I declined since I wasn't sure where or how we were getting around the farm during my visit.

Oh, the organic farm sits right alongside Harkins Slough, hence this habitat location label. It looks like the slough area has changed since the main road (as evidenced by the submerged power poles) is now covered and many shrubs have died from the flood of water. Apparently the birds like it.

As a side note and in line with my other comments about seasonal birds in the area, I'm a little curious why a couple reputable online bird sites (Cornell and WhatBird.com) and the ever present Wikipedia state white pelicans only overwinter along coastal CA. Considering the last time I saw white pelicans was in May and my friend says she's seen them around the farm all summer, this seems to be a glaring trivial error. Stan Tekiela's Birds of California seems to get it right in saying white pelicans are a non-migrator in most of CA and includes the only correct map of seasonal presence I've found. This, my blog readers, is the reason why I'm so persnickety about backdating all my post to the dates of my photos and why I try to keep my blog posts writing to what I experienced first-hand, versus paraphrasing and promulgating potentially incorrect information.

St. Catherine's lace covered with honey bees
Eriogonum giganteum var. giganteum covered with Apis mellifera
Polygonaceae

I couldn't believe how big this buckwheat is. The fence post in the second picture is about as tall as I am. Thanks to the organic farm's native plant restoration lady, I have a positive ID. Goodness knows I'm not good at identifying buckwheats since there are so many in CA... 269 species & varieties of Eriogonum to be exact, all native to CA with many of them limited, rare, or endangered, including St. Catherine's lace.

Calflora doesn't show this plant as being native to Santa Cruz County, but Harkins Slough is only a couple miles from the Monterey County border. However, like many other buckwheats, I suspect this one was purposely planted outside of its native range. Simply based on recent CA blog posts, the red buckwheat (Eriogonum grande var. rubescens) seems to be very popular in gardens along the western, central to northern area of CA, yet its native range is mostly southerly Santa Barbara County and is a CNPS 1B.2 rare plant.

So, this got me asking a series of questions (as a caveat, I am not a gardener and plead ignorance)... 1) What exactly constitutes "native" in terms of gardens and nurseries? County borders? State borders? Stolen from the woods and fields nearby? 2) Where do the nurseries obtain their initial stock? 3) Like orchid collecting from the early 1900's, could the current "native garden" trendiness actually be depleting our regional, natural populations? 4) What are the long-term environmental impacts of introducing a non-regional, yet "native", plant to areas where it doesn't naturally occur? Are we inadvertently creating hybrids? Is that something we want? Is it "good" for nature? 5) How is a "native" plant planted in a garden hundreds of miles away from where it occurs naturally be somehow better and preferable than say planting something from South Africa with similar climate? Just asking.

Btw, Apis mellifera is not native to North America; I'm not sure how many people know this. Really, they're the insect version of cows, sheep, cats, and dogs. It makes me wonder how much we anthropomorphize the plight of the non-native honey bee.