Our correspondent from near Silver Creek, Idaho, sent more wildlife pictures. You might remember his photographs of the bald eagle nest, and here are the female (presumed) with her two chicks, clearly close to fledging:
Click to enlarge.
There’s also an insect photo, identified as follows:
This is a Brown Drake mayfly on Silver Creek. These are huge and prolific mayflies, and the trout go nuts for them. Billionaires fly here on private jets to fish this hatch.
The Cornell red-tailed hawks have been exercising their wings, and may fledge within a week; two at most.
First of the 2013 Cornell red-tailed hawks fledged, June 4.
Seems so strange for an organism to potentially live for a fixed number of years before transforming into a sexually-active adult for just a day or so before dying.
I’ve long thought that many of these insect species would make great templates for huge epic space opera stories spanning the galaxy. For example, follow a complete migration cycle of the Monarch Butterflies and their encounters with predatory birds and seventeen-year cicadas and mayflies and the rest as they journey from the galactic core to the outer rim and back.
b&
You have to overcome your vertebrate prejudices, regarding adult as the “real” organism and the juvenile forms as somehow not truly the animal in question but lesser. In the case of the mayfly, the “true” form of the organism is the juvenile (see that word has pejorative connotations) form and the adult is just part of sexual system, much like a flower on a tree. Pretty and essential but not the organism’s main game.
Thank you for that – I’d never thought of it that way before, and it makes more sense.
Nice shot of the mayfly
The bald eagle parent could be Mom or Dad, as both parents are involved in raising young ‘uns, including incubating the eggs. If you get a photo with both parents in it, the bigger one is the female.
I wasn’t sure of the Idaho location based on the photo posted last week, but Silver Creek is the necessary clue. This site has to be the Wood River Valley area (lots of farm acreage) near Picabo/Sun Valley (aka millionairville). The irrigation rig on a field with highlands in the background in the earlier pic threw me a little; they are all over the place on the Snake plain, too, and flat farming terrain butting into mountain foothills is not an unusual feature along that river. The Snake may not support crop irrigation when the west dries up in coming decades, unless cities that tap it & the Columbia in the Pacific Northwest evacuate and stop requiring water. The immediate potential there is probably less dire than for Phoenix, though. Sound right, Ben G?
Phoenix’s water problems have much more to do with exponential population growth than anything else. But another big part of it is heavily subsidized water rates. If our water bills — municipal and agricultural both — included the cost to replenish the aquifers, we’d use a hell of a lot less water in the first place and much of the problem would simply evaporate, if you’ll excuse the term.
b&
Reblogged this on yasarnorman.