Jamey's cow killer

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Velvet ant. Photo by James (Jamey) McDaniel

"In case you were wondering, there is in fact an ant with an inch-long stinger that can cause 30 minutes of life-changing, pray-for-death pain," writes G. Clay Whittaker. The velvet ant is no fuzzy sweet thing and it's not an ant. It is in the same insect order Hymenoptera, but instead, it's a wingless wasp.

Rex McDaniel adds, my son, James, agrees. Here's what he said, and his photo is above.

"This is nicknamed a "Cow Killer." Way before digital cameras 35mm film use to come in little canisters, that is what my Dad would put his bugs in so he could take pictures of them when he changed film. One day last year I found one of these in the yard and picked him up with my bare hands. Let me say the name fits, it was like 20 wasps stung me in the same place. And I was down for a minute. Although the pain didn't last long I will never pick one up again."

This is one insect to avoid. And tell your cows the same.

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once in a lifetime

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Solar eclipse 21 August 2017. Wiki media

A week ago the plan was simple enough: get up early, drive south on Hwy 411 to Vonore, find a place to park and wait. It was only 33 miles, we could make it in roughly 40 minutes.

Then we were given a spoonful of castor oil called reality. Thousands of out-of-state travelers were here to do much the same thing. I guess a once-in-a-lifetime total eclipse of the sun belongs to everyone. It wasn't just our eclipse or a time to be exclusionary and provincial. There's enough of that going on in the nation's capital.

This morning we quickly had to reconnoiter and devise a new plan. Returning to the totality map we realized Maryville would give us a good enough show. But could we even get there? 

Rachael Eliot and I joined the slow flow of traffic on Alcoa Highway and aimed for Foothills Mall. Instead of waiting in the hot car for hours, we did what the other half of all Americans were doing, we went shopping. Perhaps we needed more red in our wardrobe.

We arrived early enough to park in the partial shade of a chinkapin oak and met people from Alabama, Pennsylvania and even Poland around us.

The big totality show started right on time—2:33 pm—and isn't it a beautiful piece of symmetry that the moon is exactly the right size at exactly the right distance from Mother Earth to exactly snuff out the light of the sun albeit briefly. And I know using the word "exactly" three times in one sentence is a writer's no-no, but it is exactly true.

We live in a chaotic yet orderly universe: black holes and a clockwork solar system. A loving populace with hate-filled leadership. At totality, all went dark, the crowd oohed and aahed, birds started to coo and roost, scissor-grinder cicadas began to buzz. My friend John Goodall and his family saw bats at their Maryville location. Probably anything crepuscular became active. Heck, it sure looked like twilight to me. 

As the sun returned, undulating shadow bands raced across the asphalt of the parking lot, and for one brief moment the world did not seem so wackadoo but in perfect alignment. Peace and joy throughout the land. "Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya. Hallelujah. Hallelujah." 

But nature and science have always made so much more sense to me than the rest of the so called civilized world. 

Tiny holes in the tree canopy overhead created pinhole cameras.

Disbelief...

turned to twilight

turned to joy at the sun's return.

as ephemeral as the chalk that documented the site

And 21 August 2017 ended on yet another bit of immaculateness.

   

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kudzu cunning

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There's a scourge in the South. It's clandestine and creepy. It's kudzu.

It works quietly among honest, moral folks. Unnoticed. Secretive.

Our friends north of the Mason-Dixon probably think it's much ado about nothing, after all, it's only a plant in the pea family. But it is wily.

Kudzu's threat is insidious, slowly blanketing acre upon acre, its goal is to turn everything into a monoculture, discouraging biodiversity and exclusion is never a good thing. All one color is not the way the natural world works. Nature thrives on diversity, even here in the South.

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illustrations

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Whooping crane from "Ephemeral by Nature"

Often asked about the covers and illustrations in my books, I generally reply, "I'm the only illustrator I can afford."

True. 

But the fact is, I have been drawing since I was 8 or 9-years-old. Don't know why. Some kids dance. (I cannot.) Some kids tell jokes. (I cannot remember one to retell.) For me, the drawing just started and Mom would often buy me arty supplies for Christmas. One year, my parents gave me a Gilbert microscope set with prepared slides. (I still have it.) I clearly remember looking through the eyepiece sketching what I saw: a fly's wing, a bee's leg, a gnat. It was an early indicator of things to come. A budding naturalist recording the natural world.

Today I write books for UT Press and draw in my studio the things that interest me. I also work with a lot of junior naturalists at Ijams. We often look at newts, dragonflies and stinkbugs. Ergo, encourage you child's interests and someday they might draw you a bug.

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hellgrammites?

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Hellgrammite

In my last post about Crawdad Willy the creek pirate, I casually mentioned hellgrammites. 

Also known as crawlers by local fishermen/women, these are the underwater larvae of dobsonflies. And they are in turn one of the largest non-lepidopteran found in our area. 

Hellgrammites are formable, hence the creepy name, but the male dobsonflies with their enlarged mandibles are pretty intense themselves. Like stag beetles, these enlarged horns are used to compete for the attention of the females. Another instance in which female-choice has driven the males of a species to an extreme look as in the bright red of a male cardinal. 

Adult dobsonflies are nocturnal carnivores found along local streams. They prey on other non-hellgrammite aquatic larva found in stream riffles and probably eat a few of their own as well. 

Both images are from WikiMedia

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Toll-taker Willy

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The last day of Ijams summer Adventure Camp is bittersweet, but they had one last character encounter to cheer them up! 

The adventurous kids found the hillbilly creek pirate Crawdad Willy guarding his lonely outpost on the eastern edge of the nature center. 

When they came upon him, he was passing his time reading the "poyotree" of Miss Emily Dickinson. "The past is such a curious creature, To look her in the face, A transport may reward us, or a disgrace."

After they helped him decipher her cryptic words, he taught them a bit about the critters that share his "crick." Things like damselflies, dragonflies, water snakes, hellgrammites, water striders and, of course, crawdads. But did he say, "sally-amander"? And notice the pickerel frog in a jar around his neck. That's his buddy. 

To pass through the gate, the campers were each marked with creek mud after giving Crawdad a gold coin...it is called Toll Creek, after all! 

And Willy be the toll-taker.

Ijams is the home of imaginative learning.

 - Jennifer Roder, guest scribe

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