A lovely creature however you pronounce it

The lush monsoon grasses are setting seed, and waves of Lazuli Buntings from the north are feasting. This gorgeous male was among many at Whitewater Draw Wildlife Area yesterday morning.

When you see one of these, what do you say?

"Look! There's a La-ZOO-lee Bunting!"?

"Why, I believe that's a LAZ-oo-lie Bunting!"?

Or maybe "Check out the the little blue dude!"?

Leave a comment with your favorite pronunciation, or take the poll in the sidebar. --SW

Kiss kiss, bang bang

Mid-June is a perfect time for this Zooillogix post on kissing bugs. These stealthy stowaways emerge each summer from our local White-throated Woodrat (pack rat) nests (of which there's one under our bathroom floor) to invade southern Arizona homes in search of fresh blood.

Kissing bugs (genus Triatoma) are on a very short list of invertebrates that we terminate with extreme prejudice whenever and wherever they're encountered. Even bark scorpions get a pass if we find them in remote parts of the yard, but kissing bugs always get swatted, stomped, or crushed in a handy paper towel. And we do keep those paper towels handy, because offing them can be a thoroughly disgusting experience. Even if they're not bloated from a recent blood meal, they produce a powerful defensive stink like other members of their suborder, Heteroptera. You do NOT want to get that nauseating reek on your skin or clothes. There are three species in southern Arizona, but I never pause long enough to key them out before sending them to that Great Pack Rat Midden in the Sky.

They're active mainly at night and often bite sleeping humans on or near the mouth (hence the name). The bite is virtually painless but can cause severe allergic reactions, and droppings shed at the scene of the crime can contaminate the wound with the trypanosomes that cause Chagas disease, a mainly tropical infection that kills thousands of people in Latin America every year. Though the most effective vectors for the disease seem to be South America species of Triatoma, there have been a handful of recent cases in the southern U.S. The organism gets concentrated in the bugs' feces; in fact, the traditional method to test for Chagas is to let fresh, uninfected kissing bugs bite the patient, then check the bugs' droppings for the trypanosome. Chagas has even been suggested as a contributor to Charles Darwin's chronic health problems.

These nasty bloodsuckers are macabre harbingers of our late summer "monsoon." The increase in heat and humidity really seems to bring them out, so it's no surprise that in the last 36 hours we encountered the first two kissing bugs of the season inside the house. The first landed right in front of me on my drawing board at about midnight; the second casually waddled out from under our claw-foot bathtub this morning. Only the second had dined recently, though three or four itchy, swollen spots on my feet suggest that the first had already partaken of my juiciness and was looking for a refill.

CRAP! Make that three--one just came buzzing in to land on the computer hutch while I was typing. Thank goodness they're such clumsy fliers, but now I'm paranoid about how many might be sneaking around under the desk, waiting for me to put my juicy toes back on the floor. *shudder*

Because I refuse to let one live long enough to photograph it intact, here are a bunch of pix from Bug Guide: Genus Triatoma

And here's a whole bunch of skin-crawlingly fascinating information from the University of Arizona: The Kissing Bug Project

--SW

Update: By 11:30 p.m. the body count for the season was up to four--not a good sign, since we rarely find more than a dozen in the house per summer. It wasn't easy getting to sleep, listening for the dry buzz of wings and hard little thop of another six-legged vampire homing in on its prey.

Fire and Rain

Oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain...
- James Taylor

It's been a fire-and-rain week, with some wind thrown in for good measure. On Thursday, I noticed a couple of good-sized burned areas by the highway that runs parallel to the Huachuca Mountains. Cigarette, I thought, Damned smoking litterbugs. But no, it looks like another case of alcohol + testosterone = insanity. Seems that a couple of idiots, described by witnesses as one young and one middle-aged male, were cruising down the highway tossing lit fireworks out of their car every few yards. No structures were lost despite at least seven different sources of ignition, and the wildlife habitat will be the better for it, but I shudder to think of all the what-ifs.

And rain and wind, too. We're in the middle of a storm right now, and Tom's standing by our electronic rain monitor calling out the upward-creeping increments: "Eight hundredths...twelve hundredths...." A little storm yesterday dropped a trace of rain at our house (while we were gone, dammit!), but fearsome downbursts from far bigger tormentas put an early end to Friday's hummingbird banding session and almost kept us from getting into the theater to see Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (after seeing it, we wish it had - we'd have saved $13).

Today may be retroactively declared the first official day of the monsoon. Meterologists backdate to the first of three consecutive days when the dew point is 55° F. or higher. We're running a few days behind average, but it'll be okay if the storms don't fizzle out again, as they often have in recent years.

We're still riding pretty high off last summer's and winter's moisture. Most of the hummingbirds we caught at our two banding stations this week were juvies, and several showed good "baby fat," suggesting that they were well fed in the nest. But these babes and the southbound migrants already beginning to arrive will need more food, and that's going to take rain and plenty of it. Think wet thoughts...