היומן של crediblecorvid

I was taking a walk along Farmington Lake in northwestern New Mexico yesterday and stopped to take a picture of some cattails (probably Typha latifolia, but I haven't paid enough attention to be sure), and decided to submit it as an observation. Which led to a discovery I found much more surprising than the presence of cattails along this particular lake. iNaturalist has very few observations of cattails in this region!

One of the things I'm interested in is what people choose to record on iNaturalist, given the opportunity. More specifically, given all the possibilities where an observer is, what's the probability that they'll choose to record that species rather than another. Obviously, individual observer preference has a lot to do with this, but on average I suspect that showier, more photogenic or charismatic taxa are preferentially recorded. Which brings me back to cattails. I wouldn't say they are one of my favorite taxa, but they do look kinda cool, and they're certainly not inconspicuous, and they aren't uncommon along standing water in the region. So why so few records?

I got somewhat fixated on this question, so I decided to go for a run later in the day in a place where I was pretty sure I'd find more cattails along a well-traveled foot path. They weren't in the first place I looked, along the pond by the Farmington Nature Center (cattails may have been removed from there), but I did eventually find them along an irrigation ditch further down the path. I may have to go for more runs along standing water in the near future.

There's a place I often run past where Ephedra torreyana E. viridis, and E. cutleri all grow together in prolific abundance. I've read a little recently about the debate over whether E. viridis and E. culteri should be considered different species, or whether E. culteri should be sunk to rank E. viridis var. viscida. I don't have a horse in that race, and without seeing genetic data I'm unlikely put a lot of money on one. I'll refer to E. cutleri here by specific rank, because that aligns with iNatuarlist's taxonomy. Anyway, I finally stopped to take a good look at them today.

At first glance, E. viridis and E. cutleri look very distinct. I mean, this is E. cutleri, and this is E. viridis.

What I'm calling E. cutleri spreads rhizomatically in moderately dense aggragations over areas larger that can be 1,000 square meters. It's stems show little branching above ground, stand fairly vertical and are genearlly around 30 cm tall, and sometimes quite a bit shorter, and the amount of above-ground woody growth is rather limited. It can reasonably be described as grass-like.

E. veridis on the other hand, is more shrub-like. It often shows a lot of above-ground woody growth, with quite a bit of branching, and it's not uncommon to find individuals 150 cm tall or more. Also, while it can be difficult to tell whether a particularly bushy one might be spreading some underground, it's unusual to find them covering more than 5-10 square meters.

And then I came across this ephedra and got confused. It appears to be spreading below ground with rhizomes like E. cutleri, but the above ground growth habit looks much more like E. torreyana, though honestly throughout this rather large patch it pretty well grades from one form to the other. So now I'm wondering, are they different species? And if they are, do they hybridize? Incomplete reproductive barriers are definitely a thing, so maybe?

@gentilcore?

I'm so ready for spring, and now I feel bad for having encouraged all the plants I saw starting to leaf out last week: Sphaeralcea coccinea, Sphaeralcea parvifolia, Streptanthus cordatus, Astragalus mollissimus, Purshia tridentata, and some grasses I couldn't identify. I'm guessing they paid less attention to me than to the nighttime lows above freezing and highs pushing from the 50s into the 70s. Now it's freezing again, around zero overnight and barely edging above 30 during the day. Well, false springs are not uncommon, so the plants are probably used to it. Still, I'll have to go check on them when the ice melts.

The plants have not been cooperating, so I decided that it's time to put some effort into learning birds. The timing was convenient, just a few weeks before this year's Great Backyard Bird Survey. I've been going outside and stumping about in the mud to look at birds when I can, and pouring over visual and audio identification quizzes with Larkwire when I can't. Larkwire has been surprisingly fun and effective, and I'm recognizing a lot of birds by sound now when I go running. Photographing birds is proving frustrating, as I expected it would. I'm afraid getting really good bird pictures requires some really expensive equipment. Someday. Maybe. Anyway, I'm only posting observations here that I can document with photos or sound recordings (of which I've only made one so far).

I had a lot of fun with the survey. Since I couldn't get a decent picture of everything, here's what I managed to see: red-tailed hawks, bald eagles, great blue herons, common mergansers, American coots, Canada geese, northern shovelers, mallards, crows, a spotted towhee, Townsend's solitaire, western bluebirds, song sparrows, house sparrows, house finches, white-breasted nuthatches, American robins, northern flickers, buffleheads, and a ring-billed gull. And a porcupine, which I'm counting with the birds because it was way up in a cottonwood tree along the river. Now I want to figure out the phylogenetic relationships and life histories of everything I saw, but I need to put some more work into a couple papers before I let myself do that.