Chicken of the Woods Spied Next Door

While returning home from school, I noticed a giant bright orange mushroom/fungus cluster on the trunk of a eucalyptus in my neighbor's parkway. Although I'm no mycologist, my online research leads me to believe it is a Laetiporus sulphureus or Chicken of the Woods.

Chicken of the Woods are edible, although I read warnings about Laetiporus sulphureus causing stomach upsets when harvested from the base of eucalyptus trees. I think it merits more research. I'm thinking about acquiring David Arora's All That the Rain Promises and More field guide to Western mushrooms, especially after spying the cover of the book. Who doesn't want to party with David Arora?

The Timid Brown Widow

While planting some nasturtium seeds in recycled six-pack vegetable containers, I ran across many brown widows. According to the National Wildlife Federation Field Guide to Insects and Spiders & Related Species of North America, the brown widow rarely bites. We practice a policy of relocation. Their black widow cousins, however, are not so fortunate at Camp Ramshackle.

Unknown Beetle or Maybe It's Just a Bug

Found cavorting through the pumpkin patch at Underwood Family Farms. Looking a my NWF Guide to Insects and Spiders & Related Species of North America, it looks most like a Spotted Cucumber Beetle. But I don't know.

I'm going to ask the Bug Guy and hope for an answer.


If the bug remains unidentified, the fascination was enough.

Grass Spider

Outside our kitchen door, I stumbled upon this web. Usually I find grass spiders (Agelenopsis) in our Canyon Prince grass with tunnel webs looking like a thick gossamer funneling into a black hole.


I was surprised to find this enterprising grass spider using a vacant bolt hole as it's tunnel. The web is not particularly sticky.


When prey stumbles into the web, the grass spider darts out quickly to grab it and bring it back to it's hole. We searched all day for earwigs to feed to the spider. With our hot dry weather, our typically abundant earwig population was no where to be found.

Agelenopsis identified using the Audubon Society Pocket Guide: Insects and Spiders.

Great Gardening Books

A friend recently started gardening and asked if I had any books to recommend. The absolute workhorse in our house is the Sunset Western Garden Book. It covers vegetable gardening, native and non-native plants. I also consistently refer to the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden Care & Maintenance of Southern California Native Plant Gardens which is printed in Spanish and English.

But the best gardening education is to do it. Stick it in the ground, give it water and see what happens.

Lizard Season

No, we don't eat them, but I can't help it, I still enjoy catching lizards and we are just entering the prime lizard catching season here at Camp Ramshackle. Lizard activity is highest during the hot months of July, August and September, but the lizards are much too fast to catch then. It's this time of year, when the nights and mornings are a little cooler, that, before they warm all the way up, an old guy like me can catch a blue-belly or two and feel a quiet sense of awe in holding something wild. Awe and at the same time comfort in the fact that I am not doing any damage in my indulgence (at least not much damage, providing I don't accidentally pluck off a tail.)

Pictured above is what we called a blue-belly when I was a kid but have identified as a fence lizard through our field guides and online. These range from tan (pictured) to charcoal gray. From my observations, the colors variance appears to break along gender lines in our yard -- males are darker and have more pronounced blue patches on their bellies. This one looks like a pregnant female to me.


Young fence lizards are all over our yard right now but this one is a rarely seen baby Alligator Lizard. We wrote about an adult skink I caught a while back - it was actually an Alligator Lizard. They have sharp teeth and bite! Here are two more I caught while engaged in what appeared to be mortal combat. I thought until recently that these alligator lizards were a type of skink but I was wrong.

We do have skinks here too, although I don't have a picture of one yet. I have also learned that what, when we were kids, we used to call a blue tailed skink is actually a juvenile Western Skink. It has an electric blue tail that fades as it grows older. I have seen them and caught them but have yet to photograph one. Maybe this will be the season.

One-Eyed Sphinx Moth

While we were in Colorado this summer, a one-eyed sphinx moth (also called Cerisey's sphinx) landed on my brother-in-law, Clark, giving us all a close up look. I was pretty sure it was a sphinx moth when we saw it and confirmed it tonight when looking back through the pictures with the help of the National Wildlife Federation Field Guide Insects and Spiders of North America.

Male Brown Widow on Our Dish Rack

Julia noticed this spider on our dish rack and immediately went to the insect field guide when she noticed that it had a faint hourglass under it's abdomen.


She identified it as a brown widow almost immediately but it didn't seem quite right. The abdomen wasn't as large as the image of the female spider in the book and it had large round bulbous appendages near it's head. A little further investigation on wikipedia and then to this picture confirmed that what we had was in fact a small brown widow.

The males have very small fangs and are therefore much less dangerous than the females because they can't deliver as much venom but there are conflicting reports that the brown widow venom is either twice as strong or not as strong as the black widow. We decided to "get rid" of this chap rather than employ the usual Ramshackle catch and release program.

Giant Wolf Spider

Hogna carolinensis found in Ramshackle latrine. Strictly amateur i.d. thanks to the NWF Field Guide to Insects and Spiders and National Audubon Society Pocket Guide Insects and Spiders.

Caterpillar in the Mist

This fine specimen was discovered by Eric on Friday while weeding in the garden. Earlier in the week, my sons and I stocked up with identification books at Vroman's. My eldest son voiced his desire to know the names of the insects in the yard. Thanks to the National Wildlife Federation Field Guide to Insects and Spiders of North America, our strictly amateur i.d. guess is the caterpillar of the White-lined Sphinx moth (we are open to suggestions).

Field guides offer endless hours of exploration in our house. We enjoy the process of identification and learning more about the small critters we stumble upon in our yard and on our hikes. The naming generates a familiarity about their habits and life cycles.

A few of our picks: