Buddigower Banding - an unsprung Spring?

The weather was unseasonably warm and the bush very dry. The last time I had been out there banding, exactly four years prior, the place had been awash with wildflowers and everything seemed fresh and vibrant. This time it all seemed a little tired.

Buddigower Nature Reserve is in central New South Wales, just 7 km further along a dirt road from the Charcoal Tank Nature Reserve (12 km south of West Wyalong) where we have a regular bird banding site. We generally only get to Buddigower about every three years, and this time the gap had been four. Apart from the core group of eight banders, there were also five COG members (COG = Canberra Ornithologists Group) along for the ride on this Labour Day long weekend (3-6 October).

I’d been in Melbourne for work on the Friday so couldn’t get out to Buddigower until later on the Saturday afternoon. But this did mean we were travelling in daylight and along the way we stopped for a couple of reptiles on the road to ensure they didn't become road-kill.

A Shingleback Lizard Tiliqua rugosa (Scincidae)
was persuaded to remove itself from the middle of the road.

And a beautiful Sand Monitor (or Gould's Goanna) Varanus gouldii (Varanidae) welcomed us to Buddigower

while always keeping a close eye on us. 

When we arrived at Buddigower, Karen and I set to to get a few nets up before dusk, in the same area we had banded those four years previously, then went about the business of setting up camp. It seems Mark and his crew, who had set up on the Friday afternoon, hadn’t done so well, with less than 20 birds banded for the day.

The dryness may well be the first sign of the predicted el Niño cycle. Whatever the case, there wasn’t much flowering; certainly not the main woodland eucalypt species, nor the widespread understorey of cassinia bushes. But there were several acacias still in flower. And a few isolated cassia bushes, as well as a scattering of Calytrix, Thysanotus, and some everlastings, added splashes of colour (mainly yellow) to the otherwise fairly muted landscape.

Currawang Acacia doratoxylon (Fabaceae-Mimosaceae)

Streaked Wattle Acacia lineata (Fabaceae-Mimosaceae)

A cassia (probably Cassia nemophila) (Fabaceae-Caesalpiniaceae). In the early morning the surrounding bushland was redolent with the scent from these bushes, smelling like freshly prepared garam masala!

Common Fringe-myrtle Calytrix tetragona (Myrtaceae)

Twining Fringe-lily Thysanotus patersonii (Anthericaceae)

A 'Yellow Buttons' everlasting (Chrysocephalum sp. either apiculatum or semipapposum)

There were certainly birds about. They were quite vocal, and fairly active, but mostly they kept to the canopy so we had little success at the nets. At our site, Karen and I managed just 23 birds for the weekend: 7 White-browed Babblers, several Eastern Yellow Robins (including a presumed family party of mum, dad, and a stripe-headed juvenile in the first net on the first round), 3 White-eared Honeyeaters, a couple of Red-capped Robins, a Variegated Fairy-wren, a very obstreperous kookaburra (with its mate egging it on from the sidelines), a trio of Grey Fantails and a Willie Wagtail. The juvenile robin, as well as a few birds with brood patches, were the only signs that some birds at least were breeding. The Rufous Whistlers, Weebills, Inland Thornbills, Western Gerygones, Jacky Winters, Grey Shrike Thrush and Mistletoebirds were constant and welcome vocal companions but all stayed resolutely away from the nets.

White-browed Babbler Pomatostomus superciliosus (Pomatostomidae)
one of the seven caught was a re-trap from the 2010 trip.

Male Red-capped Robin Petroica goodenovii (Petroicidae)

This little Inland Thornbill Acanthiza apicalis (Acanthizidae) came to investigate why the Red-capped Robin was making such a fuss while he was being photographed immediately prior to release.

The middle of the day was hot. 36 degrees hot! More than the predicted 32, which would have been bad enough, and well above the long-term average for October (about 24ºC). The birds quietened down, but the mad-dog non-Englishman (me, in this case) continued his vain pursuit of them - in vain.

The insects, however, seemed to be enjoying the conditions. Several butterflies (Meadow Argus, Australian Painted Lady, Caper White, and a tiny grass blue) were around in small numbers. One Meadow Argus had taken a liking to, indeed laid claim to, a three square metre patch of track and was flushed each and every time I passed to check the net. Grasshoppers of several species gave me some great opportunities to play with my new macro lens, as did several robber flies, and the occasional dragonfly hummed by (possibly an emerald or emperor?) or perched on exposed twigs (Wandering Percher).

Australian Plague Locust Chortoicetes terminifera - brown form.

Australian Plague Locust Chortoicetes terminifera - green form.

Grasshopper 'type B' - red & grey form.

Grasshopper 'type B' - orange form.

The 'type B' grasshoppers would wave their front legs about
in what looked like some kind of semaphoric signalling 

and had gnarly 'old man' faces.

Robber fly 'type A' - male

Robber fly 'type A' - female.
The dense cluster of bristles in front of the face is called a mystax;
it helps to protect the fly against the struggles of any incalcitrant insect prey.

At first I thought this was a weird-looking robber fly (Asilidae) but on looking it up determined that it is in fact a species of Apiocera, from the family Apioceridae - closely related to Asilidae but one I've never come across before. Woo-hoo!

With evening, the temperature dropped slightly and the spiders came out to prowl, their eye-shine, reflecting back from the ground in front of our head-lamps, as bright as the stars above. More scope for a bit of macro experimentation. While I focussed on the larger spiders for photography, it was evident there were very many young spiders about, clearly following a major recent hatching event.

A wolf spider on the prowl.

Ain't she beautiful!

Another wolf spider hiding in its burrow - this one has very dark chelicerae compared to the first one.

I managed to induce it out of its burrow by scratching the ground with a small twig...

and got a great face on photo before it scuttled back down its hole. 

Another night-time discovery provided, for me, the highlight of the trip. There had been a Spotted Nightjar calling sporadically the previous two evenings, but on Sunday night a brief bout of spotlighting by some of the group located a nightjar nesting on the ground not far from camp (thanks Kathy), while its mate continued to call in its distinctive and eerie way as it swept over the tree-tops or the more distant paddocks. I’d just settled down for a well needed sleep when alerted to the find, but I threw off the sheet and was pulling on jeans in an instant for this opportunity.

Spotted Nightjar Eurostopodus argus (Caprimulgidae) on its nest at night.

Spotted Nightjars lay a single, pale green, speckled egg,
the 'nest' being a simple scrape in the leaf litter.

Next morning, the Spotted Nightjar's camouflage in the dappled sunlight was exquisite. Just as well I knew exactly where the nest was.

Spotted Nightjar Eurostopodus argus (Caprimulgidae) on its nest - what a great bird

So while the bird banding could have been better, and spring breeding isn't perhaps in fullest swing, the trip was undeniably a success. 

The Bee and the Wasp

Back in November 2012, the bird-banding at our regular site at The Charcoal Tank Nature Reserve, not far from West Wyalong in central-west New South Wales, was keeping us occupied if not busy, and I had time to follow the activities of several solitary bees that I was not aware of having noticed on any previous trips.

Throughout the Saturday (3 Nov 2012), single bees were seen hovering low over the bare dry ground around our banding station. After what seemed to me a fairly prolonged inspection, the bees would decide that one spot that looked pretty much like any other spot was a good place to initiate a burrow. I don’t now recall how long they spent excavating these burrows, but by the end of the day there were probably 5 or 6 burrows scattered about in the immediate vicinity of our banding tables.

A solitary bee hovering just above the ground, looking to excavate a burrow.

When seen from above, the inspecting bees were clean and attractively patterned with white banding on the abdomen, a buff furriness to the thorax, and a yellowish face. It was this colour scheme, and their persistent hovering behaviour just a few inches above the ground, that drew my attention to them.

A solitary bee relocating its burrow.

As their burrowing continued the bees became progressively drab and dusty.

A solitary bee in the early stages of burrow excavation.

A solitary bee in action excavating its burrow

The bees became more and more dusty as the burrowing progressed.

The following day, the bees had essentially disappeared (though there was at least one still finishing off an excavation), and instead a brightly coloured wasp was seen hovering about in their place (there may have been more than one – I can’t clearly recall).

But it was clear to me from the general shape of these wasps that they were a type of parasitic wasp of the Evanioidea superfamily, and it didn’t take long to realise they were interested in the bees’ burrows. The implication being that these wasps parasitise the bees by laying their own eggs in the bees' burrows, to hatch and avail themselves of the food store provided by the bee for its larvae, or to feed on the growing bee larva itself. The host specificity of such interactions can sometimes be quite tight.

This parasitic wasp was hovering about in the same area the solitary bees had been the day before.
(Pseudofoenus sp. Hyptiogastrinae, Gasteruptiidae)

I spent several minutes watching and photographing one of these wasps sussing out one of the burrows, but then had to leave to check the mist nets for birds and didn’t pursue the vaguely Aesopian story of the bee and the wasp any further.

The wasp homed in on one of the solitary bee's burrows...
 (Pseudofoenus sp. Hyptiogastrinae, Gasteruptiidae)

... landed, and spent quite a while "smelling" the burrow entrance with its antennae...
(Pseudofoenus sp. Hyptiogastrinae, Gasteruptiidae)

... before finally entering head-first into the burrow.
(Pseudofoenus sp. Hyptiogastrinae, Gasteruptiidae)

But more recently, and since starting this blog, I’ve been inspired to do a bit of research on these two and their interaction (ain’t the web a wonderful thing).

It turns out that the wasp is a species of Pseudofoenus, which is one of two genera (the other being Hyptiogaster) in the subfamily Hyptiogastrinae of the family Gasteruptiidae (which is indeed in the superfamily Evanioidea).

According to the CSIRO website (http://anic.ento.csiro.au/insectfamilies/biota_details.aspx?OrderID=27447&BiotaID=29799&PageID=families ) the “Gasteruptiidae are one on the most easily recognised families of parasitic wasps. They are particularly distinctive because of their slender subclavate metasoma, the dorsal articulation of the metasoma to the propodeum, the elongate neck-like propleura, and expanded hind tibia.” - I think this means they have a thin machete-shaped abdomen that hinges out from near the top of the thorax rather than lower down, and have fat hind legs.

Pseudofoenus sp. (Hyptiogastrinae, Gasteruptiidae) at Charcoal Tank Nature Reserve, NSW.

Pseudofoenus sp. (Hyptiogastrinae, Gasteruptiidae) at Charcoal Tank Nature Reserve, NSW.

My Google-searching led me not only to Pseudofoenus, but also to a guy called John Jennings at the University of Adelaide who is a specialist on these wasps and has done a fairly comprehensive review of the genus. I got in touch with John and he kindly confirmed that my photos were of a Pseudofoenus species, but that “there are still many undescribed species”, and that he’d be happy to receive a specimen in alcohol if I was to see them again. Not sure what this means with respect to my wasp, but I certainly couldn’t find any images on the web that looked anywhere near as bright or with as much yellow as this one. Most are a dark reddish-brown in colour.

It seems the genus Pseudofoenus has a fairly restricted Gondwanan distribution with the majority of species being endemic to Australia (66 described so far), particularly the south-west, with others found in New Guinea and New Britain (5 species), New Caledonia, New Hebrides and Fiji (2), New Zealand (4), and South America (2 species).

So much for the wasp; what about the bees?

Despite a fair bit of effort, I haven’t really been able to narrow down the options at all well. I haven’t found anything that looks specifically like these bees, but did find lots of images of lots of bees, even from different families, that looked sort of similar. And my inexperience precludes me from being able to discriminate between or weight the possibilities. L

A solitary bee, most likely from either Stenotritidae or Colletidae families. 
(Postscript: this is most likely a species of Stenotritus - see below.)

John Jennings and Andrew Austin, in their 2002 review in Invertebrate Systematics (http://www.publish.csiro.au/?act=view_file&file_id=IT01048.pdf ), state that “The hosts of very few species have been determined, but the few available records indicate that members of Pseudofoenus s.l. are predator-inquilines of colletid, halictid, masarine, and stenotritid bees.”

I think I can eliminate Halictidae, and Masarinae (which are the pollen wasps, a subfamily of Vespidae rather than bees), but Colletidae and Stenotritidae are still options. On balance, I’d like to think my bees are stenotritids (giving the option of either Stenotritus or Ctenocolletes), but I’d love to hear from anyone who might be able to give me a more definitive identification.

So this story doesn't really have an end, but I do wonder how tight the specificity these wasps might have for these particular bees is?

POSTSCRIPT (September 2014)

Subsequent to posting this article I made contact with Associate Professor Michael Schwarz from Flinders University in South Australia (a bee expert suggested by Dr David Yeates, Director of the Australian National Insect Collection - thanks David), as well as Dr Remko Leijs, Honourary Research Fellow at the South Australian Museum (thanks to John Jennings for this suggestion). Both were of the opinion that the bee in question is a species of Stenotritus. Specimens would need to be taken to attempt a more detailed ID, but both also made the point that there are likely many species that remain undescribed. 

So there is certainly a possibility that both the wasp and the bee are as yet undescribed species. I’ll certainly bee keeping (groan - sorry!) an eye out when bird banding at Charcoal Tank over the coming season...


POSTSCRIPT 2 (November 2014)

On the weekend of 14 -16 November I was back out at Charcoal Tank Nature Reserve for bird banding. The weather was rather extreme – 42 degrees when we arrived about 1:30 pm on Friday, dropping to 22 degrees by the following evening, and rain all Saturday night.

The rainfall patterns over the three months leading up to this weekend were very dry and quite different to those of two years previously when I last saw the bees, so I wasn’t overly optimistic of seeing them again. Nevertheless, after no sign of them in the heat of Friday afternoon, on the Saturday afternoon, about 2 pm, we did see a single stenotritid bee hovering over the same area where I’d seen them before. A bit later a second bee was seen. They seemed a bit more wary than last time, but perhaps that was because there were more people about and we were stationed slightly closer to where they were hovering.

Anyway, the short of it is I managed to collect one of these bees. I was reluctant to try for the other one as they don’t appear to be very numerous.

The bee is currently at home in the freezer in ethanol, but will be sent to Michael Schwarz to be included in some bee sequencing work by a past honours student over the coming months. Stay tuned...

Bowra Non Birds

While at Bowra Station in south-western Queensland for a four-day stint of bird banding (see previous post), and despite being fairly flat out on that activity for most of that time, it was, of course, impossible not to notice the abundance of life (other than birds) busying about in the landscape.

Perhaps most evident were the grasshoppers, prolific in both numbers and species. While not having the time to pay the attention to them they deserved, I reckon there were easily in excess of a dozen species that made their presence known to even the casual observer. Unfortunately only a few of these ended up being photographed (i.e. the ones that most conveniently flushed and landed on open ground when I happened to have my camera with me) and I missed getting shots of some of the more spectacular ones.

One of the more common grasshoppers at Bowra.

This grasshopper is well camouflaged among the dry grey fallen mulga leaves.

And this reddish grasshopper of unknown species is clearly designed to blend with the red soil. But it appears to be different to the similar but even more cryptic species depicted in the banner at the top of this blog post.

Dragonflies were also prevalent anywhere there was surface water, though numbers were mainly made up of just a few species; notably the Blue Skimmer and Scarlet and Wandering Perchers, all of which tend to settle and pose prominently for photographers (these species must surely be three of the most common and widespread dragonflies in Australia!). But there were also big greenish-yellow types (emeralds?) also darting and flitting hither and thither, and thereby thwarting all efforts at photographic ID determination. 

Blue Skimmer Orthetrum caledonicum (Family Libellulidae)

Scarlet Percher Diplacodes haematodes (Family Libellulidae)

Wandering Percher Diplacodes bipunctata (Family Libellulidae)

This tiny Aurora Bluetail Ischnura aurora, a damselfly rather than a dragonfly, also occurs commonly and Australia-wide (indeed it occurs from India to the central Pacific) but moves more discretely, or at least less noticeably, about the swamp vegetation than the dragonflies.

Butterflies were obvious if not over-abundant, but again just a few common species comprised the majority seen, including Meadow Argus, Lesser Wanderer, Caper White, and one of the grass-yellows (Eurema sp.).

Two Caper Whites Belenois java sipping moisture from the mud beside a billabong.

Caper White in full frontal.

This beautiful hairy caterpillar, about 5 cm long, is possibly a species of Anthela from the Anthelidae family of moths.

The mulga country is characterised by the distinctive nests of mulga ants. These are of the genus Polyrhachis (meaning many or variously spined), of which there are almost 700 species, mainly in Australia, Asia and Africa, with Australia hosting many of these. The mulga ants, probably just a few of the Polyrhachis species and especially P. macropa, are invariably associated with the mulga plant Acacia aneura, and they use the dead fallen mulga leaves (phyllodes, actually) to decorate pronounced rings or levees the ants build around the entrance to their nest. This is thought to be an adaptation to help prevent surface water from flooding the nests during the mulga country's infrequent heavy rainfall events. 

Mulga ants, Polyrhachis macropa, are just a centimetre in length - think I need a macro lens!

This is a comparatively young mulga ant nest, still small with a relatively low 'levee' and fairly minimal decoration with mulga leaves. 

Several large orange wasps were seen but never settled in my presence. The mud nests of wasps are less mobile, however, and I was intrigued to find this one attached directly and firmly to the ground rather that to some more elevated support.

There was the expected diverse range of miscellaneous moths attracted to lights and insect screens around the homestead’s shearing quarters at night, and the odd praying mantis and even a stick insect seen in flight one day, but these were never followed up. The bush flies and mosquitoes attracted attention only through their supreme nuisance value!

That seemingly ever-present Australian spider the golden orb weaver of various Nephila species, was common, in this case probably Nephila edulis. Some of the webs, and the spiders for that matter, were probably the biggest and fattest I've seen. Conditions must be good. The genus name Nephila, incidentally, comes from the Greek words nen = to spin and philos = love, hence love to spin or fond of spinning. And apparently the species name, edulis, which means edible, comes from the fact that the original describer of the species noted indigenous people eating this spider in New Caledonia. I didn't try them! 

A large and fat female Nephila species.

Apart from the odd rabbit and a single black-spotted feral pig, the only mammals I recall seeing were the Red Kangaroos that were not uncommon at Bowra. Though I did see another camper watching by torchlight what must have been a possum at the campground one evening. 

A mother and young Red Kangaroo Macropus rufus - these two were on the main track through Bowra on our way back from banding late one afternoon, but moved into the paddock as we approached. 

We saw surprisingly few reptiles; just a couple of Common House Geckos (Hemidactylus frenatus) in the shearers’ quarters and one unidentified caramel-coloured skink disappearing into the long grass at one of our banding sites at one of our busiest times.

But the frogs were in evidence. The billabong at the campsite hosted good numbers of at least two species, but I don’t know my frog calls at all well yet so don't know what species they were.

The various buildings around the homestead harboured several other species, including a goodly sized Green Tree Frog Litoria caerulea and a smallish Desert Tree Frog Litoria rubella in the bathroom block, and a line-up of six Peron’s Tree Frogs Littoria peroni in the old toilet stalls.

Green Tree Frog Litoria caerulea in the corner of the bathroom.

A small Desert Tree Frog Litoria rubella, also in the Bowra bathroom block.

Five of the six Peron's Tree Frogs Litoria Peroni that make the old toilet stalls their home.

But the real prize was an incredibly incongruous, exquisitely decorated Crucifix Toad (Notaden bennetti) that Karen found plumply plopping along a dry track adjacent to where we’d set up for our second day’s banding. She discovered their ability to secrete copious amounts of sticky defensive ‘frog glue’ as soon as she picked it up, but it was well worth it for the photographs we ended up getting of this amazing outback denizen.

Crucifix Toads are one of very few frogs in Australia that do not exhibit cryptic colouration or patterning, i.e. camouflage. Indeed the opposite is true - they exhibit aposematism, which is a fancy way of saying that they signal to other animals to keep away from them (apo = away, semantic = sign or meaning), in this case through bright yellow/green warning colouration with a range of variously coloured warts and dots in the vague shape of a cross - hence the name. 

The psychedelic Crucifix Toad Notaden bennetti.

The frog is variously called the Crucifix Toad, Holy Cross Toad or Catholic Frog for obvious reasons.

For a bit of anuran esoterica; the glue produced by the Crucifix Toad is composed essentially of a mix of proteins (ranging in size from 13 to 400 kDa) with a high proportion of the amino acids gycine (15.8 mol %), proline (8.8 %), and glutamic acid/glutamine (14.1%), which appear to form large, porous, elastic proteinaceous structures. The glue presumably clogs up the mouths or mouthparts of would be predators and thus acts as a deterrent. Not sure what it might taste like!

The frog was described scientifically in 1873 by Albert Karl Ludwig Gotthilf Günther, a German born British zoologist who was Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum of Natural History from 1875 to 1895. Despite looking, I couldn't find an explanation of the scientific name, though the genus name must surely derive from the Greek noton which means back, and aden which means gland. 

The species name, bennetti, is a little more problematic. It may well be in honour of George Bennett (1804-1893) who was a medical practitioner and naturalist who first visited Australia in 1829, returned in 1832, and finally settled in Sydney in 1836. He was fascinated by the flora and fauna of Australia and his inland travels culminated in the Wanderings in New South Wales ...Being the Journal of a Naturalist (2 volumes), published in London in 1834. He later played a significant role in the newly fledged Australian Museum in Sydney and the Zoological Society, and was agent for John Gould. His second book, Gatherings of a Naturalist in Australasia, was published in 1860. 

Alternatively, as in the case of the Little Crow (Corvus bennetti), which we also saw on this trip, the honour may be to Kenric Harold Bennett (1835-1891), a naturalist with interests in birds, plants and Aboriginal artefacts who was active in central NSW in the second half of the 19th century. Though this seems less likely to me. 

And while I'm on the meaning and history of names, the Green Tree Frog has an interesting tale (pun intended, sadly)! Its specific epithet, caerulea, means blue - rather odd for a bright green frog. The original specimens were described by John White in 1790. White was the surgeon on the convict transport Charlotte, one of the eleven ships comprising the First Fleet, and was then appointed as Surgeon-General for the new colony. Despite a severe dislike for Australia, White developed an interest in its fauna and flora and the potential use of the local plants in medicine. He described many Australian species for the first time in his Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales (1790), including Rana caerulea, which he described as "Blue Frog, fpeckled beneath with greyifh; the feet divided into four toes; the hind feet webbed. Size of the common Frog."
The original name of Blue Frog was apparently due to the fact that the specimens on which the species was described were in preservative. The frog's colour is produced by both blue and green pigments covered in a yellow layer - the preservative destroyed the yellow layer leaving the frogs blueish in colour. 

White's Tree Frog is therefore an eponymous alternative name for the Green Tree Frog (that makes three different colours associated with this one species!), others being Australian Green Tree Frog, Common Green Tree Frog, Northern Green Tree Frog, Dumpy Tree Frog, and perhaps most appropriately for most people, Dunny Frog! A good place to stop.

The good old "Dunny Frog" - this one at the dunnies at the Kalpowar Crossing camp ground in Lakefield National Park (now Rinyirru NP), Cape York, Queensland (Nov 2005).