More Birds and Persimmons

A sparrow looks on hopefully as the gray starling feasts.

The reward for patience is the golden heart of the sunrise.

Rear end view of a Japanese white-eye.  These birds are very acrobatic, and can hover like hummingbirds.

Last of the Persimmons

Day after the winter solstice and a total lunar eclipse which we couldn't observe due to rain. Today is warm, in the sixties, and feels nothing like winter. Yet the birds at dawn have been working over the last of the persimmons, and today the tree is wintry bare. Below, the shrubs have red berries, and the red camelia has started to bloom. Christmas colors!

Many kinds of birds come to eat the persimmons. Jungle crows, sparrows, Japanese white-eye (mejiro), the brown-eared bulbul (hiyodori), and the gray starling (mukudori) are frequent and very noisy diners.

Here we have the sleek female bulbul, and her spiky-headed mate. These two get the prize for being the most outrageous characters, and having the best and loudest song repertory. I love them dearly. 

The bird with its head in the persimmon is a gray starling, who unfortunately only makes typical starling rasping noises. The nesting behavior in spring is kind of endearing, though, as it hops about carrying long strands of straw. I also like the sky blue eggs.

Last Leaves of Autumn

Today the wind blew all the remaining leaves off the trees. Ginko nuts rained down on the roof and bounced to the ground. We have a lot of work cut out for us, peeling the smell skins, washing and drying the nuts in their shells, then storing them to be roasted or steamed and devoured little by little.
The tenacious little blueberry still has its microcosm of autumn color, warming my soul every time I open the door.

Dragons beard, flower and fruit, the fruits so important to the survival of wild animals in the mountains. The tanuki (racoon dogs) will be by soon, eating the kiwi left on the vine for them, snuffling through the ginko skins, and scarfing down the dragon's beard berries.

And then there is the late afternoon spent in the park, when magic hour struck, highlighting, among other things, the unseasonal blooming of lotus in a pond riddled with the detritus of fallen maple leaves.

Forest farm

Our forest farm, with persimmons in the foreground. The yellow tree is providing us with enough ginko nuts to keep us fat over the winter. Kiwis hang over the front door, and I am still trying to figure out how to harvest the ones that are hanging over the neighbor's driveway. And our mini mandarin orange tree has five little oranges on it this year.

Also you can see the juxtaposition of persimmons with Japanese maple leaves (momiji), each symbolic of the autumn season and brilliant with color. The birds have eaten half a sphere and will come back for the rest, later.

On Mushrooms and Mantis

Mid-summer, and the praying mantis is delicate among the tomato vines, its exoskeleton, shedding as the mantis grows, as green as any young leaf.

  End of summer, and the movements of the mantis have become weighted and ponderous, the exoskeleton toughened and worn, tinged with the colors of autumn, fading to the last brown, inviting autumn leaves to follow suit.

Early autumn rains soften the mushrooms on an old plum tree. The mushrooms resemble edible tree ears (kikurage), but they are not tree ears, and likely not edible, either.  Can anyone identify this mushroom?

Autumn Spider

On November 6, we awoke to puffs of frosty breath. Autumn comes at last, touching the edges of leaves with the palette of flame.
The Jorogumo (Nephila clavata) spends winter as an egg, hatching in mid-spring.  She spins larger and larger webs as she grows over the summer, dining on bees and other flying insects.
Autumn comes, and the Jorogumo spiders are resplendent against  backdrops of forest or sky, reposing in signature 3-D webs. The webs are unique, large orbs with a 3-D lattice backing,  tensile enough to span small rivers.

The females are large and beautifully colored. They each keep a tiny male consort or two, sometimes instinctively devouring them. On the first night of frost, the spiders abandon the webs, secure their precious eggs to the backs of evergreen leaves, and then  pass beyond the veil to the otherworld, to haunt the edges of our prehistoric dreams.

Hidden Things

Some parts of the circle of life remain hidden from us because we aren't looking. Others consciously hide from us, like the elusive medaka fish beneath the water hyacinths. The medaka live in a large urn in the garden year round. In winter they bury into the mud at the bottom, and so escape freezing. Nightly temperatures are recorded in the quality and depth of the ice each the morning.

The medaka share the urn with snails, dragonfly and mosquito larvae, and countless other small organisms. Birds come to bathe, and sometimes a cat comes to drink. The cat cannot stop itself from hunting that which moves. It brings the taste of the wild to the garden, and so the medaka, grand hunters within the urn, know that there is danger also, and more than one reason to remain hidden.

Indian summer

We have Indian summer. The sun is still too high in the sky, and the everthing has taken on a kind of strange, dryad loveliness. Time has stopped. The persimmons, ginko nuts, kiwi, are all there, on the branches, looking very tempting, but not ready to be picked. The tropical butterflies from the wrong climate zones are still fluttering around.

The Uraginsujihyoumon (Argyronome laodice japonica)sits on my hand before dying, its lifespan ending as summer may finally turn to fall.
Photos taken in the evening with my cell phone camera.

The Cycle of Life

There is a whole family of small, upright-winged butterflies that are classified as Hesperiidae, mostly found in the Indomalaya zone. I have not really seen them before this year, but they are certainly bountiful in number at present. They are difficult to recognize as butterflies when flying, as they dart about so quickly. Sometimes they come to rest on shady leaves or flowers, with their wings folded in an upright position, and that is the shutter chance.

When I took the photo of the yellow butterfly, I mistakenly labeled it "yellow moth." Days of research later, I still can't identify it for sure. It may, possibly. be a Hime-kimadara seseri, (Ochlodes ochradeus). One Japanese photographer calls it the "Little Princess." I could find no other English name. That was the only time I saw this butterfly.

A more dramatic story happened a few evenings later, as I tried to photograph a cousin of the Little Princess. Another Hesperiidae, or seseri, which the Japanese call Ichimonji, is a more frequent visitor to the garden.  The Latin name is Parmera guttata, and in English we call it the Common Straight Swift.

I was following a Swift around the garden with my camera. Before my very eyes, the butterfly became ensnared by threads cast from an awaiting spider. That was some hunting! The spider is a Thomisdae (labefactus), called Azuchigumo in Japanese.The scene of the drama is my husband's bicycle basket.

Japanese five-striped skink

Last night I was sung to sleep by the soft trill of crickets. Much more lovely than the torturous rasping sounds of another night-time singer, the katydid, which performed its monotonous repertory all last week.

There are many food chains in the garden. Skinks eat the crickets and cockroaches, and snakes and cats hunt the skinks.  It goes on and on, cycling around and around.
I love most of the denizens, and try to treat them all with equal respect. So in a kind of bittersweet tribute to the lives of crickets, I present a photo of the skink, taken in spring when the sun was just warming the deck.

The Japanese five-striped skink is a kind of lizard, with the Latin name Eumeces latiscutatus.
The gorgeous metallic colors indicate juveniles of either sex. Females retain the metallic sheen into adulthood, while the males morph into a duller brown color, with added reds during mating season.

Spangle

This beautiful dark butterfly loves the sage and the jasmine flowers. It is friendly enough as long as I don't have a camera in my hand. I have been trying not to "stalk" it since summer began. The side view drinking sage nectar was shot in the evening several weeks ago. The hovering wings are in constant motion, hence the blur. Early this morning, the Spangle (Papilio protenor demetrius) was lounging motionless in the Rose of Sharon tree, so I got a still shot, though not perfect, as the shadows and dark wing colors were difficult for me and the lens to resolve.
Demetrius is the Japanese subspecies of the Spangle, which ranges across China to the Himalayas. Demetrius' range is mostly in southern areas of Japan, however, in the past few years it has moved north, and has taken up an abode here, on the outskirts of Tokyo.

Many years ago I saw myriad Spangles flying above the jungle canopy on Iriomote Island, (East China Sea) along with the Common Bluebottle (Graphium sarpedon)(actually not so common, as it ranges in the tropical areas of Japan and Korea) and the Indian Fritillary (Argyreus hyperbius a.k.a Painted Lady.)

Now I can see all three species in my garden outside of Tokyo. Someday I may actually be able to get photos of them all.
Yesterday afternoon the Indian Fritillary was chasing the Spangle around the garden in what looked like some kind of territorial squabble. I hope the Fritillary takes some time out to pollinate the bitter melon!

Waiting for the bitter melon

The tiny baby bitter melon, native to more southern climes, has gotten a very late start this year.  It needs to grow fast, while the summer heat lasts. The fruit will end up looking really lumpy and strange, but it's such great summer food, refreshingly bitter and medicinally cooling to the system. Hurry up and grow!
It is hard to imagine that the delicate stem of the flower will soon hold the weight of a zucchini-sized fruit.

The smaller pollinating bees are scarce this year. I am hoping that the Painted Lady butterfly, also a southerner from Okinawa, will emerge from the pupae stage soon. 
There are a few bumblebees who visit the garden, but they are mostly interested in the sage flowers. Black Swallowtails visit daily, but drink mostly jasmine nectar with a touch of sage for desert.
Who is going to pollinate the bitter melon flowers?

At Last a Butterfly

When I first got my camera I thought it would be really easy to take a photo of a butterfly. I was wrong.  Seemingly photogenic and benign, butterflies are very sensitive to the presence of the hunter, and when approached will often gracefully flit away, leaving the hopeful photographer earthbound and photoless. The photographer of Not as the Crow Flies gave me some good advice, to get to know their habits, where they like to hang out. She told me to try to seem less like a predator, and more like someone who was gently in tune with her surroundings.

It took me over a year of following butterflies around the garden to no avail before one would let me approach and point a camera at it. The photos I got are of a Regular Swallowtail butterfly (regular is what the Japanese call it, I happen to think it's pretty spectacular) with the Latin nomenclature of Papilio xuthus. They look like regular photo shots, too, and you wouldn't know that I braved death to get my first shots of a butterfly.
This is the story you don't see: A convergence of pathways had put the butterfly, me, and a thirsty killer bee all in the same place at the same time. The butterfly was tentatively perched on an iris leaf, I was trying to approach as a person gently in tune with her surroundings, and a large killer bee, who was getting territorial over the water urn around which all this was happening, was divebombing my head and back with loud angry buzzes, and buzzing the butterfly to boot.
Normally I would back off right away and let the bee have the territory. The bee knows this very well, being a regular visitor to the garden and having successfully routed me countless times. ( I am probably not going to photograph the killer bee, by the way.)
But in that moment, hunched over the water urn, I could feel at last the magical connection happening with the butterfly, and I found myself very forcefully telling the killer bee to get out of the picture.  Amazingly, it left in a huff and stayed away for almost two days. That, I guess, is how you have to deal with a killer bee who won't let you commune with a butterfly.

The Bamboo Partridges

The male.

And the female.

Photos for the last two entries.

A Painted Lady Larva dining on violet leaves. These butterflies first showed up in the area last summer. They were native to more southern climes, but as the Kanto Plain is becoming more tropical than temperate, we are seeing many tropical butterflies during the summer months.

Sunday

Yesterday I found Painted Lady(argyreus hyperblus) larvae eating the violets behind the house.
The Black Swallowtails are still feeding on the jasmine, and the regular Swallotail (white with black stripes) is still flitting among the trees.
Of course the cabbage butterflies are trying to lay eggs on the herbs....

Today's Visitors

Strange clucking sounds and the rustle of underbrush alerted me to a new visitor. Just a tad larger than a partridge dove, with longer feathers and a darker eye, the bamboo partridge pair seemed unafraid of me and the camera. Welcome to the garden, new friends.