Month: May 2016

I’ve Got This Bug

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment
Pseudocoremia leucelaea

Pseudocoremia leucelaea

“So, I’ve got this bug?”

I grimaced into the phone. It was going to be one of those calls.

One of those calls where the caller expects me to identify an insect over the phone. An insect they didn’t really look at terribly closely and didn’t bother to collect.

“It’s sort of brown, with long feelers. What is it?”

I try to help. I try to tell people where and how they can get their bug identified, but sometimes I think I’m just talking into the wind. Most of the time I’m sure they hang up thinking, “Well, she didn’t know much, did she?”

Here’s the thing.

Even in New Zealand, which has a very limited number of insects, compared with other places in the world, there are 10,000 species of insect to choose from.

Some are iconic, to be sure. Some are easily recognisable.

Many are not. Many look different as an adult than they do when young. Sometimes males and females look very different. Colours and markings can vary from individual to individual. Some features are only visible under a microscope. And verbal descriptions are less than useless.

So when a person says an insect is brown, I wonder whether it is a dark chocolate sort of brown, a reddish brown, a light brown…because “brown” could be anything.

When they say it’s “about a centimetre long” I wonder whether it is closer to 9 millimetres or 11 millimetres, because it might matter.

When they say, “It looks sort of like a huhu grub” I wonder what features make them say that. Is it legless? Is it a creamy white colour? Or is it just that they’ve seen pictures of huhu grubs and it’s the only thing they can think to compare it to?

When they say it’s got long feelers, I wonder whether those antennae are filiform, moniliform, pectinate, capitate, or serrate.

When they say it has clear wings, I wonder whether it has two or four. And whether those wings are fully clear, tinted, or partly covered in scales.

I wonder how many tarsal segments its legs have.

I wonder whether it has setae on its tibia. And if so, how many, and what size they are, and how, exactly, they are arranged.

I wonder what the shape of the marginal cell on the front wing is. Or whether the wing venation is reduced, or whether the wing is fringed at all.

Sometimes, someone can describe an insect in detail to me over the phone, and I am baffled. Then they bring me the insect, and I can immediately identify it, and it looks nothing like I imagined from the description they gave.

I’m always happy to try to answer people’s entomological questions, but sometimes I feel like one of the three blind men trying to identify an elephant by feeling just a small part of it’s body.

 

 

Chick Pea Salad

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

2016-05-08 17.32.36 smWho would have thought we’d still be eating tomatoes and eggplant in mid-May?

But since we are, my husband made baba ghanoush on Sunday, and we had a lovely Mediterranean meal of baba ghanoush, freshly baked bread, homemade goat cheeses, and chick pea salad.

I looked at a number of chick pea salad recipes on-line, then ignored them all and used what we had in the garden. The result was quite lovely.

1 cup dry chick peas

1 sweet red pepper, chopped

2-3 medium tomatoes, chopped

ÂĽ cup chopped fresh parsley

12 large black olives

1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1 Tbsp balsamic vinegar

1 Tbsp red wine vinegar

salt and black pepper to taste

Cook the chick peas until tender, and allow to cool. Drain. Mix the chick peas, tomato, pepper, parsley and olives in a bowl. In a small bowl, whisk oil, vinegars, salt and pepper. Toss the salad with the oil and vinegar.

This salad holds up reasonably well to refrigeration (I just ate the last of it for lunch today, two days later, and it was still good), but is best eaten at room temperature on the first day.

A Fine Delivery

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment
The cat declared the stack of straw bales an excellent napping spot.

The cat declared the stack of straw bales an excellent napping spot.

I ordered pea straw a couple of weeks ago. I told them there was no rush. They took me at my word.

The straw arrived on Sunday. I happened to see the ute as it came down the road, and guessed it was my straw. Finally.

The old blue truck was piled with bales, but it wasn’t nearly as crowded in back as it was in front. Three men, the youngest not a day less than 68, were squashed into the cab and rattled like bottles up the gravel drive. A little dog scampered back and forth across their laps, eager to jump out and explore.

“The men grinned at me as they drew up to the house.”

“The usual place?”

“Yes,” I said, “But we’ll just stack it next to the shed—I’ve got to do some organising in there before I can put the pea straw in.”

The driver pulled the ute across the lawn and into the rough paddock, bouncing over ruts and hillocks I was sure he’d bottom out on. He stopped just beside the little hay shed.

“That’s the closest we’ve gotten yet!”

The dog leapt out of the cab, and the three men unfolded themselves and stumbled out. They began hefting bales as they took them off the truck and stacked them beside the shed.

“One, two…So, when’s it gonna rain again, eh, Robinne?”

“I don’t know but any day now is fine with me,” I answered.

“That’s five, six…”

“Sure is dry.”

“Seven, eight… Oh. We don’t know how to count. That’s only nine.”

I’d ordered ten bales.

“Aw, all I’ve got is sixty dollars,” I joked. “Let me see if I can come up with fifty-four.”

“Nah, don’t worry about it. We’ll bring round another bale some day when we’re coming by.”

“Yeah, we’ll be coming past at some point, we’ll just toss one out the door.” The old farmer grinned, but I know he was only half kidding, and I reminded myself to keep an eye out for a bale of straw on the verge.

So the men and dog squeezed themselves back into the truck and backed out. I watched in fear as they did so—last year, they’d nearly gone over the metre-high drop onto the kids’ playing field. But they managed to back out without flying over the edge or taking out any of the plantings along the way.

“Thanks!” I called, waving as they rattled back out the drive.

I smiled. Every pea straw delivery is sort of a James Herriot moment. Even if I didn’t need it, I might still order straw every year, just to see those guys…

Saturday Stories: The New Ngu

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment
photo: Fabrice Stoger

photo: Fabrice Stoger

Inspired by a game of bananagrams with my daughter, in which I spelled the word gnu.

What’s that called?

That? It’s a gnu.

A new what?

A gnu, but it has a new name.

A new name?

Yeah, I used to know it.

What? The new name?

Yeah, I knew the new gnu name, but I’ve forgotten it.

Huh?

Wildebeest!

What?

It’s a gnu.

A new what?

New Arrivals

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

IMG_1139 cropThe Saturday Story will have to wait until Sunday this week, because there’s excitement in the paddock today.

I made the difficult decision a few weeks ago to sell my dairy goats and switch to angoras. The daily grind of milking, dealing with mastitis, kiddings, and all the other stress that goes along with breeding and milk production was getting really old. It was time for a new adventure.

So today, we drove to Rangiora and picked up three lovely wee boys (wethers) from Mohair Pacific. My elderly dairy goat, Artemis, will remain with us. The last of the other dairy goats is due to be picked up on Monday morning.

We’re still getting to know the new boys, and they’re still settling into the paddock. We’ve been tossing around names for them, with such notable trios as the three musketeers, the three stooges, and the three tenors being among them, but I think we’ll wait and learn a bit about their personalities before we stick names on them.

This will be a new adventure for me—learning to spin and dye yarn. I love mohair, though, and I’m looking forward to weaving and knitting with it.

A Scourge of Snickerdoodle Scent

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

2016-05-05 19.47.42 smWell, I made Snickerdoodle cookies the other day, and it wasn’t until I thought to write a blog post about them that I discovered I could also buy Snickerdoodle scented shampoo, thus having that “just been baking” smell all day.

BLECH!

I love snickerdoodles, which, lets face it, are just sugar cookies rolled in cinnamon, but snickerdoodle shampoo?

Modern commercialisation has a way of turning even the best things into something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Next, there will be snickerdoodle scented hand lotion, snickerdoodle scented pillows, a snickerdoodle scented Barbie who comes with an apron and oven mitts.

How about just baking some cookies, eh? That’s a great way to fill your house with snickerdoodle aromas.

Homeland

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments
Lovely, but doesn't make me feel at home.

Lovely, but doesn’t make me feel at home.

When Europeans settled new lands, they had a habit of bringing all their favourite plants and animals with them. The result has been a plague of invasive exotic species all over the world. It’s easy to dismiss these settlers to as misguided imperialists, and I’ve done so myself.

But being a stranger in a strange land more than once in my life, I have to admit that I understand the desire to bring a little of the homeland to a new land.

Autumn is when I feel it most.

Most native New Zealand trees are evergreen. There are no native autumn colours, no piles of native leaves to be raked and jumped in. No smell of wet leaves carpeting the ground on crisp autumn mornings.

Last year my daughter and I found a lovely little path along a stream on one of our city walks. Dropping down to the stream edge from the street, I was first struck by the fact that all the trees were non-native oaks and maples. Then I was struck by the smell, and the rustle of fallen leaves on the path, and the glow of yellow that suffused everything. The familiarity of that little stretch of path lifted a weight I didn’t know I carried—the weight of being away from home. For the three minutes it took us to stroll through that little patch of Northern Hemisphere trees, I was in my element. The illusion came to an end all too quickly as we stepped back out onto the street.

So, while I still advocate native plantings, and whittle away at the non-natives on our own property as our young native trees grow, I don’t pass judgement on those early Europeans. They carried a weight in their hearts greater than mine—once they were here, there was no going back for most of them. Never to return to their homeland, they needed to bring a piece of it here. I can sympathise.

Any day now…

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

DSC_0060smOkay, it’s allowed to rain now.

Any day would be fine.

Just a little?

And maybe something a bit cooler than t-shirt and shorts weather to go with it?

Please?

Six years ago, the beginning of May looked like the picture above—we called it the black days of May. That was a bit too much rain, but normally we’ve had some good rain by the beginning of May.

Not so, this year. This year, it’ll be the brown days of May. We had plans to do a lot of landscaping this fall, but the soil is still bone dry—new plants wouldn’t stand a chance, even if we could water them. Almost every bit of promised rain has failed to materialise. The little that has fallen has evaporated within a day under summer-like heat.

2016-05-03 10.26.14It feels like summer will never end.

I’m still watering the garden, though the summer crops have mostly given up out of drought and exhaustion. The winter crops are likely to bolt in this weather, even with watering.

And who knows how long I’ll be able to water. It hardly rained last winter, and last summer was particularly dry, too. Canterbury water is over-allocated. The water table is dropping, and some people have already had to deepen their wells. How long before we run out?

Water is still being managed for short-term profit here—to ensure maximum output of dairy and crops. Environmental concerns and future supply are given lip service. That will come back to bite us. Climate change models predict less rain for Canterbury. If we keep on like this, at some point, we will run out.

Do we have the will to change before that happens? Experience in other parts of the world says no.

I do my best to conserve water here—using greywater to water plants, watering sparingly, mulching heavily, planting shrubs that can handle the dry—but I’m a tiny player, surrounded by farms hundreds of times the size of my property. The water I conserve is just a drop in the bucket.

A drop in the bucket would be nice about now. But the meteorologists are predicting no rain at all for the month of May in Canterbury.

 

Mosquitoes, Disease, and Environmental Change

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-05-02 07.38.34With Te Waihora/Lake Ellesmere just a few kilometres away, we’ve always had mosquitoes at our house. But since we installed a small pond, the mosquito population of our property has gone up (in spite of the fish, which do eat a lot of them).

Though mosquito identification is not my forte, most of the mosquitoes appear to be Culex pervigilans, the common house mosquito, or vigilant mosquito. Like most of our mosquitoes, this species is endemic to New Zealand.

Because of the isolated nature of New Zealand, few of the world’s nasty mosquito-borne diseases have ever arrived here, and no human diseases have managed to arrive and spread. But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t, if given the opportunity.

Whataroa virus is an Australian bird virus, which may also produce flu-like symptoms in people. In New Zealand, it has been found only in the area around the small West Coast community of Whataroa. It was first detected in 1962, and recent surveys show it has not increased in prevalence since then. In New Zealand, it is vectored by Culex pervigilans, which is common throughout the country.

So why hasn’t it spread?

Well, we don’t know for certain, but to get a clue, it’s worth looking at why other mosquito-borne viruses spread. Most emerging diseases come on the heels of environmental change—when the habitat changes, mosquito populations may increase (many mosquitoes do well in disturbed habitats), or the virus’ other hosts may increase or move around, spreading the virus. Environmental changes can be natural, like seasonal flooding; or human-induced, like cutting native forest (or digging a pond…).

Which brings us back to Whataroa, which hasn’t changed much at all over the past 50 years. There’s been no great increase in mosquito habitat, and little development that would favour the non-native blackbirds and thrushes that appear to be the reservoir for the virus. So the Whataroa virus has simply languished in place.

If the Whataroa virus had arrived at another location, it might have already spread far and wide (as avian malaria has done over the past 40 years). If a developer had come into Whataroa and built golf courses or fancy subdivisions, it might have spread. When the next big Alpine Fault quake happens, the resulting destruction will likely create new disturbed habitat for mosquitoes, blackbirds, and thrushes, and Whataroa virus might spread with them.

All sorts of variables determine whether and when a mosquito-borne disease becomes a problem. Some of these are known, and under our control, but many are either not understood or are out of our control. Sometimes, the only thing we can do is to react when trouble strikes.

Which is, of course, my excuse for swatting this mosquito when it landed on my arm this morning.