Massive rivers and kettles of raptors are migrating over the Texas A&M University-Kingsville campus. Tens of thousands of birds swirling like black clouds. Swainson’s hawks, broadwings, black vultures and other unknowns are mixed in the groups. One of the most incredible migratory spectacles I’ve ever seen. They are headed down the raptor river, a corridor that passes along the east coast of Mexico, funneling migratory raptors and many other species down into Central and South America. The groups of raptors I saw had moved a mile or two within fifteen minutes. They circled slowly heading towards the border of Mexico to the south. They will all move between the Sierra Madre Oriental and Gulf of Mexico after they hit the border, crossing through the states of Tamaulipas, San Luis Potosi, and Veracruz. Some will stop in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, while others may continue as far as Bolivia.
Due east of Las Vegas, New Mexico, the southern Rocky Mountains drop off into the Great Plains. Yellow and brown grasses bend to the harsh winds that flow across the landscape daily. Although the grasslands seem to extend unobstructed for hundreds of miles, there is another dramatic change in the landscape, where grasslands give way to redrock canyons and low elevation desert. The change happens quickly, and along the eastward face of the canyons, one can see for dozens of miles into the harsh mesquite and juniper woodlands down below. At that transition, the distribution of many reptile species come together. On a warm afternoon in the spring of 2021, I drove my 1994 red Jeep Wrangler down one of the backroads that progressively descend from the grasslands to the deserts below. Along the edge of the old road, I noticed a large Western diamondback rattlesnake Crotalus atrox sunning itself. After I stopped and approached just outside of striking distance, the snake coiled and took up its signature striking pose. The snake was well over four feet in length, very thick and had a tail with many rattles. The beautiful white and black striping patterns along the tail and distinct diamonds along the extent of the snake’s body, give the identication away. You can see from the first video that although the snake took a defensive stance, it did everything it could to slither away backwards. The second video shows it crawl off into some shrubs and ponderosa pine along the face of a cliff.
The day before brought in three or four inches of snow, followed by rain and sleet in the afternoon. During the night a windstorm swept through the forest, and the logging roads were blocked by the snapped tops of douglas fir, grand fir, and western larch. The larch needles were beginning to erupt in bright yellow colors across the mountain hillsides and the cold weather caused the deciduous trees of the forest to break out in bright colors. After driving into the forest in dark morning hours and moving several fallen conifers from the roads, we parked and made our way into an old clearcut.
We moved around the leeward side of a tree covered ridge, where a slow breeze pushed into our faces. From up above, where a crease in the hill broke our plain of view, barks and chirps broke the silence. We were standing on a muddy trail, covered with tracks of white-tailed deer and elk, and cool freezing air numbed our faces. We watched and waited.
Small brown ferns, thistle, currants and grasses swayed in the breeze and the face of an elk appeared on the hill. After several minutes of indecisiveness, it made its way directly towards us at midslope. Only after she was within 20 yards and the wind was in her favor, did she make the decision to move off in the other direction.
The most interesting aspect of the elk´s behavior was the sound of its vocalizations. I am accustomed to the meeeuuuu sound that cow elk will often make, but these cows were mostly barking. The barks were so different that they sounded doglike on our initial approach. It even caused me to think there could be wolves on the other side of the ridge before we had seen the animals making the sounds. Unfortunately, the camera turns off prior to the barks being made again. The video shows just how close you can get to an elk though if you play the wind in your favor.
We had been portaging canoes through ephemeral swamp channels for two days after crossing from oil palm plantations into virgin forest along the east coast of Sumatra. We used the skeletons of dead trees to gain footing in mud that pulled us down to our waists and the tropical heat caused the mud to dry on our skin and clothes, forming what looked like pieces of shattered pottery. Members of the team could be seen wiping sweat from their eyes with wet and muddy sleeves, and during the peak heat of the day, nobody said a word for hours.
We had been in Sumatra for over a month with the goal of finding and surveying Sunda gharial populations (Tomistoma schlegelii). It was the focus of a portion of my doctoral dissertation, and we were traveling into the most remote stretch of jungle we had visited to date. We were entering the core zone of Berbak National Park in Jambi province. An intact patch of black water peat swamp forest, where Sumatran tiger populations, two species of crocodilians, Asian sun bears and probably king cobras still thrived.
On our third day, we paddled our canoes into a billabong where thin swamp channels opened up into a large black pond. I was being guided by a local, Kasno and his son, Andi. We pushed the canoe to shore along the edge of the swamp to wait for the rest of our party to arrive, which included a young undergraduate student from Indonesia, Aisyah Arimbi, a local national park guide, Sismanto and an additional canoe captain, Imran.
As we waited, Kasno noticed a small fragment of bone along the shoreline. I watched with curiosity as he picked at other pieces before pulling up a single vertebra.
“Buaya (crocodile) mister” he said in Indonesian. I was unsure and pressed him a bit. “Mungkin babi (Maybe it’s a pig)” I said.
“Tidak! (no!)” he said, emphasizing he was certain.
I watched as he proceeded to wade into the swamp digging for more bones. He swept his hands through decaying leaf matter for a short time before lifting a piece of the mandible of a very large crocodilian. My eyes grew and I waded into the swamp telling him “you are right pak (sir)”, “you are right”!
We both swept our hands through mud and leaf matter, slowly wading deeper into the swamp. As we reached our waist, we each had collected osteoderms, more vertebrae and other random fragments. The animal had died and its whole skeleton seemed to be left in place, the way you see a fully preserved raptor skeleton formed into a single fossilized piece of rock.
We pushed deeper into the swamp, and by that time the rest of our party had arrived. They watched with eyes fixated on Kasno and I. With each step deeper, more bones emerged. We formed a collection on the bank by passing them from one person to the other and we pushed deeper.
Kasno and I stood up to our necks and began taking deep breaths and diving down to sift through the muddy bottom. The substrate reminded me of a thin pancake batter, hardly thick enough to stay in my hands under water. While diving down, I opened my eyes to see what was out in the water, but the visibility was so limited that I couldn’t see Kasno swimming just a few meters away.
I came up gasping for air without anything in my hands and watched as Kasno took another dive. We continued to dive, one after the other, occasionally finding leg bones and other things. I estimate that I reached a point where I was diving to roughly nine or ten feet down. After coming up for air and moving to a position to stand, I stood dripping and waiting for Kasno to come to the surface. Moments later he emerged with a massive crocodile skull, measuring 65 cm in length. The skull was stained brown from the tannins in the water, but otherwise fully intact.
We cheered and moved to the bank, dripping from head to toe, and investigated the skull. It was in fact a member of the rare species, the Sunda gharial, which we had been searching for. We strapped the skull to a tarp and carried it for another week through the jungle for the rest of our surveys. We delivered it to the national park headquarters where it proudly sits in their entry in Jambi, Sumatra.
Kasno (seen in the picture) truly deserves the bulk of the credit for the find, but we did work together that day in the swamp to make the discovery. Without local knowledge and expertise, these expeditions would never be successful. Kasno, Sismanto, Andi and others still help us with our work in Berbak until this day. Hopefully you enjoy the story behind this skull. I will try to post more info on our YouTube channel: https://m.youtube.com/@emptyforests
In mid-september, after many weeks of 100+ degree temperatures, the summer temperatures finally broke. A storm front brought cooler temperatures and the first bit of rain that we had seen in weeks. We lived at the base of mountain range on the south side of Monterrey, Mexico, just a five minute walk from hills covered in semitropical shrubs and stunted trees.
One afternoon, I walked out my front door and noticed thousands of bright yellow sulfur butterflies gliding over our little home. They were all flying south and as many as 20 or 30 would pass just overhead within a matter of a 10 seconds.
I decided to go for a walk up to the adjacent hill and I found dozens of other species of butterflies visiting a dozen or more blooming shrub species. Each species of plant tended to have specific butteflies visiting its flowers, although they were a few generalist butterflies that appeared to be visiting several different species of plants.
I wondered if moth activity would also spike during the night. I took walk the next morning to the hill and found the eaves of a small school covered with no less than two dozen species of moths. They had all emerged within the last 24 hours and I assumed they must have been responding to the same shift in weather that had triggered the butterfly activity.
The activity of the butterflies and moths waned over the next few days. After a week, I would guess that less than half of the butterfly and moth diversity had dissappeared. I have struggled to find more information on these fall emergence patterns of butterflies.
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