Down to Earth Ecological Consulting, LLC

11/07/2022

It was 75 degrees on November. I had the time and energy to do some light work at one of my volunteer stewardship sites. Honestly, it was too warm to be cutting brush. It was just right for a colony of this small, native ladybug. My years with a research collection brought it's scientific name instantly to mind, Coleomegilla maculata lengi, despite not having worked with them for more than a decade.

Despite many native ladybug beetles being displaced by alien species, this one is doing is great, and on this warm day, they were swarming. Wouldn't you know it, I get a clear picture of just one, when there were hundreds in the leaf litter. The light-colored piece of debris is a wood chip from my saw.

This species is an important predator of apids, and is a testimony to the importance of biodiversity to all ecological systems, including agriculture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleomegilla_maculata

03/09/2022

It's easy to forget that local thinking isn't a local phenomenon. I'm just back from the Tucson area, falling in love with the grassland scrub of the high desert. There are ecological challenges here, too, and good people fighting the good fight. I harbor a long-standing obsession with Agave - a highly diversified and diversely implemented plant group of the Americas. Native peoples found this plant useful for so many things - carbohydrates, water, pulque (analogous to beer), and fiber. Via Borderlands Nursery and Seed (), I learned about this agave, a cultivar grown by the Hohokam people and now propagated by Borderlands.

Agave murpheyi is a species of agave. It is a succulent plant that is found growing only at a few dozen archaeological sites of the ancient Hohokam Indians in southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico. In 1935 there were reported half a dozen sites and in 1970 only two were known. It appears to b...

01/24/2022

A reminder of better days ahead here in the deep of winter.

12/21/2020

In honor of the Solstice and the first day of Winter, a very short poem from Wendel Berry.

To Know the Dark, by Wendel Berry

To go in the dark with light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

01/03/2020

You may have already noticed that the sunsets have been become, however slowly, later in the day. The evening lasts just a little longer. This has been happening for the past two weeks. Today, January third, marks the latest sunrise during the solar cycle. This is an effect the earth's axial tilt, its elliptical orbit, and its daily rotation in relation to the actual position of any part of the earth to the sun.

Sunrise (or sunup) is the moment when the upper rim of the Sun appears on the horizon in the morning.[1] The term can also refer to the entire process of the solar disk crossing the horizon and its accompanying atmospheric effects.[2]

12/18/2019

Understanding nature doesn't stop with winter or when we come indoors. My Grandmother's Christmas cactus had several offspring, including an old woody plant that I managed to kill off many years ago. My sister in California, who hardly has a green thumb, had kept her cutting alive, and with just three segments from that plant, I've managed to reconnect with this family legacy.

Green things evoke many memories. This plant reminds me of my childhood. It reminds me of a grandmother I barely knew, her house full of old things, and of my own mother who kept her own cutting, the one I couldn't keep alive. The plant also reminds of the wild relatives of the Christmas cactus that grow from trees in the tropics.

05/30/2019

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