Dac Crossley's Western Blog

The Season of Yellow Flowers

Why is it - Spring flowers come in all shades and tints. Fall flowers are predominantly yellow? Here on the Georgia piedmont I'll find goldenrod, camphor-weed, Confederate daisy on the granite outcrops, fields of sneezeweed. In south Texas I'd look for broom-weed, snakeweed, golden-eye asters.

Come along and let's take a look at the autumn insects that visit those flowers. I'm taking a white enameled pan. If you don't have one, bring a pie plate or something similar. Take a fistful of the yellow blooms and tap them into the pan, dislodging the critters. What do we see?

Ecology 101 - there are many more tiny insects than large ones.

Aphids, leafhoppers, little squirming thrips. And a crab spider or two. Yellow or white, they wait in the blossoms for unsuspecting flies.

A few larger insects. On goldenrod, some yellow and black soldier beetles. Maybe a locust borer --

Locust-borer larvae bore into the stems of locust trees (well, duh!). They kill the tree, releasing a slug of nitrogen into the soil. Other trees like tulip-poplars reap the benefits of that nitrogen.

The big black-and-yellow adult beetles congregate on goldenrod in the autumn. They eat the pollen. Do they gain anything from that? I suspect that it's more like a singles bar -- a place to meet dates.

I recall a Spring in South Texas when huisache borers laid low all of those multi-stem shrubs, right down to the ground. And there are mesquite borers. I don't know much about them.

Where do those borers go, for a good time?

Dac Crossley
September 13, 2012.

"Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control." - Cyril Connally

XX Century Rangers

A long and painful transition carried the Texas Rangers from the Border Wars to the militia stand-off at Fort Davis. In the years between, the Rangers survived inept Texas governors, pressures from the Legislature, and some bad publicity. The Twentieth Century saw the force evolve from gun-slinging border terrors to a modern State Police force, embedded in the Department of Public Safety along with the State Highway Department.

All of this history is described in detail in Robert M. Utley’s history “Lone Star Lawmen. The Second Century of the Texas Rangers.” I highly recommend it to those of us of a certain age, who’ve watched these events unfold. The Duval County machine, the LBJ election, rustlings and kidnappings, the Bonnie and Clyde years. Utley reports these events in a fair-handed manner. Did a Lone Ranger radio show get the force through a rough period?

Sometimes the Rangers weren’t the good guys. Utley identifies the good and the bad among Ranger captains. It isn’t always easy to tell the difference. During the first twenty years of the Century, the Texas Rangers harried Mexicans viciously. The enmity created still exists in some quarters.

These are the times when automobiles replace horses, helicopters fly overhead, and automatic weapons are part of the arsenal. Undermanned, quick to act, the modern Ranger carries forward the reputation of the frontier days. A Texas Ranger on the job is no-one to trifle with.

Only two Texas icons are well-known internationally: The Alamo and the Texas Rangers. Only the Canadian Mounties equal the Rangers in world-wide recognition. Is this how the world sees Texas? Heaven help us!

And I recommend a brief but thorough history of the Rangers on a Texas blog: Sweethearts of the West. That’s
http//sweetheartsofthewest.blogspot.com/

A nice blog to follow, if you like Texas.

Dac Crossley
September 3, 2012

“There are two motives for reading a book. One, that you can enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.” – Bertrand Russell.