Bob cats are common in Arizona and occur in many different habitats.  They especially like the outskirts of urban areas because that’s where the prey is concentrated.  Adult bob cats weigh 15 to 35 pounds, males larger than females, and stand 18 to 24 inches tall (long legs make them look taller), and are 24 to 48 inches long.  They can jump as high as 12 feet.

Bob cats generally hunt at dawn and dusk.  During the day they may lounge in the shade of a bush in your backyard.  Normal prey includes rabbits, rodents, and birds.  They have been known to take down a deer.  They prey upon small domestic pets, poultry, and other small livestock.  They also prey upon snakes, including rattlesnakes.

Bob cats usually mate from February through March and kittens are born in April through June.  The kittens stay with the mother for about a year.  Normal life span is 10 to 15 years. Bob cats are generally solitary, but you may see a mating pair, or a mother and her kittens.

Bob cats generally do not attack humans, but they can inflict serious injury with their fangs and claws.  You should not feed wild bob cats because that makes them too comfortable around humans.  If you need to discourage a bob cat, make loud noises or use a garden hose to spray them with water.  If it happens that a female has kittens in the area, then leave them alone for a few weeks until the kittens are old enough to leave with their mother.

Here is a video produced by Arizona Game & Fish department:

Do you have a bob cat story?

See also:

Do not mess with Javelinas

Mountain Lions

Urban Coyotes prowl Tucson neighborhoods

What Color is a Black Bear?

Three Desert Squirrels

Desert Museum has a new Black Bear

Speckled Rattlesnakes

According the Arizona Game & Fish Department, the population density of coyotes in the urban area is twice that in the wild.  Coyotes favor residential areas, parks, and golf courses and use natural areas and washes for dispersal.  Coyotes can run at almost 40 mph and can jump a 6-foot wall.

 AZG&F says: “Coyotes are curious, clever, and adaptable. They quickly learn to take advantage of any newly discovered food source, and are often attracted to yards with abundant fruit and wildlife to eat. Coyotes will eat pet food and knock over unsecured garbage cans, or may walk along the tops of walls around homes in search of unattended dogs and cats to eat. Coyotes may consider large or loud dogs to be a threat to their territory and become aggressive toward those dogs. Coyotes have lured free-roaming dogs away from their owners to attack, and bold coyotes may attack small dogs on retractable leashes.”  Game & Fish has a short brochure about how to deal with urban coyotes here.

The coyote (Canis latrans) is a very adaptable omnivore that occurs in 49 of the 50 states. (Guess which state they don’t inhabit.)  A coyote resembles a medium-sized dog with a long, bushy black-tipped tail, big ears, and a pointy face. The fur color varies from grayish to light brown, with a buff or white underbelly. You’ll never see a fat coyote in the wild. Mark Twain wrote: “The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry.” Wiry and with long, slender legs and small feet, a desert coyote usually weighs only 15 to 25 pounds. The tracks are much smaller than those of a domestic dog of the same size.  Coyotes will eat anything from road-killed carrion to cactus fruit, mesquite beans, seeds, plants, and meat. They hunt small animals such as rodents, rabbits, birds, snakes, insects — especially grasshoppers and crickets — and any injured animal they can subdue according to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum staff.

Coyotes generally hunt singly or in pairs around a core area that contains their den.  During the breeding season, coyotes will scent-mark their territory with urine and by scraping the ground to leave a visual mark.  They will defend their territory during breeding season, February to March, with pups born in April and May.

 Coyotes, which some call “sound dogs,” typically howl at dusk as they begin their hunt.  They also howl to communicate with neighbors and family members.  Within neighborhoods, coyotes howling usually sets off the neighborhood dogs.

See also:

Creatures of the Night: The Bats

Creatures of the Night: Kangaroo Rat

Creatures of the Night: Grasshopper Mouse

Desert Museum has a new Black Bear

Do not mess with Javelinas

Mountain Lions

New Prairie Dogs at Desert Museum

New Coatis at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

Pack Rats are Desert Archaeologists

The Urban Coyote and a Creation Story

Three Desert Squirrels

What Color is a Black Bear?

Jaguar sighted near Tucson

I took the photo below at the Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum. The plant occurs near the art gallery. It is Passiflora incarnata or incense passion flower, which is actually a tropical variety. The flower is about five inches across.

The Arizona passion flower (Passiflora arizonica) is much smaller, only about one to two inches across. See “Southeastern Arizona Wildflowers” for photos and a description. Arizona Game & Fish Department has a detailed description here. The two other Arizona varieties are Passiflora mexicana (which smell like mothballs), and Passiflora bryonioides.

The Arizona passion flower produces fruit about one inch in diameter which go from green to yellow to red. According to Southeastern Arizona Wildflowers, these fruits are edible, but contain little pulp. Another name for the Arizona varieties is “fetid passion flower” because crushed leaves give off a fetid smell. The leaves and other green parts of the plant are poisonous. “This unusual passion flower may be carnivorous, or at least protocarnivorous (on the evolutionary path to becoming carnivorous in the future). The bracts surrounding the flowers and fruit have glands that secrete both a sticky fluid to trap insects and digestive enzymes to digest them.”

Writing more generally of passion flowers, Botany.com says: “Some varieties [including the incense variety] produce edible passion fruits, which vary in shape and size. They contain a jelly-like pulp embedded with numerous seeds. These fruits are only produced where the summer-time temperature is a minimum of 60º.”

Passion flower vines generally bloom from May to December.

See also:

Edible Desert Plants – Barrel Cactus Fruit

Jojoba oil, good on the outside, bad on the inside

Mesquite Trees Provide Food and a Pharmacy

Freezing weakens the cactus, making it more susceptible to infection. A healthy middle-aged saguaro can stand a few hours of temperatures as low as 10 degrees F in mid-winter. On the other hand, 12 hours of 20 degrees F in late fall causes damage and death. The first sign of trouble is dark scaly skin which cuts down on the cactus’ ability to carry on photosynthesis.

The chief agent of infection, a bacterium, Erwinia cacticida, is carried by the caterpillar of a moth. The bacterium causes rot upon which the caterpillar feeds. The rot turns the flesh of a weak saguaro into a smelly, black liquid.

According to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, a dying saguaro:

becomes an oasis to numerous insects and other arthropods, providing food, moisture, shaded habitat or an enticement for predators seeking live food…. Carve off a piece of tough outer skin of a decaying saguaro, and you’ll find the innards teeming with life. Move the whole saguaro, and spiders race from beneath it, escaping exposure to sunlight.

The sheer size of insect populations is always amazing. A small chunk of rotting saguaro (about 1 cubic foot) was examined at the University of Arizona; it yielded 413 individual arthropods, including adult and larval beetles, larval flies, pseudoscorpions, and mites. Compare that small portion to the size of a whole saguaro and you instantly understand why insects are this planet’s dominant life form.

A closer look at the fauna in a rotting saguaro will expose an ecosystem with grazers on fungi, such as the feather-winged beetles Acrotrichis and Nephanes, and such recyclers of plant matter as the flattened, leathery syrphid fly larvae Volucella, the neriid cactus fly maggots Odontoloxozus longicornis, and numerous phytophagous mites. This habitat is no longer solid plant material, but is now quite aquatic in nature. Several hydrophilid beetles, Agna capillata and Dactylosternum cacti, may be seen swimming awkward strokes through the muck. They feed on a wide assortment of organic material, from fungus and dead plant matter to castoff exoskeletons and dead insects. What better pond is there in the desert?

And what would an ecosystem be without predators? They swarm to this bountiful table in hordes—all sizes of rove and hister beetles, each staking claim to a prey size suitable to its mandibles. Most are colored red, so an observer may readily spot these hungry terrors of the bug world as they stalk their prey through the saguaro rot. One must be careful, however, when searching through this habitat, as another great predator of the desert, the scorpion, may be lurking in a hidden recess with its pinchers and sting at the ready. (By the way, Hister beetles are used in forensic entomology to determine time of death.)

And, of course, there are spiders, snakes, lizards, and rodents waiting to prey upon the inhabitants of the rotting saguaro. High school biology teachers, why be satisfied with dissecting frogs when you could lead your class in dissecting a very aromatic and messy chunk of decaying saguaro that is teeming with life?

Besides bugs, there are also minerals. A mature saguaro can contain as much as 200 pounds of the mineral weddellite (CaC₂O₄·2H₂O). According to Laurence Garvie (American Mineralogist, 2003):

After the death of the saguaro, a series of minerals crystallize in the rotting flesh. These minerals form from elements released from the decay of the cactus by microorganisms and thus is a type of biologically induced mineralization. During the initial stages of decay, authigenic Mg- and Ca-bearing minerals crystallize from elements released by the putrefying flesh and include lansfordite (MgCO₃·5H₂O), nesquehonite (MgCO₃·3H₂O), several polymorphs of MgC₂O₄·2H₂O including glushinskite, monohydrocalcite (CaCO₃·H₂O), calcite, vaterite, and several unidentified Mg-bearing phases.

Even in death, the saguaro provides habitat for life and a learning experience for us.　

See also:

A Desert Christmas cactus

Agave, a plant of many uses

Brittlebush and chewing gum

Can You Get Potable Water From a Cactus?

Chiltepin peppers, spice and medicine

Creosote Bush, a Desert Survivor

Desert Tobacco, a pretty but poisonous desert plant

Edible Desert Plants – Barrel Cactus Fruit

Jojoba oil, good on the outside, bad on the inside

Mesquite Trees Provide Food and a Pharmacy

More on Mesquite

Ocotillos and the Boojum

Palo Verde Trees Will Turn the Desert Golden

Saguaro Cactus Icon of the Sonoran Desert

The Old Man and the Totem Pole

There will be family oriented educational stations at which children can collect free mineral specimens. Children are encouraged to bring an empty egg carton in which to put their specimens. These events will be held from 10 am to 3 pm both days. The events include: Find Fossils, Seeing Double, Crystal Origami, Ride through the rock cycle, Discover micro-minerals, Minerals in my chocolate? matching game, Mineral Wheel of Fortune, Meteorites and more.

There are also other attractions such as the raptor free flights at 10 am and 2 pm. Come on out and help the museum celebrate its 60^th anniversary year and you might see:

 See also my ARTICLE INDEX page for more on the natural history of the Sonoran Desert.

But the real Christmas cactus, with red winter fruit and a green stem, is a native of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts: a Cholla, Opuntia leptocaulis.  This Christmas cactus, also called Tsejo, Pencil-joint Cholla, Holycross Cholla, Diamond Cactus, and Darning Needle Cactus, is a small shrub-like cactus usually about two feet high (but can get to five feet high) that likes to hide among other shrubs in the desert.

The round stem is just one-quarter inch in diameter but it supports a two-inch long spine in each areole as well as glochids (tiny hair-like, generally barbed spines, very irritating). Because the plant is inconspicuous except when in fruit, it commonly ambushes hikers.

Opuntia leptocaulis (aka Cylindropuntia leptocaulis) has half-inch pale yellow flowers that open in the afternoon and close by nightfall.  The flowers are open for only three hours a day. The flowering season is May and June.  Pollinators appear to be hummingbirds, honey-bees, and cactus bees.

This desert Christmas cactus has bright red mature fruit that persist through the winter.   The normal range is Arizona to Oklahoma, Texas, and northern Mexico at elevations from 1,000 to 5,000 feet on desert slopes and in washes.

I have seen this desert Christmas cactus around Tucson, and I have a volunteer in my yard.

The fruit provides food for a variety of animals including quail and wild turkeys.  White-tailed deer eat the joints.  Both fruit and stem provide about 8 percent protein.

See also:

Agave, a plant of many uses

Brittlebush and chewing gum

Can You Get Potable Water From a Cactus?

Chiltepin peppers, spice and medicine

Creosote Bush, a Desert Survivor

Desert Tobacco, a pretty but poisonous desert plant

Edible Desert Plants – Barrel Cactus Fruit

Jojoba oil, good on the outside, bad on the inside

Mesquite Trees Provide Food and a Pharmacy

More on Mesquite

Ocotillos and the Boojum

Palo Verde Trees Will Turn the Desert Golden

Saguaro Cactus Icon of the Sonoran Desert

The Old Man and the Totem Pole

Agaves, sometimes called century plants, are succulents like cacti.  Their normal life span is usually between 10 and 30 years, not a century.  At the end of their time, they shoot up a stalk which is often quick growing, as much as one foot per day.  Agaves make a stalk just once in their lifetime, then die.  Of the at least 40 species, there are two main groups, those with branched inflorescences pollinated principally by bats, and those with unbranched flower spikes, pollinated mainly by insects and hummingbirds.  Agaves reproduce from seeds, by pupping from the roots, and some, such as the octopus agave, produce plantlets on the flower stalk instead of seeds.

Fiber

Fiber, often called sisal, is extracted from the spiked leaves.  The cut leaves were allowed to dry or were baked, then pounded to loosen the pulp which was combed out with a sharp stick and washed away with water. By the way, the pulp in some species is acidic enough to cause dermatitis but baking reduces the acidity.  The cleaned fibers were used to make clothing, rope, baskets, and brushes.  The end spines could be used for needles, and with careful extraction, came with thread attached.  I have used this for an emergency field sewing kit.

Agaves have been exported around the world.  I have seen plantations in South Africa where agaves are grown for sisal fiber.

Food

After the leaves were cut off, the heart of the plant (imaging a giant artichoke) was roasted yielding a sweet nutritious food that is slightly slimy and  tastes like molasses.  This food could be wrapped in the skin of the leaves and stored. Cooking is essential because otherwise the heart of the agave is very poisonous.  Flower stalks were also eaten but could not be stored.

The juice of the agave heart was boiled down into a sweet syrup. Apparently the nectar is also used.  I have a bottle of “organic blue agave sweetener” from Trader Joe’s which claims to be made from the nectar.

Drink

The juice could be fermented (by spitting into it) into pulque, a beer-like drink.  It wasn’t until the Europeans arrived with their knowledge of distillation that the agave juice was made into tequila and other distilled spirits.  It is my understanding that tequila is a proprietary name and only spirits distilled from the blue agave can be called tequila.  Other agave spirits are called mescal or bocanora. Some sources say that the Mescalero Apaches of southern Arizona were named after their extensive use of the “mescal” agave.

Medicine

The juice or syrup also was used medicinally.  The agave contains polysaccharides which are bactericidal, and saponins and sapogenins that have antibiotic, fungicidal, and antiviral properties.  Saponin in Agave schottii is being investigated for cancer treatment.

Building materials

The stalks can be used for a variety of building purposes and they make good, light, strong walking sticks.

See also:

Brittlebush and chewing gum

Can You Get Potable Water From a Cactus?

Chiltepin peppers, spice and medicine

Creosote Bush, a Desert Survivor

Desert Tobacco, a pretty but poisonous desert plant

Edible Desert Plants – Barrel Cactus Fruit

Jojoba oil, good on the outside, bad on the inside

Mesquite Trees Provide Food and a Pharmacy

Ocotillos and the Boojum

Palo Verde Trees Will Turn the Desert Golden

Saguaro Cactus Icon of the Sonoran Desert

The Old Man and the Totem Pole

Brittlebush is very drought tolerant and will go dormant and look dead.  The leaves will turn very brittle and eventually fall off.  The plant can also be cut back nearly to the ground and revive the next season.

The plant was/is widely used by native people.  The upper stems exude a yellowish gum or resin that can be chewed.  The gum was also burned as incense (hence the Spanish name incienso).  The fragrance is due to terpenes or terpenoids which are components of essential oils. Vitamin A is a terpene. You can sample the fragrance by crushing the green leaves. It smells like strong tea to me.  Tea made from the dried leaves is used to treat bronchitis and arthritis.   The gum was also used to seal pots.

Yellowish-brown resin collected from the base of the plant can be heated and used as glue.  Native people used this to glue arrowheads to the shaft, for instance.

The Seri Indians used the branches to treat toothache: remove the bitter bark and heat the branch, then place in mouth.  There are some reports that old-time cowboys used the branches, minus bark, as toothbrushes.

For more posts on desert plants, see:

Can You Get Potable Water From a Cactus?

Chiltepin peppers, spice and medicine

Creosote Bush, a Desert Survivor

Desert Tobacco, a pretty but poisonous desert plant

Edible Desert Plants – Barrel Cactus Fruit

Jojoba oil, good on the outside, bad on the inside

Mesquite Trees Provide Food and a Pharmacy

More on Mesquite

Ocotillos and the Boojum

Palo Verde Trees Will Turn the Desert Golden

Saguaro Cactus Icon of the Sonoran Desert

The Old Man and the Totem Pole

The Thick-billed Parrot is 16 inches long with a wingspan of 32 inches and weighs about one pound.  It is dull green with red on the bend in the wings, lower thigh, forehead, and eyebrow.  The legs and feet are gray; the beak is black.

The parrots primarily eat pine seeds and therefore are nomadic within highland pine-oak forests between the elevations of 6,000 to 9,000 feet. They also eat fruit, something that got them into trouble with farmers.  They have also been observed eating buds, acorns, juniper berries and tree bark.

Thick-billed Parrots nest in cavities and the females lay and incubate two to four eggs in June and  July.  The females brood and feed the chicks while the male brings food to the nest until the chicks fledge in September or October.

At one time the parrots occurred in large flocks in the Chiricahua Mountains in Southern Arizona. Historically, they occurred as far north as Payson and Flagstaff, AZ during the summer breeding season.  The current known breeding ground is in the mountains of Chihuahua and Durango, Mexico.

Thick-billed Parrots are preyed upon by raptors.  Their main defense against predation was use of complex flocking patterns and large numbers to confuse the predator.  However, the Thick-billed  Parrot is highly gregarious  and noisy, and relatively large  and  tame, characteristics making them  especially vulnerable to hunting.  They were hunted for food during the 1800s and early 1900s.  Reduced numbers made them easier prey for raptors.  Thick-billed parrots are now thought to be extinct in Arizona as a breeding population, although there may be individuals that come from Mexico.  The last large flock of Thick-billed Parrots seen north of the Mexican border was observed in 1938, in the Chiricahua Mountains.

Several attempts were made to reintroduce the Thick-billed Parrots to Arizona in the 1980s and 1990s, but these attempts were apparently not successful.  The captive bred parrots did not know how to forage in the wild and the small numbers made the parrots susceptible to predation by raptors.  You can read about the reintroduction effort in a New York Times article (1995) here, and in an article from The Condor, A Journal of Avian Biology here.  The Condor article also has some historic observations about hunting and populations.

New Mexico Game and Fish reports sighting a Thick-billed Parrot on one of Ted Turner’s ranches in northern New Mexico in 2004.  It is unknown whether any still exist in the wild in Arizona.

The Thick-billed Parrot is listed as endangered by the Arizona Game and Fish Department and is on the Mexican Endangered Species list.  You can see a breeding family of Thick-billed parrots at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.

Other posts on birds of the desert:

American Kestrel

Barn Owls

Cactus Wren

Gambels Quail

Harris’ Hawks, Wolves of the Air

Observations on Mourning Doves

Way of the Hummingbird

Western Screech Owl

The Arizona Game and Fish Department over the weekend was able to confirm a hunter’s report of a jaguar southeast of Tucson and collect hair samples from the area for possible DNA testing.

 Game and Fish categorizes the report as a Class I-10, meaning the report is considered verifiable or highly probable, and visual or physical evidence is provided and confirmed.

   The report was initially received on Saturday, Nov. 19 at 9 a.m. from an experienced hunter using dogs to hunt mountain lions. The dogs pursued an animal the hunter ultimately deemed was a jaguar. The animal was treed approximately 15 feet up in a mesquite tree, and the hunter was able to obtain photographs and video. After photographing the jaguar, the hunter quickly left the area with his dogs and observed from a distant point. The jaguar remained treed for approximately 15 minutes and then headed south.

Based on the images, biologists believe the jaguar is an adult male that appeared in good, healthy condition and weighed approximately 200 pounds.

Biologists will compare the photos and video to images of other jaguars photographed throughout Arizona in the past. They will try to use comparisons between a jaguar’s unique spots, or “rosettes,” to determine if the animal has been identified previously.

Four of the last five confirmed jaguar sightings in Arizona have been reported by hunters, who all took responsible action to document the animal, report it to Game and Fish, and remove their dogs from the area once the animal was identified as a jaguar. These hunters have provided biologists with critical information that may not otherwise be known, information that will help increase the understanding of the species’ existence in the borderland area.

The species has been protected outside of the United States under the Endangered Species Act since 1973. That protection was extended to jaguars within the U.S. in 1997, the year after their presence in the Arizona and New Mexico borderlands was confirmed.

Jaguars once ranged from southern South America through Central America and Mexico and into the southern United States. It is believed that southern Arizona is the most northern part of the range for a population of jaguars living in Sonora, Mexico. As noted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in a 2006 report, it appears there is “regular intermittent use of the borderlands area by wide-ranging males.” The report also observes that “no indication of the presence of females or cubs, indicates that physical and biological features in the U.S. may allow individual transients to survive, at least temporarily, but do not support a breeding population.”

Jaguars are the only cat in North America that roar. They prey on a variety of mammals, fish, birds and reptiles. Females breed year-round and have litters of one to four cubs that stay with their mother for nearly two years.