**This post is a part of the Wild Davis course at UC Davis in which students must complete three timed observations of an urban habitat within the UC Davis campus or Davis city limits. As an instructor for this course, I joined the students in this exercise in order to provide a public example of the types of work the students do in this class. For more information on the course, you can read about my morning observation, follow #wilddavis on Instagram and Twitter, and check back here for more posts throughout the quarter!**

The second observations for the Wild Davis class are to occur at mid day (between 11 am and 1 pm), in the same location as the morning observations. I did my observation on Sunday April 22nd, as I can’t get away from work over the lunch hour on weekdays, and it seemed fitting to do an ecological observation exercise on Earth Day.

The city mowed along the path since I was here last week, which at first has me concerned for the bunnies and ground squirrels, but as you can see in the photo, only a narrow strip next to the path has been mowed, and much grassy cover remains.

I realize as I’m biking to my bench that I have only walked this path in the evening, around sunset, and last week at dawn. In the daylight, I’m surprised at how much closer the housing development and golf course seem. I expect both the path and the golf course to be heavily trafficked on a warm Sunday afternoon, but I see only seven people along the path (not much more than I saw on the morning observation), though this time most folks have their dog with them. The golf course is a bit busier – I see three groups go by – but they are far enough away that I can’t hear them, with the exception of a single “Woo!!” that echoes its way to my bench after what must have been a particularly nice shot.

the path on the right, with the golf course on the left

It is warm and sunny today, a much more enjoyable environment than the chilly, foggy morning observation (I’m wearing a tank top and capris instead of a hoodie and two pairs of sweatpants). There is a slight warm breeze, which keeps me from getting too hot, even in the full sun. I close my eyes and inhale, but all I can smell is the sunscreen I applied before I biked out here. I have to get really close to even the lilacs before I can smell them over my own scent.

I don’t hear as many human noises as I did in the morning. I can’t hear the highway traffic, and the golf grounds crews aren’t working this late in the day. I do hear two jumbo jets that fly almost directly over me, heading south. This surprises me, since I have not noticed jets overhead anywhere else in town, but perhaps I just haven’t been paying attention.

I am also surprised by the lack of water in the little creek. In the few times I have been down this path, it has always had a decent amount of water in it, but today, it is completely dry. Just two weeks ago, my husband and I stood here at dusk and listened to a chorus of little frogs, and I wonder where they have gone to now. Perhaps to one of the water features in the golf course. I wonder now how ephemeral this stream is, and I make a point to check it on my evening visit in another week.

No chorus of frogs in the dry streambed…

The animal activity is also different from my morning observation. I see no sparrows, and no bunnies. There are two ground squirrels perched on the fence about 15 feet apart periodically barking at each other through my entire 45 minutes. It is meant to be intimidating, but comes off pretty adorable to my ears.

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There are many birds, but not the sparrows I saw in the morning. Today, they are mostly mockingbirds, chattering noisily at each other and at me from nearly every tree. I hear the bees too – they are buzzing about the lilacs and the purple flowers growing close along the path. On the lilacs, I see a few honeybees, bumblebees, a hover fly, and a beautiful metallic green bottle fly. I think this is a lot of activity until I wander down to the Isomeris a few feet further down the path. There are so many individuals of so many species that I capture four or five apiece in the frame of my camera lens. Once, I even get two different pollinators on the exact same flower. I see a few butterflies this time, too, though all but one flutter by before I can be sure what they are. One is small and white, another medium sized and black, and the last is a western tiger swallowtail. As I’m scampering about to get a better look at the them, I startle a fence lizard out of an oak tree. I get very excited about this, since he is the first herpetofauna I’ve found on these observations. He stares at me without moving until I creep forward to get a picture and then he races back up his tree.

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The past few years, I’ve been dabbling in wildlife and landscape photography and pollination is hands-down my favorite thing to photograph. I enjoy the beauty and tiny-ness of the flowers and insects and the mutualism of the relationship. It is also a strange reproductive strategy when you think about it; to convince another living thing to carry your gametes to your mate. I don’t want to spend my entire observation staring at pollinators through the lens of my camera, so I make myself wait until the end of the 45 minutes to take most of my photos. Honestly, you could leave me with a camera in a wildflower meadow full of pollinators for hours (days?) and I’d be happy. I (mostly by accident) get a nice shot of a tiny little native bee with two massive Apis honeybees in the background on the Isomeris. Most folks love the honeybees, and they are certainly beautiful and an important ecological player. They are also introduced, from Europe, and can negatively impact populations of native bees (ex. bumble bees) which are also important pollinators of native and crop plant species, so much so that the Integrated Crop Pollination Project recommends (among other things) establishing wildflower corridors around crop fields to attract a diverse array of native pollinators in addition to managed and wild Apis hives. As beautiful as they are, I can’t help but notice how massive the Apis are compared to the native bees, which makes the native bees seem delicate and vulnerable by comparison. In the photos below, you can see how the honeybees bury their whole body in the flower while the tiny Lasioglossum perches precariously on the end of one anther. I don’t know the native California bees very well yet, so when I get back from my observation, I send a couple pictures to Neal Williams, an entomologist here at UCD who studies native pollinator ecology and he responds within hours with a genus-level ID for each one, and an offer to ID to species-level anything we can catch and bring it to him. One thing I love about academia is how total strangers will lend you their expertise at a moment’s notice – we are all lifelong learners and total nerds here, and we love sharing it.

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In class this week, the students will share their own mid-day observations. For the morning observations, I was impressed at the diversity of locations the students chose. They observed a variety of spots in the arboretum, an urban green space near a housing development, tucked-away corners of campus between lecture halls, managed campus gardens, etc etc. I look forward to hearing how different their mid-day observations were from the morning observations, particularly for those that chose campus locations that were mostly empty prior to 8 am in the morning. These sites will likely be very different in the hustle and bustle of the regular campus afternoon. And in two weeks, we will have the evening observations, when I will (fingers crossed!) perhaps get to see my burrowing owls.