Del Rio News Herald

I love opening emails from readers.

This week I received one from longtime reader Doris Feathers, who sent the sweetest series of photos of a young ground squirrel beginning to explore the world outside its den in the comforting company of its mom.

Most of the photos I get send me to my shelf of research books, and Doris’ photos were no different.

I had really always assumed that the ground squirrels we have in Del Rio were the Thirteen-lined Ground Squirrels we had in Fargo, but apparently that’s not the case.

When I checked out the ground squirrel page in my “Mammals of North America,” part of the Princeton Field Guides, I noticed right away that the range of the Thirteen-lined Ground Squirrel doesn’t extend south of the Edwards Plateau and that the Thirteen-lined Ground Squirrel has solid white stripes on its back interspersed with lines of spots.

The closest match seemed to be the Mexican Ground Squirrel, a cousin of the Thirteen-lined.

This species’ range was right – western Texas and eastern New Mexico – and the book noted, “. . . no solid white stripes.”

So – Mexican Ground Squirrel it is.

The book also noted that Mexican Ground Squirrels are generally larger than their northern counterparts and that this species sports a pronounced white eye ring.

See, when I pay attention and check things out, I tend to always learn something new!

Thanks again for the photos, Doris. I wish I could have run all of them!

I love watching the ground squirrels that have made their colonies around the walking track off Fox Drive, although once in a while, one of them ends up being hawk food.

Last weekend, I watched a big adult Zone-tailed Hawk swooping low over the open portions of one of the fields adjacent to the walking track, and I’m pretty sure he was after some of the resident ground squirrels.

I didn’t know for a long time that these squirrels make a very high-pitched, almost insect-like chittering sound when they are alarmed. For the longest time, I thought this sound was made by cicadas or some such.

They are also very curious animals. If you have the patience, you can sit beside one of the many holes in a ground squirrel colony and simulate this high-pitched squeaking. Eventually, one of the ground squirrels will poke his head out of the hole to see what the fuss is all about. If you are very still, you can watch the ground squirrels up close like this for a fairly long time.

Earlier this week I spent some time watching hundreds of American Snout (Libytheana carinenta) butterflies swarming on a coral vine growing on a pecan tree across from Memo’s Restaurant in south Del Rio.

For information on these butterflies, which are one of our most common summer species, I turned to my “Butterflies Through Binoculars: The West: A Field Guide to The Butterflies of Western North America” by Jeffrey Glassberg.

“The extremely long snout is obvious on this otherwise quite variable butterfly,” Glassberg writes.

He also notes that American Snouts, which are classified as members of the Brushfoot Family of butterflies, sometimes swarms in the millions in the Rio Grande Valley.

The habitat is for this butterfly is noted as “thorn scrub, thickets and open woodland with hackberries.”

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