Sept 28: El Malpais

A harsh and forbidding world teeming with life

El Malpais, meaning badlands or, literally, “the bad country,” is a most appropriate name for the wild and untamed areas in New Mexico that are part of the National Monument.¹ I’ve mentioned the Monument several times previously; one of those posts, titled “The Tenacity of Life,” also began with a (different) photo of the tree below.

This post, too, deals with life’s stubborn tenacity — and abundance. The photo below looks down through the Sandstone Bluffs area to part of an old lava flow, covered right now with blooming chamisa.

I ran into New Mexico’s state insect browsing on chamisa in another part of El Malpais.² It’s the tarantula hawk wasp which, in many ways, is even more unsavory than its name implies. Its sting is said to be incredibly painful³ and, as if that weren’t enough by itself, it lays its eggs within living tarantulas.⁴

Yes, its body really is bluish. A big surprise for me was learning that its antennae sometimes form clearly segmented spirals. Who knew?

There was snakeweed everywhere, even in the most improbable of places. Snakeweed is one of my favorite flowers/plants, perhaps because its blooms, to me, signal the fading of summer into fall. It has seemed especially abundant this year.

Flowers growing out of rock are guaranteed to delight me simply because of their dogged will to live. The flowers below may be hairy golden asters, or some other kind of yellow asters, or … we could always call them DYCs.

I also ran into the grasshopper below, who wanted nothing to do with me. Nevertheless, I persisted, and was eventually able to get a few shots. Its name, plains lubber, definitely doesn’t do justice to its beauty.

To top it all off, I came across some red wildflowers I’d never seen before, growing with a few asters in between two slabs of rock. I believe they’re called cardinal catchfly.

This is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. I saw many more wildflowers growing in El Malpais, not to mention some outstanding petroglyphs. Stay tuned.

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About that black and white woodpecker …

Everyday Magic’s collective wisdom has pegged it as a downy woodpecker. Many thanks to all who chimed in.

1. Click/tap here to read a long but fascinating National Park Service page about all the lava features to be found in El Malpais.

2. New Mexico has a state butterfly in addition to a state insect, despite the fact that (ahem!) butterflies are insects too.

3. There are numerous YouTube videos of people deliberately provoking tarantula hawk wasps into stinging them. I can’t bear to watch them so, if you’re interested, you’ll need to search them out on your own.

4. I also can’t bear to describe in further detail how these wasps reproduce. You can read an excellent description here (not for the faint of heart).