Pied Beauty 

Off the Beaten Track in the Back Yard

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 

Praise him.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty, 1918

In his poem Pied Beauty nineteenth century British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins invites the reader to look at ordinary things and see them as an expression of divine beauty. One doesn’t have to go far in the Santa Monica Mountains to find beauty that is “counter, original, spare, strange.” Just a few feet from the back door one might encounter furry red spiders with oddly human expressions; small, jewel-like snakes and lizards; glittering beetles, fuzzy bees, and iridescent wasps, centipedes that glow under UV light. Tiny butterflies with wings the color of the summer sky, salamanders so slow and reclusive that they may move no more than a few yards in their entire lifetime. Life exists almost everywhere one looks, and here in our mountains even the backyard or the roadside can hold a miniature world full of strange and wonderful things. Let’s take a look at a few of our neighbors—“counter, original, spare, and strange.”

Spotted Towhee (Pipilo maculatus)

Is that the Topanga bear family in the underbrush, or a three-hundred-pound cat burglar with size 12 feet trying to tiptoe through the flowerbed? Odds are good it’s just a spotted towhee. The spotted towhee is a largish member of the sparrow family. Its common name used to be the rufous-sided towhee, but in 1995 the western population was split off to become the spotted towhee, Pipilo maculatus, while the eastern population became the Eastern towhee, Pipilo erythrophthalmus.

Whatever it’s called, this colorful bird, with its ruby-red eye, red and black plumage and white polka dots is a year-round native garden and chaparral resident in the Topanga area, but it is heard more than it’s seen, except at this time of year, when mating and defending mating territories is all-important. All spring its rusty call echoes in the garden, or it does if one has the sort of untidy garden spotted towhees prefer. These birds have evolved powerful claws with long talons that enable them to excavate leaf litter and find tasty morsels hidden below, including beetles, grubs, moths, sow bugs, and spiders. They also like acorns, seeds and are the only species we’ve ever seen eating the bulbs of the invasive oxalis pes-caprae, also known as Bermuda buttercups. The towhee’s powerful beak is the ideal tool for peeling the tender kernel inside the bulb out of the tough protective layer.

Spotted towhees form a strong bond with their mates and often remain together for years, maintaining the same territory. The oldest spotted towhee found in the wild was 11 years old, so it’s likely that the towhees in the garden are the same ones for several years.

This species prefers to nest on the ground or in the lower branches of shrubs—a perilous place to lay eggs in snake country. If there are towhees in the garden in the spring time it’s a good idea to check for their nests before weed-whacking and leave them space to finish hatching their eggs and raising their young. 

As the author writes this, her own backyard spotted towhees are calling outside of the window, a welcome voice of springtime in the Santa Monica Mountains.

House Finch (Haemorhous mexicanus)

Cheerful, loud, and ubiquitous, at first glance there may be nothing interesting about the house finch—this bird is so common it is easy to take it for granted and fail to really see what a beautiful and remarkable species this is. House finches have learned to thrive alongside humans. If there’s a bird feeder in the garden, the house finches are guaranteed to find it on day one. Those conical beaks are designed for cracking open seeds and they do so with enthusiasm. 

House finches forage on the ground or in the brush for grass seeds and berries and will even eat the seeds of the invasive mustard plant which aren’t on the menu for many native bird species. In the garden they like orchard fruit and grass seeds, and they adore sunflower seeds and millet, but also the little green fruits on the poison oak. House finches are dedicated vegetarians. They eat only seeds, berries, and other plant-based foods, and they do not even feed insects to their hatchlings, like most other vegetarian bird species.

If a house has eaves or sheltered ledges, open vents, or hanging pots, house finches will try nesting there. They aren’t always good at choosing a safe location, but they are extremely determined nesters. If the first nesting attempt doesn’t work out they will try and try again. House finches are prolific, raising as many as five or six broods a year. 

House finches are social, gathering together to forage and sometimes, especially in mating seasons, to squabble. Females are gray and brown and speckled—”freckled (who knows how?).” Males have beautiful red or sometimes yellow or orange feathers on their heads—it depends on each bird’s ability to process the carotenoids present in their food. This species isn’t long-lived—just a few years usually in the wild—but house finches seem to pack a lot of living into the time they have. They give the impression of industrious cheerfulness, waking their neighbors before dawn on spring mornings with chirps and cascades of song, filling the garden with chatter and flashes of red and brown feathers. A constant presence in our lives whether we notice them or not. 

Western Fence Lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis)

Almost every garden in Topanga has its resident fence lizards. They sun themselves on the patio step, do pushups on the driveway, wander inside and run afoul of the family cat, leaving their tail behind to distract the would-be predator and having to be fished out from under the sofa. Like the house finch, the fence lizard is so ubiquitous it rarely receives a second thought, but there’s a lot to this little lizard. Long toes and long claws enable the fence lizard to climb trees, walls, fences, and the screen door. This little lizard, like a Hindu divinity, is equipped with a third eye. The “parietal eye,” located on the top of its head, doesn’t have rods and cones but it does have a cornea, retina and lens that have evolved to detect light levels, helping the lizard to maintain its body temperature and maintain its spatial awareness.

A 2006 study in the Journal of Parasitology found that levels of Lyme disease are lower in areas where Western fence lizards are abundant, and suggests that a protein in the lizard’s blood may help neutralize the bacterium that causes the disease. 

Fence lizards also eat ticks, which could also help decrease the spread of the disease in a small way. They also prey on other pest species, including mosquitos, scorpions, centipedes, and beetles. Fence lizards are also known to eat other reptiles, including their own species. They, in turn, are a food item for many species of bird, mammal, and other reptiles.

Fence lizards are territorial, especially during the spring breeding season. Adult male fence lizards have vivid, metallic blue scales on their bellies—the source of the common name “blue belly.” Females are less flashy. The blue coloring is thought to be used to attract mates and warn off the competition. The fence lizard’s distinctive “push ups” are a way to show potential rivals their blue patches as a warning. The male lizard’s spiky scales are also sometimes flecked with blue, especially during the spring months.

Females lay several clutches of eggs in the spring, usually in damp soil. The eggs hatch in midsummer, filling the garden with a sudden abundance of perfectly formed, miniature lizards. Life is rough for newly hatched fence lizards. Not many will survive, but the ones that do may be around for a long time. This little lizard can live for as long as seven years, so odds are high that the one who lives on the patio and suns himself on the step every morning is the same lizard, year after year. 

Southern California Legless Lizard, aka the San DieganLegless Lizard (Anniella stebbinsi)

Should one be fortunate enough to see one, the Southern California legless lizard looks almost exactly like a small, smooth, shiny snake, but this small reptile is a true lizard, it’s just traded its legs for a more efficient shape that has evolved for life almost exclusively underground. Look close, and eyelids and ears are visible—things that lizards have but snakes do not. 

The Southern California legless lizard’s habitat technically extends throughout much of the southern half of the state and into Mexico, but it’s hard to know how abundant it is, because remarkably little is known about this animal. This lizard spends most of its life out of sight in sandy soil or foraging under stones or leaf litter and is rarely seen (the author has been looking for more than twenty years and saw her first local legless lizard just this year). 

This elusiveness is a big problem for these little lizards: habitat has been wiped out without anyone knowing whether these seldom-seen reptiles were present or not. Anniella stebbinsi is designated a Species of Special Concern by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, mostly due to habitat loss and fragmentation. It is hard to cultivate awareness of a species that is almost never seen, but this increasingly rare reptile needs our protection whether it is seen or not.

The best documented habitat for this species in Los Angeles County is the Ballona Wetlands area and the last remaining coastal dunes around LAX, but they also turn up occasionally on the Malibu coast and in the Santa Monica Mountains, wherever there is sandy soil—dunes, washes, or alluvial soils, from Mexico all the way up to Bakersfield. 

Are there legless lizards at the bottom of the garden? If the soil is sandy and mostly undisturbed by human activities then it’s a possibility, and seeing one might also be a possibility—the once in a lifetime kind. 

California Red Jumping Spider (Phidippus adumbratus)

The California red jumping spider is an incredibly fast-moving creature that has a furry red abdomen and an unforgettable face. Anyone who has looked one of these spiders in the eyes can’t help but feel like they’ve just come in contact with an alien intelligence. 

There are other native jumping spiders but few of them are as eye-catching or as charismatic as Phidippus adumbratus. This species is endemic to Southern California and Baja Mexico. It is one of a number of red jumping spider species with a range overlaps that of Dasymutilla, or “velvet ants” species of wasps that also has a furry red abdomen, and it is thought to have evolved to mimic the wasp because as a defense against predators, unlike the jumping spider, the wasp has an extremely painful sting. 

P. adumbratus may look fierce, but unless one is an insect it doesn’t pose a threat, which is good, because this spider, which is supposed to stick to the chaparral, always seems to end up wandering inside the house. Only the mature spiders have the distinctive red color. Females are a little bigger than the males and can grow to be nearly a half-inch long. Mating rituals are complex and include a lot of leg waving on the part of the male—a kind of arachnid version of sign language.

P. adumbratus has excellent vision for a spider and is a fierce hunter, able to jump more than 50 times the length of its own body, and tackle prey bigger than itself. It’s quite happy to consume household and garden pest species like flies and beetles.

Although this colorful spider is a regular garden (and sometimes house) resident throughout Southern California, it was only described in scientific literature for the first time in the 1930s. For those who don’t suffer from arachnophobia, this spider is fun to encounter, and is a beneficial and well-behaved neighbor. 

House centipede (Scutigera coleoptrata)

When the lights are out, and the humans asleep, the house-centipede, Scutigera coleoptrata, emerges to hunt. If HP Lovecraft had ever tried his hand at writing a story about a good fairy this might be the result. 

The centipede’s nightmarish profusion of legs—fifteen pairs—enable it to zip about with amazing speed. It can run up vertical walls and across ceilings with the same speed and dexterity, in pursuit of flies, spiders, beetles and other household pests. While it looks alarming, this wee beastie is a beneficial presence in the house, and it isn’t quite as large as it looks. The body of the centipede is rarely more than an inch long, but all those legs and antennae can make it more like four inches, giving it a formidable appearance. If one ignores that first surge of fear that humans feel towards anything creepy crawly, and takes a closer look, the house centipede is strangely beautiful. Its body and legs are translucent gold, with purple stripes.

House centipedes are present year-round but they make their presence felt more frequently in the spring. This is the only creature in this feature that isn’t native. It originated in Europe and the Mediterranean, but it travels with us almost everywhere that humans go, and unlike many non-natives this one tends to stay close to home and to prey on many other unwelcome non-natives, like cockroaches and silverfish and the invasive and venomous false widow spider (genus Steatoda) that also traveled here from Europe and is a far less welcome houseguest.

House centipedes are long lived. They aren’t fully mature until they are three years old, and can live to be more than seven. That means the one that lurks under the sink in the laundry room is probably the same one that one always sees there. Just give it a polite greeting (we admit our’s tends to be “eeek!” but we are still learning to adapt to its presence) and let it get on with its life. 

What do the species discussed here have in common? They all live alongside us in the Santa Monica Mountains, they are all creatures the author has encountered in and around her home this month, and they all evoked elements present in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem: “counter, original, spare, strange; fickle, freckled, swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.” Rare or common, seen or unseen, strange and wonderful things are all around us. We just need to take the time to see them.