What: It's FOY (first-of-year) season, and the skies are abuzz with the wing beats of our first returning migrant birds. Apparently, they didn't hear about our record-setting cold weather. I love the first flocks of vultures returning north. They come with the male red-winged blackbirds, the waterfowl (if only our ponds would thaw!!), and the courtship behavior of our over-wintering birds like chickadees.
I spotted this committee of vultures (see my post on collective nouns) over the St Joseph Cemetery on Archibald St in Burlington on Saturday afternoon. There were at least 15 birds.
Over the next few weeks we'll see more and more birds returning to the state. It's an exciting time of year - I'd love to hear what other folks are starting to see as the days get longer and (hopefully) warmer.
What:
Just a heads up that I saw my first fire fly of the year! It's not unusual to see them "calling" from the ground, as this one was. During mating season females, for example, signal the ground that they are rather particular to the luminescent advances of a male. Mating, of course, ensues. It's still early for that, and there weren't any flying males to be receptive to. Fireflies will also light up as juveniles. Which is crazy that a sexually immature firefly will light up. I'm assuming it has something to do with advertizing toxicity. Maybe I'll try eating one and see if it's bitter...
What: It feels so good to break out Newcomb's Wildflower Guide once again! The spring ephemerals have already emerged and are starting to blossom. Their vibrant greens have given me pause, and I've been thinking about what exactly it means to be a spring ephemeral - what adaptations I'd need to survive. If I were an ephemeral I'd want nutrient rich soil to fuel quick growth, some gnarly chemicals to prevent browsers from gobbling up the first green thing they'd seen in 6 months, a bulb, rhizome, or root that could store copious amounts of energy to emerge quickly in the first warm weather of spring, to be small so growth didn't require excessive energy or time, to reproduce vegetatively in case it was a cold spring and insect pollinators weren't out, and a way of attracting pollinators. So there are definitely some adaptive patterns between our different ephemerals that all allow them to take advantage of that brief moment in a year when the ground is warm and the maple leaves still share the branches with the flowers.
Oh, and a spring ephemeral refers to herbaceous perennial plants (above ground parts die back each year) that have a lifespan shorter than the growing season, usually less than two months in April and May. They have to emerge, leaf out, flower, and go to seed before the canopy closes in and blocks out the shade. I'll be posting updates on spring ephemerals over the next couple of weeks as they continue to emerge in the Burlington area.
The one pictured above is a skunk cabbage (Symplcarpus foetidus). Naturalists love to note this plant's ability to generate its own heat to warms itself up on the cold late winter/early spring days to jump start its growth. I was fascinated by the rotting smell of its flower and swarm of blue bottle flies (Calliphora vomitoria) circling around (pictured above). The ravine I was in grades from ash/maple/oak to hemlock/yellow birch. There's considerably less skunk cabbage 'neath the hemlocks, and the few that were there were considerably further behind in terms of development.
Where: I was finding the skunk cabbage on small flood banks of a brook at Red Rocks. Soils were very silty sands, enriched from calcium rich bedrock upslope. Also seemed higher density in alluvial areas where movement downslope (not just downstream) was enriching the soil.
What: Full on outbreak of the boxelder bugs (Boisea trivittata). Coincides with the flower buds on the female boxelders (Acer negundo) bursting open. Ecological notes: These population booms are (primarily) associated with female boxelder trees. But then again, a single boxelder tree is only mostly female or mostly male, meaning that on a single tree you can find both male and female flowers, just with one sex being in the vast majority (the fancy term is polygamodioecious). I heard the bugs before I spotted them. It's been so dry here that their rustling in the leaves made them sound much louder than they actually were. At first I thought (and hoped) it was a hibernacula of snakes waking up in the warm (60o) weather. Alas it was not.
Once I spotted the culprit (actually hundreds and hundreds of culprits) my interest was piqued. I'd watched some type of fly by the lake mating yesterday, with their rears touching and the boxelder bugs took the same posturing. The males are the larger of the two and have much brighter orange bellies. They more or less dragged the females over the rocks. Pairings seemed to last anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes or so. Where: The bugs were lining the train tracks where North Ave crosses over (by the Donahue Sea caves). The whole stretch of the tracks between North and 127 is lined with boxelders, both male and female. The bugs were mostly along the rocks between the rail lines and the horsetails where it was the warmest.
Other notes: I didn't spot any eggs, but the females will deposit them in the bark of the boxelder. Once they hatch, these little guys have a gradual metamorphosis. They can't fly when they're young but develop wings as they get older (the young look like red aphids). Supposedly they eat boxelder seeds. I'd seen lots and lots of seeds this winter on boxelders that had little holes bored into them - I'm not sure if that was from these insects.
What: I've been watching the tamaracks (these are European Larch, Larix decidua) from a distance emerge into spring with this odd yellowish color. These little spur shoots have stacks of rings indicating previous year's growth.
Ecological notes: I climbed the tree to take a photo of the storm clouds dropping rain to the east over the Green Mountains. This patch of 3 larches are part of a larger plantation of trees adjacent to Centennial Field. As such they've got great lower limbs for climbing. I boosted myself up an all too healthy buckthorn and took these photos about 40' up one of the larches. The wind wasn't even that strong today but still made me uneasy - life in the sun ain't that easy (see video for a poor attempt to capture what caused my uneasiness). After about 20 minutes the two crows that I'd seen yesterday with nesting materials flew over and made a ruckus. With my arms hugging the bole like a frightened koala I twisted my head to watch them dip acrobatically down into the valley below. As the crows disappeared I spotted an old nest!! Or a new nest?!
Larch branches seem to break quite readily. In fact the whole tree has this appearance of someone who barely made it out of bed. Snapped branches litter the lower limbs, latent buds burst from every fissure on the bark, the bark turns a dead scraggly gray and flakes readily, and the new growth is a sickly grayish white. Yet it maintains it's own elegance (though certainly, at least to me, this peaks in the fall when it, unique among conifers, drops its needles. And so the crows' shabby little nest blended in perfectly with the dishelved backdrop. But again my mind wandered to the wind. On the edge the trees were like sails, and would be worse once the leaves fully emerged. Crows obviously don't get motion sickness. But imagine the nestlings - in a nest that barely has sides to it - perched up there in a good wind storm.
Where: Most of the larch in the Champlain Valley are plantation European varieties, these being no exception. There's one other European larch that I know of in Centennial Woods and it's a bit bigger than these - though I don't know exactly how old they are.
Other notes: I've found my desire to want to know challenged by my want to experience. While driving home tonight, the sunset was beautiful, and I thought of stopping at Overlook Park and snapping a photo, but didn't. I couldn't imagine trying to explain away the pink fire swallowing the horizon with the physics of light scattering.
And I started this blog in part to confront much of the misinformation about natural history (or at least plagiarism) rampant on the internet. One source quotes an esoteric piece of information from another source and then another source quotes the second, changes the text a bit, drops the citation, posts it and this gets reposted and changed to suit the new author's needs. Pretty quickly the initial attribution is dropped and nobody really knows the original source. Take the etymology of Tamarack (and alias for Larch, more properly applied to L. laricina, our native larch). Tamarack is supposedly a bastardized version of hackmatack, the Abenaki word for "wood good for snowshoes." In this case the original source is Charlotte Erichsen-Brown's 1979 book Medicinal and Other Uses of North American Plants, and even she doesn't cite her source (I don't have access to Gordon Day's Abenaki Dictionary so I can't verify this).
So now everyone can run around and say, Oh yeah, larch is great for making snow shoes without having actually tried. Hopefully most of what you'll read here is less recapitulation of other people's speculation and more (mis)information that at least comes from first-hand experience.
What: Leaves on Red elderberry (Sambucusracemosa), Tartarian honeysuckle (Loniceratartarica), and Black cherry (Prunus serotina), respectively, bursting.
Ecological notes: Trees in the understory are often the first to leaf out. They risk hard frosts (like that 19 degree night we had the other day) in order to photosynthesize before the canopy trees leaf out. As a generalization, larger trees can store more energy relative to body size so they have a little more of a buffer on how long they can overwinter, plus they're in prime real estate during the summer to make for lost time photosynthesizing.
Where: All over Burlington the green is starting to return. First in the grasses and celandine poppies, then in the shrubs. By now the ostrich fern is starting to pop up as are the wild leeks.
Other notes: Already I've seen blossoms on red elderberries (at Red Rocks in South Burlington). My ornamental elderberries (Sambucus canadensis) haven't put out flowers yet and the emerging leaves do not have the same reddish tinge to them as the wild ones do. The red is caused by the same pigments that make the leaves red in the fall (non-photosynthetic vacuolar pigments called anthocyanins). It's possible that these require little energy investment chlorophyll takes lots of energy to produce) and the plant can produce the structural part of leaves initially and then chlorophyll once the fear of frost is reduced.
What: Wood frogs (Lithobates sylvaticus) have been singing in Centennial Woods for about a week now (sounds like a bunch of ducks quacking). Yesterday I was out and found several egg masses in various stages of development.
Ecological notes: Along with spring peepers, wood frogs are one of our first amphibians to emerge in the spring. Spending their time literally frozen for the winter, they revive with warming temperatures and head from their upland overwintering sites down to their breeding ponds. With the upcoming cold weather, this should slow down the development of the eggs considerably, and the tadpoles won't emerge for another 10 days or so.
Where: Wood frogs breed in shallow seeps, cattail marshes, and vernal ponds (particularly fond of the latter) and just about anywhere else there aren't fish to eat their tadpoles.
Other notes: There was a couple of inches of water on top of a thick sheet of ice at the bottom - must have frozen all the way through this winter. The little "pool" of water is at the bottom of a seep and slowly filters into Centennial Brook. The water on top is probably from increased flow of water as frozen ground water has been melting.
What: First coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara) blossoms of the year. Along with all the other harbingers of spring, this always signals the regreening of the ground (maybe the end of sugaring, too?). The flowers come up first and look similar to dandelion flowers. Note, however, the leaflets ringing the stalk and lack of leaves.
Ecological notes: Like dandelions, they have perennial roots, which allows them to sprout earlier in the year. They also spread vegetatively (by roots) so I find them in dense clusters. The leaves will come up in a few weeks. Not sure if these jumped the gun with all that warm weather. It's 19 degrees as I write this.
Where: Look for coltsfoot growing in gravely ditches, sandy streambanks and other "waste places." I found this beautiful specimen growing alongside Pond Rd in Shelburne while looking for amphibian sign.
Other notes: The subtle flowers were easily overlooked while searching for amphibians. We heard a few spring peepers peeping in the 80 degree heat (record high). Plus we saw lots of Eastern Newts swimming in the shallows and heard muskrats making their whining mating noises.
What: It's FOY (first-of-year) season, and the skies are abuzz with the wing beats of our first returning migrant birds. Apparently, they didn't hear about our record-setting cold weather. I love the first flocks of vultures returning north. They come with the male red-winged blackbirds, the waterfowl (if only our ponds would thaw!!), and the courtship behavior of our over-wintering birds like chickadees.
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