Birds along the Winooski River

Male and female Common goldeneyes

Zac asked me if I had a name for the spot we went today, and I don't, but perhaps I should. Turkey's Respite? Willow Wonka and the Tangled Edge? It's an old largely forgotten stretch bordered sharply by the Winooski River, the Interstate, and Patchen Rd. It's quite a few acres (about 40) and seems to be major habitat for quite a few species. Over the years, I've spotted otters, beavers, muskrats, red and gray foxes, deer, turkey, and lots more making use of it - and only very seldom do I ever see people.

2 male (bottom), 2 female (top) goldeneyes

With eager anticipation to see what ducks were in the open water, we crept up to the edge. The mallards seem largely indifferent to my approach, but I'd spooked off the other ducks the two previous times and hadn't gotten a good luck at them. Today, we wound up getting a good look at some goldeneyes hunting along the edge of the ice. There were about 25 in total. 

Flock of goldeneyes flying over

Waterfowl aren't a specialty of mine, so it was great to get to spend some time looking at the difference between the males and females. The males have significantly more white on their throats and bellies. The females are much grayer and have just a thin collar of white between their brownish heads and grayish chests.

Female (immature?) buffleheads

Initially, we supposed that they were all goldeneyes. When I got home and was looking at the images, I realized that the drab birds I assumed were female or juveniles were actually another species - note the white patch behind the eyes. Turns out these little gals were females buffleheads. It makes sense in retrospect. When we finally spooked the birds, three of the four drab birds flew upstream, the forth ambled slowly to where two male goldeneyes were feeding.

Three female buffleheads. No males around...

Besides wanting to check out the open water and see what was utilizing it, I wanted to show Zac a patch that'd been cratered by deer. Shortly after looking at that section we spotted a turkey. We eventually saw three turkeys in total.

Wid Turkey

Other notable birds, were a couple birds of prey. In our field trip to Addison last week I realized that I'd always thought red-tailed hawk wings to be much lighter on top, but I keep seeing red-tails with really dark tops to the wings. 

Red-tailed hawk soaring overhead

Ice Jams and the Winooski River

What: About a year and a half ago, we were faced with severe flood warnings up and down the state. Irene didn't disappoint and wreaked havoc with both flash floods and sustained flooding events. The day after the storm the air was thick, but quiet, when I went down to the Salmon Hole (just downstream from the dam in downtown Winooski). I took the photos from the bridge on Colchester Ave looking west towards Salmon Hole. They definitely don't really do justice to how absolute and immense the power of that water was.

It's full on winter (Happy coldest day of the year!) and to celebrate I thought I'd head down to the river  to retake photos from the same perspective as I did during Irene. What a difference! Upstream there are a few patches that are open, and there's a frozen waterfall. Somehow we're faced with flood warnings once again; residents in Franklin Co. NY have even been evacuated.

Ecological notes: Ice Jams are not uncommon, and occur on all different scales (you can get an ice jam in a gutter). There are a few types of ice jams, as I'm learning, and the warning is for freeze-up jams. The flood warnings are caused by the excessively cold weather we've had. The cold weather will rapidly freeze the surface water of rivers that haven't frozen over yet (sections of the Winooski, Lamoille, etc.). Surface flow will break off chunks as they freeze and send them downstream. These frozen rafts of ice can get hung up on snags, and any other obstruction. If enough of that ice starts to accumulate it dams up the water. The thicker the ice the better it acts as a dam. If and when those dams burst, they'll release all their water at once, which can cause devastating flooding downstream (as it did in Eagle, Alaska in 2009).  Here's a video from Woodsville, NH of the flooding caused by an ice jam that broke. You can imagine how destructive those chunks of ice would be to trees, houses, etc. along the way.

Where: Salmon Hole @ Winooski River

Red Squirrel Tracks

What: One of my favorite finds of the day on Saturday was a beautiful set of red squirrel tracks that had been preserved on top of the snow. Compressed snow melts slower than light fluffy snow, so you can often find tracks embossed, or raised in the snow as the surrounding snow melts away. Here, we found a whole set of red squirrel tracks that looked like little ice buttons sitting on the surface of the snow. Once we spotted these I started noticing similar tracks everywhere - particularly the raised ridges of cross-country ski tracks. Sorry for the high contrast photos, but it was about the best I could do with the lighting (I had to ramp up the contrast to make them more visible).

Here the squirrel is moving away from the camera. It's two smaller front feet land in the middle, slightly offset from one another. The larger rear feet land after the front feet pick up and on the outside, in line with each other. Red squirrels tend to land with their feet more offset than gray squirrels. I think I learned this from Jim Halfpenny's tracking book: animals that spend more time in trees (e.g. gray squirrels) land with their front feet in parallel (like they'd been while perching on a branch) and animals that spend more time on the ground (e.g. rabbits) land with their front paws far more offset.

Where: The Intervale

Goodbye snow

What: I went for a wonderful walk on Saturday morning with my friend, Kate, to check out her topbar beehive. Her bees were reluctant to come out when we first arrived, but by the time we left the sun was out and it was about 43 degrees. Her hive is in full sun and has a dark cover, so it must have warmed the hive up much higher than that. Her bees were flying with great relish! I can only imagine the relief of being able to fly after spending a month and a half cooped up in darkness.

Bee flyling, yellow blotches on snow are their poop

They spend their time on warm winter days cleaning shop and making poop flights, for lack of a better term. The little yellow splotches in the photos immediately above and below are bee poop. We were both surprised at how much poop a single bee can poop; it was like watching a great blue heron or bald eagle fly over head and unleash a torrent of poop. 

bee poop on surface of snow

Inside the hive, bees shiver to maintain heat. To fly a bee needs to be at about 85oF. It'll shiver and spike it's temperature to about 100o before taking off. If the weather outside is too cold, the bees won't make it very far. But their temperature can drop pretty low before they'll die. Bees on the inside of the hive that are on the outside of the cluster can have body temperatures as low as 41o. Below is one unfortunate bee. The dark bodies of the bees absorb the heat from the sun, so many had melted down into the snow.

When we inspected a couple of the bees that had flown and landed on the snow we found some varroa mites, which Kate wasn't too happy about. They look like shiny water pennies (a type of limpet). Below is the best my camera could do, they're about as big as a grain of sand so they're hard to spot.

Where: The Intervale

The Weird World of Mollusks

What: I don't think I'll ever be able to fully empathize with a mollusk, well at least not with a bivalve. But I do find them terribly fascinating, which isn't a bad start. And like most things, the more I learn and observe them the more I appreciate their quiet existence. While walking the shoreline at Delta Park, I was caught by the odd swirling groves etched into the sand. I had been spending some time trying to figure out how different water currents would manifest in the topography of the underlying sand - in some patches there were long straight furrows like a recently plowed field, while others had overlapping u-shaped mounds consistent in size for a given patch (see end of video for what I mean). I couldn't help but be distracted by the seemingly chaotic lines that the clams had carved across the ripples.

Ecological notes: While walking barefoot through the shallows, we didn't have to worry much about zebra mussels at Delta Park because the substrate is largely sand. Mussels are a subset of clams (see etymology notes below) that have byssal threads that serve to anchor their shells to a solid substrate - no solid substrates, no mussels. Only in a few places, like where we found heaps of downed trees partly submerged in the water, did we find zebra mussels. We did however find an abundance of freshwater clams. I unburied one, then left it with my camera set to take a picture every minute and a half. The time lapse was shot over about an hour and a half. In the first few seconds you can see the animal expel a mess of waste, which appears to be attached by a string.

There behavior still largely mystifies me. With their large rubbery foot the clams slowly reposition themselves along the shoreline - perhaps following changes in wind direction, water depth, or some other factor. Some of their trails were long slow arcs, others overlapping and confused circles. The groves left behind in the wake of their movement created small eddies in which algae settles. Fresher trails appeared as gray fissures bordered with crusty plates of sand fragmented. I checked some of the same trails after about 12 hours and they looked largely in tact, so I'm guessing it takes some stronger currents to breakdown the trails (and that they move really really slowly).

Smaller bivalves burrowed in sediments. Water level is super low right now

Their trails in the sand (hard to see unless you click on image to see a larger version).

Algae settled in old tracks

Where: Delta Park in Colchester (mouth of the Winooski River).

Etymology notes: The term clam is a muddy one to say the least. A clam could be a bivalve (a mollusk with a pair of hinged, clasping shells) that burrows into sediment - as opposed to a mussel, like a zebra mussel, which attaches itself to a substrate like pilings, other bivalves, whales, or just about anything else with a solid surface.  Or a clam could be an umbrella term for all bivalve mollusks (a square is always a rectangle, but a rectangle is not always a square like a mussel is always a clam but a clam not always a mussel). When I called ECHO to ask about help identifying freshwater clams, I was corrected: "freshwater mussels," which further confused the matter since I was referring to bivalves that burrow in the sand. Maybe there's a vernacular understanding of "mussels" as any of those freshwater filter feeders.

Other notes: Not sure about the edibility of the mussels, but they seemed an enticing source of food. Mussels themselves are not toxic, but they are filter feeders so you're essentially eating whatever microscopic stuff is floating down the Winooski or hanging out along the edges of Lake Champlain). Plus I'm not sure what species they are. Vermont's Wildlife Action Plan says that of the 18 species of mussels in Vermont, 13 are listed as threatened, of special concern, endangered, or already extinct (a rate on par with national figures). I used a field guide from Connecticut to try and ID these guys, with little luck. There's another publication UVM has that I plan on checking out to try and narrow it down: Fichtel & Smith's The Freshwater mussels of Vermont. Plus, depending on who you talk to, some species can live 75-200 years. I'd feel bad eating something that old.

The Clouds and the Lake

What: I've now paddled the Salmon Hole to downtown Burlington loop about 7 times, this last time with my sister, Meryl, and our friend Carlos. It's amazing that I can walk my boat three quarters of a mile, paddle, 16 miles, and then walk 2 miles home. With all the rain we had the other night the river level was considerably higher and I had a blast running the rapids at Salmon Hole. The wind was also much stronger. The following day (Wednesday) we had fair weather, with a nice blanket of cumulus clouds settled over Vermont and New York. With a different perspective of being on the lake I was struck by the noticeable absence of clouds over the water.

Panorama showing absence of clouds over Lake Champlain

Ecological notes: My theory is that we had lots of rain on Monday, followed by warm temperatures. Already when the rain was falling it was evaporating and there was a beautiful mist carpeting the understory of Centennial Woods. As the warm moist air rises it reaches cooler air. When enough water vapor cools enough degrees (the birds and bees of making a cloud) it can reach what's called the dew point. Dew point is the point just beyond 100% relative humidity where water vapor condenses out onto a solid substrate, like dust or grass or your tent. An easy example is a cold glass of water on a warm humid day. As the air comes in contact with the glass it cools rapidly. Cold air can "hold" less water vapor, so the air in contact with the glass reaches the dew point and little water droplets form on the glass (but not on your much warmer skin). 

In the atmosphere, as that warm air rises, the water vapor can condense and will appear to us as a cloud. So the greater the difference in temperature between the ground and the sky, the lower the elevation at which clouds should form, because they'll reach that dew point much sooner.

We started paddling on the lake around 9:45am and I guessed the clouds were around 3000'. Once we rounded Apple Tree Point we had a great view of Camel's Hump and a little more than the summit (4081') was covered, so the clouds were probably closer to about 3500'. About an hour later it was considerably warmer outside, and more warm air had already risen into the atmosphere, thus, the air around Camel's Hump had warmed as well. This should have raised the dew point and the elevation at which clouds were forming. Sure enough, by about 11:15am, the top of Camel's Hump was exposed, indicating that the clouds were at about 4100'.

So why no clouds over the widest parts of the lake? The temperature of the lake is more stable and cooler, so the temperature gradient between water and air is far less. Because there is a lower temperature gradient, the air rises at a much slower rate, allowing for water vapor to reach equilibrium rather than condensing out.

Where: Lake Champlain & the mighty Winooski River

Other notes: The sunlight on Tuesday was stunning - those soft sunset golds. The winds were kicking up the leaves of the silver maples that line the Winooski River. I could never understand why they were called silver maples until I saw this a few years ago. The undersides have a much paler color and when the winds dance them around exposing their bellies the whole tree takes on this ethereal silvery sheen. Someone must have named it in the sunset after a good summer storm.

A gaggle of nouns

A deer stopping for water in the 90 degree heat

Where: Winooski River (still). Zac and I just got back from another paddling adventure to complete my last trip from Bolton to Salmon Hole, this week from Salmon to Skinny Pancake. Another perfect day of paddling!

An outburst of water striders

Other notes: This time of year has the most overlap across life stages for animals. You may have noticed not just one crow perusing the lawn for food, but a mini-flock of 4 or 5, or a sudden flush of 30 robins sweeping through a honey suckle thicket. As nesting season winds its way down (com on goldfinches, hurry up and finish nesting already), lots of family groups are out and about feeding, the males are less territorial trading the stress of land disputes for the comfort of extra sets of eyes to be vigilant. It was hard enough on the trip to identify the many different species of birds, flowers, and trees I was passing by. Throw into the mix the different names for males, females, juveniles, and even collective nouns, and I was a bit over my head trying to keep it all straight. I got curious about what the different names for groups of different animals might be (and is there a term for a herd of cottonwoods? a "stand" is so boring, "grove" gets better, but there's a whole world of opportunity here).

  

A scuttling of mergansers

A motoring of ducklings

  

A ring of ring-bills

A dastardly of F-16s

I've long been fascinated by names and the naming of things. I was first introduced to the quirks of latin names by my love of gray squirrels, and indeed Sciurus carolinensis was the first scientific name I learned. Turns out Sciurus derives from the Greek words skia (shade) and uros (tail). The Greeks must have thought that squirrels their tails much like one might find respite from summer heat under the cover of a parasol. They were wrong, but thanks to the convention of naming things, their error is preserved in our scientific lexicon.

A flapping of kingfishers

Contemporary naturalists seem to have a certain fondness for collective nouns used to describe groups of animals. Being able to call a flock of crows a murder, starlings a murmuration, or vultures a committee is a sure sign of esoteric adeptness when it comes to being naturalist. It's like the painfully obvious difference (to those in the know) between a tourist ("Bar" for Barre, "Shar-let" for Charlotte) from a Vermonter ("Bare-ee", "Shar-lot"). There is delight, beyond proving ones worth in the often ridiculous and colorful phrases. Some are probably grounded in some sense of the animal's natural history, while others, it appears, are from the fanciful imagination of the 15th century British author Dame Juliana Berners, or at least were first recorded by her. She was the prioress of a nunnery, where she kept up her passion and dedication to fishing, hunting, and other outdoor pursuits. Her book, The Boke of St Albans, is damn near impossible to read (much like Canterbury Tales). It includes three sections - on falconry, hunting, and heraldry. In her section on hunting she publishes a lengthy list (3 pages worth!!) of collective nouns. The most famous to make it from her pen to our vernacular is murder of crows, but the rest are just as inventive.

A lonesome of bald eagle

It might be easy to chalk the lengthy list up to the poetic musings of one more skilled in writing than shooting, but I think Berners, like other hunters, had stories that got bigger and bigger with time: "I once caught a fish th-------------------------is big." I imagine that sport hunting was a hobby for the finer and fancier of folks, a well-educated bunch that would lounge around the hearth in their parlors recounting hunting tales from days of yore. "If you think today was good, you should've been here yesterday, we caught a suit of mallards, a muster of peacocks, a covey of partridges, and a bevy of girls."

A hawking of kingbirds

Language reflects what's important to the culture that uses it. Thus, the Yup'ik Eskimos, for example, use the word kanevvluk for fine snow particles, natquik for drifting snow, aniu for snow on the ground, and have other distinct lexemes (like a root word) for variations of snow. So if your culture values hunting and the pride that comes with it you might expect a distinct lexicon to accompany it, much like any subculture develops its own language to describe shredding the gnar, sick pow-pow, etc.

An awkwardness of herons

Since her writing, many more collective nouns have sprung up, some useful and serious, others amusing and useless (a clutch of auto mechanics). In the captions for each picture, I've thrown my hat into the ring, vying for a few new collective nouns.

A flotsam of jetsam

As a side note, the publishing of Boke of St Albans made Berner the first published woman in England.

Berner's list of collective nouns in its original format