A study in growth

Striped maple (Acer pennsylvanicum) - the top of this year's growth

Looking out my window at the striped maple Sam & I transplanted last year made me want to start a long-term documentation project. The shrub caught my attention because it seems to be turning colors from the top down; this is the opposite of virtually everything else, which tends to turn from the top and outside working in and down. Maybe being a small shrub with a single stem of leaves makes this pattern so different? Maybe being in super low light conditions? 

Anyways, I've started various projects in the past, but this one will be easy - each year around Nov 1 (even marked it on my calendar) I'll take a quick photo of the striped maple to track its growth and branching pattern. I guess I probably should have put the marker just below the terminal bud, but below the first set of lateral buds will do. The other thing that will be neat to see is how the tape affects the color of the bark. Striped maple has photosynthetic bark, and my assumption is that it will drop its chlorophyll content and shift to a deeper red/purple color (as the older bark is). Though the tape isn't totally opaque, so we'll see about that too.

Dogbane beetle

What: The end of summer is the time of the insects! I've been watching the dogbane sprout up new shoots, flower, and finally go to seed over the past three months. Because they're a particularly noxious plant (toxic to almost all vertebrates and many vertebrates - they're related to milkweed which is infamous for its implications for monarch caterpillars), they have insects specialized to feeding on them. Similarly, koalas, which exclusively eat the poisonous leaves of eucalyptus, is specialized to eat one and only one thing. The koala's evolutionary trick was to find a way around the defenses of something so toxic that doesn't have any other predators and then exploit that weakness. So too with the dogbane beetle (Chrysochus auratus). Dogbane is a notorious weed in the midwest, largely because it doesn't have any natural pests that control its population.

On the photo at the bottom, I had actually moved it to a milkweed leaf right next to the dogbane where I found it. There were a number of milkweed aphids on the underside. Once the beetle had crawled to the underside of the leaf it kept stomping its feet and then would fly a few inches to a new spot. It seemed really perturbed by the significantly smaller beetles. After about 30 seconds of "torment" it flew to another leaf.

Woodchuck(lings)

Woodchucklings are on their way. Unfortunately. Despite being obnoxiously adorable, woodchucks are the three-year running champs of destroying our garden. We spotted these little critters on April 17 mating. It doesn't bode well or our veggies this year.

The actual mating process seemed rather uneventful, other than a few high pitched chirrups, but there was a rather long process of nuzzling, smelling, and coyly playing with one another that preceded copulation.

Signs of spring

It's been an exciting couple o weeks here in Burlington. In addition to the dramatic sighting of a moose in our yard!!, we've had a number of other visitors. This morning a catbird was singing. Yesterday, a house wren. And persistent throughout has been the large flock of juncos and white-throated sparrows (some chipping sparrows mixed in as well). 

Female dark-eyed junco (females have more brown on sides than males and are less bicolor)

Chipping sparrow

The aptly named white-throated sparrow. Song is a whistle-y "Oh Sweet Canada Canada Canada"

Sapsuckers and sap flow

What: Last week, I was out checking the bees with Zac and Sophia and we noticed that the boxelder looked like it had wet its pants. A few days earlier, Clay had spotted an odd ball woodpecker in our backyard and I thought from a quick glimpse it may have been a sapsucker. When we inspected the "wet spots" on the boxelder, sure enough there were all sorts of little drill holes. We licked the bark and it was delicious.



There are a lot of origin stories about the human discovery of maple sugaring. I'll bet almost all of them are false and created many generations after humans were utilizing syrup. I've got three bets for how humans discovered sugaring:

1. Red Squirrels: I've watched red squirrels chew little notches in branches of sugar and red maples. I've also watched them return and lick off the sap from bark later.
2. Sapsuckers: Water can be hard to come by in the winter. Curiosity, particulalry when there's a need for something, runs high in humans. My first inclination when I saw the drill holes and wet bark was to wonder what the sapsucker was after. My second inclination was to taste the sap. I was rewarded with a delicious treat.
3. Broken branches: Silver maples and boxelders both grow along floodplains. Winter can be rough on trees and without the metabolic activity to heal wounds, exposed wound sites will "bleed" once the sap starts flowing. Early in the sugaring season, when temperatures still drop well below freezing at night, any sap that might flow out of a broken branch can freeze into a sapsicle. The water freezes first and the outer coat is extra sweet. Kids love to suck on icicles and I'll be it was a kid that first discovered these sweet treats. 

I've kept an informal list over the years of species that I've seen sapsuckers tapping. The list this year includes: Black walnut, Red oak, Boxelder, Silver maple, Hemlock, Bitternut hickory, White pine, Norway spruce, Black cherry, and Paper birch.

black walnut with drill holes from sapsucker

Silver maple - an update on the twig

What: A short interruption (tomorrow as well for first of the month) on the spring ephemerals to bring you an update on the silver maple bud I've been watching. The leaves on the twig have started to burst open! Also, the flowers have largely been pollinated and are starting the short journey to ripening (they look like purplish mini maple seeds). For more information, see my two previous posts on the silver maple twig.

April 3 post: click here

March 29 post: click here

Silver maple buds exploded (well, sort of)

What: This is a follow up post to one last Friday, where I've been tracking the developments of the silver maple buds outside my window.

Ecological notes: The weather has cooled off a bit and things are reluctantly marching their way indelibly towards spring. I want to give it a big push!

Taken last week

Where: My backyard

Other notes: The silver maple has been dubbed one of the wonders of the modern world of Latham Ct. While working the other day I spotted an awesome abundance of birds.

What do foxes eat?

What: A couple nights ago, Meryl, Julia, Brian and I were watching a couple of eastern cottontails chasing each other ferociously around in my backyard. For the 3 or so minutes we watched, one was definitely the pursuer. They would sprint for short periods followed by great acrobatic displays with one or both jumping straight into the air. Their breeding season is March through September, so this might be an early start on staking out breeding territory, a mating ritual between a male and a female, or it could be a late winter food-shortage spat. I'd only ever seen one rabbit at a time in my backyard so I didn't realize that their territories overlapped. I have no idea of gender, nor is there a reliable way of telling without having the animal in hand.

I left some food out to bait so I could get a photo of at least one of the rabbits. For the hour or so I watched the rabbit from my window, it spent about 95% of its time in surveillance mode and the other 5% eating, moving, or grooming. I love the above photo, because it shows those great big back legs and stubby little front legs.

Where: My backyard

Other notes: Eastern cottontails (Sylvilagus floridanus) are virtually identical to the native New England cottontail (Sylvilagus transitionalis), and can only definitively be identified if the animal is dead (genetics or skull morphology). NE cottontail populations have declined since Eastern cottontails were introduced to Vermont over 100 years ago. According to a publication on Eastern cottontails produced by Vermont Fish Wildlife, wildlife agencies and private hunting clubs were responsible for the introductions. Rabbit populations have declined as a whole over much of New England due to reforestation and loss of transitional habitat.

Not so Wild Burlington

What: I've wanted rabbits since I knew what a rabbit was and I've been knitting for about 7 years. Recently my sister mentioned angora rabbits and I thought how amazing it would be to have my own source of wool. I did some research and started obsessively checking craigslist for listings. I wound up finding a pair of females from a great family in Essex Junction. The little sweethearts are a mix between French and English breeds. We're still not sure what to make of them other than that they're impossibly adorable.

Peanut (left) and Sister (right) eating snow off the floor

Where: My porch!

Other notes: One of the most interesting facts I learned about angora rabbits was that in World War II, Nazis started the "Angora Project" to raise rabbits for their wool. The wool, about 6-7x warmer than sheep wool, was used to line the jackets of Luftwaffe pilots. A wool bound book, Angora, was found at the farmhouse of Heinrich Himmler, among other possessions of his stashed away towards the end of the war. The book was a hand-crafted photo album carefully inscribed with notes on the rabbits.

Himmler, a reichsfuhrer - highest ranking member of the SS - said in a recorded speech about Nazi's angora project: "We shall never be rough or heartless, when it is not necessary; that is clear. We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude towards animals, will assume a decent attitude towards these human animals; but it is a crime against our blood to worry about them." Prisoners, who were housed in conditions overwhelmingly undersized and in everywhere debasing, cared for the rabbits, who were kept in comparative luxury and used as a showpiece for visiting dignitaries. Prisoners were punished severely (even killed) for mishandling the rabbits. It's an unbearably sad story, and hard to reconcile the aggressive callousness for human life with the overlapping tender fondness and hyperbolic appreciation for these animals.

The Continuing Saga of Squirrels and Walnuts

*** Starting this week my UVM students will be posting occasionally in response to the prompt: Find something in the woods that you've never seen before and figure out what its story is. So look for that!

What: Last week Clay and I found a dead gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) on the sidewalk. It was a pretty good mystery as to how the squirrel had died. I skinned it with my Crow's Path kids and before we did the autopsy we couldn't detect any broken bones from getting hit by a car (plus it was about 10' from the road). The squirrel was a full grown male (just about the most enormous squirrel I've seen), and we thought maybe it could have eaten poison from a nearby house, fallen out of a tree, got hit by a bike or chomped by a cat/dog. We couldn't find any evidence of blunt trauma from getting hit by something, but when we pulled the skin up above the neck we could finally see two chomp marks that hadn't pierced the skin (so no external blood) but were most likely what killed this little critter.

You can notice in the two photos below the difference between the rear (left) and the front feet (right). The difference in color is due to the constant assault of the squirrels on the walnuts (see my previous post on how it stains their face and paws). I love looking up close at squirrels to see all the little differences between individuals, and this little guy, with a lone black chin hair popping out, was no exception. It also had orange staining its whole belly, probably from eating walnuts and then grooming its belly (around its crotch was particularly orange, which was amusing).

Ecological notes: With the kids we noted that the rear foot was flexible in almost all directions and could rotate just about 180 degrees. I was telling the kids that the squirrels will hanging from a tree hanging down with their feet rotated back behind them. I've also noticed that when they leap to a branch they rotate their feet so that they're hanging below their body and the bottoms are facing the direction they're going. As they hit the branch their rotated feet catch their body and grip onto the branch as they then rotate around to face forward and propel them in their next jump. Amazing! Another thing to note is that animals have larger feet where they hold most of their weight. Gray squirrels hold most their weight in their butts, so have larger rear feet. Same with raccoons, possums, beavers, etc. Dogs (think about pitbulls here) have larger front feet to support their broad chests and big torsos.

Where: Burlington

Praying mantis

What: Meryl & Julia spotted a hitchhiker in our house today - it apparently came in on one of my sweatshirts. This adult female European mantis (Mantis religiosa) was a blast to watch. They're visual predators, focusing right now on all these late summer, early fall insects like crickets and grasshoppers fattening up for a late breeding season. They move slowly and awkwardly through lawns, relying on camouflage and stealth to ambush their prey. Their "praying" arms are really vicious graspers that clasp onto a prey and don't let go. Here, the lady is just using those forelegs to hold a rear leg that it was cleaning.

Ecological notes: Mantises mate in the fall and lay their eggs in a frothy mess (called an ootheca) that hardens. Eggs overwinter and hatch in the late spring. This time of year they're fattening up stores for laying all those eggs. Oh, and apparently it's a myth that they eat the bridegroom. That only happens in captive settings. They're pretty finicky when it comes to visual stimuli so a lab setting, where they're in a glass case results in some weird behavior. In the video, she responded to my movement, but seemed relatively unperturbed when I stomped my feet against the ground to try and elicit a response. The creepy part was that she was watching me, intently. I think it's extra obvious because she could move her head, but it felt like she was studying me - it reminded me of Muldoon, the Aussie hunter in Jurassic Park, who says of the raptors: "That one... when she looks at you, you can see she's working things out."

Where: My backyard

Other notes: For adult praying mantises, females have much larger thoraxes and their wings are never longer than their bodies, while males are more slender and their wings are longer than their bodies are.

The Diversity of Squirrels (in my backyard)

Notch-o on my roof

What: After my last post I decided I wanted to really get a handle of who is who in my backyard. It's pretty obvious who Captain Death is, since he has but one ear, but there are about 4 other gray squirrels that also use my yard at various points throughout the day. Another one has a large cyst like thing on its left side, making it another easy one to ID. The lady above has a pair of notches on her ears, presumable from a male biting them during their odd little courtship routine.

A while back I thought it would be a fun challenge to see how many wild animals I could touch. It becomes pretty obvious pretty quick that the easiest way to win an animal over is through its stomach, whether it's downy woodpeckers, woodchucks, beavers, or chickadees. So in the spirit of feeding wild animals and in order to get a better handle on the rascally little squirrels I set up a feeder in the middle of my yard. This way I can see them out in the open and watch them long enough to start to discern unique features that will allow me to recognize each individual (gender, size, coloration, scars, tail length, etc.). Next step will be to name them.

FIELD GUIDE TO THE SQUIRRELS OF 56 LATHAM CT:
1. Squirrel has one ear: Captain Death
1b. Squirrel has two ears
      2a. Has large cyst (or whatever it is) on left side: Lumplestiltskin
      2b. Does not have cyst on left side
            3a. Both ears notched: Notch-o
            3b. Both ears not notched
                  4a. One ear notched (has scraggly tufts on back): Tufts
                  4b. No notches in ear: Youngyun

Tufts

Tufts, showing those clumps of scraggly fur on back

Youngyun with a walnut I set out for her

Youngyun with feet extended backwards (grays can rotate rear feet 180o)

Where: My backyard (but could just as easily be yours)

Other notes: I've noticed that their mouths all seem to be a bit darker these days, probably from the non-stop chewing of walnut husk. My hands are stained for a couple of weeks after handling walnuts, and I imagine it sticks just as well to fur as to skin.

Captain Death

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What: In college I started Ye Olde Lovable Li'l Scamps Feeding Clubbe (Y'olls FC). We collected stale bread from the dining halls and spent lunch hour on the quads hand feeding the squirrels. After a few days we could easily recognize one squirrel from the other by personality as well as by physical scars on each animal (more than not had some sort of visible scar on its face). It turns out squirrels lead a pretty tough life. One in particular, who we called Captain Death, had a large scar cutting diagonally down across his face. He was certainly the most skittish, but once we earned his trust he was the one that would approach first and stay the longest. Each time a new person joined us, Captain Death had to be won over again.

Many of the females had ragged ears or other signs of the hazards of living. Males with aggressively court females and defend access to them (see my post from May 7 for more on that). I assume that many of the scars on the squirrels were from squirrel-to-squirrel interactions during breeding season. Once we had the chance of watching a red-tailed hawk swoop down and steal a squirrel off the ground. The hawk was successful and we then watched it eat the squirrel. I imagine that not every attempt ends this way and that many a squirrel lives to climb another tree, hide another acorn, a scar as wide as a talon bears witness to the fact that squirrels are prey.

Well this morning my mom, Callan, and my sister were outside when they spotted this sad little earless squirrel. He was happily (well, as happily as he could have been) cleaning the husk from a walnut from the shell. I've been finding walnuts hidden everywhere around my backyard. The gash runs from his eye (barely visible in some of the photos) back towards his left ear (you can easily tell it's a male in the photo below), which is noticeably absent. The wound looks fresh and I haven't seen this scar before so I'm assuming it happened in the last couple of days (there's no blood on the fur, so it at least had a chance to clean that off).

Ecological notes: The squirrel was eating a walnut from our tree. This has definitely been a bumper year for walnuts and a red squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) has been fiercely defending it, trying in vain to fend off the grays from stealing a snack.

Where: We spotted the squirrel on one of the wonders of the modern world of Latham Ct (the Silver Maple in my driveway).

Late season nesting

What: Last week I spotted a female robin (Turdus migratorius) bouncing around in the slippery elm (Ulmus rubra) at the corner of my house. It was so neat to watch because the bird almost had an architectural eye when looking at the tree. I imagined it looking at angles of branches, sturdiness of limbs, relative hiddenness of the entryway access to food and water. She investigated for quite awhile, bouncing every so often to a new vantage point to reassess the quality of her new domicile. I had followed her to the spot because I heard a male robin singing and I hadn't heard one in a while. When I went to investigate I saw the female in my driveway picking up nesting material and then dropping it (female robins alone build the nest and incubate the eggs). It was like she was doing a full inspection of the territory for quality of supplies and location. This week I checked in again on her progress and she is now sitting on some eggs (not sure how many yet, will report back later).

Robins nest made mostly of mud with
twigs, grass, and bark strips (Ruby Mtns, Nevada)

Ecological notes: Last year a pair nested on the light outside our neighbor's door, the year prior they nested on the floodlight on my garage and fledged three young. I was bummed this year when we didn't have any nesting robins for most of the spring. What a treat though to have this pair, and so late in the year too. Most birds are done nesting by now and have started flocking together in larger groups (Monday I spotted about 50 geese honking and flying towards the lake).

Robins can have two to three clutches in a year, so I'm assuming that this is the second or third for this female this year. In general male robins are a darker gray, with a darker patch of slate on top of their heads, females tend to be browner. Lots of sources I read just parrot other sources, so I don't know how reliable they are. Apparently males have more robust streaks on their throats than females, but I don't know how reliable this is since it's a relative comparison. I'm in out of town right now (the photos are a couple days old), but when I get back I'm excited to look closer at their throats. Since the females are the only ones that sit on the eggs, that should be a pretty easy thing to study. The one sitting on the  Males are definitely the only ones that sing though.

Where: My backyard

Other notes: Robins are one of three types of birds we have that use mud to build their nests, phoebes and swallows being the other two in Vermont. I've watched a robin dip a stick in mud and carry it to the nesting site. You can see in the above photo that the nest also incorporates twigs, grass, and strips of plastic. Phoebe and barn swallows are pictured below:

Phoebe nest made primarily of moss, (Shelburne Farms)

Barn swallow nest made mostly of mud and grass (Bread and Butter Farm)

Bees and gender in Insects

What: I've been thinking more about my last post and the importance of words in relation to our understanding of the world around us. I was telling a friend about the woodchuck that's growing fat off our kale, and how he had gotten the broccoli too. My friend asked how I knew it was a "he" and then pointed out how it was weird that animals automatically and unconsciously becomes "he" when the gender is unknown (I'm always conscious of when someone uses the pronoun "she" in a gender neutral situation). The pronoun "it" lacks so much emotion and humanity, like describing an automaton, so, because we like to anthropomorphize animals (e.g. Bambi), we assign gender to them. I even hear people refer to my bees and egg laying chickens as male.


As a naturalist my first questions are often around identification, particularly with insects. I posted an ID request to the bugguide.net community. John Carr sent a response "It's a female dolichopodidae." Well female is awfully specific, but animal scientific classifications ending in -idae (-aceae for plants) are family groupings, which are pretty general (Curculionidae, the weevil family, contains over 40,000 species). This is from a guy who specializes in IDing midges and their relatives, and he could get gender but only ID down to family. So what was he cuing into that said female and not male? Turns out the answer is more about what makes a male a male.

Ecological notes: So even with the vast evolutionary divergence of insects into every ecosystem around the world, some morphological adaptations are still conserved or at least have converged. One of those things is a male's ability to detect a female, and they do this in a variety of ways, like hearing, smelling, or seeing females from a great distance. Male mosquitoes, for example, have enlarged antennae to pick up that horrendous and penetrating bzzzzzz sound the females make as they look for that perfect patch of skin. What I'll call foot moths (and cover in a future post) have huge antennae for "smelling" the sex pheromones from females.

Male honeybees, aka drones, have enlarged eyes to spot a queen before other males do. The first picture in the post is a drone; note how the eyes are so big that they actually touch in the middle of the head. The next picture shows a bunch of females at the entrance to the hive, their eyes considerably smaller and not touching on the tops of their heads. Drones are pretty much useless to the colony other than for reproduction. They hanging around feeding on honey, begging for food, and grooming themselves. When the timing is right they'll start going for exploratory flights to breeding sites. These change frequently, so a male needs to be able to spot one from a distance. The story is far more complicated than this, but it's a neat start and I"m tired, maybe more later...

Where: My backyard

Other notes: Ryan Morra and I noticed a whole bunch of female worker bees crawling around on the ground near the hive. I went back with my camera after he left and spotted one a worker dragging another, much lighter colored worker out of the hive. At one point the lighter one started to fly and the other one held on and pulled it back down. Once it got to the edge of the platform the darker one left the lighter one to die on her own. In the middle of summer, this generation of worker bees have the shortest lifespan of just a few weeks (c.f. winter life span can be several months). Kicking out unproductive bees is essential, I guess, to maintaining efficiency.

June bugs

What: Just in time for the end of June, I heard this June bug (Polyphylla sp., poly = many + phylla = leaf referring to the many "leaves" that fork out at the tips of its antennae) before I spotted it. I finally found it tucked into the ground, head up, butt half in. When I rediscovered the same individual it was again nearly vertical, but this time more submerged with its abdomen in the ground and head barely above. The beetle itself is rather large, about an inch long and almost half that around. Its elytra (hard coverings beetles have over wings) were a dullish brown with irregular speckling that seemed more from wear and tear than genetic programming. When it made its noise, it sounded more like a wounded baby mouse than an insect. It made the sound in response to my footsteps and when provoked (i.e. poked with a blade of grass) it repeated the noise. Seems like an odd defense, and made me wonder what other defenses it had to back up the aggressive noise. A little research unearthed some anecdotes of pets going after these large insects then requiring vet visits for swollen faces. So the sound must be some sort of deterrent rather than mate attractant.

I watched the beetle to figure out how it made the noise and it appears as though it makes it by puffing out its abdomen and then sucking it back in, rubbing the top of it against its wings as it does to make a scratchy noise. Pretty wild.

Ecological notes: Males have very robust enlarged feathers on their antennae for picking up whifs of the female pheromones. This one, with much smaller antennae was most certainly a female. Most of the beetle's life cycle is spent underground as large white larvae with yellowish to orange heads - hard to miss. The females lay their eggs in the soil, which makes me wonder if the defensive posturing of the female was her actually defending her egg-laying territory from an intruder (me).

Where: My backyard (maybe yours too?)

Other notes: Heard my first cicada of the year today!

Vinca, Garlic Mustard and an Eastern Cottontail

What: The patch of woods behind my house (dominant trees are black walnut, slippery elm, boxelder, and and Norway maple, with black cherry, honeysuckle, and common buckthorn in the understory and that is literally all) has about three different herbaceous plants growing in the understory and they form near monocrop patches. The first is Vinca spp. (or periwinkle), which I have growing in dense, impenetrable thickets closest to the walnut (walnuts have juglone in their roots which is known to inhibit growth of other plants). Farther away is a 1-2' tall forest of garlic mustard. The scilla, which I already posted about has pretty much gone through its life cycle before the garlic mustard is up.

Ecological notes: I've long just attributed this overwhelming abundance of garlic mustard and vinca to the fact that this is a heavily disturbed area and so non-native exotics like garlic mustard would thrive. The Vinca was probably ground cover from an ornamental planting. There's virtually no leaf litter (all that's there is from this year) due to an over abundance of earthworms (Lumbricus terrestris), the soils are pretty darn sandy, and there's lots of browsers and not a lot of predators.

But I've also been noticing more and more a rabbit in my backyard. The rabbit's an Eastern cottontail, Sylvilagus floridanus, which, for Vermont, is an introduced species that has largely outcompeted the native New England cottontail. We don't really ever get foxes or other rabbit predators and so I think that the rabbit population might be big enough to essentially be controlling the herbaceous layer. I see them eating violets, dandelion, the grasses, and my blueberry shrubs, but they have entirely avoided the garlic mustard and vinca.

Where: My backyard! Sandy soils, an old plowed field (abandoned in the 70s).

Other notes: I tasted a periwinkle flower and it was okay at first and then had a taste reminscent of black licorice but much worse. I haven't seen any really browse sign on them at all so stuff seems to pretty well avoid it.