the Marvelous in nature

The last day of March, and this morning found me down at the Tommy Thompson Park Bird Research Station, helping to set up the site for the start of another fabulous spring migration season. The research station’s primary goals are to collect data on local and migratory bird populations to aid with conservation efforts here and afar, to promote awareness of birds and conservation through education programs and demonstrations, and to contribute to research initiatives by helping to collect data or providing a location or means for someone else to do so.

The primary, and initial, project run by the research station, through which these objectives are achieved, is the migration monitoring program. It involves constant-effort bird banding and surveys (that is, we’re out there every single morning for the entire migration period, weather permitting), which provides data on bird population numbers and demographics, including information such as adult:young and male:female ratios in the population, stuff that can’t be easily (or sometimes at all) obtained through non-banding means but that gives you an idea of, for instance, how successful the breeding season was this year. There are some 25 or so similar stations across Canada, each contributing valuable data to fill in their local piece of the puzzle. The birds are banded, measurements collected, and then safely released to return to their regular activities. The Palm Warbler in the top photo popped nearly straight up out of the hand before taking off for the nearby trees.

I’ve been volunteering since 2003. I love being down there, and would happily volunteer all season if I had some other means of making ends meet (who’s seen/read About A Boy? perhaps all I need to do is write a hit holiday song and I’ll be set). I like seeing who’s about every day, watching the migration ebb and flow across the season, the composition of species progressing and changing from week to week. On a daily basis, I like turning the corner to check a net, not knowing what we’ll find this time around. We’ve had some marvelous surprises show up, such as the above Yellow-throated Warbler, the only bird of this species I’ve seen (they’re normally more southerly in range).

I love the opportunity to hold such fragile, but beautiful, life in my hands, to feel the wonder of it. I enjoy seeing the birds up close, at a distance where you can marvel at the intricate feather patterns or subtle plumage details often lost in the field. Who’s seen the orange crown of an Orange-crowned Warbler? I have, but only with the bird in my hand. And who’s paid much attention to a Mourning Dove’s face, the subtle colours of the eye ring, the bright pink at the corner of its mouth, the small patch of iridescence on its neck? But you get a chance to see this when you study the bird up close.

Yes, I’m looking forward to returning. Ironically, tomorrow, the first day of banding, has been rained out (we don’t run in conditions that would threaten the welfare of the birds, though surveys are still a go - we’re less concerned about our own comfort). So we’ll be starting on Wednesday instead.

The setup this morning went smoothly, but was quiet for birds. We had a group of a dozen chickadees moving back and forth through the area, and there were some blackbirds and a few grackles that flew overhead throughout the morning, but not much moving in yet. Perhaps this warm spell will encourage some more movement from the south. Hermit Thrush, American Tree Sparrow, Dark-eyed Junco, perhaps even Eastern Phoebe or Ruby-crowned Kinglet - they should all be around in the first week during a normal season, but the unusually cold weather might delay their arrival this year.

The park and station are open to the public on weekends and holidays, and anybody in the Toronto area who’s interested is invited to swing by Tommy Thompson Park on the Leslie Street Spit, and drop in during a spring or fall morning to check us out, learn about what we’re doing, and get a chance to see a little bird up close and personal.

Earth Hour took place yesterday around the globe, locally at 8pm. By early afternoon yesterday, the first photos and stories were coming in from New Zealand and other countries on the far side of the world from here. Ours, of course, took place at 8pm our time, and I nearly forgot about it even after all the lead-up earlier in the day. We shut down our lights and then I headed down to a spot on the lakeshore to check out the cityscape.

The above photo was taken last fall, showing a city of light and colour, brightly illuminated. The spotlights are coming from the Air Canada Centre, home to the Toronto Maple Leafs and Raptors. All of the downtown office buildings are lit up, despite that it’s nearly 10 at night and one would presume even the overtime workers would have headed home. At one point I think I heard that building owners and/or the businesses renting space left the lights on as a security measure or something like that, but there’s got to be a better solution.

This is the skyline last night, taken at about 8:50pm. When I was down there I recall being underwhelmed by the difference at the time. There was still considerable glow from the city illuminating the sky, though it did seem reduced. I could still see the beaver I’d disturbed from the shore swimming across the water a few metres out, in clear silhouette. I really got the best sense of the difference when I came home and opened the two files side by side on my monitor. I know that streetlights remained on during the hour, as did businesses that were still open at 8pm, for security and safety reasons. There were a few planes and a helicopter circling over the city while I was there, presumably news stations getting shots of the event from the air.

On the other hand, the camera settings have a huge influence on how you perceive the scene. The below photo was taken only five minutes earlier, also during Earth Hour. Yet it looks like the city’s as bright as ever. The above photo was taken at F/8.0 for 20 seconds, the below photo was at F/4.0 for 30 seconds. The slightly wider aperture and longer shutter makes a huge difference in the image. I’d say my perception of the scene, by eye, was probably between the two, but closer to the first photo.

The Toronto Star reports that energy consumption during that hour was down nearly 9% from comparable late-March Saturday nights. It was only down 5% from levels just prior to the start of Earth Hour, but that was likely because a number of businesses and buildings, such as the CN Tower and some of the office towers, had already turned their lights off earlier in the afternoon. Across the province as a whole (bearing in mind that many cities and rural areas didn’t actively participate the way Toronto did), energy draw was down 5.2% from normal.

The Earth Hour’s launch point, Christchurch, New Zealand, had a 13% lower consumption during the hour. In Sydney, Australia, it was down 10%. I did get the impression that a lot of people didn’t participate, though, through numerous valid reasons but also some half-hearted excuses.

The Toronto Star states, “Ireland’s more than 7,000 pubs elected not to take part - in part because of the risk that Saturday night revellers could end up smashing glasses, falling down stairs, or setting themselves on fire with candles.

Likewise, much of Europe - including France, Germany, Spain and European Union institutions - planned nothing to mark Earth Hour.

That didn’t dismay organizers, who said there’s a powerful message in the fact that the usual powerhouse countries aren’t leading the way, and that even in wealthy places like Canada it’s very much a grassroots phenomenon.”

The Toronto Star had a great slide show of scenes from the different participating cities around the world. Many are very subtle before-and-afters, but I liked a number of them, including one of Sydney Harbour, from across the water. It doesn’t seem to let you grab the address for the individual images or I’d post a linked one here.

I picked my way across the little patches of grass and stone, the few areas that aren’t submerged, till I reached the point where the water began to deepen. I squatted down on my heels, peered into the water and saw……

….nothing.

At least, not at first. The water looked still and quiet and empty. I can’t say this surprised me a whole lot; if I lived in a pond year-round, I certainly wouldn’t come out of wherever I was spending the winter until the water was a civilized temperature. Some bubbles floating on the surface cast some interesting star-shaped light patterns on the pond bottom, but that was about all I saw.

And then…

…a bright red water mite zipped across a little depression in the mud. It was the only one, and it didn’t stay out in the open long enough for me to study it or get a good photo. But it did tell me that things were actually awake in the icy water.

So I carefully studied the pond bottom with a bit more scrutiny than the casual scan I’d given it initially. The first thing I noticed were tiny little organisms moving about suspended in the water column (the short amount of it there was). I couldn’t make out a whole lot of detail on them. As I was considering these, a larger movement caught my eye. I also couldn’t make out enough to say what this was, but it was brown and seemed to have a shiny silver eye.

I tried taking some photos of the creatures in the pond, but it was hard to get a good clear shot while they were swimming around, over and under vegetation and detritus. So I ended up getting a bucket and tall yogurt container from the house and scooping out a few containers’ worth of water and pond muck. I couldn’t tell if I’d gotten the creatures of interest or not, but there was really only one way to find out.

The water was very cloudy for the first little while. Gradually as the evening progressed the silt settled out to the bottom of the bucket, but it was still difficult to see the bottom even by the time I went to bed. I could see the little creatures swimming about in the water column, but not the silver-eyed things. I wondered if maybe I hadn’t scooped any up.

When I got up this morning I was delighted to see that the silt had all cleared and I had in fact caught a number of the silver-eyes. The challenge was then how to get them somewhere where I could study them, since I had six inches of water sitting atop the muddy bottom. I ended up using a turkey baster, which was large enough that I could aim the end over the creature and suck it and a bit of water up and deposit it in a little white measuring cup that would allow me to see more details. I set the cup under a bright lamp and poised my camera, firmly attached to a tripod, directly above so I could get some macro shots.

The silver-eyed creatures resembled tiny shrimp, once I got them out of the muck and against a clean background. Less than 2mm wide and no more than a centimetre long for the largest, they had long antennae and many long legs, and curled their tails under their bodies. They scooted about quickly, on their sides just as often as on their “feet”.

This locomotive habit gives them one of their two common names, “sideswimmers”. Their other name is “scud”, which comes from the Norwegian “skudda”, meaning to push. They’re a type of crustacean, belonging to the same family as crabs, lobsters and shrimp, and in fact are sometimes called “freshwater shrimp”, even though they belong to a different group than the shrimp you eat.

They come in all sorts of colours: orange, brown, green, and even silver. These individuals are all likely of the same species, despite the colour differences. There are a few different species of sideswimmer around here, representing a range of different aquatic habitats. I suspect these to belong to the genus Hyalella, which are one of the most common groups. They are so common, in fact, that their conspicuous absence is sometimes used as an easy indicator of lake acidification below pH 6.5 (their tolerance limit). In some streams with ample cover and food it’s possible to record up to 10,000 of these little guys in just one square metre. They eat primarly detritus and help to tidy up pond bottoms. They’re also mostly nocturnal, hiding in the mud during the day, which explains why I didn’t see any while I had the bright light suspended over the water to warm it yesterday evening.

This is the other creature I saw in the pond. If the scuds are tiny, then it’s itsy-bitsy. Only 2mm long, it’s hard to distinguish much detail without a microscope, which I don’t have. The macro lens on my camera allowed me to get a bit closer, but you still can’t make out much detail.

This is a copepod, another type of crustacean. The name means “oar-foot”, and reflects their use of their long antennae as a means of propulsion. This one belongs to the suborder Cyclopoida, the “cyclops” part of the name referencing their “eyespot” (actually two close together when looked at under high magnification), which is used for detecting light. You can just see the small dark dot at the front of the head. The above individual is a female, identified by the two prominent egg-sacs on either side of the body. When she lays the eggs they drop to the bottom of the pool. Some may hatch right away, but depending on conditions, others may settle into the mud and wait. They can survive long periods of drought, and scientists have even discovered and successfully hatched 300-year-old eggs.

I believe this is a male of the same species (although it could be a different species altogether). Males don’t carry the egg sacs and so can look fairly different, particularly when you can’t get a good sense of the whole body shape without a microscope. I’m not sure why the dark upper body; it may be food that it’s ingested recently (the organisms are somewhat transparent and their inner contents can usually be seen fairly easily; for instance, the dark-coloured eggs the female is carrying can clearly be seen through the sacs).

Different species can be either predators of smaller plankton in the water column, or grazers of algae on vegetation or other surfaces. Copepods in general will undertake daily vertical migrations, usually coming to the surface for the night and returning to the bottom during the day.

As I was poking around with the turkey baster sucking up little creatures to put in the cup and examine, I spotted something else moving slowly, worm-like, along the top of the mud. I stuck it in the cup with all the rest to have a closer look.

I recognized it right away from my Invertebrate Zoology classes as a member of the group Platyhelminthes, and observed that it was a flatworm, but I couldn’t get much further than that without additional reference. There’s a number of different types of flatworms, many of which have triangular heads. This one didn’t, which helped narrow down the options. I think it may be a member of the genus Hymanella or Phagocata, but who knows, really; my Invert Zoo text is packed away somewhere at the moment, and the other guides I have on hand don’t give enough detail.

Flatworms are incredible contortionists. This one went from being stretched out, perhaps nearly a centimetre long but only a millimetre wide, to short and squat, nearly round and almost 3mm across. They don’t actually swim, but rather move on hair-like cilia on their underside. They’re typically predators or scavengers of microorganisms or other protein sources. They don’t have teeth, but instead use an extendable mouthpart that acts as a suction tube to suck fluids from their prey, or ingest small ones whole. One of the neat things about these guys, that you can actually see in the first picture, is their “crossed eyes”. Like with the copepods, these spots are actually simply photo-sensors, used for detecting light. Another cool factoid: they’re regenerative, and if you cut one into multiple pieces, nearly every piece will regenerate into a new complete flatworm.

That seemed to be about it for my haul, and after I’d taken a few pictures I returned everything to the bucket and then took the bucket back out to the pond where I’d gotten it. I’ll go back in a little bit, once the spring peepers start to peep, to see if the fairy shrimp are out yet, and perhaps to look for vertebrate life.

With the days getting longer, and the turning forward of the clocks a few weeks ago, daylight lingers well into the evenings these days. When I finished the day’s house renovation tasks today there was still ample light to go padding about outside, and I wanted to get out for a bit to enjoy the relatively mild temperatures. It was beautiful and sunny all day today, and with the combination of the two factors the snow was doing its best to melt. Of course, with the giant snowpiles we have it’s hard to notice much of a difference, but there was a steady rivulet of water running down the tire-tracks in the driveway all day, as if there was a spring welling up near the house and feeding it.

I decided to go down and see if the warm sun had awakened anything in the ice-free water of the little vernal ponds in the backyard. There’s two small ponds, connected through small channels, both of which mostly or entirely dry up in the thick heat of summer. One I remember skating on when I was quite young. It’s since grown in with seedlings from the Silver Maples in the front yard, creating a miniature maple swamp. The largest of the young trees are now a good 10 cm (roughly 4 in) in diameter-at-breast-height, and while it’s a pretty, picturesque scene, the leaf fall has mostly choked the waters so that the pond that I recall being too deep to wade in even with our rubber boots is now fairly shallow through most of its length. Very little inhabits this pond anymore, although I regularly return to look.

The other pond is in the middle of the fenced-in field the horses get turned out in, but despite the disturbance it sometimes gets as a result, the horses generally aren’t all that interested in it and life does well there. (There’s actually two much larger swamps close nearby, but they’re harder to access without a pair of hipwaders.) It was to this little pond that I headed this afternoon.

The snow still lies thick over much of the pond. Portions of it have melted to expose the water, which was free of ice in the warm sunshine and mild air, but more than half is still concealed by snow. The crusty layer over the surface of the snow allowed me to gently pick my way across without breaking through to my knees, which was generally appreciated. The snow mounds up around the vegetation, creating little hummocks from which the red dogwood branches poke up, reminding me a bit of anthills.

There was a fair bit of bird activity in the area. Behind me, in the larger true swamp, the Red-winged Blackbirds were perched at the top of the small trees calling loudly their familiar “oak-a-lee!” (despite that in most field guides it’s phoneticized as “konk-a-ree”, this is how I learned it growing up). There were a couple of Common Grackles up there with them, doing their best rusty creak.

The dogwood clumps are a favourite foraging spot of both the overwintering sparrows and the local chickadees. I’m not really sure what they’re eating when they’re foraging in or under these bushes, but there’s often a lot of little birds hopping among the branches. There were a few chickadees in the area while I was standing in the middle of the pond, and I watched them for a little bit.

This one came down and had a bath while I was standing there. Naturally, I had my short lens on the camera, and by the time I got the long lens switched over he’d finished up and hopped up to a branch in the back of the clump of dogwood to fluff up and dry off. The water through most of the melted area is quite shallow and perfect for bathing. Well, for the birds, anyway. I think I’d find it a little muddy and cold at the moment.

A couple of American Tree Sparrows were hanging out in the dogwood as well. This one gave me a rather pensive stare before moving into the thicker cover of the bushes. In the areas where the snow has now melted I could imagine there being a fair bit of grass seed and other such food items exposed that had been buried through the winter.

After watching the birds for a bit I turned my attention back to the water. What I was specifically looking for was fairy shrimp. While growing up, we’d come down to look for these every spring once the snow melted, but I think I’m perhaps a tad early yet. Nonetheless, it’s worth a check.

I was a little hasty and forgot that I was standing on an ice ledge. As I moved to the water’s edge to peer in, the snow under my feet cracked and I nearly fell in. Whoops! I did manage to catch my balance without falling and back away from the danger zone. And then circled around to approach from the open, muddy area.

I picked my way across the little patches of grass and stone, the few areas that aren’t submerged, till I reached the point where the water began to deepen. I squatted down on my heels, peered into the water and saw……

At my parents’ for Easter dinner yesterday, I popped outside for some around-the-house birding while waiting for the turkey to come out of the oven. I decided not to venture further because there’s still quite a bit of snow on the ground, and with the (slightly) warming temperatures it’s quite soft now. Also, the driveway practically requires galoshes to navigate cleanly, and I haven’t unpacked mine from the winter yet.

There was still a fair bit of activity even just around the house, which is where birds congregate due to the presence of the feeders. I had to wait a little while, but I did finally get to see the Red-winged Blackbirds that my mom had reported arrived the other day. They usually come to the seed spread out on the driveway in front of the house, but yesterday they were sticking to the cast-off litter under the feeders in the backyard, possibly because of the seven cars parked in the driveway turnaround surrounding the seed. One also visited the suet a couple of times, which was where I got the best photos of him.

This is just a youngster, a second-year bird, meaning he was hatched last year (as birds’ ages are labeled by calendar year - he won’t truly be a year old till the summer). You can tell because the black feathers on his back and wings are fringed with orangey-brown, a characteristic of young males.

Behind the blackbird, a couple of American Goldfinches were coming to the nyger feeder. They’ve been mysteriously absent for the last couple of months, only just starting to return recently. I’m not sure where they all went. Normally they spend the winter mobbing the feeders in fairly substantial numbers. The most I’ve seen at a time since mid-winter has been three.

The males, like this guy, are starting to get their brilliant summer yellow plumage. You can see it all beginning to come in around his face. In the middle of winter you can still tell the males from the females despite their relatively drab plumage because some males will retain slightly brighter yellow faces. Also, their wings and tails are a sharp, crisp black, rather than the duller brownish-black that females sport.

The starlings have settled in. There’s at least a couple of pairs present now, with the two males often counter-singing to each other from their respective territorial perches. This particular male seems to have chosen the north peak of the house as his nest site of choice. Here he pauses in his singing to check out the activity (me) below. Two starlings, a Blue Jay and a White-breasted Nuthatch are the birds to have discovered the suet dough, so far. The nuthatch takes respectable small pieces, but the other two species really toss it back when they visit the feeder.

While standing out there watching the feeder birds, I glanced up at a crow crossing the the sky, and happened to spot, up high behind it, this Red-shouldered Hawk moving with purpose to the north. It was right at the reach of my (relatively) short 300mm lens, this is a close crop on the original image. There are a pair of Red-shoulders that live in the neighbourhood every year. I’m not sure where they nest, other than that it’s somewhere to the west of my parents’ place. I regularly hear them calling from that direction in the summer.

I recall some years ago there being some concern over decreasing populations in the province, but I think these declines are more limited to the southwestern portion, west and southwest of Toronto. That said, the recent Ontario Breeding Bird Atlas recorded them in quite a number of areas where they hadn’t been 20 years ago. There is some likelihood that this is due in part to new surveys that were implemented for the species by Bird Studies Canada in 1991, contributing a lot more targeted effort than took place in the first atlas. Still, even taking this into consideration, the results of the atlas are encouraging, and probably suggest increasing forest cover in the south of the province as abandoned fields regenerate. They remain an uncommon species in most of my “home range”, and I’m always pleased to see one.

Also on the raptor front, although I wasn’t able to get a photo, I spotted a Turkey Vulture circling over the escarpment, the first of the season. They migrate south for the winter, so are always a welcome sight in the spring. Come summer you can usually see at least one or two over the escarpment where the topography of the cliffs creates great thermals for soaring. During the peak of migration you can have up to a couple dozen.

This Common Redpoll has been hanging around the feeders for a little while, she was there earlier in the week as well. She doesn’t seem to be doing too well, although I’m not sure what she might be ill with. She was feeding periodically, and moving around on the ground, but at other times would just sit on the feeder perch or at the top of the birdhouse in the centre of the garden, looking around but otherwise not doing much.

She’s identifiable primarily because she’s always fluffed up into a near-spherical shape. Fluffing like that is a bird’s way of putting on extra layers - when we would go grab an extra sweater, the birds will fluff up their feathers. The amount of fluffing is similar to the number of layers of clothing, as the air pocket trapped under the feathers, which traps warm air close to the body, will increase as the feathers are further raised. None of the other birds were fluffed this much, it wasn’t that cold out. Birds that are sick will usually fluff their feathers as well, I suspect in a similar reaction to our burying under the covers when we have a fever and are suffering chills.

She was too active for me to consider trying to catch her, and she is continuing to eat, so that’s in her favour. However, she was still sitting at the feeder at dusk, one lone redpoll. I hope she gets well.

With the nice weather yesterday, and perhaps also as a symbol of the new season, I took my screwdriver and went out to clean out the birdhouses to make room for this year’s residents. When I was growing up we didn’t have birdhouses set up. I’m not sure why, because we always had feeders. Perhaps it just hadn’t occurred to us. Sometime in university I think I won a birdhouse in a bird-related contest that I’ve since forgotten the details of. We put it up that summer, and it wasn’t long before a House Wren set up shop. The burbling song brought such life to the garden - not that the garden hadn’t been lively before, but the wren just added that sparkle.

There’s now five and a half birdhouses out in the garden: four traditional single-unit houses, and a double-unit house. The double-unit is the above covered wagon, which my mom won at a convention or AGM some years ago. By the end of the summer, every single one of these houses has been checked out or used, and they all need cleaning the next winter. The primary residents are the House Wrens, although we have had Tree Swallows and Eastern Bluebirds using a couple of them during the early part of the season (once they’ve fledged the wrens move in and raise a second brood there). There’s perhaps as many as three pairs of wrens on the property, although it can be a little hard to keep track of them.

Both compartments of the covered wagon had been stuffed with twigs. Wrens make very characteristic nests in boxes, you can always tell it’s a wren when you take it out. Somehow they manage to tote these twigs, many longer than their own body, back to the nestbox, pull them through the small opening, and stuff them into every corner. They fill every nook and cranny in the box, and the result is a firm rectangular nest that holds its shape even when you take it out of the box.

This wren has lined its nest with horse hair, which is abundant at the property, what with there being five of them plus a donkey within easy flying distance. You can tell which horses donated their hair to the nest by the colour of the strands. There’s also downy breast feathers from several birds, which suggests that this was a late-summer nest, after some other species had already finished raising their brood and had started moulting in fresh feathers. The bright orange one is obviously from a Baltimore Oriole; the others I’m less sure about, but could possibly be from a robin.

In the compartment on the other side of the wagon was this nest, which fell apart as I removed it. It had no lining and appeared to never have been finished. House Wren males will build multiple nest structures that they then show off to their prospective females. The female decides which one she likes best, and then works to finish lining it to start the family in. You can tell a lot about the surrounding trees by what the wren has stuffed in its box; in this case, the box isn’t far from a grove of cedars that would have provided a fair bit of easy, short building material.

This is the Tree Swallows’ box. They usually arrive early in the spring (perhaps in the next couple weeks) and start checking out the boxes in the yard. They invariably choose this one in the end. They raise one brood and then move off. They leave at about the same time that the wren is looking to start up a second brood (or a third), and he’ll often move in to build his own in there.

Here’s the house with the door open. I can’t recall now whether we cleaned this house out between tenants or not, but the wren’s twigs go right down to the bottom of the box, so it’s possible we did, or he stuffed more in there around the swallow’s nest. Either way it’s very much a wren nest now. They like for their nests to be a certain height below the entry hole, and will fill the bottom up with twigs to bring the lined nest up to that height as necessary.

The hole in the covered wagon is much closer to the bottom than in this nestbox, and so the twigs were used more to fill the back of the space than to fill the bottom, you could actually see the snow through the bottom of the cup. In this case they needed to bring the height up a fair bit, and the bottom two or three inches are solid twigs. I’m not sure what laundry Mom was hanging out on the line at the time, but it may have been a sleeping bag or comforter - the lining at the top of the nest is partially composed with synthetic fluffy filling.

When I opened the nest up to check out what the wren had used in building it, I was surprised to discover something in it. At first I thought it was a clump of fur, maybe leftover from an owl’s rabbit kill or something like that, that the wren had picked up. But it turned out to be a little baby wren, old enough to have fledged, but still in the nest. Why?

The answer was in its position. One leg was stretched out way in front of its body, and in removing the little bird from the nest I found a strand of the synthetic filling wrapped around its foot. I actually had to snap the strand to get the bird out of the nest. Evidently the nestling had become caught, and couldn’t leave the nest when its siblings did. It would have starved to death as a result. It’s rather sad.

The nestling was soft in my hand. They are the most beautiful mousey brown, even the colour suggests soft. Their wing feathers are a little rustier, particularly when young, and barred in neat lines characteristic of wrens. I left it in the nest contents where I found it. I feel sad for it, but I also have to consider that this is nature. Perhaps only one of those young birds that left the nest last summer will survive to return to the area this spring. A bird’s first year is brutal, and the death rate among first-year birds is very high. Once a bird has made it through its first year its chances of surviving to three or four years, or perhaps even longer, is greatly increased. So instead of dwelling on this one death, I look forward to the return of these cheerful little birds, the ones who’ve made it through another winter, in the coming month.

Yesterday was the first day of spring. The sun was out today and the birds were singing. My mom heard the first Red-winged Blackbird calling from the swamp. I heard a flock of Sandhill Cranes flying by, out of sight. I’m also fairly certain I heard a Brown Creeper, though I wasn’t able to find him, either.

I walked about my parents’ property looking for other signs that it was indeed upon us. For instance, the ice on the little pond, above, was beginning to melt. I checked it for frogs, eggs, or little aquatic invertebrates, but saw no signs of life yet.

The icicles on the eaves of the house are also melting.

The buds are coming out on the maple trees in the front yard.

I spotted some green grass! Admittedly, this was in a footprint along one of the regularly-traveled paths through the snow, but still. Grass.

But the most conclusive sign that spring is finally here:

The driveway has turned to mud.

When I returned to my parents’ this week my mom had brought out a beetle she had found while shopping downtown in the local town back in the summer, following a conversation we’d had earlier this week on a subject I can’t recall now. The beetle was dead when she found it, so she picked it up and brought it home with her. It was a warm reddish-tan, with large black spots down each side of the carapace, and one in the middle of the back. It’s obviously a member of the scarab beetles family, and further research revealed it to be a Grapevine Beetle, Pelidnota punctata.

Ordinarily a dead beetle on the sidewalk would probably have been passed by unnoticed, but the size of this particular beetle was what caught her eye. Below is an image of the beetle posed with a (live) ladybug for comparison. The scarab family contains 1300 species, some of them the largest beetles in North America. Grapevine Beetles can grow up to an inch long, which is not quite up to the six inches of the southern Hercules Beetle, but is still a pretty impressive beetle for this part of the country.

I’ve never seen this beetle alive myself; in fact, this is the first time I’ve seen it ever, which seems somewhat unusual for what looks like it should be a rather conspicuous bug. It seems fairly common, occuring through most of the east from Ontario south to northern Florida and west to Nebraska. The adults can be found from May to August through much of its range, and will regularly come to lights in the summer.

It inhabits deciduous forests. Adults feed on the foliage and fruit of grapevines (hence the species’ common name), but appear to do little serious damage. It lays its eggs in the summer on decaying logs, which the larva feed on during their development. Larva overwinter in the logs, pupating and emerging as adults in the spring. I found one site that offered care information for the species, but aside from a couple comments on the web, couldn’t see any evidence that it was frequently kept in captivity.

One of the features of scarabs is their club-like antennae. You can sort of see here that the club is actually many-parted. These plates are called lamellae, and the beetle can fan them out when sensing odours. When it’s not testing the air, it folds them up out of the way. This individual’s a little dusty from sitting on a shelf since the summer, but in this and the previous photo you can also see the mouthparts it uses to cut bits of vegetation. In the previous photo you can get a better view of the upper cutting mandibles, and the lower manipulating ones.

Beetles, like many insects, have hairy legs and bodies, under their smooth carapaces. These hairs are called setae, and are used for sensing the environment. Generally they sense small changes in air pressure.

Take a look at the claws at the end of this guy’s feet. The claws are primarily used to help the beetle secure itself to whatever it’s walking on. However, in scarabs the front claws are modified for digging. You can see how much more curved they are on this individual. Grapevine Beetles aren’t really diggers the way some scarabs are (such as dung beetles), but they retain the characteristics of the group.

In looking up information on beetle feet, I discovered this site that is doing research on the applications of beetle-foot design to modern technology. One of the main things they’ve developed from it is an adhesive that’s twice as sticky as glue-based tapes, and is reusable simply by washing with soap and water. I wasn’t quite clear on the specifics of the technology from their description, but it uses the principle of a beetle’s hairy feet (I gather this is a characteristic of a different family of beetles), which act like a thousand little suction cups on long threads. The suction cups adhere to the surface, while the long threads allow dust motes and other debris to slip between the affixing surfaces, so it can attach to dusty and dirty surfaces as well. The lab’s site has videos of their Mini-Whegs robots scaling vertical glass walls using the adhesive. I’m on dial-up while here at my parents’, so wasn’t able to watch them, but even just the idea is pretty cool.

When I sat down to enjoy the sunshine and do a bit of sketching in the Don Valley trails on Sunday, I chose a young sapling to sit in front of. Not for any particular characteristic of the tree, but just that I like to have something at my back. I didn’t pay much attention to the tree initially, and I hung my camera bag on a broken-off branch before sitting down. When I got up and reached for my bag, I happened to notice these lines on the bark.

They’re obviously made by some sort of insect. Curious to what it may have been, I started poking around the ‘net. The answer to this question was not nearly as easy to find as I had expected it to be. Between yesterday and then again today I’ve spent several hours typing in search terms into Google and checking out promising links. This is easily the longest I’ve spent on researching a post to this point, and I didn’t even come up with anything conclusive for all that effort.

Research for my posts usually starts with a single, rather vague, descriptive term. For instance, when I was researching the Black Knot information, my first term was “black crusty growth on twig”. You usually get a few misses at first before hitting on to what’s obviously the correct identification. In this case I started off with “bark miner”. I’m familiar with leaf miners, which create tunnels between the two surfaces of a leaf, and this looked very similar. It seemed like a pretty obvious connection, but the search produced no viable hits. I changed my approach. “mines under bark lines on surface insect branch”.

This turned up a lot of not very useful stuff, but did contain one page that had something. It was a fact sheet on the Allegheny Serviceberry. What does that have to do with insect mines? It had a section on pests. The first paragraph read, “Cambium miners cause concern when noticed but are not very damaging to the tree. The mines can extend from a twig all the way down to the roots. The mines form light-colored lines in the bark.” Aha! A lead!

So the next search term was “cambium miners”. The cambium is the layer of reproducing cells in a tree located between the outer bark and the inner hardwood which is the source of the tree’s outward growth. It’s just a narrow layer, and in a young thin-barked tree like ash, maple, birch, and other deciduous species, it’s pretty close to the surface. This seemed promising.

Most hits I found just simply called them cambium miners, without identifying the species or even the order of insects they belonged to. I didn’t find this especially useful. However, after poking through a number of hits I came across a page from an online resource called Tree Dictionary. The page seemed to be focused on pests of trees as well, and included a lot of information on various fungi. Also paragraphs on sapsuckers, squirrels, frost, beetles, and, the object of my search, cambium miners.

The page indicates that cambium miners are flies belonging to the genus Phytobia. The flies lay their eggs on branches near the top of the tree, and the young larvae mine their way through the cambium down toward the roots, where they stay till they pupate. There isn’t actually a lot of information on the life history of this genus on the web, at least that I turned up in my initial searches. I was able to determine that there are a number of different species that have different host preferences, and some are cambium miners while others are leaf miners.

Knowing the species of my tree would help. I’m not certain, as it’s a small sapling in the middle of winter with no leaves. I can rule out birch fairly safely, I would think, and cherry, because there aren’t any horizontal lines. Beech and maple would be grey. Hawthorn would have spines. But that still leaves me with an assortment of options, including common species like ash, and less common ones such as alder, hickory, etc. I’m leaning toward ash, given the location and its commonness.

On the website ForestPests.org I found an informative factsheet on the Ash Cambium Miner. The page indicates that the larvae of this fly mine in straight or serpentine tunnels near the top of the tree, but the further down they get (and presumably, the older they get), the more their tunnels take on a zig-zagging appearance until they’re distinctly so by the time they reach the roots, where they’ll spend about 10 months. They overwinter there, then exit the roots in late spring and pupate in the soil.

I continued to poke around, pressing on and changing the search terms to see if I could turn anything else up. I had a few other potential culprits, including flat-headed borers (metallic wood boring beetles, the group that includes Emerald Ash Borer), and small moths of the genus Cydia, but none of the online resources seemed to match as well. I’m still not positive on calling them Phytobia sp, either, given that I couldn’t find any resource showing their mines to be able to compare to the ones I photographed, but the information all seems to match pretty well.

Today I spent the day laying laminate floor in the family room at my parents’ house. I’m pretty sure that laminate wood flooring is a little like vinyl tile in that they make the wooden planks out of pressed particleboard (or something resembling it) and then print a design on top, rather than laying an actual wood veneer over it. However, I assume they use an actual image of woodgrain to create the print image, so the laminate planks represent actual woodgrain patterns.

What does this have to do with cambium miners? Well, on both of the sites mentioned above, they indicate that the mines left by the larvae get grown over as the tree continues to grow and result in small discolourations in the wood. These show up as small dark marks on stumps when the tree is cut or, as in the case here, in wooden planking, where they’re called “pith flecks”, among other names. They apparently don’t show up in ash wood very well, but are fairly noticeable in most other types of wood. I’m not sure what type of wood this laminate is supposed to be an imitation of, but it’s got a distinctly reddish tinge.

Here’s a close-up of the pith flecks in the woodgrain of the laminate print. You can see nearly all of them are associated with the tree-ring growth mark, where the larva would have been tunneling close to the surface of the bark (the dark growth line). A couple of the marks are further in; apparently there are some species that will occasionally feed in the xylem (the layer under the cambium) for short periods, and that could be what these are.

Despite that these marks are due to insect damage, they’re not generally considered defects of the wood by most lumber manufacturers, but they are recognized as such by the Fine Hardwood Veneer Association (who knew there was such a thing?). I suppose that, over the course of a tree’s life, there’s a good chance it will be infested at least once so it would be hard to completely eliminate the marks from wood products.

Insects. They’re everywhere.

This morning I got up early, leaving Blackburnian still asleep in bed, and slipped out the door with my camera and sketchbook to go to one of my favourite spots in the city. Unlike the Rouge, this area is just a short drive, perhaps ten minutes along in-town roads, located in a section of the Don River valley. I discovered it a couple of years ago, when I was hired by the city to do a report for them on one of their properties. This was the area I chose to use as a control site during my study. I chose it initially because it was un-groomed, natural and wild, and over the course of the next several months I really fell in love with the location.

It’s accessed from a small park and playground, through a short, narrow mini-ravine that runs between two rows of houses. The trails are used almost exclusively by the local residents for jogging and dog-walking. I encountered very few people on the trails during my surveys. This morning, in the hour and a half I’m there, I meet no one. This is one of the things I love about the place; it’s quiet, peaceful, relatively undisturbed, and you can almost forget you’re in the heart of the city.

Halfway down the entry trail I notice these snowballs. The sides of the mini-ravine here are steep, and evidently something, perhaps a fallen twig or bit of bark, began sliding down the side of the slope, gathering snow about it as it went. It’s not the typical snowball you see when snow rolls down a hill, and I have to assume that the object slid rather than rolled, and spun as it did so to create these neat doughnut shapes.

The entry trail meets up with the main network, and I turn to follow it to the north. It runs along the base of another set of homes. I think how magnificent the view from their back porches must be, and then I think they must command a real premium on house price for such a location. Indeed, most ravine-backing homes are way out of my price range in the city, usually starting at $500-600k for the small run-down places, and going up to well over a million for the really nice ones. Toronto is a wealthy city. It has to be, in order for so many people to live here, with property prices being what they are. In the neighbourhood where we rent you’re lucky to find anything in good shape for less than $300k. I couldn’t afford to buy here on my own. Even Blackburnian and I together would be hard-pressed to find something we could afford jointly. Who are these people, making all this money?

I turn west down a small side trail, and am afforded my only real view of the city as a backdrop to the park, with a few tall apartment buildings towering over the treetops, at the far side of the Don. A short distance down the trail and the city melts back into the trees, hidden from view, and forgotten, for the moment.

The side trail comes out at a bluff, overlooking a bend in the Don where a gravel bed has been exposed. During my surveys I always scanned the gravel for Killdeer or Spotted Sandpipers, but never saw either, despite it looking like a good spot for them. I did once see a Black-crowned Night Heron fishing from one of the low-hanging trees, but the bend, for all its nice scenery, was always disappointingly empty.

I pause, and look out over the river. The sun is peeking above the trees and casting a warm glow on the bare canopy of the forest across the way. It hasn’t yet reached the river, or even where I’m standing. I briefly consider stopping here, but decide I’d like to sit someplace in the sun, and move on.

The trail goes down a small incline (decline?) and where it levels out it passes through a small grove of spruce. Their lower branches have been pruned from them years ago to make room for trail users to pass through, which gives them an unusually domesticated look, for someplace far from the nearest backyard. In this natural tunnel I recall frequently encountering chickadees, kinglets, and Yellow-rumped Warblers during my spring surveys. There is no one here at the moment.

In other areas, though, the trees are full of song. The cardinals have woken with the dawn, and perch in the upper branches of the poplars, illuminated by the warm orange rays of the rising sun. There are at least a dozen of them, I estimate, throughout the area. They all belt out their declaration of possession of their claimed bits of woodland. “Cheer! Cheer! Whit-whit-whit-whit! … Birdy, birdy, birdy-birdy-birdy-birdy!”

The other birds join in. I hear a pair of White-breasted Nuthatches arguing back and forth at each other over the ownership of a particular patch of cedars, and briefly glimpse a short chase as they dash through a small clearing. A pair of male Downy Woodpeckers has at it over the attentions of a female, who seems rather blasé about the whole episode. House Finches fly over the site in groups of two or three, and I hear the odd male singing. Chickadees move through a patch of hawthorn, calling to one another, and a trio of crows perches atop the maples and caw loudly. The birds seem to be as happy about the sunny morning and approach of spring as I am.

I come out from the spruce grove along side the river, at a lower area along its banks. The river takes another turn here and is lost from sight, winding its way through the city toward Lake Ontario. It is beautiful here, natural and undisturbed, but along its length it will run through less pristine areas, ultimately coming out through an industrial zone at its mouth before exiting into the lake. A freeway runs north and south through a large part of the valley system, but is far enough away here that I don’t notice it. A rail bed also runs along the valley, and a train thunders by while I’m there. It’s just beyond the ridge, and I can’t see it, but I can certainly hear it. I’ve seen salmon in these parts of the river before, and it seems at odds with the surrounding city, particularly considering the state of the mouth of the river. Nature forges onward.

I decide to take a trail branch that I’ve never been down. On this section of the trail I had always been in the middle of my survey and was unable to follow the side branches. They were often muddy, too, compared to the main trail. However, a few people have been down here recently, and the snow is packed enough to walk along comfortably. I come through another small grove of spruce and the trail widens into a small open area. The sun is streaming in here, and the spruce protect me from the wind. The clearing feels cozy, and I decide this is the spot. I find a log to settle on, and pull out my sketchbook.

I am not ordinarily a field-sketcher. Usually I’m too busy watching birds or taking photos to settle down somewhere and sketch. I admire those who do, though. Debby at Drawing The Motmot is a fabulous field-sketcher. I absolutely love her rainforest studies, which are done in pen while sitting in the field, over as many as three days.

While I have the skill to execute those sorts of drawings, I am sure, I also know I don’t have the practice, or the patience, right now. There’s too much to do, to look at, and I haven’t disciplined myself to sit still long enough to study the landscape and develop the eye necessary to render such detail so accurately. I content myself to sitting for perhaps 20 minutes, soaking up the warm sun, and casually sketching the trail in front of me. Perhaps I’ll make an effort this year to pause more often and sketch a little more.