the Marvelous in nature

A week and a bit ago, when I was down at TTPBRS to allow the coordinator a much-needed day off, we caught a Rusty Blackbird. It was a rather slow morning, we hadn’t caught many birds, so this caused a bit of excitement. Although Red-winged Blackbirds are a dime a dozen, Rustys are the opposite. We see them every season, but in very small numbers, rarely more than one or two at a time, and usually only a handful over the course of the whole season.

This year the water levels are very high on the lake, possibly the highest we’ve seen them in the five years we’ve been there so far. A couple of our net lanes are located close to the water’s edge, and as the water level has crept up, the lanes have become flooded, such that we now require rubber boots to be able to wade in to check them. This is great Rusty Blackbird habitat, as they, like their cousins the Red-wings, are partial to water, and indeed this was the net the Rusty was caught in.

As we do with all birds, we banded him and took a few measurements and then let him go (after an obligatory, but short, photo shoot). He flew up into a nearby birch where he perched for a few moments, straightening out his feathers and checking out this new accessory on his leg. I couldn’t tell how old he was specifically; most songbirds can be aged as far as whether they were a baby or a parent last summer because of the way the two age classes moult their feathers (adults generally moult everything, while young birds only replace a subset of their nest feathers prior to migrating). However blackbirds are one of those exceptions to the rule, and all I could say was that I knew he wasn’t a 2008 hatchling.

In the top photo you can see the rusty tips to the glossy black feathers that give the species its name. We tend to think of a lot of species as having “breeding” and “winter” plumages. In most cases, these breeding plumages are obtained through a second moult in the spring. However, there are a few that only have one moult a year, in the fall, generally before they migrate. Their breeding plumage is obtained through the general wearing down of the feather tips over the winter. European Starlings are a good example of this that most people are familiar with. In the fall the birds replace all their feathers with fresh, white-tipped ones. Over the winter the white tips wear off revealing the oily-black breeding plumage. Snow Buntings are another, rather dramatic example of this type of plumage “change”. In the case of Rusty Blackbirds, their rusty tips wear down to form their black breeding plumage. This individual is an adult female that we banded a couple of years ago in the fall. This year’s male is the first that I’ve banded in the spring. Although we see them both seasons, they’re ordinarily a fall capture.

Rustys are just migrants through our area. They do breed in southern Ontario, but only once you get up onto the rocky Canadian Shield. There they favour forested wetlands and swamps, particularly fens, bogs and muskeg. In the recently published Ontario Breeding Bird Atlas, the southernmost record for the species were concentrated around Algonquin Provincial Park, a huge expanse of protected boreal forest about three hours north of Toronto, just a few shades shy of Yellowstone National Park in size. They nest as far north as Hudson Bay, where they tend to breed in muskeg along creeksides. They reach their highest breeding abundance in the Hudson Bay Lowlands, where they can be relatively common, though never as abundant even in their peak areas as Red-winged Blackbirds are south of the boreal forest.

Population monitoring surveys such as the Christmas Bird Count and Breeding Bird Survey have shown a rather alarming trend for the Rusty Blackbird. Since BBS counts started in the 1960s, the species has declined by about 95%. Put in other words, only 5% of the population that existed in the 1960s still remains today. The reason for this incredible decline remains a bit of a mystery, as other species that share their habitat and food preferences on the breeding grounds have not shown the same dramatic trends, although many species that breed in boreal wetlands have been declining to some degree. This may be in part due to acidification of boreal wetlands by acid rain (the limestone rock base south of the shield does a lot to neutralize the acids in the water here, but on the shield the rock is granite which doesn’t have the same properties, so groundwater becomes acidic), or, more recently, chemical or physical changes in boreal wetlands as a result of global warming. But it doesn’t explain the huge decrease in numbers of the Rusty Blackbird.

The answer may instead lie on the wintering grounds. In the non-breeding season blackbirds and related species will congregate to roost in flocks of often hundreds of thousands of birds. They target the waste grain left behind in harvested agricultural fields, but also become a pest to growing crops, particularly ripening corn and sunflower seeds. Blackbirds aren’t protected by the same laws of the Migratory Bird Act that cover other songbirds, and they’re often persecuted as agricultural pests. Surfactants are sprayed on roosting winter colonies that disrupt the birds’ natural water-repellent protection, and the birds succumb to the elements. Despite that Rusty Blackbirds don’t actually feed in agricultural fields very often (even in the winter they prefer wet woods for foraging), they tend to join these communal roosts at night, and so are targeted by the same control methods.

Virtually all species of blackbird are in some level of long-term decline (this includes the widespread and widely abundant Red-winged Blackbird, which is nonetheless declining as well). Why the Rusty should have been so dramatically affected when other birds haven’t been is hard to say, and is part of the mystery behind their population crash, however another likely factor is the gradual loss of wet woodland habitat on their wintering grounds as it’s converted for agriculture and development. It may be that a combination of breeding ground and wintering ground factors are coming in to play to cause the species’ decline.

Because the cause of their decline is still uncertain, it is difficult to form a plan of action to protect the species and bolster its numbers. All we can really do for now is to try to protect the birds on their wintering grounds, maintain the habitat they require there and during migration, and continue to monitor their populations.

It’s sad to think that once upon a time, not so long ago, Rusty Blackbirds may have rivaled some of the other blackbird species in numbers during migration and the winter. Nowadays, it’s a real treat to spot one of these guys as they make their perilous way north and south.

Last week, after my mom and I visited the pond with the salamanders, we stopped by a little creek that was just around the corner. It’s Silver Creek, which is one of the primary tributaries of the Credit River, which itself runs into Lake Ontario. Silver Creek joins the Credit just south of Georgetown, a small town west of Toronto, not far from where my parents live. It runs north through Georgetown, passing the little hamlet of Ballinifad, to its headwaters… or I suppose it’s the other way around, running south from the headwaters, to join the Credit. Either way, it’s one of the primary creeks in my parents’ “neighbourhood”.

The Credit River was one of the rivers that was part of an Atlantic Salmon reintroduction program launched in 2006 due to the quality of its water. The salmon can occasionally be seen migrating up its Silver Creek tributary, and there are signs in areas where the creek passes under roads or through parks indicating that it’s a salmon-spawning creek. It’s a good creek for salmon, with the sort of stony bottoms that create many nooks and crannies for spawning. The same characters that make it good for salmon make it good for other aquatic invertebrates and fish.

We stopped at this beautiful stone bridge and hiked down to the water’s edge. The water comes over the waterfall above and then slows down (a little) in this broader area just before the bridge. The slower water allows creatures to move around between and under the stones where in the faster currents they would be swept away. It also allowed us to step in to the water without being knocked over or our boots filling with water. Or my mom’s boots, anyway - I stood on the bank. Mom waded in and started turning over stones while I held the net a short ways downstream.

It didn’t look like we’d caught anything at first, but as I pulled the net out of the water I could see something large moving amongst the debris. We put some water in a tub and dumped the net contents in. To our surprise, there was a lot more than we initially thought. The large moving thing turned out to be this giant crayfish… in fact, all the moving things were crayfish, of varying sizes. The biggest one was dark, and very big. I can’t believe I didn’t see it go into the net when Mom turned over the stone. Mom decided she didn’t really want to lift up any more rocks.

In contrast, the little guys were quite little, perhaps only 1.5cm (less than 3/4″). There are about 500 species of crayfish in the world, about 350 of which occur in North America, where they’re also called crawfish or crawdad. I had no idea there were so many species of them. The largest is found in Tasmania and may grow up to 40cm (15.5″), the smallest is in the southeastern US and only reaches 2.5cm (1″). On average, most species grow to about 7-8cm (2.5-3″), sometimes reaching 12cm. Our big one was definitely one of the larger guys.

So I don’t know if what I had in the tub were different species or just different life stages. McMaster University lists 9 species occurring in Ontario, of which 6 are stream-dwellers. Many species will reach sexual maturity and mate the fall after they hatch, though fertilization (the female holds the sperm internally over the winter) and egg-laying usually occur in the spring. The female carries the eggs attached to her belly until they hatch 2-20 weeks later (what a time span! I assume that to be a range across species, although water temperature is also a factor). The young stay on the female till after their second moult. A crayfish lives on average about two years.

Crayfish are crustaceans, closely related to lobsters, and are in fact eaten in much of the world. In the US, they’re mostly found on plates in the southeast, prepared similarly to the lobster. Wikipedia makes the interesting observation, “Notably, in Canada the crawdad is considered interchangeable with the potato.” You know… this one seems to have slipped my observation. I use potatoes.

They’re also occasionally found as pets in aquariums. They’re easy to keep, feeding on shrimp pellets, tropical fish food, algae wafers, or other easy sources. They’re also not opposed to taking small fish if the opportunity arises, and may deplete an aquarium’s community rather quickly. Most Ontario species eat small invertebrates or fresh vegetation.

The eyes of a crayfish are on movable stalks that they manipulate to look around, rather than moving the eyeball (or the retina, like the jumping spider). They have two pairs of antennae, which they use for sensing their environment. They breathe through gills that are located on their frontmost legs (which are also used for manipulating food, and are in front of even their large pinchers); you can see them poking out from under his chin here.

After examining our catch and marveling at the size of the big guy, we gently released them back into the water to carry on with what they were doing. Which was probably sitting under a rock waiting for food to float by.

This past week we’ve had beautifully warm temperatures. Up to 20 C (68 F) or more on some afternoons, warm enough to wear a t-shirt (some warm-blooded types might also pull out the shorts or skirt, but I need for it to be at least 25 before I’d feel comfortable with bare legs. Either that, or sitting in the sun with no breeze). These warm daytime temperatures translated into warm nighttime temperatures - a regular occurrence come late May, but in April are worth taking advantage of for mothing. Some early-spring species live for these warm April evenings, and there are many that are more difficult to find as the season wears on.

As indicated last post, early this week I was at my parents’, out in the middle of the countryside. The rural setting there, it turned out, and the relatively diverse habitats on the property resulted in an excellent collection of species observed over the two nights. I ran the blacklight and sheet in the self-portrait of the first photo for a few hours of the evening, shutting down about midnight, and then had my trap set up which ran the whole night. In the pic it’s shown with a blacklight, but I actually had the more powerful mercury vapour bulb in it, which I think helped with the night’s catch. Although the blacklighted sheet didn’t do too poorly, either, really. It wasn’t a wide array of equipment; I also had two more blacklights and an extra sheet to what I put out, but I didn’t want to have to spend a lot of time taking it all down. And, as it turned out, I didn’t really need it anyway.

I ended up with a conservative estimate of 42 species, but there was probably a few more than that - I haven’t yet ID’d all the little small guys, and there’s a good chance that, with my inexperience, I may have written off some stuff as variations of other more common species. This isn’t too shabby for mid-April, as I understand it. Most of these species have emerged from overwintering as larvae or pupae, but a few overwinter as adults. They tend to be the raggedy ones, at least in the spring. Later on in the year the raggedy moths are just worn with age. As I photographed them I released them on to a concrete statue of a raccoon my mom has beside their front stoop. Because they go into a sort of torpid state they didn’t move very far after I placed them on the statue.

This was possibly my favourite moth from the two evenings. I caught five of them total, three on one night, and two the other (it’s possible that one or both of the two were among the three caught the next night, I suppose). It’s a Lettered Sphinx, one of the smaller of the sphinx moths, and fairly blandly coloured compared to many other sphinxes. I loved the way it curls its abdomen up when at rest. I didn’t realize what it was at first, something about photographs of sphinxes makes them look bigger than they really are. This was actually one of the larger moths I caught, but it was still less than 4cm (perhaps 1.5″) long. For whatever reason, these moths only came to the mercury vapour bulb at the trap, I didn’t have any at the sheet.

Another that only came to the trap was this Dogwood Thyatirid. Considering the abundance of Flowering Dogwood, the larvae’s host plant, at my parents’, it wasn’t a great surprise to discover five in the trap over the two nights, either. They’re a pretty nice moth, with a hint of pink to the whiteish patches that just doesn’t really come through in the photos well.

This moth was the opposite, I had five individuals over two nights that only ever came to the blacklighted sheet. Now why would that be? I hypothesize that the blacklight produces a slightly different wavelength of UV light that the different species orient to with greater or less preference. But really I don’t know. This striking green moth is The Joker, and was the very first moth on the very first night. Considering that up to that point most of the moths I’d seen were rather drab, this really made my evening. And, I gather, they only get better from here.

Here’s another one that I was pleased to see. It belongs to the genus Caloptilia, and it’s tiny, less than a centimeter long. This group of moths are among the leaf miners that create trails through deciduous leaves. Like the sphinx moths, when I first saw photos of these guys I thought they were substantially larger than they really are. I thought they were pretty neat-looking, propped up on stilts as they seemed to be. I got one to a sheet last fall, and immediately recognized it (it’s really a rather distinctive shape and posture), but was a little shocked at how tiny it was. Little moths (the so-called micromoths) are tricky to photograph because they tend to come out of torpor very quickly, basically as soon as you disturb them, because their small size means their bodies warm up and resume normal function very quickly. I got two of these guys, both in the trap. The first one I only got a photo of it on the carton it was resting on while in the trap; as soon as I nudged it to try to get it onto something more photogenic it took off. This one is waving its antennae furiously as it contemplates leaving.

This last moth I like because of the intricate mottling and nice mossy-green shading to the pattern. It’s a Grote’s Sallow, and I think I got five between the two nights (what is it about the number five?). Imagine this guy tucked into a crevice on an old, jagged-barked tree trunk. He’d blend right in and you’d never know he was there.

It’s hard to pick just a few species to highlight of the dozens I got, but those were definitely among my favourites. Those interested in checking out more of what I got can visit my moths series on Flickr.

I’ll wrap up with this photo of Lettered Sphinxes snickering behind a Curve-toothed Geometer’s back.

In the last week or so I’ve managed to accumulate quite a backlog of potential post subjects. This is largely because I’ve been out looking at things, rather than sitting indoors in front of a computer, and with spring progressing there’s the potential for a lot of interesting observations. For the same reason that I’m getting lots of good stuff, I’m also falling behind on writing about it - it’s hard to write when you’re not at the computer! I rather suspect that a number of these subjects will be tucked away for safekeeping, to be pulled out at a future date when things aren’t coming quite so fast and furious, or when I’m stuck indoors and haven’t been out to observe much. Julie Zickefoose refers to a person who sequesters posts for lean times (such as herself) as a “blog ant”, referring to the ant’s habit of building a larder in the underground (think of the Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper). I’m probably more akin to a packrat than an ant - an ant, it would suggest, is discerning. My blogging habit more closely resembles my living habits, where I store things that may come in useful, and when I decide I need something I go back and look over my cache for something that might work.

None of that has anything to do with this post, of course. I’m not writing about packrats, or ants (although I do have some ant photos tucked away). Rather, today’s post is on salamanders, who I’m pretty sure don’t participate in caching behaviour. While visiting my parents this week, my mom and I went out to a local site where she often does pond study field outings with schoolgroups for a local non-profit. It’s a relatively small, but still nice pond, set in the woods back from the road. They usually scoop up some water or sediment and poke through it to see what they can find, learning about the aquatic environments in the meantime. So, to be prepared for what they might encounter, my mom wanted to scout the site and see what was happening.

Along with a handful of different invertebrate species, there were a couple species of frogs heard, and these guys. This is a Red-spotted Newt, a subspecies of the widespread Eastern Newt. A newt is actually a type of salamander, one belonging to the family Salamandridae. The Eastern Newt is the only representative of this family in North America, although they’re fairly widespread on other continents, primarily in the northern hemisphere. There are in fact 10 different families of salamanders, but the other ones we typically think of here in North America, such as the Jefferson’s or the Spotted, are mole salamanders, family Ambystomatidae. Most other salamander families aren’t differentiated by name the way the newts are, however.

The Red-spotted Newt inhabits still or slow-moving waters such as ponds or small streams. They generally prefer moist woodlands, with sufficient debris or submerged vegetation in the water to be able to hide under. The ones we saw were all doing that, they’d cruise languidly along in the warm surface waters (the water was less than a foot deep in the very gradually-sloping pond edges, so it was pretty much all surface water) but as soon as I made an attempt to come in with the net they’d dive under the leaf litter at the bottom. They never went very far, but they disappeared completely.

They eat aquatic insects and insect larvae, small molluscs and crustaceans, and even small frogs and tadpoles. They have an amazing lifespan - females can live up to 12 years in the wild, males up to 15. I suppose this difference could be due to the greater energy demands on a female in creating and laying eggs, versus the relatively energy-”cheap” effort of creating sperm. One study notes that female survivorship from year to year is generally lower than that of males, though a reason isn’t provided.

At just 7-10cm (2.5-4 in), they’re not large creatures. They also aren’t very difficult to catch, once you know how. I started out trying to catch them by surprise by swooping in quickly before they could dart away. Although I successfully got the first one this way, the drag of the net through the water reduced its speed to the point where speed was not the answer anymore; the salamanders were all easily able to dart off before the net reached them. Then I discovered that if you came in quite slowly, they would just sit there, and you could practically scoop them up without them moving.

The species has three life stages. The first is as “larvae”, the salamander equivalent of a tadpole. Eggs are laid in the spring, and take about a month to hatch into young. These are gilled, and spend the next 2-3 months in the water hunting small aquatic prey. They hatch at less than a centimeter (less than 1/2″), but grow quickly; within a couple months they’ve reached nearly 4 centimeters (just under 2″). At this point they metamorphize into their second stage, pictured above.

The second stage is called a Red Eft, and is terrestrial. They can remain in this stage for as many as 4-7 years, depending on latitude and the richness of the local habitat. This is the most commonly seen stage of the species’ life history, likely because of the bright colouration and also their on-land habits. It is in this stage that dispersal takes place, with individuals undertaking long treks of 800m or more where they may encounter new ponds. While their olive-green back is useful for camouflage in the water, on land they have a different strategy. Newts in non-larval stages have toxic skin that is used as a deterrent to predators, but the skin of the efts is ten times more toxic than in the adults. Their bright orange colouration is a warning to creatures wanting to make a meal of them (this special warning colouration is termed “aposematic”).

Of course, I didn’t know this at the time that I was looking at them, and I happily (though gently) picked them up to get a couple of side-on photos that better showed their faces and bellies than a top-down view of them sitting in the water. Fortunately, I suffered no ill effects from the encounter. The back is more toxic than the belly, and despite this defense, newts are often preyed upon; predators get around the toxicity by targeting the newt’s underside. The newts rely on a learned avoidance by predators, where young predators that attempt to take a newt for dinner will remember the distastefulness of it and not try any others. This may result in the loss of one newt, but the protection of many others. Some predator species have an innate avoidance of aposematically-coloured creatures.

The eft I caught was found in the water. This is an unusual spot for one, as they generally stick to the land, and it could be that it was preparing to metamorphize into the third life stage, the adult (perhaps resulting in a lowered toxicity level). Only the olive adults mate, which means that sexual maturity isn’t reached until often three or four years of age, or potentially up to seven or more if the efts metamorphize late. I wonder how old some of the newts I was looking at actually were.

The adults have an amazing homing ability, like that of homing pigeons. Displace a newt from familiar territory and it can still find its way back. It orients using magnetic fields, but also uses its sense of smell (to detect water) and sight (to orient against the sun) to guide it, although in experimental tests even newts with no smell or sight could successfully find water. Displaced newts will automatically orient downhill, which is reasonable, since water usually lies in the lower areas. I wouldn’t've thought that newts would find themselves displaced often enough to have needed to evolve such a complicated system.

I probably saw more salamanders in that single outing than I had in my life prior to that combined. They don’t occur in the ponds on my parents’ property (or, if they do, certainly not in great numbers like they were here, and don’t hang out in the open). I will admit to never having made a special outing to look for them before, either, though. As is the case with so many things, if you actually go looking for something, you can amaze yourself with how common it actually is.

Yesterday I returned to my parents’ for a couple of days, and took advantage of the warm weather last night to try for some moths. There’s a great diversity of habitat here, with a mature mixed forest on one side, open scrubby areas to another, of course the wet swamp in the corner of the property. So I was hopeful for some good stuff, and I wasn’t disappointed. That all will be the subject of another post. I’ll be setting up again tonight (I head back home tomorrow), to hopefully add to the list.

I ran my new trap overnight, but I also put out a sheet and blacklight. I got a number of species at the blacklight that didn’t show up in the trap, and some nice ones among them. However, the most interesting thing to come to the sheet last night wasn’t a moth at all. Most of the time I just glance over the beetles and wasps and midges (I can only focus on one taxon at a time, and currently it’s the moths). But I couldn’t ignore this guy. I was leaning forward investigating some moth on the sheet when a very loud buzzing whirr whizzed by my head and flopped on the ground in front of the sheet. Out of the corner of my eye I thought it was a sphinx moth or something big like that, but when I stooped to investigate, it most definitely was not. My second impression was of a cockroach, since it had the same dorso-ventrally flattened body.

But it’s neither. In fact, this is a Giant Water Bug, also called Giant Electric Light Bug, after its habit of coming to artificial lights. It was rather alarming in its size and apparent ferocity. Fortunately, the same features made it very easy to identify. I got a clear plastic container and brought it inside to show my mom. She joked that she wasn’t going outside at night again.

It’s about 6cm (or 2.5″) in length, with these giant broad modified front legs that it uses to secure its food. As its name indicates, it’s an aquatic insect, primarily, associated with swamps and wetlands. Normally it lives in or near the water, preying on aquatic insects, but supplementing this diet with opportunistically-caught vertebrates such as frogs or small fish. It uses a tubular rostrum to suck out the body fluids of its victims. It can inflict a painful bite, and so also has the name “Giant Toebiter”, which I would assume dates back to the days when kids were more likely to wade into mucky water barefoot (I used to do that as a kid, carefree about the creatures inhabiting it; I’m more cautious now, but it’s more because of concerns over submerged or buried sharp things, especially glass or metal garbage).

Check out the giant eyes, which it obviously uses in stalking its prey. Plus the giant single claws at the end of each leg. I’m not sure what the white goop on its one eye is. The bugs are found across North America; there’s actually three species that are similar in appearance (I’m not sure which one I have here), and which overlap in range. Young look similar, but are obviously much smaller and take smaller prey. It takes them five moults to reach adulthood, which they do in a season; they overwinter buried in the mud as an adult. This site suggests that adults are edible, but I’m not sure I’d find them much of a delicacy.

When I copied the photos to my computer and looked at them closely, I discovered that the bug had been carrying what I took to be mites. You can also see a couple of large ones in the second photo, where it has its wings spread. I have no idea what species they are, or even if they are really mites, and not fleas or some other parasite like that. It seemed to have a good infestation going.

It’s amazing how it’s possible to overlook something that you would think would be quite obvious. If it comes to lights, why have we never seen it at the porch light? And being so large, you’d think we would have noticed it one of these times when down poking around the ponds. But it somehow escaped our notice to now.

I was down at the station yesterday, one of two days a week I’ve been going down. It was an absolutely lovely day, cool at startup, but not cold, and warm enough to strip down to a single layer by the time we wrapped up at noon. I pulled out my sunglasses and wore a ball cap instead of a toque for the first time this spring. Naturally, on these first, early sunny days of spring I can never seem to remember to pull out the sunscreen, and so I inevitably get lightly sunburned. At least it’s not the painful, peely sort.

Despite a relative dearth of birds yesterday, there was a good diversity of species. One of the birds hanging about the station was this beautiful Red-tailed Hawk. Red-tails are rather uncommon birds at the station. This isn’t necessarily reflected in the log book, where we often record hawks sailing over high. It’s also not really applicable to the park as a whole, where there’s usually one or two hawks hunting the broad, open meadow areas that cover most of the land area of the park. However, down on the station’s peninsula it’s mostly early successional forest, with enough trees and shrubs to make it less than ideal for the usual hunting tactics of a Red-tailed Hawk.

This guy (or girl; although hawks are dimorphic, it’s by size and not plumage, and a hawk sitting on a branch fifteen feet away just looks large no matter which way you cut it) flew right up and perched just beside the station building, where I was in the process of doing some training with a new volunteer. We both stopped and ogled the hawk while it sat there, since it’s not often that a wild raptor will oblige you with such flattering views. I did my best to run off a few shots, despite the backlighting. A moment or two later he decided further down the road might be better, and he took off from the branch, soaring by just a few feet above my head, close enough that had I desired to (and had the reflexes to), I could have reached out and snagged a few feathers at his passing.

I’ve handled a Red-tail before, though - we banded one in 2004, my second fall at the station, when I was there in official capacity as an assistant (now I’m an unofficial, volunteer assistant instead). Boy, do I ever look young in that photo. Normally birds this large don’t stick in the net very long, if they even fall into the net in the first place; just as often they’ll bounce right off the mesh and carry on. If they do fall into the net, they’ll likely take a minute or two to flap their way to the end of the net, where they can find some tension in the mesh to pull against to launch themselves out. This assuming that they don’t bounce out before reaching the end. In the case of the above, one of our volunteers happened to be just approaching the net at the time when the hawk flew in. A flailing hawk in a net is extremely dangerous, so we ask our volunteers to call for myself or the coordinator rather than tackle it themselves, but she was able to get help over very quickly. It’s the only Red-tail banded by the station to date, and one of just three large hawks (the other two being a Cooper’s in 2003, and a Northern Harrier in 2005). However, if this Red-tail continues to hang about low the way he has been the last few days, it’s likely that eventually he’ll blunder into a net. Hopefully we’ll be there to snag him.

A bit later we observed him fly from his perch in a tree down to the leaves on the ground in an open patch of trees. He hopped about here, clambering over sticks and tangles, looking for I’m not quite sure what. Insects? Although they prey primarily on rodents, Red-tails are opportunistic hunters, and will eat large bugs like grasshoppers if they’re available. They’ll also take rabbits, which can be very abundant at the park, but I doubt he’d be hunting those on foot. I don’t think he was after grasshoppers this early in the season, either. Snakes are a possibility, I did see a few out in the warm weather, and they’d still be a bit sluggish in the early morning cool. You can see a smear of blood on its upper breast in the first photo, so it was obviously finding something to eat down there.

I never actually saw him snag anything while he was on the ground, so it might be he was just looking. On the other hand, he stayed pretty well hidden behind a low ridge and some trees the whole time, so it was difficult for me to see everything he was up to. It may be that this particular individual was less dominant to the ones that frequent the meadow habitat, and was here less by choice than because he was forced out of the other areas. Or perhaps he just desired a change of scenery.

A minute or two later, after deciding there wasn’t much worth looking for down on the ground, the hawk turned about and took off - once again straight toward me. Red-tails can travel at up to 20 to 40 mph (30 to 60 km/h) at cruising speed when flying. I doubt that this guy was going that quickly, but he was moving too fast for me to be able to get my focus adjusted well.

I managed to snap this shot just as he soared by me; a little further this time than the first, I probably couldn’t have touched him, but it was still closer than I usually find hawks flying by me! I got the impression that while he was wary of humans, and kept an eye on us, he wasn’t terribly concerned. He was down there again today (I wasn’t), flying about the area, and demonstrating a similar coolness toward the people.

He swooped up to perch in a tree not far from me, before departing for parts unknown.

In the very early spring, one of my favourite plants to look for starting to wake up is the Pussy Willow. In my childhood I have fond memory of a large one that grew beside the second pond, in the horse’s field. I’m not sure why, because it wasn’t a tree I ever actually did anything with, not like the tree one has their childhood treehouse built in, or a favourite swing, or that one liked to climb, etc. It was just always there, and every spring it would be one of the first trees to waken from dormancy, putting out new soft buds. There were probably others in the area as well, but this was The pussy willow.

Back in mid-February, I actually found this one struggling to bud along one of the trails on the Rouge, the day Blackburnian and I went hiking there. Mid-February seems a bit early, and it may have been woken during one of the mild spells we had. Generally I think of them starting to come out mid-March, with the catkins reaching their peak in April.

Along with the dominant cottonwoods and birch, willow is one of the prominent tree species at TTPBRS. Most are the non-fuzzy kind, but there are a few Pussy Willow here and there as well. By the start of the spring season, they were well in “bloom”.

There’re three species of willow that have been given the common name of Pussy Willow, but the one that occurs in North America is Salix discolor. It’s only found in northern North America, through Canada and the northern States. Like most willows, it’s found primarily in wet habitats such as river and pond edges, swamps and bogs.

Like the sumac, all willows, including the Pussy Willow, are dioecious, meaning a plant is either male or female, but never sports both sexes of flower. The male flowers produce long pollen-producing anthers, which give them a fuzzy yellow appearance once they’re blooming. The female flowers develop stigmas, long thin tubes that lead down to the flower’s ovary, which are greenish-yellow and lack the fuzziness of the male flowers.

Willow bark contains the compound salicin, which is closely related to aspirin. Native Americans used to harvest the willows and extract the compound from the bark for use as a painkiller and fever reducer. Branches with the fuzzy white catkins are often used in flower arrangements in the spring, and harvested stems can be forced to flower in the greenhouse by manipulating light periods.

The Pussy Willow, like all willows, is a prolific grower and will grow a new tree from a severed branch if provided water. Although not a Pussy Willow, I recall as a child the willow trees along the road being trimmed around the power lines, and we ended up with a log with a small branch, probably no more than an inch in diameter, growing out of it. The log sat for a while on the lawn, and the branch flourished. Eventually my parents buried it beside one of the little ponds. This was perhaps 20 years ago or so; the tree is now easily over 20m (60 ft) tall and measures a foot and a half in diameter at chest height.

The name Pussy Willow, of course, comes from the soft buds that sort of resemble cats’ paws, in a very abstract way… they’re both soft and fuzzy. The pointedness of them makes me think more rabbit paws, actually, but I suppose Bunny Willow didn’t roll off the tongue as nicely? These would make nicer keychains, though.

The buds are eaten by birds, including finches and grouse, in the spring. Their dense branches make great shelter and nest sites as well. The leaves are a food source for caterpillars of a number of butterflies, and the male flowers are visited by pollinators such as bumblebees.

Personally, I like to gently stroke the deliciously soft catkins against my cheek. I’m not one for fur, but I’d love to have a muff made out of these - with the fur on the inside, of course!

I’ve had this cocoon sitting around since mid-March, a loose end without a blog companion to parade the web with. I also didn’t know what it was, although I imagined a Google search would turn something up quickly enough. However, recently I had two things happen. The first was I finally received my copy of Stephen Marshall’s book Insects (the first copy that was sent was lost by Canada Post, something I’ve never personally had happen before; the seller was kind enough to courier the second parcel overnight - I didn’t specifically need it overnight, but I thought it was a nice gesture). In flipping through it recently I came across practically the exact photo of the little cocoon I’d taken. The second was that I got some partnering photos to post it with. They’ll come next.

This first one, above, is the itsy-bitsy cocoon of a cedar leaf miner. It’s one or the other of a couple moth species from the genus Argyresthia that occur around here, but likely Argyresthia thuiella. This little moth is tiny. You can tell just by looking at its cocoon that it’s going to turn into a small moth. It has a wingspan (not length) of about 8mm as an adult. I happened across it while looking for bagworm moth cases (I didn’t find any), and just by chance spotted a little dash of white on the underside of a cedar branch.

You can notice the dead brown sections of cedar “leaf” nearby. These are areas that have been mined by the larva of the moth. On a deciduous leaf you’d see little trails, but the structure of the evergreen leaf hides it. Larvae overwinter inside the mined tunnels, then come out to pupate in late March or April, with adults emerging in May to June and hanging around for a couple months. They lay eggs mid-summer, and the larvae, once they hatch, spend the rest of the fall munching on cedar leaves. They overwinter in the tunnel and the cycle begins again. I gather that at the peak of their flight season, approaching a cedar where they’re gathering and laying eggs can result in momentary clouds of moths as they take off at the disturbance and swirl before landing again.

This second photo I encountered while tracking the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker at TTPBRS last week. It’s the cocoon of a silk moth, I’m pretty sure a Polyphemus Moth. I know that the Polyphemus occurs down there because several years ago, in the first fall season I was volunteering there, we found one of the caterpillars dangling in a mist net, either having fallen off a branch above, or dropped by a bird when the bird that was carrying it flew into the net (there was no bird in the net, so if that was the case, the bird had escaped by the time we checked it). We took the caterpillar home with us, curious about what it was. Shortly after bringing it home it spun itself a cocoon, which sat for some time on the top of a dresser. When it finally emerged, it had turned into a beautiful, big, rich brown moth with gorgeous big eyespots on its hindwings. In sharp contrast to the previous moth, this one has a wingspan of nearly 6 inches.

The name Polyphemus comes from the mythical cyclops with the same name, mentioned in The Odyssey by Homer, and presumably refers to the moth’s giant eyespots. It’s the most common and widespread of the silk moths found pretty much across the continent north into southern Canada. There’s a neat series of photos of a newly-emerged adult moth at BugGuide.net. When a moth or butterfly first leaves its cocoon its wings are small and crumpled. The moth then has to pump haemolymph (the same blood-substitute body fluid that the jumping spider uses to jump) into its wings to extend them before they dry. If they dry before they’re fully filled out, or if the moth is in cramped quarters without room to extend them, the wings will be deformed and the moth most likely unable to fly.

This last one… I don’t know what it is. When poking around the sides of the building at TTPBRS (the same building where I found the jumping spider), I found dozens of these little coils of sand grains stuck to the walls. They weren’t especially clustered, although they did seem to mostly be on the south and west sides of the building (the sunny sides). They’re only 7-8mm in diameter. I thought they were the neatest little things, and whatever made them had to be fairly common. The closest thing I could find was the cocoons of antlions, which make spherical balls of sand, but they’re found actually in the sand, not stuck to a wall, and they’re round, not coiled. I posted an ID request to BugGuide.net, and will add an edit if I figure it out.

Edit: I have an answer! The folks at BugGuide.net have come through: it’s the cocoon of the Snailcase Bagworm, Apterona helix. It belongs to the same family, Psychidae, as the bagworm moth I posted about previously. It was accidentally introduced to North America from Europe in the 1940s, and is now found in many states and provinces on both sides of the continent. The coolest thing about this species is there’re no males - the females reproduce parthenogenically (unfertilized eggs). Also cool, the adults are wingless, and the moths spend their entire lives within their case, only crawling out once they’ve laid their eggs, at which point they die.

The first wildflower I see every spring is the above, Coltsfoot, Tussilago farfara. Even before the Bloodroot starts unfurling, or the trilliums open up, there’s the bright yellow flower heads of the Coltsfoot, pushing up between the brown leaves of last autumn. Like many of our wildflowers, Coltsfoot isn’t native to North America. It’s funny, all the wildflowers that I think of when I think of a summer meadow, things like Queen Anne’s Lace, or Butter-and-eggs, Viper’s Bugloss, or Chicory - they’re all introduced from Eurasia. Which makes you wonder what inhabited the meadows in the summer before they got here. Coltsfoot was introduced to Canada in the 1920s, and is now found in most provinces.

The flowers superficially resemble dandelions, and can be mistaken for them. Like dandelions, they belong to the aster family. Asters can be identified by having a group of central flowers that form a “capitulum”. In a plant like the coneflower, the capitulum can be tall and pronounced. In the daisy, it’s flat, or slightly domed. The flowers can by tiny, looking to the naked eye like a stippled but solid surface, or they can be pronounced, giving the coneflower its spikey appearance, but in any case they’re always present. The “petals” surrounding the capitulum are actually bracts, modified leaves that are frequently brightly coloured to present the appearance of a large flower head, widening the surface area that attracts pollinators. If you remove all the little tiny bracts from the coltsfoot, there’s not a lot of flower left to attract insects.

Coltsfoot is usually found growing in large patches. This is because the plant grows and spreads from rhizomes, a “root” network (actually a type of horizontal stem) that has the ability to send up new shoots at a distance from the parent plant. All of the flowers in the above photo likely belong to the same plant.

It has the ability to grow in poor-quality soils, such as roadsides and waste places, and probably explains why it does so well out at TTPBRS relative to other flowers, as the primary soil substrate there is sand. It can often be found growing in gravel pits, and frequently rhizomes that are carried away with a load of gravel will start up a new plant where the stone is deposited, aiding in the species’ dispersion. Tilling can have the same effect in agricultural fields.

The plant does also produce seeds, although seed production is a less important form of reproduction. The seed heads of the plant resemble those of a spent dandelion, white and fluffy. However, Coltsfoot will begin to go to seed before dandelion is really beginning to bloom.

Coltsfoot puts up flowers first thing, even before it grows any foliage. Food, in the form of starches, is stored in the rhizomes over the summer, allowing the flowers to form in the following spring before the plant begins photosynthesizing. A potato is an example of a starchy storage system used by the plant for future growth (in the potato’s case the tuber is from a stolon, not a rhizome, but same basic purpose). Usually the plant’s leaves only begin to appear after the flower has matured and set seed.

The name “Coltsfoot” is taken from the shape of the mature leaves, which resemble the cross-section of the hoof of a colt (young male horse, though they have the same foot-shape as a female horse or an adult horse; indeed, among other names for the plant are Foal’s Foot and Horse’s Foot).

Historically, Coltsfoot has been used for medicinal purposes as a cough suppressant. The plant would be dried and crushed, and then smoked to relieve asthma and various coughs. The genus name, “Tussilago”, even means “cough suppressant”, and another common name it has is “Coughwart”. Crushed flowers were also supposed to cure skin conditions.

Being one of the earliest flowers in the spring, it’s especially important to early-flying insects. In Europe it’s the larval foodplant for a few moth species, but I didn’t see any records of it being commonly used by North American species. However, honeybees (incidentally also a Eurasian species) are a common visitor.

At TTPBRS, the flowers bloom at the side of one of the primary trails, in an area of young cottonwoods. As I’m doing the rounds in the morning, early in the season, I look for the flowers. They close up at night, so take a few hours in the morning to become obvious again - a person walking through just after dawn might miss them, while someone coming by at noon would find a wide scattering of bright flowers. Its status as an introduced species notwithstanding, I’m always happy to see them blooming, the first colour to come to the post-winter landscape.

When I was down at TTPBRS on Thursday, it was a pretty quiet day. Not too many birds around, so I spent some time examining the walls of one of the buildings for bugs or other interesting things. One of the creatures I came across was this jumping spider. Jumping spiders are tiny, less than a centimetre long, and fairly stocky. This particular one is a Zebra Spider (Salticus scenicus), so called for the striping on its abdomen. It’s a species with a holarctic distribution, found nearly throughout the northern hemisphere. There are more than 5000 species in this family of spiders, which represents nearly 13% of all spider species, the largest taxonomic family of the arachnids.

Jumping spiders have excellent vision, aided by two giant eyes placed on the front of their head, which gives them strong binocular vision, but in a narrow field of view. They have eight eyes total; two others are also located on the front of the head, but the other four are on their back. These remaining six provide the spider’s peripheral vision. They are also amazing jumpers (hence the name of the group). They don’t have the large leg muscles of some jumping insects (such as grasshoppers). Instead, their spring power comes from a hydraulic-like system that uses their interior body fluid (insects and spiders have their “blood” loose in their body cavity, rather than contained in a vascular system) to rapidly extend their legs.

Some jumping spider species can grow quite large; one African species can reach 14 inches in length. These massive spiders have been recorded to jump as far as 7 feet in a single leap. In the larger spiders, where you can clearly see their eyes, you can watch which way they’re looking. This is because the retina of the spider’s eye sits loose at the centre of the back of the “eyeball”, and the spider moves it around, rather than moving the eye itslef, in order to see. This causes the visible colour of the eye to change, depending on where the retina is. When the eye is blackest, the spider is looking right at you.

All spiders are predators, there are no herbivorous spiders. Zebra spiders feed on other insects and spiders that are their own size or smaller. As I stood there and watched this individual, snapping photos, I noticed a small brown spider crawling up the wall towards the Zebra, apparently oblivious.

The Zebra honed in on it right away. It patiently waited for the brown spider to pass it, actually moving out of its way, to one side, to allow it to do so.

Then, once the brown spider’s back was turned, the Zebra lined itself up, gathered its legs under itself…

…and pounced!

The brown spider made it out alive by rapidly letting go of the wall and dropping down on a thread. A happy ending for the brown spider, not so happy for the Zebra.