the Marvelous in nature

This Baird’s Sandpiper, an uncommon-to-rare migrant in Ontario, has snagged some sort of mud-dwelling invertebrate for lunch.

July 10 marks the (approximate) three-year anniversary of I and the Bird, a blog carnival for all things birdy. Originally started by Mike of 10,000 Birds, he has hosted all three anniversary editions, as well. Each anniversary he’s challenged contributors to write on a theme. The first aniversary theme had bloggers discuss “why they bird, blog, and/or blog about birds,” while the second asked contributors “why their blogs were must-read material.” Many of the contributors who were part of those first couple of years are still writing today, and so it follows that this year’s anniversary question is “Why are you still bird blogging?”

This is an excellent question for people who have been at it for three (or more!) years. Blogging, for most people (at least the blogs I follow), is not a casual thing. Some people do have very easy-to-maintain blogs where they simply post a photo and a few words about it, or links to news stories, or such things like that. I think the majority of the nature bloggers I follow, though, spend considerably more time on their blogs than that. For instance, the average post on my blog takes me about an hour or two, depending on how much research goes into it. Even the “easy” posts, the ones where you know everything or you’re just talking about a trip you took, or that sort of thing, posts where all it takes is some image selection/editing/resizing and a bit of free association, those posts will still usually take at least half an hour start-to-finish. This is a fairly substantial time commitment that one has to make to a blog.

Hermit Thrushes are over-the-wing head-scratchers - many other birds reach under the wing to their head.

My blog is young, only half a year old at this point. I think the qualifier “still” in “why am I still bird blogging?” hasn’t come to apply yet. I haven’t reached that stage that I think all bloggers inevitably go through of feeling a little tired of the time requirements involved in making frequent, thoughtful posts. The blog is still new, still fun and interesting. Who knows, perhaps it will always be that way, only time will tell. The qualifier “bird” in the question is also only loosely applied to this blog, since, while I do regularly talk about birds or bird observations, they make up only a small portion of my diverse subject matter.

I did used to update a more personal blog, one that I called my “bird journal”, which wasn’t shared with the general public but was instead mostly intended to share my birding exploits with other people I knew. I started that journal in January 2004. Initially I posted frequently to it, sometimes nearly every day. Over time, the frequency of my updates dwindled, until I was only posting once every week or two. My last post there was November 2007, after which I went into winter hiatus, when I tend to post infrequently because I’m simply not out birding a lot, and then started up this blog in the new year. The journal still exists in the blogosphere, but hasn’t been updated since.

Ruby-crowned Kinglets eat gnats, flies, spiders, midges, and many other little bugs.

Something that this blog has that my other one didn’t is a readership. With my old journal, I had perhaps a dozen or so people who followed it regularly, nearly all friends, and I was essentially writing to them. It was a “hey, here’s what I’ve been up to lately” sort of thing, like sending out the annual letter with your Christmas cards only on a more day-to-day basis. Birding trip reports, documentation of interesting sightings, that sort of thing. I wrote to it partially to keep people updated, partially as a record for myself to look back on later. There was no sense of community in that journal. With this one I feel like I’m actually reaching out to a community of like-minded individuals.

Blackburnian and I are moving on from the research station after many good years there, and the volunteers threw us a farewell party. They’re all great people, the volunteers are, and I’m going to miss them. The party’s organizer made an informal speech about each of us, and in mine he called me a teacher; I’m a person who enjoys sharing things with others, seeing their enthusiasm about new things, watching people learn and grow. I’ve come to this realization slowly, but this is true. I love sharing information and teaching people who are likewise keen to learn and interested in the subject. In some ways I could see myself becoming a teacher, except it would need to be in a forum where all my students were there because they were interested and wanted to be, rather than in public school or such where you’ll have some students who are interested, but many more who are there just because they have to be. Perhaps someday, when I know more, I could lead nature walks or something like that.

Brown Creepers probe into bark crevices with their long beak and use their tongue to help extract hidden bugs.

The point of saying all that, though, is that that’s the reason I’m blogging. That’s the primary reason I started up this blog in the first place - it just seemed to me that there was so much cool stuff out there that you never know about till someone shares it with you, and I wanted to find it and share it. It helps that I love to write. My best friend and I have an on-going in-joke about the length of our emails (which were very rarely less than a couple thousand words). I’m sure even reading this post you can pick up on that - I could probably have summed it up in a single paragraph or less, but the words just flow out from my fingertips. Plus, I feel that any story can be summed up in a line or two, but there’s always more to the story than that, and it’s way more interesting than a single sentence can do justice to. “This is a Box Elder Bug that was laying eggs on a leaf” does accurately sum up the basic observation of this post - but aren’t the several additional paragraphs about the circumstances of its observation and its life histories and such much more interesting?

So why am I (still) (bird) blogging? To share my enthusiasm for nature and all the cool, wild, interesting, bizarre, beautiful, ugly and serene things in it. And knowing that other people are enthusiastic about and learning from what I’m writing about, too, is reward enough for me.

Yesterday I returned for visit number four to the site I’m surveying for the City. Historically the site was a landfill for a nearby brickworks, and took the ash and brick waste from the industry. The brickworks, and therefore the landfill, were shut down in the mid-1980s. The landfill was capped and covered with clean fill, and allowed to naturalize. These days the only remainder of the site’s prior use is an old shed at the far end of the meadow, tucked into the trees at the base of the ravine slope.

Of course, the legacy of the site also lives on in the vegetation found there. Being essentially one very large disturbed site at the time it was capped some 20+ years ago, early successional, fast-growing, and introduced species are all prominent through the central open area. The surrounding slopes are predominantly mature natural forest, but through the meadow the trees consist mostly of sumac, Manitoba Maple, poplars, and young pines. The site has been part of a tree planting program the City runs, and I gather the goal is eventually to reforest the site. Interestingly, I notice a lot of the trees they’ve planted aren’t in fact forest trees, but rather shrubby stuff such as hawthorn.

Along with the highly invasive garlic mustard that just seems to get everywhere, one of the common plants at the site is this lovely pinkish-mauve wildflower. It’s fairly common, I see it a lot in open fields, roadsides, abandoned properties, and re-naturalizing areas such as here. I didn’t really know what it was, but noting its resemblance to the phlox in my mom’s garden, I just labeled it a wild phlox.

In fact, it’s not a phlox, but this is a fairly common mistake. This is Dame’s Rocket, Hesperis matronalis, a native of Eurasia. Like so many of our introduced wildflowers, this species is a member of the mustard family, Brassicaceae. The easiest way to tell it apart from native phlox is by the number of petals: Dame’s Rocket has four (like all of the mustards), while native phlox has five.

The plants are prolific seed-producers, and seeds are quite hardy. The plants spring up earlier in the spring than many native meadow wildflowers, which tend to bloom in the height of summer. As such, it’s not uncommon to see extensive stands of Dame’s Rocket in meadow areas. Seeds of the plant are often included in wildflower seed packages, which aids in its spread. They prefer full sun or partial shade, but can sometimes be found in open woods as well. The flowering stems are likely two-year-old plants; most plants produce only a basal rosette in their first year.

There’s quite a variety of colour in a stand of the flower. It can vary from a deep pinkish-mauve to nearly white, with a full range in between. A few have variegated patterns on the petals. I’m not sure if this is a natural variation, or a result of gradual domestication. The flower was cultivated as a common garden plant in its native Eurasia, and brought over to North America in the 17th century for that purpose. These days it’s found scattered virtually across the continent, with the exception of the deserts and mangroves of the south, and most of the arctic tundra of the north.

Even though it’s introduced, Dame’s Rocket does have good benefits for wildlife. It’s frequently visited by many insects such as bees and butterflies for its nectar. Seed-eating birds will eat its seeds in the fall. Even in North America there are insects whose larvae will feed on the foliage, one of the most common being the Cabbage White butterfly. I’m not sure that placing the bird house in the middle of the stand of flowers really offers the residents any benefits, but it does afford them a nice view.

The genus name for Dame’s Rocket, Hesperis, is Greek for “evening”. The flowers of members of this group have very strong scents, which becomes much more noticeable in the evening. This strong fragrance also provides a couple of the other common names for the species: Night Scented Gilliflower, Summer Lilac, and Mother-of-the-Evening (the latter seems to imply that mothers are especially fragrant). Two other often-used names are Dame’s Violet and Sweet Rocket. I’m rather partial to “Gilliflower” myself, though.

I seem to be featuring a lot of introduced species here. Eventually I’ll find a native one! The more I look, the more I’m amazed at how many introduced species there are. I’d be interested to know what percentage of the wildflowers we see are actually introduced, both as a proportion of species, but also a proportion of biomass. I wonder if you can find that information somewhere…

Time just seems to fly by. I can’t believe we’re at June already! It seemed like just yesterday the snow was melting and I was chomping at the bit for warm weather, green leaves, birds and moths. Well, they’re all here, and they seem to have snuck up on me quite unexpectedly. They say this begins to happen as you get older, but I would hardly qualify myself as such just yet - and if time flies this much at this age, I can’t imagine how it’ll be zooming in another few decades. They also say time flies when you’re having fun, so I suppose that indicates how I’ve been feeling about life lately. I find myself whistling to myself while doing chores a lot more now than I ever did in the last couple years.

Speaking of time flying… I was at my parents’ earlier this week; I had a dentist appointment that I had been putting off for some time, and then opted to spend some time in the countryside before I returned to the city. It was a gorgeous, sunny afternoon when I arrived, and I grabbed my camera and headed out to wander about the property for a bit and enjoy it all. In my wandering I spotted the Horse Chestnut above.

My sisters and I planted this tree as a chestnut when I was quite young. I can’t recall exactly how old now, but probably no more than ten or twelve. At the time, my parents took us to music lessons that were held in the basement of a small church. Just outside the church were a couple of beautiful, mature chestnut trees. The three of us loved to stop and browse through the fallen chestnuts, looking for ones whose cases were whole and unblemished, trying to find the perfect, smooth chestnut. We’d usually come home with pockets full of them. I don’t remember what became of most of them - they were likely either used in games we made up, or were lost. But during that period a couple got planted.

This tree is exactly the same age as the first one. We didn’t have any idea of ideal conditions to grow a chestnut tree. In fact, we probably weren’t thinking of the long-term at all, but just planted them as a bit of fun. The first tree grows in an open patch that gets sun through most of the day, the second is in a well-shaded area at the edge of a stand of trees. I don’t know what the rationale behind choosing these two spots was, although the latter was along a path my dad kept mown at the time that we used to play along.

While the first tree grew and flourished in the bright sunlight of its open location, the second remained rather stunted, growing to about a foot high and then seeming to remain at that size for years. It had trouble with rabbits, too, and for a while we had to put a wire cage around it to protect it. I’m not sure what changed; no trees or branches have fallen to open up the sky any more for it. However, it slowly began to grow again.

This week as I arrived for some reason I paused and looked at the tree, growing a short distance from the driveway as it was. And I was somewhat amazed to note that it was now about as tall as I was, with a good canopy of leaves on it. How long had I not been paying attention to it? In my memory it’s still a little sapling two feet high.

Both trees are now somewhere between fifteen and twenty years old. The second has a long way yet to reach maturity. But on the first tree, as I was standing there pondering how quickly life slips by while you’re busy living it, I happened to notice a few white racemes of flowers on a couple of its lower branches. And I thought, what a lovely metaphor for my own stage of life - the two of us, the tree and I, both poised on the edge of maturity. I consider myself a very mature person, but with 30 in sight I feel like I’m reaching maturity - that age at which all those things that one associates with being a “grown-up” actually happen, when people settle into careers, families, homes, and life begins to feel more stable, less uncertain. These are the first flowers the chestnut has produced. I counted seven racemes, nearly all on the lowest, oldest branches.

The Horse Chestnut isn’t a true chestnut at all (which are in the genus Castanea, members of the Beech family), but a member of the genus Aesculus, which also includes the buckeyes of North America. It’s sometimes written horse-chestnut or horsechestnut to avoid confusion with the other group, and to simplify common names of the different species. It’s not native to North America, but is commonly grown as an ornamental, and has since escaped into the wild. You can see why it appeals - the lovely white flower spikes, hinted with pink, are eyecatching in the spring. And what about chestnuts roasting on an open fire? I will admit never to have tried this, however; also, the nuts are slightly poisonous raw, and I presume this is the reason for the roasting.

Children, especially those from the UK, play games with the large seeds - in fact, in some places the tree is known as the Conker Tree, after the children’s game of securing a string to the chestnut and taking turns trying to smash someone else’s with your own (the winning chestnut being the one that doesn’t break). I never played this game, either, though Blackburnian did as a kid. The seeds were also used by militaries in the two World Wars to create acetone, which was then used in the production of armaments. Historically they were also used for whitening and cleaning natural-fibre fabrics, as they’d produce a soap-like liquid when ground and mixed in water.

Horse Chestnuts are one of my favourite trees, undoubtedly in part for the memories I have of them from my childhood, but also for their interesting leaves, flowers and seeds. I hope someday, when I’m well into my mature years and settled into a home of my own, that I might have a mature Horse Chestnut to shade my home and accompany me through middle age.

Towards the end of April I happened across a few observations that I thought would be interesting to post as a wrap-up to earlier topics.

This first one is going back to the jumping spider that I watched pounce at (and miss) a smaller brown spider. The following week I came across the above perched on one of the legs of my tripod. It was huge! Well, relative to my first little guy. It was easily a centimeter and a half long. Black and hairy, with striking orange markings, hard to miss. But the most eye-catching thing about this little spider was its fangs, a radiant metallic green.

The spider belongs to the genus Phidippus, but I’m unsure of the species. The metallic fangs are characteristic of this group, and are used in impressing females in courtship dances. The genus is primarily restricted to North America, and includes some of the larger jumping spider species. Julie Zickefoose apparently has a little black one that keeps her company while working. His name is Boris.

A bit earlier, I had found this guy hanging out on the wall of the station building. Unlike the individual from my original post, this one had had better luck hunting. He’s munching on a midge, which are extremely common down there.

I came across this butterfly at the end of the morning one day. It was flitting from one tree to another and paused at this birch briefly. I identified it as a Painted Lady, and didn’t really give it much further thought. Then, while preparing the photos for this post I decided I should just double-check that it was a Painted and not an American, because I couldn’t remember which one had the spot on the wing. Well, turned out it was neither. I hunted through the entire Kaufman guide to butterflies twice before realizing that it was an extremely worn, rather orange Compton Tortoiseshell. The first one I’ve ever seen. But now I wonder if I’d been seeing them but writing them off as the more common Ladies.

It was pausing at the birch trees, and when I looked closer I realized it was drinking sap from fresh sapsucker wells. This species overwinters as an adult and comes out in early spring, much the way Mourning Cloaks do. Because it’s still quite early for nutrition in the form of flower nectar, they take some of their food from other sweet sources, such as sap wells (mentioned in the original post about the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker).

And finally, returning to the Pussy Willows. The same day I had the tortoiseshell, I also observed three or four Mourning Cloaks visiting the buds of this Pussy Willow. For the same reason that the tortoiseshell was sipping at the sap wells, these Mourning Cloaks were drinking the nectar available from the female flowers of the willow. I love the velvety red-black of the wings in sunlight. Most butterflies I see that overwinter as adults look a little ratty in the spring. The tortoiseshell had a chunk missing from its wing like a bird had snapped at it. This Mourning Cloak seems to be missing a piece from its hindwing.

Fancy Daffodil

I’ve always liked that phrase. A selection of blooms from my mom’s garden. I’m cheating a bit, these were all taken in April. But most of them were the last couple days of April - that’s close enough, isn’t it?

Daffodil

Hellebore

White Trillium

Frilly Daffodil

Snowdrop

Red Trillium

Crocus

Boy, has this week flown by! Here we are at the weekend already and I feel like the week’s only just begun. Part of this has been the progression of a new project. TheMothMan and I are starting work on a new field guide to the common moths of northeastern North America, which we’re pretty excited about. I haven’t wanted to say anything till I felt it was sure to go ahead, but we just secured an agent to represent the book so it looks like it should be more a question of where, rather than if, it gets published. Our agent also represents such notable naturalists and authors as Julie Zickefoose, David Sibley, Pete Dunne, Lang Elliott…. excuse me while I geek out for a moment. How often does something happen to bring you two degrees of separation from your idols? It’s only slightly less thrilling than if I’d met them in person.

Okay, composing myself… back to the topic at hand. Moths as well, as it turns out. Or rather, their larvae.

The above photo I took a few weeks ago, at the beginning of April. It completely encircled a small branch of a small tree, with white egg surfaces on top, but a crusty golden layer across the bottom. It wasn’t very big, perhaps a couple centimeters at most in its longest direction. I filed it away as “unknown insect egg mass” and there it stayed for a couple weeks. Then, while looking up something completely unrelated (always the way, isn’t it?) I stumbled across a photo in the ID Request section on BugGuide.net that looked just like my egg mass.

They were Eastern Tent Caterpillar eggs. They were especially conspicuous against the dark bark of the tree they were on, or I may not have noticed them at all.

This week, when I arrived at my parents’ for a couple days, I was struck by the huge number of web tents in the trees. I wondered if there really were an unusual number this year, or if it was just that I was taking more notice this year, what with the motivation of potential blog entries making me more attuned to these sorts of things. Either way, there seemed to be lots of them, two or more in a few trees even.

My mom pulled out her handy dandy Stokes Guide to Observing Insect Lives and we looked it up (my images are nicer… :) ). Over the winter we’d investigated Chokecherry Tentmakers. Thinking that I’d seen several webs in the chokecherry out front, I’d suggested it was these. In fact, they don’t appear till later in the summer. The only web tents found at this time of year are those of the Eastern Tent Caterpillar (Malacosoma americanum).

There are two primary species of tent caterpillar: the Eastern and the Forest. The Forest is associated mostly with oaks and maples. The Eastern is found on trees of the Rosaceae family, most notably apple (cultivated, wild, and crabapple) and cherries (cultivated, Black and Chokecherry), as well as hawthorn, pear and plum. Indeed, when I really stopped to look, all the tents at my parents’ appeared to be in the chokecherries, the crabapple, and the cultivated apple trees. And the little tree where I’d found the eggs at the station was also a young apple. When I checked back this week, sure enough, there was a little tent.

The most obvious sign of their presence, of course, is their web tents. When the caterpillars hatch out of their egg cases they migrate along the branch till they reach a major fork, where they set up shop. This is another feature that tells the tent caterpillar apart from the webworms; tent caterpillar nests are never out at the end of the branches. The young caterpillars all band together in an amazing show of cooperation, building the first little nest to get them started.

As time progresses and the caterpillars eat and grow, they build more layers on the nest to expand it. They lay down silk on the outside of the nest, and as it dries it tightens, eventually separating from the layer it was laid down upon. This creates a stratified effect within the nest. As the caterpillars grow they need more room, but they also require additional layers as the existing ones become filled with frass and moulted skins. The caterpillars leave a hole or two in the webbing, usually near the apex but potentially anywhere, by which they come and go from the nest. You can see the hole here. They tend to lay down the most silk on the side that faces the sun most directly. Usually this is the southern or southeastern side, which allows them to catch the morning rays more efficiently to warm up at the start of the day.

You can see in this picture, of a relatively new nest beside my rather dry fingertips, just how small the caterpillars are to start off. They use the nest for a number of purposes. The first and perhaps most obvious is for protection from both predators and the elements. When not feeding, the caterpillars huddle inside the tent. They also use the outside of the tent for basking or huddling to raise their body temperatures prior to heading off to feed, which you can see them doing in this photo. They pack together like this to reduce individual heat loss due to air movement. The stratified layers within the nest also help them thermoregulate, as the silk traps heat like a mini greenhouse. By moving in or out as needed they can adjust their temperature.

As the caterpillars move about, they are constantly laying down silk secreted from a spinneret at their tail-end. In going to and from the feeding areas they end up creating silken trails along the branches. They appear to follow these trails when moving, but they’re actually following a trail of pheromones that are also laid down by individuals. Initially, or once a particular source is depleted, individual caterpillars will go on “scouting” trips, looking for good food sources. So that they can find their way back to the nest they leave a scent trail to trace their steps. If they found a really good source of food, on their way back they lay down a stronger, more specific pheromone trail that tells the nestmates where the good stuff is. Well-traveled trails will be strongly defined with silk, while new or lightly-traveled trails may be barely visible.

Here you can see the empty egg cases of the little caterpillars, with a silken trail leading away towards the nest. The eggs are laid by the adult moths in the late spring or early summer, about 200-300 in a single egg mass. It doesn’t take long for the caterpillars to develop within the eggs, only about three weeks. However, they then remain dormant until the following spring. They hatch out just as the leaves are beginning to unfurl. Occasionally, the caterpillars from two or more egg masses laid close by to each other will come together to form a single colony. I think that’s what happened in the case of this bunch, since I found at least three empty egg masses within the same branching system, but only one nest.

The caterpillars will eat and grow and shed their skins and eat and grow some more for 4-6 weeks. They’ll go through six larval stages, or “instars”, each one still a caterpillar, but getting progressively larger. In their sixth instar they stop laying silk down on the nest or trails, instead conserving it for pupating. It’s during this stage that you usually find the caterpillars on sidewalks, benches, roads, and elsewhere, as they disperse from the nest to find a safe location to spin their cocoon and pupate. The cocoon is usually tucked into a corner or crevice, and is fuzzy and imbued with a yellow powder.

The caterpillars come out of their nests three times a day to feed, all corresponding with the times of lowest predator (especially bird) activity: at the crack of dawn, in early afternoon, and at dusk. The only deviation to this pattern is in their final stage, when they only emerge at dusk. They back this up with a chemical deterrent. Apple and cherry tree leaves, in particular, contain small amounts of cyanides, which the caterpillars ingest. When disturbed they produce cyanide-laden fluids to dissuade predators.

Tent caterpillars are much-maligned because they’re a defoliator. I recall as a kid being under the impression that tent caterpillar nests, when found, should be cut from the tree and burned to prevent spread of the infestation. What a dramatic reaction! An individual nest will not do significant harm, and in fact even an outbreak of the insects will not do any lasting damage to a tree. The caterpillars rarely kill their host trees, usually only if the tree was already weak or damaged prior to infestation. Any defoliation caused by the insects will generally regenerate later in the summer, once the caterpillars have headed off to pupate. Of course, depending on the size of the colony, it may be possible that that year the tree doesn’t produce any fruit. I think this may be where their bad rap stems from - they would be nuisance pests in orchards where they may stunt the fruit crop for the year. They are likely also perceived as unsightly in suburban settings (both their nests and the resulting defoliation). But really, they’re pretty harmless.

The only potential problem the caterpillars may cause is they’ve been implicated in Mare Reproductive Loss Syndrome (basically abortion by horses). The going theory is that the hairs of accidentally ingested caterpillars may puncture the intestinal walls and provide a conduit that allows bacteria to enter the uterus.

I like to cheer for the underdog (unless there are obvious good/evil sides), and so I support the tent caterpillars, much as I back Purple Loosestrife and Brown-headed Cowbirds (subjects of future posts, I’m sure). They’re a good food source for many creatures, including as many as 60 species of birds, maturing just when the birds are looking for bugs to take home to feed the kids.

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.

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.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to spend the morning at the TTPBRS research station. It was a lovely day, and as I’d spent the weekend indoors tackling other (interesting, but not outdoor) projects on my computer, it was nice to get outside for a while. It was a busier morning than I gather they’d had over the weekend, and the final tally of birds banded was a little over 50. The species included many Song Sparrows (while I was in the bander’s seat, anyway, it seemed like every other bird I banded was a Song Sparrow), juncos, and Golden-crowned Kinglets, with a few other odds and ends such as Eastern Phoebe, Ruby-crowned Kinglet, and American Tree Sparrow thrown in for variety.

Also among them were two Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers, including the striking male pictured above (in sapsuckers, males have a red throat, while in females it’s white). It is possible to age most birds based on a number of criteria in their wing and tail feathers, but for most songbird species you can only really determine whether during the previous breeding season (so, last summer) they were an adult or a young bird. Woodpeckers are an exception to that, you can usually determine back one year further. In the case of the above male, he was an after-third-year - meaning that 2008 is at least his fourth (”after-third”) calendar year, if not more (birds are generally aged according to calendar year to make it easier to keep track of). You can’t determine his age with more precision than that, but it still means we know he was hatched either in or prior to 2005. So he’s a good old boy.

Later in the morning I spotted another bright male who flew across my path and perched on the trunk of a birch tree. I couldn’t see his legs, so I don’t know if it was the same one as we’d banded earlier. As I watched him, he systematically checked out a set of sap wells that presumably he had drilled earlier. Although I couldn’t see it from my distance, I presume he lapped up what sap had oozed from the holes since last time he visited. He was only there less than a minute, but he checked out all four holes.

Look at him stretch that neck to reach the last one without moving!

Once he left, I went up and checked out the tree he’d been at.

He’d drilled five holes, which were all running slightly, although the sap trails on the bark weren’t substantial. I’m not sure why sapsuckers drill their holes in such a neat line like that, but I would assume that it has something to do with ease of checking them (like in the above photos; he didn’t have to move to reach them all). Probably the sapsuckers won’t tell us if we ask them, so we’re left to make our best guess.

He landed on another tree not much further from the first which, when I went to check it, had a single hole drilled into the trunk. Right next to it, however, was one that was half-started. What I find particularly interesting is how a woodpecker is very methodical in its drilling - it’s not like driving a nail where you keep pounding the same spot. Instead, and as you can see here, they actually chisel out a section of the bark which they can then chip off, exposing the softer wood underneath (which is easier to hammer through). I guess after he’d done one on this tree he was either disturbed, or decided that the sap from this one tasted funny.

Underneath the fresh work you can see a couple of old, scarred-over wells from years past.

Here’s another tree that was visited in years past. There’s probably a number of different years represented there, judging by the relative scarring of some holes to others. Sapsucker holes are often square or rectangular, rather than round, which you can see well on this tree. Nearly all of the trees with sapsucker wells (old and new) down there are birch. The trees around the station are probably 90% birch and cottonwood, but the cottonwood doesn’t seem to appeal to them at all. My guess would be that there’s enough of a difference in the thickness of the bark between birch and cottonwood, and there’s enough birch in the area, that they can afford to be picky about the trees they choose.

An old section of sapsucker wells, now so scarred over it’s forming a cracked swelling in the trunk. The wells don’t do serious damage to the tree, aside from this sort of thing. It’s not all that different from tapping maple trees for their syrup. The main concern would probably be the potential for the tree to be infected by a fungus through the open wound, and even that is rare.

Aside from the obvious benefit to the sapsucker, the sap wells are often visited by other creatures as well, including many nectar-feeding insects and hummingbirds. For these guys the sap provides a sugar-rich source of food in the early spring, before many flowers have started blooming, and can often be invaluable for their survival through that period. I have yet to see a hummingbird visiting a sap well in the spring - by the time they reach us here, in early May, there’s already a fair bit blooming.

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.