November 2008 – Seabrooke Leckie

Out on the ice

For about a week now, Kingsford Lake, at least the portion that our house looks out over, has been frozen over from one shore to the other. While there were a couple days of -10 oC (14 oF), it hasn’t been exceptionally cold for a long stretch. Looking out at the ice from the house, and even the few times we’ve gone down to the dock and looked at the water’s edge (such as when I was taking the photos for my new header image), the surface looked thin, unstable. The ice is cloudy, so it’s difficult to get a visual estimate of the ice’s thickness, but because the lake is rather wide (at least compared to a pond in the backyard, for instance), we assumed it to be less than an inch thick.

This morning, as Dan was standing at the window sipping his coffee, he saw two people skate by, their dog bounding along behind them. Intrigued by this possibility, this afternoon we grabbed our skates and went down to the lake to check it out for ourselves. Sure enough, the rough, cloudy surface of the ice was deceptive. The ice was at least a few inches thick, perhaps more, it was hard to gauge exactly. In any case, it supported our weight without even a groan or a creak.

We laced up and glided out onto the lake. The surface was rough, it seemed that a snowfall last week had laid down an inch or so of snow, which melted and turned to slush on our couple of warmer, sunny days, and then refroze when the temperatures dropped again. It was still smooth enough for easy, enjoyable skating, though, and we skated back and forth over the 600 meters (650 yards) of the lake that was frozen over (in front of our house the lake is quite shallow; the deeper parts remained partially open).

Neither of us have skated for a few years. In the 4+ years we’ve been together, we’ve only gone out skating once, to a public rink in the Toronto neighbourhood where we lived. I’ve never really got excited about public skating – it’s enjoyable enough, but too crowded, and the having to go in a counterclockwise circle gets boring after a bit. Growing up we had a pond in the backyard we skated on, which is what ice skating should be, to me. In the city there never really was that sort of opportunity.

Prior to that, I probably hadn’t been skating since high school. When I was younger I skated as part of a precision (synchronized) skating team. I started learning some of the turns and jumps, but never got very far in it. I’ve long since forgotten all that fancy stuff, it’s enough for me to be able to turn from skating forward to backward in a particular direction while still moving. Dan was a hockey player. He played competitive hockey right into university, but eventually left it when the competitiveness seemed to overshadow having fun. At one point I think he had considered going pro – a funny career switch, from hockey to birds, and now to art.

Initially Raven was reluctant to venture out onto this strange surface. It was hard, and slippery. And her humans were moving in the the weirdest motions. She wasn’t at all sure about this, and thought the shore seemed a safer bet. On the other hand, her humans were moving upsettingly far away. Maybe if she sat down and barked they’d hear her and return.

Still unable to make the decision to come out on the ice, I eventually had to go back, pick her up, and carry her a short distance out. Once she found herself out in the middle of it, and nothing terrible was happening, and she got used to the weird way her people were moving, she started having fun. Dan would race her along the ice. Once she got the hang of how to adjust her gait for the best traction, she could really boot it. Not having blades strapped to her tootsies she was still slower than she is on land, though, and for once we could actually beat her.

The shore still looked temptingly secure, though, and she returned now and again to reassure herself that normal, solid land hadn’t disappeared. I’m skating after her here to cut her off and engage her in another chase. The whole point here (well, at least the point of bringing the dog along; we, of course, are out for fun) is to burn off some of that boundless energy of hers. She won’t burn much by just sitting on the shore. Okay, if I’m honest, I included this photo ’cause I think my butt looks good here. It’s not often one’s butt looks good in a photo. And if I’m sharing some rare photos of me (normally I’m the one holding the camera), I might as well share the good ones. Look at Raven smiling there. She really did get into the whole thing by the end.

We noticed these interesting patterns in the ice, just under the surface. To me they resembled neurons (nerve cells), with a large centre (the soma), the part that houses the cell’s nucleus, and long, spreading branches extending out from it (the dendrites), the parts that receive the signal molecules from other neurons. Missing from my ice formations are the axons, long “stems” with fingerlike projections on the end that produce the signal molecules that get sent to the next cell’s dendrites. This is how nerve cells talk to each other, how your toe tells your brain that it’s just stepped on a somewhat painful tack. Really, it’s rather remarkable how fast it all happens, considering the process involved even just for one cell to receive the signal and release its own transmitters. It is helped by the fact that in most animals a single sensory nerve cell will run all the way down the spinal column and down the leg to the toe (the axon makes up most of the length, and can be up to 1.5 m [5 ft] in an adult human). Motor neurons, the ones that send the signals to contract a muscle, may be only slightly shorter – the ones reaching the toes begin at the base of the spine. [And yes, I did have to look up the names of all the different parts of a nerve cell; even though I would have learned it back in one of my university courses, I’d long since forgotten the details – use it or lose it, as they say.]

They were many and varied. I don’t know what created them, but many were in long lines as though they’d started out as the footprints of an animal, formed when the ice surface was soft. Perhaps the sun had melted these thinner areas, and as they melted the water ran out in branching channels. Or perhaps the “dendrites” actually represent cracks that formed when the ice got soft. In the centre of many of them was a small, circular hole of clear ice. Looking down through it you could see some bubbles frozen a couple inches down in a ring formation. Perhaps they were formed by gas being leaked from the lake bottom? We avoided skating right over them just in case, but I suspect they would’ve held up just fine.

I don’t know how long we’re likely to have this oversized skating rink. Aside from the potential for warmer temperatures that might soften or thin the ice, there’s also the likelihood of snow, which will mean we’ll have to shovel the ice to skate on it, and we’re unlikely to clear more than just our little bay. In the meantime we’ll hopefully be able to get out a few more times to enjoy all this open ice.

The living trees

This is my 200th post. That second hundred felt like it passed more quickly than the first hundred (which I commemorated here, and also commented on how quickly it arrived). It did, actually; the first hundred took 6 months to write, while the second hundred only took me five. Part of the reason for that is the Today at Kingsfords that I’ve been including, and as a result I’ve been writing more often, simply because there’s so much to write about in the summer months. I expect I’ll be scaling back a bit now that winter is upon us again, to maybe posting every couple of days or so. Probably that third hundred will be a full 6 months again.

In my 100th post I wrote about the things I was seeing by the hundreds. It was easier to do at that time of year. In the Canadian November one might write about hundreds of snowflakes, or fallen leaves, possibly (if you have an active feeding station) hundreds of feeder birds (or at least dozens). Hundreds of trees in the forest? Wavelets on the lake? At some point you just start reaching. Summer is better for multitudes.

So I couldn’t do anything quite as catchy to tie into the milestone theme. I considered doing a post on a 200-year-old (or approximately) tree in the area, but I don’t think there are any trees that old around here. At least not massively monstrous trees, with thick girths that you need three people to form a ring around, and spreading crowns that shelter the surrounding forest. Instead I settled on writing about a tree that could get that old, if given good growing conditions and a decent chance. Okay, okay, it’s a bit of a stretch for a tie-in. Really I had the subject already picked out and the photos edited when I realized it was my 200th post.

The tree that inspired the post was a moderately large American Beech (Fagus grandifolia) that I came across while hiking in the forest. What caught my eye about this particular beech wasn’t its thick trunk or the unusually stocky side branch (see photo above), which I figured will probably be a casualty of a strong wind or ice storm some years down the road, when the strength of the wood isn’t enough to maintain support of the giant weighty limb. You don’t often see horizontal limbs that are the same circumference as the main trunk.

As interesting as this was, it was actually the texture of the bark that grabbed my attention. The lower limbs, where they had broken off, had been grown over by new bark and resembled amputated limbs, similar to the arbutus of the west coast, which I mentioned in a post back in February. The bark was wrinkled like it was beginning to sag a bit with age, giving it an almost skin-like appearance. Above each stub was a rift in the bark, a scar, arching in an inverted U shape, circling nearly half the trunk. The reason for the scars wasn’t clear, but I assume it to be the same process that created the amputated limbs, and the wrinkles in the bark.

Beech trees have beautifully cool, smooth outer bark. In my opinion, they’re the closest thing the east has to the arbutus. Although not quite the same sort of silky-smooth as the arbutus, laying a hand on the trunk of a mature beech evokes similar emotions in me. A sort of calm serenity, bordering, perhaps, on melancholy. I don’t generally tend to anthropomorphize other organisms, but unlike many other trees, when you lay your hand on their trunk mature beech trees feel alive, they feel like they have a soul. I walked home after a few introspective moments with my hand on the tree’s cool trunk, humming the main refrain of The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond:

Oh, you’ll take the high road, and I’ll take the low road
And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye
For me and my true love will ne’er meet again
On the bonnie, bonnie banks o’ Loch Lomond.

Okay, sappy spiritual moment is finished. Aside from the evergreens, beech trees lend one of the few spots of colour in the woods at this time of year. The leaves of young beech are marcescent, meaning they wither and die, but remain attached to the plant until the spring when the growth of the new leaf buds finally pushes them off. A few species do this, including oak and hornbeam, but it’s the beech that are most common and catch one’s eye in the woods.

Beech nearly always grows in deciduous or lightly-mixed woods, and is not found further north where forests begin to become more strongly coniferous. It tends to be associated with Sugar Maple, Yellow Birch and Eastern Hemlock. Although it doesn’t tend to grow unusually tall, not usually exceeding 80 feet (24 m), old individuals may eventually develop thick trunks up to 4 feet (1.2 m) in diameter.

There are ten species of beech, Fagus spp., but only one is native to North America. The species has popped up now and again in the history of the early settlers; for instance, beech leaves were used in favour of straw in early mattresses, as they had a springiness that the latter material lacked. Also, the smooth bark of the beech makes them ideal trees for carving one’s initials into, and the resulting engraving can persist, legibly, for a long time. A beech in Louisville, Kentucky, bore the engraving “D. Boon kilt a bar 1803”. Although the engraving may or may not be a fake, the particular section of beech trunk has been preserved in the Filson Historical Society in Louisville.

Aside from providing food and shelter to animals, the trees have many uses for humans, too. Many beeches are used in making quality furnitures, and can also be used to make the shells of drums (the instrument). The wood burns slowly but strongly, making an excellent firewood. This quality is also exploited by beer-makers as several, including Budweiser, use the wood in their production process. Beech pulp is used in making the textile fibre Modal, a type of rayon. Of course, the tree itself is often used as an ornamental, and several European species are found in North America in this application.

Like many deciduous trees, the fruit of the beech is a nut known (unsurprisingly) as beechnuts. They’re contained in a burr-like outer shell, are sweet-tasting (or so I read; I haven’t tried them myself), and are very nutritious, as nuts go, being about 20% protein and 20% fatty oil. They also contain a substance that can be slightly toxic, and eating large quantities of the nuts (a few dozen) can make you ill. Beechnuts used to be pressed for their oil, in tough times such as following WWII, when people would be willing to collect the nuts from the forest and bring them to a local mill. It’s time-consuming compared to many mass-produced oils, however, and so it’s not commonly made anymore.

Today at Kingsford – Puppy in the snow

The last few days we’ve had regular precipitation, which has variably been in solid or liquid form depending on the temperature outside. Temperatures dropped and stayed low enough overnight last night that when we got up this morning there was a lovely blanket of snow on the ground, the first solid couple of inches we’ve had (prior to this, all we’d got were light dustings). I love the way freshly-fallen snow looks, crisp and white, lining the branches of the trees and bushes and giving the landscape a light, lacy appearance. I can guarantee this won’t be the last freshly-fallen snow photo I post to the blog.

I took Raven out for her daily walk, bundling her up in her new coat as much to keep her dry as to keep her warm, since it wasn’t nearly as cold today as it had been a few days ago. When she just goes outside to relieve herself you’d think she was very put off by the snow, pausing reluctantly at the edge of the deck and then stepping delicately over its surface. But put the hiking boots on and head out for a walk, and it’s the best thing she’s ever seen. She tears down the path, then pauses and buries her nose in it, snuffling as dogs do. She flops over, rolls around a bit, then tears off again. It’s great fun to watch, she seems to be having a blast, and it helps to burn some of her inexhaustible energy.

All the wetness she’s been getting the last week or so has started to bring out her doggy odour a bit. She’s never smelled very strongly, the way some dogs I’ve known have, but it has been a month or so since her last bath. The first time we bathed her, shortly after she came home (her mother’s home smelled a little… funny) it took two of us, one to keep her in the tub and the other to lather and rinse. This is her third bath, and each time she’s gotten better about it. Now she looks, if not like she’s enjoying it, then at least resigned to it, and Dan was able to bathe her without having to hold her at all. We’ll make a water dog of her yet!

Bird seed surprise

One of my responsibilities while house-sitting for my parents is keeping the bird feeders well-stocked. With the period of extremely cold temperatures (at least for this time of year – we’d be laughing come February) the feeders were a hive of activity, and the seed levels dropped steadily. The sunflower and thistle seed feeders were filled again without trouble, but when I dug the scoop into the bag of mixed seed, I noticed a sharp, distinctly mouldy smell. Peering closer, it looked like perhaps the peanuts had started to turn, and it was maybe spreading to the other seed, but I couldn’t really tell. It didn’t look really bad yet, so I stood there for a moment or two, holding the container in my hand, staring at the seed inside as I pondered whether it was still okay to put out for the birds (mould can be poisonous to birds once it’s progressed).

I finally decided better to be safe and not put the seed out, but while I was standing there contemplatively staring at the seeds, I noticed something else. Some movement. The seeds were starting to wiggle. And then…

…from between them, out crawled a tiny beetle. And then another. And a third. And before I knew it, the top was crawling with a dozen or more little beetles. More accurately, little weevils, as I could clearly see the thin snouts protruding from the front of their heads. Weevils are sometimes also known as snout beetles because of this feature. There are some 60,000 species in the weevil superfamily, Curculionoidea. Most belong to the family Curculionidae, and about 2600 species from this family are found in North America. Most are herbivorous, and many are crop pests.

Probably the interaction most people will have with weevils is the opening of a bag of something to discover an infestation of them. They are common outdoor bugs, but are generally small and inconspicuous unless they happen to land on your drink glass or some other coincidental meeting. However, they do occasionally make it home in bags of grain or seed products. There are three species, all in the genus Sitophilus, who are encountered this way, but they tend to be so similar in appearance that identification to species is best left to an expert with a microscope. They have food preferences, but there is a lot of overlap and they will opportunistically infest other sources when their preferred food isn’t readily available.

The three species are Rice Weevil (Sitophilus oryzae), Granary Weevil (S. granarius), and Maize Weevil (S. zeamais), and their common names reflect their preferred food (here in North America, maize is more often called corn). They often come home in infested bags of bird seed (Granary and Maize weevils may prefer mixed seed, Rice Weevils are often found in sunflower), but will sometimes be found in packages of rice, beans, peanuts, or whole-grain cereals. I couldn’t tell which seeds specifically had been targeted in the package, although the amount of mould growing on the peanuts made me suspicious of them. I think that the decay of the seeds that the weevils had been feeding on, whichever ones they were, had lead to the mould.

The life cycle of these weevils takes about a month to complete, and requires temperatures of a minimum of 17 oC (62 oF), but ideally 27 oC (80 oF) and above, and moderate to high humidity. The adult weevil lays their eggs on appropriate seed or grains which will become the food source for the developing larva. When the egg hatches, the larva tunnels into the grain and sets up shop inside. It takes about 3 days for an egg to hatch from laying, and then the larva may be in the grain for another 18 days, at which point it develops into a pupa. Once the adult emerges from the pupa, some 6 days later, it stays in the relative protection of the grain until its exoskeleton has completely hardened and matured, about 3-4 days.

Because they spend most of their cycle inside the grain itself, it may be possible to be harbouring these little bugs in a stored product for a few weeks without even knowing they’re there. Generally speaking, the incidence of infestation is rare, and probably even if they are present the product is consumed before the eggs get a chance to develop and we’re never the wiser (consider it added protein). By the time the bugs reach adult, stage, however, consuming them or the secretions they produce can sometimes result in E. coli infections, depending on the weevil’s particular diet.

I dumped a few out on a blank piece of white paper to try to get some uncluttered photos of individuals, but I had minimal luck. They were just too quick! I found that initially they would curl up their legs and play dead, for instance if I shook the paper to knock them all back to a central starting point. But moments later they’d unfold and start hustling across the paper. Interestingly, their direction of movement wasn’t random. They all moved with a purpose, and while their particular direction varied, it was always directly towards the edge of the paper. I thought perhaps they were trying to get away from the bright halogen that was hanging over the center of the paper to provide illumination for the photos.

None of them ever tried to fly, which I think perhaps rules out Rice Weevil, which is supposed to be winged and attracted to lights. The Granary Weevil has poorly developed wings and can’t fly, and is also not attracted to lights. On the other hand, Rice Weevils are reddish-brown and have 4 pale marks on their wing covers (Maize Weevils are similar), while Granary Weevils are reddish-brown to black and unmarked. Going by that, it looks like I have both in this group. So who knows! When I submitted the images to BugGuide.net, the person who identified them thought it safest just to leave them at genus.

Today not at Kingsford – British Soldiers

It seems I often find myself at my computer late at night, just starting to compose a blog post long after a reasonable person would have gone to bed. Part of this is due to not having to be up at a set time in the morning (for instance, to go in to the office), so I don’t feel the pressure to keep to a strict schedule in the evenings. The other part of it is that some cosmic process conspires to prevent me from starting any earlier. I went back up to Ottawa to take my sister to sign the paperwork for that car, and through one thing and another ended up leaving the city later than intended. And on the way home, it started snowing. Hard. Such that I was reduced to half the speed I would ordinarily drive on a clear night (it didn’t seem to phaze the locals, however, who breezed by me in their sporty Mazdas and hefty F150s. Part of me hoped they’d get home safely, but the other part of me hoped for the gratification of seeing their taillights in the ditch a few miles up the road). When I got home the one show I watch every week was just starting, and then my Mom called not too long after that. And, well, time just slowly slips away. So all that is a very long-winded way of saying that I had planned a longer post for today, but will delay it in favour of a shorter Today post (would you believe that my university professors criticized me of being too succinct in my term papers?).

Today’s subject is British Soldier lichen, Cladonia cristatella. My sister spotted this patch growing on a stump to the side of the trail. A week or two ago I wrote about Pixie Cup lichen that I found while hiking with Dan and Raven in Frontenac Provincial Park. While looking up the ID for the Pixie Cups, I ran across a few mentions of British Soldier lichen, a member of the same genus as and therefore closely related to the Pixie Cups. It has very distinctive bright red caps, thought to resemble the caps of the British soldiers during the American Revolutionary War in the late 1700s. It’s a relatively common lichen, so it’s somewhat funny that I hadn’t run across it before, especially since you would think the bright red caps would draw one’s attention. However, at least I already knew what they were when we found this patch.

Because lichen are a symbiosis of a fungus and an alga, the red caps are actually the fungus’ fruiting structure. The structure is similar to those employed morels and some other mushrooms, although they aren’t related. It takes a lichen anywhere from 4-8 years to reach sexual maturity and begin to reproduce, so up to that point the British Soldiers would remain capless. While the ones down here may not grow quite so old, lichens growing in the tundra of the far north can reach incredible ages, some anywhere from 1000 to 4500 years. They can survive this long because they are drought-resistant (the tundra is technically a desert, after all) and very hardy. Consider that the oldest of these may have started growing back when the Great Pyramids of Egypt were being constructed, and that really puts that 4500 in perspective. Generally, though, the lichens that grow in our temperate part of the world tend to have the same sort of lifespans as the trees in the forests.