Monthly Archives: May 2009

W Week – Wings of the night

Posted on May 16, 2009 | 3 Comments

Io Moth, Automeris io

Okay, so maybe that’s stretching a bit to tie the subject in to W week, but I just had to share some of these moths with you. I’ve continued to do mothing on a fairly regular basis, aside from a brief stretch last week where it was just too chilly or two rainy for mothing to be productive. Things warmed up this week, and a couple of nights ago I set out my sheet and my light trap to see what new stuff was flying.

Well, was it ever a productive evening! I had around five dozen species of macro-moth, the larger species that are easier to identify. I haven’t been spending much time or energy on the micro-moths since they’re usually harder to ID, and I figure it’s probably best to take it in steps. It’s enough work just to learn and remember the big ones, especially when they start coming at you fast and furious (so to speak).

The above moth was the indisputable highlight of the night. Or morning, depending on how you look at it; I found it hanging on to the inside wall of my moth trap. Sometimes these large moths can get rubbed up a little inside the trap as they crawl around the egg cartons (although not so much as to cause harmful damage; it’s mostly just aesthetics that suffer), but this one was in very good shape. It’s an Io Moth, a male. The females have similar patterning but are a browny-red. They’re widespread across eastern North America, and can be found much of the year. Although there’s nothing to give you scale in the photo, he was probably about 10 cm (4 in) across with his wings spread out.

Lemon Plagodis, Plagodis serinaria

Another yellow moth, this one a little smaller (3 cm, 1.25 inch across). It was not the least bit cooperative about a photo, despite a number of attempts (via re-chilling it in the fridge before trying again). Eventually I just gave up and took a photo through the clear plastic container. It’s a lovely one, though, a Lemon Plagodis. Mostly a spring and early summer species, it’s associated with deciduous forests of the northeast.

Modest Furcula, Furcula modesta

There are several species of Furcula; all have these dark bands bordered by orange dots (not as noticeable on this species) on a white background, and a curly dark blue and black thorax. This one, the Modest Furcula, has very thick, very dark bands compared to the others. It’s only just starting to appear right now and will fly for much of the summer. It’s widespread, found in deciduous forests from southern Canada into New England in the east and Arizona in the west.

Modest Furcula, Furcula modesta

The Furculas have this cool habit of curling up and playing dead when disturbed. Presumably it helps with discouraging predators, but it does make it hard to get a photo. In Europe the Furculas are known as Kittens (eg., Modest Kitten), which makes you want to scoop it up and cuddle it. They have such great names for moths over there.

Apical Prominent, Clostera apicalis

The prominents are among my favourite groups of moths, although it’s hard to say exactly why. Perhaps because they’re never found in large numbers, and they all have interesting shapes and colours, they seem special somehow. This is one of a couple that have a similar pattern, with that thick white squiggle at the rear of the wing; I think this one is the Apical Prominent. I love the tail sticking up. Another summer species, it’s found across much of Canada and into bits of northern US, associated with early successional/riparian species such as birch, poplar and willow.

Black Zale, Zale undularis

The Black Zale is a sexy moth. The photo really doesn’t capture the rich deepness of the black. It has an almost velvety feel to it. It’s got the characteristic Zale shape, including a couple of tufts on the back of the thorax, but it’s the only Zale species to be all dark like this. It’s found through most of eastern North America. Up here it’s a spring species but in the south it has a longer flight period.

Pink-barred Pseudeustrotia, Pseudeustrotia carneola

This photo is of one from my trap, but I actually found one this afternoon just sitting on a blade of grass in a field. It’s a small moth with a big name, one of those sorts of Latin names that I need to pause to sound out – Soo-doo-stro-tia. It’s a holarctic species, found through both North America and Eurasia; in the former, it occurs in open fields and meadows and in forest edges and clearings (the latter would be the case with us, since we have no field within sight of my moth trap).

Night-wandering Dagger, Acronicta noctivaga

And finally, I think that this is a Night-wandering Dagger (aren’t most moths night-wandering?), but there are several black-and-white moths with complex markings like this. The key to identification is often looking at whether the wing spots are bordered in white, whether the lines are jagged or rise up on one end, which lines are pale and which are dark, where the dark shading is. The daggers are a group of mostly monochromatic species. Some of them have elaborate markings like this, while others are pale with distinct black dashes at the shoulder and rear edge and sometimes in between.

That’s it for this batch, but I’m sure it won’t be the last!

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Posted in bugs, moths

Tagged Io Moth, moths

W Week – Wildflowers

Posted on May 14, 2009 | 3 Comments

Sessile Bellwort, Uvularia sessilifolia

May is my second-favourite month, behind only September. And it’s not just that May is my birth month. It’s the month where the earth really begins to wake up, at least here in my home province of Ontario. The month where the trees start to leaf out, and the insects really begin to emerge, and the birds start to flock back, and the garden starts to fill out, and the temperatures start to rise. And the woods are all abloom with wildflowers.

Early Meadow Rue, Thalictrum dioicum

Often called spring ephemerals for their fleeting appearance in the brief window between snow melt and closed canopy, most of these species have evolved to spring up relatively quickly to take advantage of the sunlight that pours through the leafless branches onto the forest floor in early spring. So many of these species start blooming before the trees are noticeably in bud. Many continue to bloom even after the leaves have started to fill out, but very few forest wildflowers start to bloom once the canopy has closed up for the summer. By that point, the forest floor is too shady for any but the most shade-tolerant of species.

Common Blue Violet, Viola sororia

I’ve already profiled one of my favourite wildflowers, the Red/Wild/Canadian Columbine (Aquilegia canadensis), and I talked a bit about some of the first ones to appear in our semi-wooded yard. Here are a few more that I’ve noticed have sprung up in the forests around us over the last couple of weeks.

Trout Lily, Erythronium americanum

Early Lowbush Blueberry, Vaccinium angustifolium (I think; this one was challenging to ID. Some bushes were pinkish like this, some were whiteish. Growing on the rock barrens on the east side of the Park. Note the grasshopper nymph on the lefthand side, which I only noticed when editing the photo.)

Wild Blue Phlox, Phlox divaricata

Downy Yellow Violet, Viola pubescens

Common Strawberry, Fragaria virginiana

Miterwort, Mitella diphylla, above and below

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Posted in flora, flowers

Tagged wildflowers

W Week – Warblers

Posted on May 13, 2009 | 2 Comments

I thought this week I would do a W theme. I have several items I want to post about that are all W’s; this first one is Warblers. In the last couple of weeks we’ve had lots of warblers returning and settling in. One of the species that seems to be singing somewhere every time I go out on a walk is this one, the Black-and-white Warbler. They are an abundant species on the rough Canadian Shield, but also found more sparsely throughout much of the rest of Ontario. They nest in deciduous and mixed woodlands, which are extensive in this region. The habitat type is also increasing in Ontario, as abandoned fields slowly return to forest, and they’re one of a number of warblers dependent on such habitat to show a statistically significant increase in the most recent Breeding Bird Atlas. Black-and-white Warblers have a distinctive foraging style, climbing up tree trunks and along branches a bit like a nuthatch; indeed, some earlier names for the species included Creeping Warbler, Pied Creeper, and Black-and-white Creeper. This one’s a male because it is crisp black and white, with a black throat; females lack the dark throat and are more grayish than black.

Here’s another species we’ve seen a fair bit of: Nashville Warbler. Like the Black-and-white, they’re found through much of Ontario. They have a preference for mixed or coniferous forests, and all of the encounters we’ve had with individuals on apparent breeding territory have been in patches of evergreens. They’re flashy little birds, with a gray hood and bright yellow belly. In our region of the province their population seems to be stable, probably because regenerating forest here is mostly deciduous, which doesn’t affect them too much given their habitat preferences.

Yellow-rumped Warblers should be breeding in our forests as well this summer. They’re one of the most abundant migrants in the spring, but most of them carry on past us and head for northern Ontario, and especially northwestern Ontario where they have the highest densities. Like the Nashville, they prefer coniferous and mixed forests, but are less picky than Nashvilles, making do even with small patches. Their population, interestingly, has been on the rise in our region; presumably it’s this generalist nature that allows them to take better advantage of small opportunities. There are two subspecies of Yellow-rumps, one with a yellow throat, and the other with a white throat. Ours has the white throat, and was known as a Myrtle Warbler before the two species got lumped into one. Many birders affectionally refer to them as “Butterbutts” for their namesake plumage feature.

American Redstarts such as this handsome male are fairly common in much of Ontario. They are very much the generalist, nesting in open and semi-open treed habitats, usually successional forests but occasionally more mature forests if they are very open or have large clearings (like along roadsides). Another species that’s on the rise, the mature males are unmistakable in their smart black-and-orange plumage. However, they don’t actually attain these colours until their second summer; their first summer is spend as a drab brownish-gray like the female. Though these young males will occasionally still try to sing and defend a territory where they’re able, not all will attract a female and mate.

There is some debate as to why some species do this, but often it’s associated with maximizing breeding success. In such species, often first-summer males who are inexperienced in holding and defending territories will have very low success compared to more experienced males. Most, if they mate at all, do so through surreptitious forays into the competitor’s territory while he is away for adulterous liaisons with the competitor’s wife. Their dull plumage helps them to fly under the radar, since from a distance they just look like a female, who doesn’t attract the attention that black-and-orange plumage would. The female, for her part, is interested in these sneaky encounters because sperm from many males helps maximize the overall fitness of her clutch; it’s more likely that some of her offspring will succeed through survival of the fittest than if they come from a single parent. She hedges her bets – rather than all or none, she goes with the less risky all or some.

Photo by Dan

And finally, a species that is much less common in the region, but which has a stronghold in the Frontenac Axis, one of just a handful such areas in the province, the Golden-winged Warbler. It is a species in decline, one of the most rapidly disappearing in North America, and listed as Threatened in the province. It is being outcompeted by the closely related Blue-winged Warbler, with which it hybridizes in zones of overlap between the two species. Historically in the province, Golden-wings were more northern in range, and Blue-wings more southern; the first Blue-wing wasn’t recorded in the province until the early 1900s, but have continued to expand northward since, pushing the Golden-wing out of the southwestern regions where it was once more plentiful. Hybrids are fertile and usually backcross with one parent species or the other, further diluting the species pools (this does lead to the question of whether they are even separate species at all if their offspring are fertile, or if they’re simply two subspecies with very different plumages). Compounding the problem is loss of habitat on both summer and winter grounds, and nest parasitism by the Brown-headed Cowbird, which favours the same open, scrubby habitat the Golden-winged Warbler likes.

Beyond just these five, we also have Cerulean, Pine, Black-throated Green and Yellow Warblers, as well as Ovenbird and Northern Waterthrush, back on territory around our house. We can probably expect them to be joined by Chestnut-sided, Magnolia, Black-throated Blue, Blackburnian, Prairie, Mourning, and Canada Warblers, Common Yellowthroat and Louisiana Waterthrush, all of which are also found in the habitats of Frontenac Provincial Park and surrounding area. Twenty breeding species, what a smorgasbord. Although we won’t encounter all of those during our MAPS surveys, we will probably see most, and I’m really looking forward to those field days.

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Posted in birds

Tagged American Redstart, Black-and-White Warbler, Golden-winged Warbler, Nashville Warbler, warblers, Yellow-rumped Warbler

Monday Miscellany

Posted on May 11, 2009 | 3 Comments

It’s amazing just how fast the trees leaf out once they start. Just two weeks ago I was noting the late afternoon sun glowing through the sprinkling of leaves on the saplings across the road from the house. Now, I can barely make out the neighbour’s house, which was so apparent in winter. By June, I won’t be able to see it at all. All manner of plant life has greened up or is hard at work at it. Some shrubs are completely leafed out, while the tall ash trees are only just starting. Like the creeks that start tumbling over their rocky beds at spring melt, once spring arrived, time seems to have picked up speed and is rushing by.

We’ve had a fair bit of rain over the course of the last week. It seems to have gotten all the wet out of its system now, however, and we’re forecasted to have mostly clear skies the rest of the week (whether it remains that way remains to be seen). Although all that rain was undoubtedly part of the reason behind the green explosion, the animals were less than happy about it. This Blue Jay, for instance, was looking a bit bedraggled as it visited the feeders one afternoon.

The rain has made the ground near our dock rather soggy. As Dan was flipping his boat over one day last week to try to locate a leak that had gotten worse over the winter, he disturbed this guy from the pool of water around the boat. I spent a lot of time debating the identity of this guy. The bright green upper lip and speckled underbelly should make it easy to ID, I figured. I think that it’s a Mink Frog, Rana septentrionalis, but it could also be a Green Frog, Rana clamitans. I couldn’t figure out a definitive ID characteristic that would rule one out based on the photos I have. A Mink Frog would be a “lifer” for me, a species that I’d never encountered previously. In Ontario they tend to be found further north than the GTA where I grew up, but we’d be at the southern edge of their range, here. They’ve been recorded over in the Park. I’m leaning toward Mink because of the small eardrums, dorsal ridges that terminate halfway down the back, and lack of strong barring on the back legs, but I get the impression these are all somewhat variable features.

Before Dan flipped over his boat, he bailed out some of the water. And sitting in the water was this guy. I believe it’s a water bug in the genus Belostoma. It was rather large, about an inch long, and quite active within the container Dan had scooped it into. This group of water bugs are among those where the female lays her eggs on the male’s back in the spring. He “broods” the eggs, keeping them clean of fungus, protecting them from predators, and making sure they’re well oxygenated (by doing “push-ups” at the surface of the water). I’m not sure if the lack of eggs on this one means it’s a female, or just a male that hasn’t been laid on yet. I did notice, however, in examining the photos on my computer, that it’s sporting a bunch of red mites.

I found this strange beetle clinging to a piece of driftwood beside my moth trap one morning. I wasn’t sure if it was alive, as it fell off the wood when I touched it, and sat with its legs curled under it. I set it on a shelf in a vial for a couple of hours as I sorted through my trap and photographed the moths I’d caught. When I returned to it, it was sitting in a different spot in the vial, and its legs appeared to be out. As soon as I picked up the vial again, however, it fell over and its legs curled underneath it again.

I pulled out my trusty Kaufman Guide to Insects (I love that book, have I mentioned that?), and there it was at the bottom of page 193: Bolitotherus cornutus. Looking it up on BugGuide.net reveals its common name to be Forked Fungus Beetle, or sometimes Horned Darkling Beetle. The two horns are projections from its thorax, and are used in “battle” with other males to win females (I’m not sure the purpose of the orange “hairs”). They are associated with bracket fungi of hardwoods such as maple and beech. The Kaufman guide makes a note that they are adept at “playing dead”, so I guess that’s what my beetle was doing whenever I disturbed it. Was pretty convincing!

While out with Raven today I encountered this bracket fungus projecting from the side of a stump. Just recently I had read over at Huckleberry Days about Dryad’s Saddle, Polyporus squamosus, a stalked bracket fungus that appears about now, so I thought, “Aha! A Dryad’s Saddle!”. I took a documenting photo and returned home. I pulled out my mushroom guide just to confirm and look up a couple of life history details about the species, and now I’m not convinced that it’s Dryad’s Saddle after all. All the photos I can find on the web for the species show it being concave where it attaches to the stalk, rather than convex like my fungus. I searched through the guide a couple of times and poked about the ‘net, but couldn’t come up with an identity.

Very close to the same spot, I stood and watched this bee fly hovering at several Spring Beauties at the side of the road. It was much oranger than previous individuals I’ve seen, and I wondered if it was just a dark Bombylius major, the species I’ve seen before, or a different species. I gather the half-light/half-dark wing markings are fairly distinctive, and seem to only be shared by B. major and B. mexicanus. It’s hard to make out the specific pattern of dark, but I’m leaning toward B. major.

I have no idea what this spider is. Not being insects, they’re not usually treated in much depth in the usual insect guides, although Stephen Marshall’s Insects doesn’t do too badly. It looks like it might be a type of crab spider, but I’m not sure. I’d knocked it off the branch of a tree onto a white sheet when I was out looking for beetles (as per a post by Ted of Beetles in the Bush that suggested if you go around thwacking some branches in the spring, it’s possible to discover some beetles you might not normally encounter). I’ve only gone out the once and thwacked half a dozen branches before I was disrupted by the arrival of a real estate agent who was coming to take photos of the house, and then it rained much of last week. Now that the weather is nice again I plan to give it another try.

A few animals from a little closer to home… with the nicer spring weather the cats have been allowed to go outside in their harnesses to sit in the long grass, enjoy the sunshine, and watch the birds. They’re tied to the deck with short 10-foot leads, so they’re not really a threat to anything except perhaps the odd bug. Both for the safety of wildlife and the cats themselves, I never let my cats roam about outdoors, so this is about as outdoor-cat as these guys will get. They enjoy it, though. Despite the chipmunk who thumbs its nose at them by foraging on fallen seeds under the birdfeeder five feet away.

Fish eats cat. Fish spits up cat.

Since late winter, when the snow was just starting to melt, Raven has been taking an increased interest in water. At the first start of ice breakup, she’d paddle her feet in the shallows of the lake, but it’s taken her a while of gradually working up to letting her feet leave the security of the ground. Even when she started doing that, she’d only push forward half a body length, and then quickly turn around to paddle back. After once or twice of that, she wouldn’t go after sticks that were further out anymore, she’d just look at you and whine. We’d taken her out in the boat a couple times and “thrown” her overboard, and she’d paddle back to shore just fine, but was reluctant to go in of her own accord.

Then, a couple days ago, it was like she had an epiphany. We’d thrown a couple of sticks for her just out of reach from where her feet could touch bottom, and she’d pushed off to grab them, but turn quickly back around. She showed a bit of willingness to go a bit further, and so we got her to do two body lengths, and then three. Then Dan suggested throwing the stick way out and seeing if she’d go for it. So I tossed it four or five meters out, and she struck right out to retrieve it.

Within the course of five minutes, she was suddenly paddling all over the place like a bonafide water dog. Not only that, but once she realized she wasn’t going to drown if her feet left the bottom, she discovered that hey – I actually like this! Now when we take her down to throw sticks for her, she’ll jump right in the water and start paddling out before you’ve even tossed the stick out. Quite a change from the puppy who was reluctant to even get her feet wet last fall!

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Posted in amphibians, birds, bugs, fungus, invertebrates, mammals

Tagged Blue Jay, cats, invertebrates, Mink Frog, Raven, spring

This one’s for my peeps

Posted on May 9, 2009 | 4 Comments

I have been hoarding these photos for a couple of weeks now. For various reasons, I didn’t get around to posting about them immediately after I took them, but neither did I just want to throw them into my catchall piles. So they’ve been sitting in my “to-post” file while I awaited an opportunity to talk about them.

I came across this frog while visiting my parents’ old home a couple of weekends ago. I had brought my mothing equipment with me and set up a couple of blacklit sheets in the yard. It was as I was heading around to check them that this little frog hopped in front of me. A year ago I had something very similar happen with a Wood Frog, in nearly the same place. This year, it was a Spring Peeper, Pseudacris crucifer.

Peepers are tiny frogs. They’re the smallest species found in Ontario, at an inch long or less. This makes them difficult to spot out in the waters of the vernal pools they inhabit in the spring. However, they’re certainly not difficult to hear. Pound for pound (ounce for ounce?), they’re one of the loudest animals. Their high-pitched peeps can reach levels of up to 90 decibels or more. Since they’re not trying to draw females in from across broad distances, the explanation for the noise is likely a result of sexual selection. A male’s vocal mechanism can make up as much as 15% of his body weight. The bigger and stronger his voice-box and amplification, the louder the noise he can produce. So females gravitate to males who can peep the loudest and the fastest. Over evolutionary time, this would drive up the amplitude of the male peepers’ noise. Standing beside a whole pond-full of male peepers giving it their all can cause your ears to ring. At 90 dB, prolonged exposure can actually cause hearing damage. Unsurprisingly, frogs have evolved a method of protection from their own noise.

The scientific name, crucifer, meaning “cross-bearing”, refers to the dark X on the frog’s back. They’re usually variations on brown, though some may be grayish. You can tell the sexes apart by size (females are larger), but also by the colour of their throat – those of females are pale, while males’ are pigmented. I suspect this individual is a female.

Although they don’t climb trees, they have excellent sticky pads on the ends of their toes that allow them to grip vertical surfaces such as rocks or vegetation. This gal used hers to climb out of the yogurt container I had placed her in while I got my camera. Interestingly, they had once been placed in the same genus as the Gray Treefrog, Hyla, before being assigned to the genus Pseudacris, the chorus frogs.

This time of year peepers are caught up in the drive to make more of themselves. In northern climates such as ours they breed from late March to June, but in southern regions such as Florida, their breeding season is October through March. The female can lay as many as 900 eggs each spring. Considering that in order to maintain stable population levels a single frog must successfully make one offspring within its lifetime (therefore a pair must produce two), the percentage of eggs that make it to sexual maturity must be exceptionally low for females to need to produce 900 eggs. If even as much as 1% of eggs made it to sexual maturity, there’d be an incredible population boom (1% = 9 eggs). Most eggs and/or tadpoles will probably be eaten by predators, or suffer dessication before they are ready to leave the water if their vernal pool dries up too early. A success rate of just 2 eggs is equal to about 0.22%.

Through most of their range they are simply known by the common name Spring Peeper, but they have some delightful local names (or at least, according to various sources on the web). In New Brunswick they are often called “tinkletoes”. In some parts of southeastern US they are known as “spring creepers”. In Martha’s Vinyard they’re “pinkletinks”. But my personal favourite comes from western Pennsylvania, where they have the delightful name of “peedee dinks”.

Here, they’re just peepers. But the name suits them. Our ponds are all full of peeps at the moment, the males all advertising their studliness. Although we have no ponds right near our house, the sound from the frogs in the ones in the nearby forest carries on the still night air, and I can lie in bed with the window open and enjoy this emblematic sound of spring.

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Posted in amphibians

Tagged Spring Peeper