September 2009 – Page 3 – Seabrooke Leckie

Who are you?

One of the things I’ve loved about blogging but that was unexpected when I first started has been the community of like-minded people. I love that I can post a photo of something unknown and somebody will be able to identify it for me. I like when readers comment about similar experiences they’ve had, or when I perhaps (unintentionally) answered a question they had. It’s fun when readers take what I’ve shared and then go out to search for it themselves – sometimes with surprising and interesting results. And although there are many, many more excellent blogs out there than I’m humanly able to visit on a regular basis, I also like popping over to see what’s going on in other bloggers’ worlds.

When I started this blog in January last year, I knew pretty much all of my regular readers. It was pretty simple at the beginning – there were only a dozen or two people who visited the blog with any frequency. Twenty months later, the readership of this blog has grown substantially – far more people drop by than I’d ever imagined when I first started it! As the blog grows, I’ve started to feel more of a disconnect from the readership. And I’m still a relatively small fish – I have to imagine that bloggers with enough readers to rank on the frontpage of the Nature Blog Network have trouble with this on an even larger scale.

I love that I’m reaching more people, but I wish I better knew who I was reaching. So I want to hear from YOU, the reader: Who are you? Where are you from? Do you keep your own blog? What brought you here – and better yet, what keeps you here?

I’ve been thinking of adding in more interactive posts – polls, quizes, etc. Perhaps as another weekly regular akin to my Monday Miscellany. Is this something readers would enjoy participating in? Or should I stick to the information-sharing style that I’ve built the blog this far upon?

I have been meaning to update and reorganize my blogroll for ages, too. If you have me listed on your blogroll, but you don’t appear on mine, please leave me a comment! I already have some of my readers on a list of need-to-adds, but it can be hard to discover everybody.

Finally, a very big, heartfelt THANK-YOU to all my readers, past and present, for your patronage! You’re the reason I keep sitting down at the keyboard in the evening, because it gets a little lonely if you’re just blogging to yourself.

A hunter at heart

It’s hard to believe such a cute creature can harbour such a killer instinct. (The cat, not the teddy bear.) Both dogs and cats are naturally predatory animals, but domesticated cats retain much more of that instinct than most dogs do. If you’ve ever seen a cat perk up its ears at the sound of a fly buzzing in a window pane or jump up from where it’s curled up on the couch upon spotting a moth fluttering at a lamp, you’ll know what I mean. That hunting instinct is always present, even in the fattest, laziest of cats. Never take a cat for granted. If it doesn’t chase that fly, it’s not because it’s not a hunter, but rather that it simply chooses not to expend the energy at that moment (a cat’s urge to sleep is about on par with its urge to hunt).

I am a firm believer of an indoor-cat philosophy. Keep cats indoors. The outdoors is a dangerous place for cats. There is the risk of being hit by cars, or being caught by a predator bigger than it (coyotes and fishers are particularly fond of cat). There is the risk of it getting into fights, with racoons or wild animals, or other neighbourhood cats, and developing infection or suffering more serious injuries. The cat is also dangerous to the outdoors. If it’s smaller than the cat, it’s a target. Chipmunks, mice, birds, all favourites. Even a well-fed cat cannot resist the allure of a scurrying mouse.

Oliver looooves the outdoors. It’s fascinating, so many places to roam, so many things to see. He’d taken to scooting out through our feet as we came in the door, and had even learned how to open the door itself (it was one of those sorts without a latch), as he’s doing in the photo above. Finally, we gave in, and decided he would be okay on supervised walks where we were always outside with him.

He quickly asserted himself as a hunter. He would chase the crickets and meadowhawks in the lawn, with a fairly good success rate. Since meadowhawks are a dime a dozen around here, and the cat was just being a cat, we let him tackle those. When he startled up a snake and then pounced on its tail end (I was surprised it didn’t turn around and bite him), I took him inside. But aside from the meadowhawks, the arrangement seemed to be working fine.

Then yesterday Ollie disappeared on us while I was distracted setting up my moth sheet at one side of the lawn. Into the garden? The long grass beyond? I wasn’t sure. He hadn’t been far away while I was working, but then when I turned around next he was gone. I searched for him initially, but couldn’t find him. I needed to get started on dinner, so sent Dan out to resume the search. He found Ollie – perched on this guy, a Chipping Sparrow that Dan at first thought was dead. It wasn’t, although the poor thing didn’t make it, bruised and probably scared to death.

That’s it for Ollie. No more outdoors, supervised or otherwise. We’d let our guard down, lulled into thinking (consciously or not) that his focus was on the meadowhawks and he’d be no problem. I feel terrible for the little sparrow. It’s so easy to forget that every cat is a hunter at heart.

Last fall I wrote a post on keeping cats indoors. I strongly encourage cat owners to keep your cat indoors, no matter how pitifully he looks at you with those big, round eyes. It’s for his own good as much as it is the birds outside that you keep him indoors. If you just can’t resist, buy him a harness and tie-out lead to keep him away from problem areas where small animals or birds might frequent (eg., gardens, bird baths) and to keep him from wandering off. We learned our lesson the hard way.

Audubon Magazine recently did an excellent article on the problem of cats outdoors, brought to my attention by Clare of The House and other Arctic musings. It’s definitely worth a read.

Tay Meadows Tidbit – Great Black Wasp

Apparently Nature felt that I hadn’t been out to visit enough recently, and decided to come to me. I’d just gone into the washroom to return the tea I’d rented (as my dad likes to say) and was startled to discover a GIANT BLACK INSECT squirming at the water’s surface. It was big, at least an inch and a half (35mm) long. And, it turned out, it was a wasp. Big + wasp don’t usually go hand-in-hand as a favourable combination to me (although, I did profile some gentle giants last year; this one was close to the size of those, though not so robust), so I was a little intimidated. I scooped it up in a container and took it outside where I took some photos while it dried out, then let it fly away.

Appropriately, the insect is called a Great Black Wasp (Sphex pensylvanicus). BugGuide lists their average size as 25mm (1″), but this individual was definitely larger than that. BugGuide also remarks that males are smaller than females, so given the size I would suspect this to be a female.

Another clue might be the large mandibles you can see below her face. Great Black Wasps also go by the name “Katydid Hunter” or “Steel-blue Cricket Hunter”. The females capture katydids and crickets – sometimes as large or larger than they are – paralyze them with a sting, and carry them off to their burrow nests. There they lay an egg on the still-living katydid. When the larva hatches, it feeds on the katydid. Paralyzing the prey, rather than killing it outright, prevents the prey item from becoming dessicated or decomposing before the egg hatches. The young overwinter in the burrow; adults emerge and are present in July through September. Interestingly, while the adult catches katydids to feed the young, it itself actually feeds on nectar from flowers. I don’t know what this one was doing inside – there are neither katydids nor flowers in the house, not even dirt that it could burrow in.

Some interesting studies have been done with digger wasps of the genus Sphex. When females return to their burrow with their prey item, they drop the katydid at the nest entrance and go inside just to make sure the coast is clear before they drag the cumbersome object in. If they went in with their mouth full they could be caught in a compromising position that might make it difficult to defend themselves. If a researcher moves the katydid a few inches from where the female dropped it, when she returns outside she has to search for it again. She can find it, but then upon returning to the nest must drop it and inspect the burrow again – her genetic programming forces her to go through this behavioural sequence each and every time, no matter how many times the researcher moves the katydid. Some have cited this as an example arguing against the idea of free will, but I suspect the genetic programming in most insects is probably much simpler than it is in vertebrates.

Monday Miscellany

Isn’t this a lovely photo? I found these two butterflies clinging to a blade of grass out in our lawn the other day when I took my book outside to read in the sun for a bit. Naturally, I hadn’t brought my camera – I was going to be reading, not looking at wildlife. They seemed to be staying put, so I decided to run inside and grab it. I believe these are Clouded Sulphurs (Colias philodice), although they could possibly be the closely related and nearly identical Orange Sulphur (C. eurytheme) – they didn’t open their wings for me. I think the amount of pink edging makes them Clouded, though. Their larval foodplants are white clover and alfalfa – making our lawn a perfect place for them!

This moth was found in our garden one afternoon, flitting between these white flowers. I think they’re leeks, or some other oniony plant closely related to chives (they smell very chivey when crushed). I believe the moth is a Bronzed Cutworm, Nephelodes minians, a reasonably common species that would be starting to fly around now. We tend to think of moths as being nocturnal, but even some species that are primarily encountered at night (at lights) can often be found at flowers during the daytime. These leeks (or whatever) appear to be a favourite; I also saw a looper moth at them this week.

Dan brought me this guy one evening, wondering if it was a giant queen ant. It sure looks like one, with that long, fat abdomen. However, it’s actually a blister beetle in the genus Meloe. I found one last fall and wrote about it here. The one I found last year was a female, with a huuuuge abdomen and straight antennae. This individual has a more moderately-sized abdomen, and its antennae have U-shaped hooks halfway up their length. These hooks are used to grasp the female while mating. Blister beetles have some incredible life-history facts, including the ability that gives them their common name, and climbing stalks of grass to hitchhike rides on passing bees (visit last year’s post to find out why).

I mentioned in last week’s Miscellany that there were some bird-seed-plants growing underneath our feeder. A few days later, Dan happened to notice that there are a couple also growing in the feeder. This one is a baby sunflower. It won’t make it to any size before the frost arrives in a month or so, but it’s an extremely valiant effort.

I posted a little while ago about the delicious fresh produce we’ve been getting with our pick-ups from our local Community Shared Agriculture farm. I couldn’t resist taking a photo of one of the colourful dishes that we had this week. It’s stuffed squash – I’d made this once before, using patty-pan squash that we got in our basket, and enjoyed it so much that I thought I’d do it again, even though we lacked the patty-pans this week. I used acorn squash rings instead, and it worked out fairly well. The filling includes fresh peppers, green onions, corn and tomatoes, mixed with local eggs, cheese and chicken and baked in the oven for half an hour. Mm-mm…. this was probably my favourite dish of all the ones I’ve made with our CSA produce this summer. And I love the colours. It’s too bad this photo has a yellow cast because of the incandescent lighting.

Finally, any gardeners out there? My Love-lies-bleeding ended up growing very stumpy this year – the plants on the right of this photo are only about 6 inches high. Mid-summer it looked like it was dying and done for the year. I didn’t remove it because I tend not to pull things out till the spring. Then a few weeks later I noticed the plant had perked up, started growing again like crazy (horizontally rather than vertically, strangely) and re-bloomed (many short little droopy flower tails growing from the forks of the branches rather than the big long ones at the top of a tall plant). At about the same time, I noticed these similar-looking plants coming up beside it. They had reddish bases to the stems like the L-L-b does. Could it be possible the plant self-seeded when the original flowers had finished, a month ago?

That’s all for this week! A short post because I’m trying to beat our internet, which has been habitually cutting out on us around 11pm every night. Our ISP doesn’t know what the problem is, and can’t help us troubleshoot unless it’s actually doing it. We’ve so far been too lazy to call Tech Support at midnight.

Black and blue and wet all over

On the weekend our landlady and her son were here to shut down the swimming pool for the year. Neither Dan nor I had used the pool since moving in, although had it been an average summer with lots of glorious sunshine to warm the water and hot, sticky temperatures to inspire me to dive in, I probably would have been in there most days. As it was, we’d enjoyed the frogs that had moved in but didn’t try out the water ourselves – too cool for the weather. It takes a lot of energy and effort to maintain a pool, and since we weren’t using it, we suggested to our landlady that it might be best just to shut it down for the year.

When they went to clean out the pool filter they found this little guy floating around in the intake area. The son brought it into the house for me, suspecting (correctly) that I might be interested. It’s a Blue-spotted Salamander, Ambystoma laterale. This one was just little, maybe 3 inches (8 cm) long, but even the largest ones only grow to 5.75 inches (14 cm).

It was probably a youngster from this year. Salamanders start out aquatic – their eggs are laid in vernal pools and they spend the first couple of months of their life in the water. By late summer they’ve completely metamorphosed into their adult state. As adults they are terrestrial, living either in and around damp deciduous forests and swamps, or sometimes found in fields or coniferous woodlands (I think it’s unlikely they would spend their whole life in these habitats, though; probably they are just passing through or staying temporarily). They generally hide under rocks or logs, or sometimes just in the leaf litter. In the spring especially, when the forest floor is damp and salamanders are on the move to the vernal ponds for breeding, but also in the fall when young salamanders are dispersing, I have visions of unintentionally stepping on a salamander that’s hiding under a leaf in the litter.

Salamanders, like all amphibians, have very thin, sensitive skin. Having been in the chlorinated pool (however mild the concentration) I was a bit concerned for his health, although the frogs seemed to do okay there. Blue-spotted Salamanders use lungs for respiration, but there are some species that breathe through their skin. All salamanders need to keep their skin moist, and secrete a mucous layer that helps trap moisture, but also acts as a barrier to salt loss when they’re in the water (otherwise their bodies salts would disperse through their skin, by osmosis, into the relatively salt-less freshwater).

We have one small pond on the property, tucked a couple of fields back, hidden in a patch of trees. It’s less than a foot deep at this time of year, though I don’t doubt it will be considerably fuller in the springtime. I decided to take the salamander back there, both so that it was away from the pool (and the dog), but also so it was nearish to water should it want it, even though as adults they don’t actually spend much if any time in water in the non-breeding season. Presumably if it stayed in the area it would have a head start on migrating to the pond in the spring.

When we reached the water I slipped my hand under the surface, and after a moment the little salamander swam off. Even though they spend so little time in the water, they’re adept swimmers, using a side-to-side undulating motion much like a fish or shark. Its long partially-flattened tail probably helps play a role in this movement. Males will also have longer, more flattened tails than females (which leads me to wonder if this is a female). Presumably the males need more control in the water when they’re trying to win over and mate with a female in the spring.

The salamander, once in the water, didn’t go far. Clearly it thought the water every bit as cold as I did. After a moment it seemed to be curling up into a fetal position, so I lifted it out again. I was surprised at the temperature, since it is late-summer after all.

You can really see just how spotted it is, and where it gets its name. There is also a similarly-patterned species, the Jefferson’s Salamander, that doesn’t occur here but is found through much of the Blue-spotted’s range. The Jefferson’s is dark with blue speckles rather than blue spots. Where the two overlap they hybridize regularly, producing a non-species labelled “Ambystoma platineum“. These hybrids are triploid – that is, they have three sets of genes instead of the normal two – and are all females. They reproduce gynogenetically – they will mate with males, but the male’s sperm only acts as a trigger to the egg to start dividing; it contributes no genetic material itself. As a result, the hybrid’s offspring are partial clones of their mother – they are diploid, with two sets of chromosomes that are identical to two of the three of their mother’s.

I set the salamander back out on the leaf litter, since clearly it had no interest in being in the water. I left it there, hopefully to go off and find itself a good place to hole up for the winter. It will need to burrow down into the sandy soil some 18 inches (45 cm) or so to get below the frost line. It will reemerge in the spring, triggered by the first spring rains, often marching across snow to reach its still mostly-frozen breeding ponds. I haven’t ever witnessed this spectacle, but I’m going to try to see it next spring. Maybe, among the individuals in the meltwater at the pond’s edge, this guy will be there.