March 2010 – Page 2 – Seabrooke Leckie

Tay Meadows Tidbit – Unlucky rabbit’s foot

Or, rather, an unlucky hare’s foot. I found this out on a rock crown in the middle of a small barrens patch, apparently disassociated from whatever other remains might have been left of its original owner. It wasn’t all that much smaller than Raven’s foot, and there’s only one white animal around here with paws that large: the Snowshoe Hare. You can see the top of the foot is partly brown. This is actually the colour of the fur, it’s not stained from blood or mud. The hares change colour, from brown to white in September/October, and from white to brown in March/April. They would be partway through their colour change about now. They’re still white enough to stand out against the now-bare ground; I flushed one the other day, and while all I saw was a streak as it dashed off into the cedar brush, it was still white enough to be unmistakable. Their feet, especially the hind ones, may retain some white all year, though, so it could even have been from last summer. Given the ability of the relatively flesh-less feet to resist decay (a beneficial quality in something used as a good-luck charm), it’s hard to say if this is recent or if it’s been under the snow for a while.

Look at those nails in the top photo. Although hares don’t generally dig burrows, they will sometimes excavate scrapes in the ground in their favoured resting spot, and the nails may help in loosening up hard earth. They might also be used in the winter, digging through snow for food, though most of their winter diet consists of buds and twigs from coniferous trees. Of course, they would also be useful in protection or fighting. The underside (below) is thickly furred, which helps to make the feet more snowshoe-like in the winter. Probably keeps them nice and warm, too.

I suspect coyotes to be the hare’s doers-in, if only because we have a local pack that’s spent the winter howling about our neighbourhood. Fox, Great Horned Owl and Northern Goshawk are also regular predators of hares.

And no, I didn’t bring it home for good luck. That’s rabbit feet you’re thinking of.

Return of the moths

I’m a couple days late posting this, but let me start out by saying that The Moth and Me, the fabulous blog carnival dedicated to our most favourite lepidopterans, has returned after a short three-month winter hibernation. In TMaM #9, Jason at Xenogere has treated us to an enjoyable recounting of a chance encounter with a female Woolly Gray, Lycia ypsilon (check it out to see why this is memorable!), and along the way shared a dozen excellent mothy posts.

I’m looking for hosts for April and onward! Interested? Drop me a line at sanderling [at] symbiotic [dot] ca to say which month you’d like to host.

Outside, our local moths have also made a return with the warm weather. Although I haven’t been seeing as many this year as I was at this time last year, I don’t know if it’s because of weather patterns or just the change in location. Even still, I’ve been getting a pretty good assortment to my lights most evenings over the last week. I thought I’d share a few here.

I very much expected this moth to be one of the first out, but I’d already tallied more than a dozen species before it showed up. It’s called The Half-wing, Phigalia titea, its common name derived from the female moths which have stunted wings incapable of flight. It also comes in an all-black morph which is less common.

This is a Three-spotted Sallow, Eupsilia tristigmata. Although not the first moth, this one was one of the earliest to turn up at the porch light this year. Since then I’ve had a few, which I’ve been pleased with. Prior to moving here I’d only seen one. The Eupsilias are all early-spring and late-fall moths, spending the winter as adults holed up in some snug spot.

This is another Eupsilia, a Straight-toothed Sallow, E. vinulenta. Or, at least, it could be a Straight-toothed Sallow. The only way to tell it apart (without dissecting it to examine the genitalia) from a couple of nearly-identical species is by the tiny “teeth” at the edges of the scales – on all the other species, these “teeth” curl. Most people don’t have the means to check this, and so any moth that looks like this gets labeled a Straight-toothed Sallow. It might be more appropriate to call it part of the Straight-toothed Sallow group… but that’s such a mouthful.

The rulers shown in these photos are all displaying millimeters. The measurements are being used in the guidebook, but they’re also useful for conveying scale. This moth is a member of the micromoths, the group of moths that make up the first half of a taxonomic list. Much like birds are divided into “non-passerines” (the first half, taxonomically) and “passerines”, with moths we have micromoths and macromoths. I’m sure they fall into some sort of broad category header with a fancy scientific name, but I don’t know it.

This one’s an Aurora Flatbody, Semioscopis aurorella. I’m not sure why they’re called flatbodies (beyond potentially the obvious). There are a few Semioscopis species, all of which are early spring fliers.

Most of the time the littler micromoths get overlooked. They’re tiny, harder to see, and tend to be harder to ID both because the patterns have fewer distinguishing marks (less space and fewer scales to form marks with) and because there really hasn’t been a good guide to them. The best one out there is the Moth Photographers Group plates, which is online. None of the printed guides I own include micromoths. The new guide Dave and I are working on will have about 600 species or so. Hopefully this will help encourage interest in the group.

It really is a shame that they’re underappreciated, because some of them have some nifty patterns and shapes. This one is Acleris hastiana (as a sign of how passed-over they’ve been, more than half of them don’t have common names, while nearly all macromoths have common names).

I think this one is also Acleris hastiana. It’s a rather variable moth, with some of the patterns of the adults looking like they really should be separate species. Most of them are pretty striking, though.

All for now. I’ve been posting daily photos over at my moth blog to showcase some of the diversity of this group of organisms. Now that the moths are flying again, I’m going to try to post species appropriate to the date, whatever’s out and about. Swing by and check it out!

A field guide to nestboxes

We have had a string of absolutely beautiful spring-like days so far this week. I could’ve spent much of the day out hiking if I didn’t have work I needed to get done indoors. However, yesterday I did take a bit of the afternoon to go out and clean out our nestboxes. Dan heard the first bluebird over the weekend, and it won’t be long before they start checking out nest sites.

I took our cordless drill because there are ten boxes in the fields out back of the house, and another two near the house (and that’s not including the dozen over at the 100-acre woods). Each has two screws holding the faceplate on. If I had to unscrew all 24 screws by hand, and then put them all back in again, I would have a very sore wrist by the end of the session! I just did the “local” boxes yesterday, and left the woods ones for perhaps tomorrow.

When we moved in last summer, much of the nesting season was already done. I noted two of the boxes being active last summer, but didn’t see anyone at the others. I’m not sure when the last time the boxes were cleaned out, because I wasn’t here to do it last winter. Most birds won’t next in a box that’s already got nesting material in it, so if you want to encourage as many active nests as possible, you really need to do it every year. It could be that they were cleaned out last March, and we just didn’t notice anyone because they’d already wrapped up, or perhaps they hadn’t been cleaned for a few winters and that’s why they weren’t used.

I enjoy cleaning boxes in part because it gets me outside on these lovely days, but also for the discovery of who was living in the boxes last year. Quite often it’s a surprise when you unscrew the faceplate and remove it, especially if you weren’t able to observe the occupants while they were using it.

Different species have different styles of nests, so you can usually guess who was living in a particular box based on its contents. Sometimes you can also figure out whether or not the babies fledged, too.

The above two boxes were both used by House Wrens. Wrens build very twiggy nests, using very coarse material for most of the stuffing. It looks like they were being a little over-zealous with their nest-building, but this is their usual style. They prefer for their nest to be near the level of the hole, so they’ll stuff the box with as many twigs as it takes to fill it to reach the hole. Then they arrange the twigs so the cup depression in them is tucked into one of the back corners, and will usually line that with hairs or fine grasses.

This one’s the nest of a Tree Swallow. Swallows have a habit of using large, pale feathers in their boxes (in fact, they like large, pale feathers so much that you can sometimes get them to pluck one from your fingers the way you might feed chickadees from your hand). You can always tell when it’s a swallow nest in the box as a result.

This was one of the two boxes where I saw it in use last summer. These guys fledged in early August, about a month after we moved in.

Here’s the nest after I pulled it out of the box. It’s amazing how well the nests (of most species) will stay together when removed, usually remaining quite square. It’s a little hard to see in this photo perhaps, but the front side of the nest is positively caked with poop. This is from the young birds defecating while they’re perched in the doorway (as above) trying to decide whether they should fly. It may take them a couple of days to work up the courage. Prior to that the parents will remove the fecal sacs from the nest in order to keep it clean. You can usually tell if a nest fledged young because often there will be two or three droppings left behind in the nest, the last ones from the babies before they fledged, which the parents didn’t need to worry about removing.

Here’s another Tree Swallow nest. Just the one feather in this one, but a very similar construction.

You can see the caked droppings on the right side of the nest here, the side that was under the entrance/exit hole.

This was the nest of an Eastern Bluebird. This was the other of the two boxes where we actually saw the box in use last summer:

You can tell the nest hasn’t changed at all, but what’s with all the fluffy white stuff in the winter box? It was plant down, although I wasn’t sure what type. Possibly milkweed, given the abundance of the stuff in our meadows. The seeds of whatever the fluff had belonged to were now gone. To where? This box is near to a couple of small saplings, within jumping distance for a squirrel. The hole’s a bit on the small side for a Red Squirrel, however. I’ve also read that mice will use nestboxes over the winter, but this one was on a pole with a baffle, and I don’t think mice will climb trees and jump. So I’m a bit puzzled about the fluffy down.

I was delighted when I opened this box and discovered this nest. It belonged to a Black-capped Chickadee. I don’t know that I’ve seen inside a chickadee nest before. They cover the bottom of the cavity with mosses, and then the nest itself is lined with soft rabbit or other animal hair.

When I say “nest”, however, I use the term loosely. They don’t build a cup or significant depression like most species do, instead just making a nice soft base that they place the eggs on. I was so delighted by this find that I left the moss there, thinking maybe they’d reuse it, but in coming home and reading a bit more it looks like chickadees won’t reuse their mossy nests, so I’ll need to clean it out when I head out to do the boxes at the 100-acre woods. There was a male singing in the cedars you can see in the background of the previous photo, who may be intending to use the box again this year. Chickadees prefer natural cavities, but won’t turn their beaks up at a nestbox when natural cavities and dead trees are scarce, as they seem to be here.

Finally, I discovered this last box tucked against the wall of one of the outbuildings. I’m not sure when or why it was removed from the fields or wherever it had been, but somebody seems to have found it and liked it. This one I was fairly sure belonged to a squirrel, so I left it there.

The material is strips of cedar bark…

…torn from this log which was leaning against the wall right beside the nestbox. I did some Googling to just confirm that this was indeed a squirrel nest, and in doing so discovered this page at the Hilton Pond Center, a nature centre in the Piedmont of South Carolina. In it he shows a photo of a nestbox filled with cedar bark, just like mine – and notes that this is the preferred nest medium for flying squirrels! I think we have both species around here, although this is near the absolute northern limit for Southern Flying Squirrels, so it’s more likely to be a Northern. This looks like it was or is going to be a natal nest – one used for raising young – as opposed to a roosting nest, which are typically smaller. Now I’m wondering about all that fluff in the bluebird box – could it be a roosting nest? It’s kind of out in the open for a flying squirrel, though.

To say that I was stoked to find this is a bit of an understatement. Although flying squirrels aren’t really uncommon, they’re so rarely seen because they’re nocturnal, so they hold a bit of mystery for me. I’ve only ever seen one, at the lake house last year, which jumped on to our deck railing one evening. I got about a 1.5-second-long look at it in the light cast through the window before it was gone again. How neat would it be to have an active nest here? Even an inactive nest is a pretty cool find, though.

A chipmunk named Eddie

I’ve been debating what I want to write about this weekend. I have stockpiles of photos, some recent, some not, sitting in my “to be sorted” file folder that I’ve sifted through indecisively a few times this weekend. Nothing was grabbing me. There were several perfectly interesting subjects there, which I was quite intrigued by when I took the photos, but nothing that really spoke to me today. Purely in the metaphorical sense, of course; photos don’t actually speak to me unless I’m completely intoxicated on chocolate.

So I waffled, and took an extra day to think about it. Then this afternoon, I peeked out the window while I waited for my tea to steep, and underneath the feeders was a chipmunk. I’d actually seen this guy, or I presume it was the same guy, early last week, but I’d been in my car about to head off to my parents’, and my camera was packed away. It’s not like he was going anywhere. Still, I’d been pleased to see him (or her) there – it’s a sign that spring is near. Although chipmunks aren’t true hibernators – they enter a state of torpor and rouse from time to time when the weather is slightly milder to feed from the stores of food they built up in the fall – we haven’t seen one at the feeders (or anywhere else here) since before the snow fell. I think he’s got a nest somewhere under the old cabin (now storage shed), as we usually see him near there. In an ordinary forest situation they use burrows that they dig underground, but I have a feeling that this guy may have decided to save himself some time and created himself a cozy space underneath the floorboards of the century-old building.

He was doing well for himself under the feeders. The Red Squirrels have figured out to jump from the lilac bush onto the feeder platform, but the chipmunk prefers to keep his feet on the ground. Still, there was enough dropped or discarded seed down there to fill out his cheek pouch quite nicely. Each pouch can hold as many as 35 sunflower seeds, and obviously considerably more of the smaller millet, which is probably what he was picking up since the chickadees and other feeder visitors would dig through the millet for the sunflower. This allows them to carry quite a bit back to the burrow for storage when they find an abundant food source. They push it back out of their cheeks from the outside using their paws, like you might squeeze a tube of toothpaste.

So I was watching this little guy gathering seeds under the feeder when he turned around and faced the other direction. And I was shocked to see that he was missing virtually the entire left side of his face. I actually had to grab my binoculars to have a closer look. His face was so badly damaged that he was unable to use that cheek pouch, which accounts for why the one on the other side was crammed fit to burst. He has no left eye, just a slight depression where one once was. At points I thought I saw a seed fall from the side of his face and wondered if he was missing part of his cheek, although I can’t be sure it wasn’t one that had gotten stuck to the wound when he was pushing his nose around in the seed litter. I couldn’t tell how fresh the wound was. It wasn’t bleeding, didn’t look red or raw or leaking pus. It was hard to tell if he was in any pain, but he didn’t seem to be trying to avoid touching it, his behaviour was normal.

This sort of injury is most likely to result from an encounter with a predator, but I don’t know what might have done the damage. Hawk? Fox? Fisher? Snake? And how did one side of the face get damaged while the other side appears to have remained unscathed? Or the rest of his body, for that matter. So then I wondered if it might be an infection. Will mange destroy the eye like that? Some sort of flesh-eating bacteria, perhaps? Do wild animals get that? Should I be concerned for our other feeder-visitors, or for Raven? Or could it even maybe be a birth defect of some sort?

It doesn’t seem to have unduly affected him, in any case. He seems healthy enough. He didn’t look unusually thin, and he was clearly finding enough food (presumably also eating it) under our feeders. He was alert and active, dashing off to the cover of the lilac bush when the birds took flight, moving around at a normal pace. Presumably it would affect his depth perception, but it didn’t seem to be an issue at least during the time I was watching. I’ll have to keep an eye out for him this spring and see if he sticks around, and how he does. He won’t be hard to identify, anyway.

The name in the post title, incidentally, is after legendary myrmycologist Edward O. Wilson, who was blinded in one eye as a child during a fishing accident. It was this reduced vision that led him to study insects, which were easier to observe than mammals or birds. He actually started on flies, but when mounting pins became scarce during WWII he switched to ants, which could be stored in vials. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Tay Meadows Tidbit – Indian Meal Moth

I’ve spent the last few days at my parents’ place while my mom is away. This afternoon I decided to make some shortbread, but when you’re not in your own house, you often have to rummage around the cupboards to find what you’re looking for. So I was rummaging around and happened to pull out an extra set of measuring cups. I was quite surprised when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed there was something live in one of them!

It turned out to be a little moth, only about a centimeter (<1/2″) long. I recognized it immediately from its size, shape, and distinct pale shoulders: it’s an Indian Meal Moth, Plodia interpunctella. It’s another one of those household interlopers that usually arrive as eggs in storebought product (or adults, having emerged from eggs in the neighbour’s storebought product). In particular they like grains, though they’re not too fussy about the type. The scientist who coined the common name found them in cornmeal – which used to be known as Indian Meal. But flour, oatmeal, nuts, birdseed and even weird things like powdered milk, dried fruit and – gasp – chocolate are all also apparently fair game. They lay their eggs on or near suitable food; the eggs will hatch in 2 to 14 days, depending on temperature, and the caterpillars will take 2 to 41 weeks to grow, pupate and turn into moths, again depending on temperature. If they came in with your storebought product you’ll know soon enough after bringing it home, but if an adult finds it and lays eggs at a later date, it could turn up at pretty much any time.

The species is originally native to South America, though I’m not sure how “they” determine these things; these days it’s found around the world. Anywhere there’s cornmeal, flour, oatmeal, nuts… you get the idea. The adults are the most conspicuous, but you can tell if you’ve got an infestation of caterpillars because whatever product they’re chowing down on will be filled with fine silken threads, almost like a spiderweb fell in and got caught in it. (There will also probably be caterpillars, unless they’ve all pupated and left, but it will be the silk you notice first.) I don’t know what this guy came in with; I couldn’t see anything in any of the obvious grain products. Perhaps he was the neighbour’s moth…