February 2011 – Page 2 – Seabrooke Leckie

Birdilicious

Is there any harder time of the year for a northeastern naturalist than February? Even the slow-down of November is better. February is tough. By February, I’ve mostly exhausted the easy winter subjects and have to hope for encounters of wildlife or other unexpected occurrences to keep my interest up. By February, I’m getting really tired of the cold and the snow and the paucity of living things. I do like winter; I don’t think I could move to someplace like Florida where snow is virtually unheard of. I’d like to have a little bit of snow to enjoy. I could just use about a month less of it than what we get here in eastern Ontario, I think. But I love this landscape during the other 11 months too well to want to move simply for the sake of a shorter winter.

My posts have been slogging a little bit the last couple of weeks because of this winter wall, but for the first time since Christmas I actually have a backlog of topics right now. It’s gotta be a sign that spring’s just around the corner. And in fact, it will probably be only three weeks until the first moth of spring appears at our porch lights. The migrant birds will start returning around then, too. Three weeks; it’ll be here before I know it.

As perhaps a herald of warmer days to come, I was treated to my first “migrant” bird on the weekend. I was walking Raven down the road (the afternoon temperatures being above freezing and the snow therefore wet, such that snowshoes wouldn’t work well) when we flushed up this American Robin from the shoulder of the road. There, the snowplow had exposed the frozen grass and mud and the mild, sunny afternoon was working to melt away what thin layer was left. The ground would still be mostly frozen so he wasn’t hunting for earthworms, but it’s possible that some other invertebrates such as spiders might have been crawling about in the relative warmth. He wouldn’t let me get close enough for much of a photo, and naturally I’d only brought my short lens. But you can tell it’s a robin. Can even tell it’s a male robin.

We tend to think of robins as migrants, but not all of them head south, and those that do may not end up going far. It could be that this bird has been hanging around the area and I just haven’t run into him, or he might have moved just into town or someplace where foraging was a little easier. I doubt he came from very far, in any case. The true migrant robins probably won’t return till March at the earliest, as well. The cluck of the robin is such a warm-weather sound to me, it seemed out of place while there was still a foot or more of snow on the ground.

That same afternoon, on the way back up the road, Raven and I popped into the 100-acre woods briefly. I didn’t go far, but we followed the trail in a couple hundred meters. One of our neighbours uses the trails on the property for snowmobiling, and the heavy machine had packed down the snow sufficiently that I was able to walk on it even without my snowshoes. I’d paused near one of my favourite groves of hemlocks to let Raven bound around off trail when I heard a muffled squawk and some heavy tapping coming from the forest. Finally, after a bit of scanning, I located this Pileated Woodpecker several dozen meters away. He was working away on a dead snag, and continued there for a few minutes while I watched. It’s been at least a couple of months since I’ve seen one of these big beauties, so I was delighted by the sighting. Even if both my binoculars and long lens were at the house.

And finally, as if those two encounters weren’t treat enough, two days later I was walking back up the driveway with Raven when we flushed this Barred Owl from the pines that buffer our house from the road. At this time of year owls are starting to mate. I’ve heard a Barred Owl calling at night on a couple of occasions when putting Raven out at night, before bedtime; late winter they seem to be the most vocal. They also seem to be more active during the daytime. When I visited my parents a couple of weekends ago there were two separate Barred Owls perched on the roadside wires, scanning for rodents (naturally I hadn’t bothered to take my camera, not expecting to use it). This one perched in the tree a dozen meters away at most, looking very unperturbed. I took a few photos with my short lens and watched it for a couple of minutes, then decided to try going back to the house for my long lens. Unfortunately, in the four minutes I was gone the bird moved on.

At this time of year, so many great bird sightings practically back-to-back was exactly what I needed.

Sunday Snapshots: Silhouettes

Wild Clematis

Along the rail trail and roadsides I frequently see these clouds of fluffy seedheads suspended in the branches of trees and shrubs like milkweed down blown there by the wind. Closer approach reveals the soft puffs are attached to a vine that’s clambered its way up the undergrowth for a clearer view. The vine is Virgin’s Bower aka Wild Clematis, Clematis virginiana, and is from the same genus as the showy plants that climb the trellis in the backyard garden. Unlike the cultivated varieties, however, Wild Clematis is at its best in winter, after the leaves drop and reveal the delicate seedheads. Surprisingly, even though the white, fragrant flowers are neither few nor small, the vine often gets overlooked in the symphony of colour that is summer. I can’t consciously remember ever noticing one in bloom. (Neither could my mom, who blogged about them last year.)

It’s perhaps even more beautiful in winter, when it has the stage more or less to itself. The seedheads are designed to be functional, not attractive, but they do both well. The long, feather-like plumes can catch the wind and be carried some distance from the parent vine.

They lack tendrils and so grow like beans, rather than peas, weaving through and around their supports. Though they’re typically fond of moist or damp soils near areas with water, they’re pretty tolerant of a wide range of conditions, and will happily grow in a garden. They make a great addition to a native wildlife garden, providing food and cover for birds and other critters. The flowers are popular with native pollinators. Goldfinches may even use the downy seedheads in their nests in areas where they nest into the fall (goldfinches are a late-nesting species, only just getting started when most other birds already have fledglings out of the nest).

Many places sell Wild Clematis seeds or plants, but it’s probably just as easy to go out and collect your own seeds if you know where some grows in your area (if not, send me an SASE and I’ll mail you some!). The vines are perennial and can eventually reach 10 to 20 feet tall in good conditions. They’re apparently easy to grow from seed, though one site notes that they’re slow to germinate. I’ve collected a few and think I’ll try sprouting them myself this year.

wild clematis 2 by withrow, on Flickr; CC-licensed

Mycelium

A lot of interesting things can be found in a pile of firewood. Besides the insects and other critters we had in the log pile earlier this winter, Dan has also found my carpenter ant tunnels, and my mom recently discovered a Red Squirrel nest. And then the other day, while collecting an armful of logs for the fire, I discovered a few of them were covered with intricate black tracings. I puzzled over these for a few moments until I noticed in one spot several of them all came together into one thick line. Or, looking at it the other way, one thick line branched off into several.

I’m fairly certain that these are the mycelium of a bracket fungus that would have been growing on the exterior of the trunk. The mycelium is the fungus’s equivalent of a root network, tendrils that extend deep into its growing substrate (be it log or soil or something else). It’s the part of the fungus that’s active in decomposition; the part that we typically observe and think of as the fungus is simply its means of spreading its spores for reproduction.

The black mycelia weren’t just restricted to the outside of the log. There were more tracings along the sides, and when I examined the cut end, it was possible to see where the network extended through the wood into the tree’s interior. I’m curious as to whether the mycelium follows a path of least resistance as it grows, which would take it through the tree’s “veins” (the system of tubes that carries water and nutrients from the roots to the branches) and between the annual rings of growth, I would think. In some spots of the cross-section the black lines do look like they’re following this sort of pattern, but in other spots it just seems random.

I don’t know that there’s any way to tell simply from this which species of fungus was growing on the tree (I don’t even know what type of tree it was; the bark had long since been shed). Still, I found it pretty interesting simply to be able to see the network of mycelia, something that’s normally hidden out of sight.

I did a Google image search to see if I could find other photos of mycelia in logs. I didn’t really find what I was looking for, in part because I got distracted by this video. This is a computer simulation that someone wrote based on the growth patterns of fungal mycelia. Instead of decaying material, though, the “food” his electronic mycelia gravitate toward is the light areas of photographs. He supplies a photo to the computer program, and the program simulates the growth of the mycelia based on which parts are light and which are dark, with the densest growth in the lightest parts of the photo. At first it really does look like roots growing… (easier to see at full size at the video’s page). Pretty neat!

Marking the passage of time

My goodness, is it Saturday already? Where has the week gone? Apparently it’s been a busy week for me. Just a quick post today, too, as I’m headed out to my parents’ for the weekend.

When out hiking the 100-acre woods last week, I found this sawn tree. In any woods, trees fall with some regularity as they become old, diseased, or are taken down by weather phenomenon such as lightning or heavy snow or ice. I’m not sure why this one came down, though I think it was probably killed by insects, given that it didn’t look all that large. It’d come down across the trail, and I’d noticed it a few times over the last year of hiking the woods. Last week when I went by I noticed that the neighbour, who tends the trails in exchange for being able to ride his ATV there, had brought his chainsaw and cleared out some of the fallen logs.

I love to count tree rings, when I find stumps like this. You can’t do it on most natural stumps, of course, because they rarely break cleanly enough for you to see the individual layers. But a sawn log is easy to read. I snapped a photo and when I got home, counted the rings using Photoshop to keep track (otherwise I lose my place when I get halfway through).

This tree was 51 years old when it died. I think it came down in 2009, though it’s possible it had died sometime before that. That means that, at the latest, it started growing in 1958. I look at those rings, and try to think what each one represents, what was happening that year while the tree stood stolidly here, time flowing by. I can find the year I was born, halfway in.

I like how you can see the knots formed by the bases of branches. These would have grown when the tree was smaller, and as it continued to lay down wood each year, the bases of the branches would get overgrown and incorporated into the trunk of the tree.

We can discern the individual rings of growth because wood grown at different times of the year tends to have a different colour. The highest rate of growth is during the spring and early summer. It’s lighter coloured and usually thicker in width than the stuff that’s grown later in the summer. By fall growth has nearly stopped as the tree prepares for winter dormancy.

The light-coloured part of the ring is called “early wood” or “spring wood”, to reflect the time of year it was grown, and the darker stuff is “late wood” or “summer wood”. The lighter colour is probably due to the more porous nature of spring wood compared to the denser material of the summer wood.

Variation in the width of the bands reflects growing conditions of that particular season. Years with good rainfall and temperatures will result in more wood growth, while especially dry years, or cold years, will cause stunted growth for the year. If you count back 8 or 9 years there’s a really broad band with thick growth of both spring wood and summer wood. My guess is that the summer was wetter than normal, allowing the tree to keep growing longer than it would normally. Just a few years later the weather had flipped, and thin rings suggest a particularly dry year.

Younger trees tend to put down more wood per season than older trees, too, which is why inner rings are often wider than outer ones (compare the width of the second and third decades in the top photo to the fifth decade). It could also be an indication of localized growing conditions – perhaps when it took root as a seedling the canopy was closed, but somewhere late in its first decade a neighbouring tree fell, opening up the canopy and letting in more light and rain. I’m sure a dendrologist (one who studies trees) would know better the life story of this individual, but I enjoy hypothesizing.