I missed last week’s post, busy preparing for a wedding, and yesterday, catching up from the wedding; apologies! But I’m super excited about today’s post. I was planning on another topic for this evening, actually – I’ll end up doing it this weekend, perhaps. But as I came down to check on the fire I noticed Oliver was hunched over, peering out the window at something at the window feeder. He does this regularly, and always when I go over to look there’s nothing there.

But this time there was! A small, furry brown body was curled up right at the window’s edge, its back to the house. I thought at first it was a rat or mouse, but then it stretched out to grab a seed and I got a good look at its eyes. They were huge! This was no rat – it was a flying squirrel!

I knew we had flying squirrels around here because I’d found shredded cedar bark in one of the nestboxes a couple of years ago. The box actually wasn’t that far from the house, but I’d never seen evidence of them visiting the feeders (on the other hand, I don’t know exactly what I’d be looking for). I have, however, on occasion heard little feet scampering up the side of our log house while I’ve been working in my study late at night. I know that sound from the daylight hours when the Red Squirrels run up and down to the feeder. I guessed that the nighttime scamperings must therefore belong to flying squirrels – but I’d never seen one till tonight. Here or otherwise.

There are only the two species of flying squirrel in North America (though there are a few subspecies). Ours are most likely Northern Flying Squirrels, though we’re near the northern edge for Southern Flying Squirrel, too. There are visual differences between the two species if you get a good look at one, including size, but they’re most readily distinguished by habitat preference, with the Northern preferring mixed or coniferous forests and the Southern largely mature hardwood forests, especially Carolinian. Our forests around here are pretty strongly mixed.

The flap of skin between the front and back legs can only be easily viewed when the squirrel is gliding, of course, though you can sometimes see the wrinkle there when they’re still. They’ve also got flattened tails that presumably help with steering when they’re in the air, and oversized eyes to help see in the dark. They’ve got a varied diet and are pretty opportunistic about what they eat, but Wikipedia suggests the bulk of their diet is truffles (various types of underground fungi), which they sniff out with their nose.

Obviously, they also eat birdseed. We have our feeder set up so one side of it is butted up against the house, below the living room window. The cats and Jack love this. Jack’s mostly interested in the Red Squirrels, while the cats prefer the birds. The critters at the feeder learn pretty quickly that what’s going on behind the glass has nothing to do with them and they’re free to keep eating. All of our animals will paw at the window or press their faces right up to it, but it doesn’t bother the critters at the feeder in the least.

Apparently the flying squirrel has learned this, too. It sat not four inches from Oliver’s nose, just a couple panes of glass between it and some sharp teeth. But it was very confident in those panes of glass. Charlie came and joined us after a bit (the two of them made it a little hard to get any pictures). I could put the camera right up to the window, the lens knocking against the glass and the flash going off at regular intervals, and the squirrel would be completely undisturbed. It’s too bad there’s a screen in the window; it makes it hard to get good shots. The smeary nose prints all over the glass doesn’t help, either. ;)

I hope he’s a regular visitor! I think it’s so cool we’ve got a flying squirrel coming to our feeders.

When Dan came inside a couple of days ago he told me, “There’s a blog post for you over by the shed. All over the snow.” Figuring there’d been a predation out there and I’d had a murder scene to dissect, I grabbed my camera and went out to investigate.

But instead of finding fur or feathers, I found… purple stains?

It didn’t take much detective work to guess what these were from. We’ve had a flock of waxwings hanging about the last week or so. I’d thought they were Bohemians, the first time I noticed them, but I had no binoculars and the year since I’d last seen Bohemians had left my ear a little rusty. They turned out to be Cedar Waxwings the next time I saw them. (In my defense, Bohemians are much more common around here in the deep winter than Cedars are.)

The stains, of course, are the waxwings’ droppings, dyed purple by the berries they’d been eating. There aren’t a lot of purple berries available at this time of year; wild grapes and buckthorn would be the primary candidates. At the centre of most of the stains was either a bit of berry skin or some seeds, so I took a closer look to try to determine what they were eating.

It doesn’t help that wild grapes and buckthorn berries are both roughly the same size, especially after having passed through a digestive system. I took a photo of the bits, with my fingers for scale, figuring I’d try to look them up.

I first tried googling buckthorn berry seeds to see if I could find any images to confirm that’s what this was – I know what domesticated grape seeds look like, but don’t know if the wild type look the same, and I’ve never opened up a buckthorn berry. When that turned up nothing, I thought, you know, the easiest way to confirm this would be just to go get a buckthorn berry and see.

I write most of my blog posts in the evenings or, often, late at night. So this thought occurred to me at about 11:30 pm. After some minutes of weighing it in my mind, I finally decided that yes, in the interest of completeness, I’d venture out and find a buckthorn berry. Just to be sure.

I bundled up, grabbed a flashlight, and called to Raven. (Perhaps strangely for someone whose primary interest is a nocturnal taxon, I’m somewhat afraid of the dark. Fortunately, all the snow in the winter means it never gets really dark at night.) We ventured out to the one location on the property where I knew there were some buckthorn. The shrub was mostly empty, but a few lone berries remained.

Upon returning to the house with one, after stripping off all my winter garb again, I broke it apart on a kitchen plate. Inside the thin skin were four blunt-ended teardrop-shaped seeds that looked exactly like the ones in the droppings. Combined with the fact that the buckthorn shrub had been cleaned out, I’m pretty confident in saying that that’s what the birds have been eating.

I blogged about buckthorn a little over a year ago, and commented on its potential benefits to wildlife. It’s kind of nice to see our local wildlife making use of an invasive plant like this, especially since it’s one of those species that’s been so successful there’s probably little hope of eradicating it anymore.

With the onset of winter it’s been a little while since Dan brought me any interesting nature discoveries, but a couple of days ago he walked into my study and set something down on my desk. It clicked as it landed lightly on the wooden surface. “Two of these have been flying around my lights all morning,” he said. Bugs seem to like Dan; I rarely have anything flying around my lights. The odd ladybug, perhaps.

In this case the pestering creature was a stink bug. Sometimes also called shield bugs for their medieval-shield shape, they have the distinctive (and memorable) ability to produce foul-smelling secretions when threatened or disturbed. The idea is that the smell will put off potential predators; since most birds have a very poor sense of smell, presumably the secretion also tastes bad. If you catch a stink bug in a bad mood, you’ll soon know it. Fortunately, this one seemed to be pretty calm.

Using my Kaufman Field Guide to Insects I narrowed the genus of this individual down to Brochymena (rough stink bugs, I think so-called for the toothed edges to the pronotum, the section right behind the head), and then went onto BugGuide to figure out the species. I’m pretty sure this is a Four-humped Stink Bug, B. quadripustulata (“four pustules”?), which is one of the more common and widespread members of this genus. The KGI indicates that adults of some Brochymena species hibernate as adults beneath bark, so I’m wondering if these two came in with the firewood.

I found it interesting how much red the bug had on it, when I looked at the photos. To my naked eye it seemed fairly uniformly brown, with some darker Vs at the shoulders and around the bottom of the scutellum (the bit in the middle of the back that appears as a pale U in the first photo, and which didn’t stand out as pale to my eye). It amazes me how much detail cameras reveal in these smaller subjects, and it’s one of the reasons I enjoy photographing moths and other insects so much. (Incidentally, the random little pale dashes, such as the one on his head, are moth scales. I had him in one of my moth jars until I got my camera equipment set up.)

Although some of the 250 species in family Pentatomidae are hunters of other arthropods, most feed on the sap of plants. Some can be serious crop pests. They stab the plant with their long, thin proboscis and use it like a straw to suck the sap out. This doesn’t usually kill the plant (except in cases of bad infestations) but because a scar will form where the plant was pierced it can create deformities and blemishes – a problem for farmers trying to sell their produce for human consumption since we humans are so picky about the aesthetics of our produce. Sometimes it will destroy seeds, which can be problematic for grain crops or things like corn, where the seed needs to be whole to be useful. When not in use, the proboscis is tucked firmly against their underside. You can see it here as a thin line going from the head down between the legs.

The other interesting thing you can see on its underside is the scent gland that produces the stink. It’s just a small divot in the side of the thorax, dorsal to the middle leg (ordinarily, when the bug is upright, it would be right above the leg, but in this photo it’s right below). A close-up of the gland is below, indicated with an arrow. Not the best quality, but he was squirming a lot, rowing his legs and pushing against the stone to try to flip himself upright. He wasn’t having a lot of success, and as soon as I got the photo I turned him over again. (For a better-quality photo, check out this one on BugGuide.)

I’m a fan of tiger beetles. Pretty much any open dirt or rocky trail in the summer will have at least one or two of these gorgeous metallic-green beetles. I usually notice them first when they’re flushed; they fly up  from the ground with a bright glint of colour that catches the eye. Once they’re landed they can be a bit harder to pick out, but on a bare dirt path, and in the sun, they really stand out.

There are a number of tiger beetle species, found in every state and province, but by far the most common here in the east is the Six-spotted Tiger Beetle, Cicindela sexguttata. The only other species I’ve seen before was Green-margined Tiger Beetle, C. limbalis, along the road where we lived by the lake. I saw lots of Six-spotted on the biothon, hunting in sunny spots along open dirt trails. Tiger beetles, as their name implies, are predators. You can’t really see it in this photo, but they have huge, sharply-toothed mandibles that they use for catching their prey. Their large eyes are used for hunting visually, and their long legs make them swift.

I was absolutely delighted when I turned up this second species of tiger beetle on the second day of biothoning. I didn’t recognize this one at the time, other than to know it wasn’t a Six-spotted; but it happens to be the same species I found along the road by the lake house, a Green-margined Tiger Beetle. This beauty caught my eye as it scurried across some open rock at the crest of a low roll (I’m not sure it was high enough to call it a hill) in a small treed meadow I checked out.

It was remarkably unflighty, which I found interesting, and even more so when I note that in my post from a few years ago, where I shared the lake house individual, I commented that that one was also pretty calm. Six-spotteds are so difficult to photograph because you really have to sneak up on them and even then they may take off before you get really close. But this one sat calmly for me (as did the lake house beetle); I was even able to lift off a twig that it had scuttled under and which was partially obstructing the photo. Species-specific temperaments in beetles?

Strangely, I wrote in that post:

In this case, Marshall notes, “The Green-margined Tiger Beetle lives on clay soils across Canada and the northeastern states.” BugGuide.net, my number one online reference for all things six-legged, adds that the habitat is “usually steep, moist bare clay soil, including… dirt roads”.

Except there really wasn’t any moist bare clay soil, dirt roads or otherwise, in the area where I found this one. It was on an open crown of granite amid quite a lot of grassy meadow. There were other patches of rock here and there, but I’m not sure there was even much open dirt along the trail, which was some distance away anyway. So that’s somewhat odd.

I actually found this third species on the first day, not the second, so I’m presenting these a bit out of order. But this was the only one whose identity I needed to look up because I didn’t think I’d seen it before. Using this site of Ontario’s tiger beetles (created, interestingly, by a prof at my alma mater, University of Guelph, with whom I did an entomology course to Ecuador), I’ve tentatively ID’d this guy as a Twelve-spotted Tiger Beetle, C. duodecimguttata.

I found this one along the short dirt trail that led down to the gravelly beach. It paused to rest on a bit of rock, where I took this photo of it. It was much flightier than the Green-margined, more like the Six-spotted, and after snapping this photo (this is a tight crop from a much farther-away shot) I pressed my luck trying to get closer and it took off, not to be relocated.

On the Ontario page the habitat is given as gravel dams as well as areas with mixtures of moist sand and organic soil, tending to prefer sheltered spots rather than open beaches or dunes (the habitat favoured by most tiger beetles). BugGuide, meanwhile, says it’s found along the edges of streams and ponds. The lake we were camped at was hardly a pond, but it wasn’t huge, either.

When I found all these tiger beetles one of the first thoughts to cross my mind was “I’ll have to share these with Ted!” (Author of the wonderful entomology blog Beetles in the Bush, and an expert on beetles with a particular interest in tigers. He’s already corrected the ID of the fuzzy flower beetle of my last beetle post!) So Ted, hope you don’t mind confirming the identifications I’ve made here!

Hope everyone had a great holidays! I’m a little late with this week’s post as a result of my own. I’m digging back into the archives again for this one. I spent some time this fall helping my sister and her boyfriend out with a bit of house and yard work. I happened across this little guy while scraping old paint from exterior trim; he was sitting right next to the frame so I wouldn’t miss him.

It’s a moth fly, a member of the family Psychodidae, a group of flies whose hairy bodies and long antennae give them the look of moths. I was absolutely delighted by this find; I’d seen the photos of moth flies in my Kaufman Field Guide to Insects and kept watching for one, unsuccessfully.

Moth flies are pretty small, only a 1/4″ (1/2 cm) long at most (some are only a third that length). They favour wet habitats, and apparently can become nuisance pests in kitchens, where their preference for sink pipes lends them another of their common names, drain flies. The larvae eat algae and bacteria that are growing in the damp environment of the drainpipe (or other more natural situations); adults are nectar-feeders. Because they utilize habitats in human homes, they can be encountered at any time of year.

There are 113 species in North America, but some 3000 worldwide. A particular subfamily are blood-suckers and can transmit diseases, but the ones found in your home are generally harmless. In fact, the larvae of some moth fly species are actually useful and important in the purification process of sewage treatment plants.

I’m pretty sure this one is Clogmia albipunctata, for which BugGuide gives the common name Filter Fly. BugGuide notes that the species used to be primarily tropical but is now found through much of North America.

Wishing you good company, good cheer, good food and good hiking. :)

Remember back in the summer I did a biothon in support of Frontenac Bird Studies? I wrote one post for it, but I never did get around to returning to the rest. And since I had selected and edited 48 photos from it, that left quite a few photos unused. I thought I’d revisit some of these over the winter.

Here’s the first, and possibly my favourite, of the outstanding photos. Dan brought me this guy back from a hike he and the other participants had gone on; it’d been in one of my moth containers for a little bit, so it got a bit rubbed up. But it was still pretty clear to see that this was a FUZZY YELLOW BEETLE. Yes, it was just that cool that it requires all-caps.

[Edit: I've been corrected by the fabulously knowledegable Ted of Beetles in the Bush. The beetle is not, in fact, a bumble bee scarab, but rather another type of scarab in the genus Trichiotinus, sometimes called hairy flower scarabs or bee-like flower scarabs. Ted suggests that while members of this genus do have a fair bit of "fur", much of what's on this beetle is actually debris, with pollen giving it the bright yellow colour. Thanks Ted! The info below still applies to bumble bee scarabs... just not to my beetle.]

As always, my fabulous Kaufman Field Guide to Insects (go buy a copy if you don’t already own one!) provided me with its ID. It’s a bumble bee scarab, family Glaphyridae. There’s only one genus in this family found in North America, Lichnanthe, containing eight species. The common eastern species on BugGuide.net is Lichnanthe vulpina, which goes by the common name Cranberry Root Grub for its larvae’s habit of feeding on – surprise – cranberry roots. BugGuide says it’s primarily in eastern coastal states, but we do have cranberry around here, too, so I don’t know. Adults seem to be bumblebee mimics and visit flowers during the day. I can’t find much other info on it.

Another beetle! I’ve got at least half a dozen beetles to share, but I’ll stick to these two for this post. This one’s much easier to figure out: it’s a net-winged beetle, family Lycidae, by the interesting pattern of raised veins on the wings; and it’s Calopteron discrepens by the way the vertical black bar joining the upper black band to the thorax widens as it reaches the thorax (another lookalike, C. reticulatum, remains the same width).

There are five species in this genus, all restricted to the north and east. The KGI suggests that some members of this family feed on honeydew from aphids, though I don’t know if it’s true for this species. Other species seem to feed on nectar from flowers.

Another species, C. terminale, lacks the upper black band. There’s a species of moth, the Black-and-yellow Lichen Moth, Lycomorpha pholus, that looks nearly identical except that it’s wings are smooth, lacking the raised veins, and its antennae don’t have the saw-teeth. And, y’know, it’s a moth, not a beetle. :) The black and orange patterning of these beetles is probably aposematic (warning predators that they’re distasteful or toxic), in which case the moth would benefit through mimicry.

Not a beetle:

Red dates are confirmed or probable; I’m trying to set up something for teal dates; brown date is the New River Birding and Nature Festival (paid event); navy date is my day off to visit a couple friends in the area. :) A few of these are subject to final confirmation and may change; I’ll post the definitive schedule in a few weeks once I know.

April 29 – Detroit, MI area

April 30 – Columbus, OH area (The Nature Conservancy Ohio)

May 1 – Wheeling, WV (Good Zoo at Oglebay Resort)

May 2-5 – New River Birding and Nature Festival, WV (closed/paid event)

May 5 – if anyone is interested in an event in eastern KY, western VA or southwestern WV, let me know; it may be possible to arrange an event on May 5

May 6 – Richmond, VA area

May 7 – Davis, WV (Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge)

May 8 – Millersburg, PA (Ned Smith Center for Nature & Art)

May 9 – Hockessin, DE (Ashland Nature Center; Delaware Nature Society)

May 10 – East Brunswick, NJ (Playhouse 22, Friends of the East Brunswick Environmental Commission)

No event on May 11.

May 12 – Athol, MA (Athol Bird and Nature Club)

May 13 – Ithaca, NY

Late last week we received a visit from this spider, which Dan discovered on the silverware in the drying rack while he was washing dishes. I gather it appeared out of nowhere and caught Dan quite by surprise, not least of all because of its size. Though it’s mostly all leg, it’s still impressively large. He carefully saved it in the fridge for me, and I did my best to push aside my squeamishness over spiders (one of the few groups of invertebrates I get that way around) to take a few photos. I moved him out to our woodshed once I was done, where I felt his presence was more appropriate.

The spider is male, which I could immediately tell by the two short, round projections at its front; these are its pedipalps, which are modified mouthparts the male spiders use to transfer sperm packets from their own abdomen to the female spider during mating, so females don’t have them. Considering that female spiders are most often noticeably larger the males, it left me wondering just how big the females of this species must be.

I didn’t know the species right away, despite the size of this guy, and so spent a while flipping through pages on BugGuide. For all that I can ID our local birds with a glance or quickly guess the families, if not the species, of most of the moths and butterflies and dragonflies I encounter, when it comes to spiders and some other groups of insects I’m back to being a novice again. My identification method usually becomes scanning the photos associated with each family, looking for something that might be similar. Usually I end up checking out half a dozen families, sometimes more, looking for a photo of an individual that seems to match mine. Most of the time I can reach an ID, though it can be time-consuming.

Despite what would seem to be a very distinctive individual, given the size and those bristly legs and the interesting rayed-circle pattern on the thorax, I didn’t come up with a conclusive identification for this guy; but I’m leaning toward Cross Orbweaver, Araneus diadematus.

Normally I think of the orbweavers as having huge, spherical abdomens, so the family didn’t immediately cross my mind for this one. But it’s the females that look like that; the males are slimmer. What prompted me to check that family for photos was the short third pair of legs. I’ve come to think of this as a defining feature of the orbweaver family, but I can’t see anything to say that’s true. Defining or not, it is still a feature, however; those shorter third legs are modified for use in building the stereotypical spiderwebs the group is known for.

Araneus diadematus - Garden Spider by Camponotus Vagus, on Flickr; CC-licensed

The Cross Orbweavers are a very big species; BugGuide gives the average measurement as 13mm (1/2″), and that’s just the body. Once you add legs to that, you’ve got an impressively large spider. Check out this male and female of the species, above, then compare to my top image with average-sized butterknife. As I checked out the page for the species, I recalled some massive female orbweavers that hung around the covered walkway along the back of our house, where I set out my moth trap. I unfortunately seem not to have taken any photos of them, so I can’t be sure they were the same species.

Araneus diadematus by Astroblue, on Flickr; CC-licensed

The Cross Orbweaver’s name comes from the white cross on its abdomen, which my spider lacks; the species is variable, however, and I’m not sure whether the lack of a cross on mine is due to the variability of the species, or the fact that I’ve misidentified it. ;)

The records on BugGuide are nearly all late summer and fall, right into November for Ontario. It’s only found in northeastern and western North America; like so many of our species, it’s a European introduction. It goes by the name European Garden Spider in its native range and is, unsurprisingly, a common resident of gardens.

I gather orbweavers are very docile spiders, slow to bite, and with a preference for flight rather than fight. I did in fact have some trouble getting this one to sit still for me, but I had no inclination to put out my hand to stop him. It’s not that I fear being bitten – the bite is supposedly no more painful than a bee sting – as much as it is just the creep factor of having a spider walking over me. If this was a moth, however, or a beetle or praying mantis or walking stick, no problem. But just can’t do with with a spider.

One last interesting fact: orbweavers are mostly nocturnal. During the day they’ll either hang out on their web, or in a bit of cover such as a rolled-up leaf nearby, only coming out to immobilize trapped prey. At night they return to their web, rebuilding any damaged sections. A few species actually ingest the remains of the old web and build an entirely new one from scratch. I recall watching one of the large females actively building a web one evening while I was checking my moth sheet, though whether she was repairing or building fresh I couldn’t say.

I admit I find November a rather uninspiring month, nature-wise. So barren, so still. So I’m going to go back into my archives and pull out a subject I’ve been hoarding since June. Can you see him in this photo?

I nearly missed him myself, that day. It was on one of our MAPS visits to our Blue Lakes site, and I was just preparing to go check the nets when I happened to notice… something… in the grass that made me pause and take a closer look. And the something turned out to be a snake. He wasn’t moving, I hadn’t seen him slide into that spot; it must just have been the wide pale stripe of his belly that caught my eye.

It turned out to be a Smooth Green Snake, Liochlorophis vernalis. This is the first (and so far only) individual I’ve seen of this species, and I was pretty excited. I’m not sure why I’ve never seen one before; according to the Ontario herpetological atlas they’re not uncommon and can be found throughout southern Ontario below Sudbury. Interestingly, though, they do seem to be more frequently found along the edge of the Canadian Shield and in a few clustered spots like the Bruce Peninsula or the southern part of the Niagara Escarpment. Since our MAPS sites are Shield edge, perhaps that explains why my first one was there.

In any case, I’d never seen one before, so I spent some time studying this guy. He did this interesting thing where he held his body upright like this, stiffly, and every now and then waved back and forth a little bit. I wasn’t sure whether he was trying to camouflage himself by pretending to sway in the wind like a piece of grass (even though there was no breeze that day) or if by moving back and forth he could get a better sense of where we were relative to him. He continued doing this even once he finally left the grasses and slithered out onto the open rock, so I’m inclined to think the latter. We took a few videos of the behaviour; here’s one:

Smooth Green Snakes eat mostly invertebrates, though I think they’re opportunistic enough they wouldn’t turn down a small vertebrate like a salamander or spring peeper, should they come across one. I’ve been calling this one a he, but I don’t actually know the sex. If it were actually a female, she might have been looking for a place to lay her eggs, which they may do anytime from June to late summer. They deposit the 4 to 6 inch-long eggs in a soft, protected spot like a pile of rotting vegetation or wood, and these hatch in 4 to 23 days.

I found the 4 days figure rather startling; I gather that a few rare individuals may retain the eggs inside their body till near to hatching, and would guess that’s more likely what’s happening with the 4 day situation. I can’t really see any vertebrate going from zygote to hatched in only four days.

I left the snake while it was still in the grass, but Dan sat and watched it for a while. Eventually it came out and crawled across the rocks toward him, slipping under our data binder and appearing out the other side before disappearing again into the grass on the other side of the rocks. They’re supposedly fairly docile snakes, slow to bite, but we didn’t try catching him. It was enough just to enjoy watching him where he was.