October 2008 – Seabrooke Leckie

Today at Kingsford – Northern Saw-whet Owl

While visiting my new favourite property, I heard the sound of a predator being mobbed. It’s a very distinctive sound, the sound of a dozen chickadees going absolutely crazy. Chickadees are big talkers in general, usually keeping up a running chatter amongst themselves when they’re foraging. But when one stumbles onto a predator, they ramp it up a notch. In this case, the dozen chickadees were joined in by a few nuthatches, who lended a higher-pitched version of their regular nasal eenh to the cacophony.

Almost invariably when you hear that, the little songbirds have discovered themselves an owl. Owls have to roost during the day, since most are primarily nocturnal hunters, and generally try to find a spot that’s sheltered and hidden from view. During the winter, when the deciduous trees have lost most of their leaves, they usually choose conifers. By following the racket I was able to locate this individual, a Northern Saw-whet Owl, sitting in a white pine, doing her best to try to remain unperturbed by the alarm-callers. Indeed, she showed the most concern with the dog, who, oblivious of the spectacle going on above, dashed under the tree. Even that only warranted barely more than a glance. Eventually the chickadees moved out to carry on with their lives, feeling assured that they’d let that owl know its place, and Raven and I moved out to head home, leaving the owl in peace.

So the moral of the story here is, if you hear a flock of chickadees really kicking up a fuss, go check it out, they’ve probably found something good.

Infatuation

I’ve become more familiar with our immediate surroundings now that I’ve started going for regular walks with Raven. Although I’ve only walked about a kilometer to the south, I’ve gone about two and a half to the north along our road, and the same distance along a side road that branches off from it. I know where all the houses are along these stretches, which ones have year-round residents, which properties don’t have buildings at all. As I was walking Raven with my mom last week, we passed this one, which she commented on. It’s a simple gated driveway, but the driveway itself is all grown over with knee-high weeds to the point where it more resembles a linear clearing than a driveway, and its connection to the road and the gate going across it are all that identify its past purpose.

Mom asked if I’d wandered around down there, and I said no, of course not, it’s not my property. But after a few more pass-bys, my curiosity got the better of me. Okay, I admit it – I trespassed onto someone else’s land. But it was vacant, and obviously hadn’t seen vehicular traffic in ages, so I wasn’t worried about the owners finding me there and getting upset. And I was curious. I knew the property must stretch back onto the lake, and I wanted to see what some of the surrounding landscape was like. Aside from the park immediately across from us, though, and one small 2 acre parcel that’s vacant and for sale, we haven’t wandered through any of the forest that neighbours us.

So yesterday I stepped around the gate and headed down the lane. The driveway beyond was in the same state as that before the gate, overgrown by goldenrod and raspberry canes, and with downed branches that gave me the impression that it hadn’t been used in at least a year, perhaps two. Not far down I found a patch of evergreens. Coniferous trees are conspicuously lacking just half a kilometer down the road in the area around our house, but here they were reasonably abundant. Mostly white pine, it seemed, but there were some cedar in an area of wet ground that the driveway passed, and a few hemlock scattered in. I love coniferous trees, and miss having them around the house here (there are a handful of little saplings that seem to have been planted in the yard a few years ago, but they hardly count). Just that discovery alone made me like the place.

Generally speaking, by this time of the year I tend not to use the word “beautiful” to describe forests, but the property was beautiful, and held so much potential for the return of leaves in the spring. A small creek cut across the property, and though the water level was low, it was still running. Hemlocks and cedars lined portions of it, and mossy stones made the water trickle lightly in others. The landscape of the surrounding property was rolling, and many of the beech trees still held their bright yellow leaves, lending colour to the now mostly gray forest.

As I neared the end of the driveway, I could see a building hiding behind some trees. At first its darkened sides looked like it had perhaps suffered a fire, and was now abandoned. That would explain the disuse of the driveway. Right near the house a couple of large trees had come down across the driveway, and were old enough to be starting to decay, but hadn’t been removed. Underneath one, protected from the clutter of falling leaves by the large trunk, I could see gravel, suggesting that the driveway had actually been surfaced at one point.

The house hadn’t been in a fire, it turned out, it was just weather-worn. It looked like the owners had begun building it, got as far as getting the frame completed and a roof on top, and then ran out of money. There were cement pilings with rebar set into the ground around the front that looked like they were intended to support a deck. All the windows were boarded up, but you could see where they were intended to go; the front of the house was designed like a Viceroy home, with big windows opening into a vaulted living space, perfect for looking out over a vista such as a lake. Inside it was a bungalow design, with a big, open living space and a couple of bedrooms framed in in the back. The washroom and kitchen hadn’t yet been laid in, so I wasn’t sure where they were intended to go.

They had put siding up to protect it, but it had been so long since anything had been done that some of the boards had come off, or been broken. The top boards from the front windows were missing (or had never been put in place), and when I peered inside, I could see whitewash across the floor; evidently crows or some other large birds had been perching in the windows.

To say I was enamoured with the place is an understatement. The land was beautiful. And there was so much of it. When I returned home after I looked up a map of our district that included property lines. Based on this, I figure the house includes about 15 acres. It faced out onto a quiet lake – although there was no provincial park on the other side, neither were there any houses, and the same district map indicated the far shore consisted of just three properties. And the house has so much potential. (Nina of Nature Remains recently coincidentally mentioned that that was the word they kept repeating upon discovering their own home in the woods.) It reminds me of buying the puppy – someone else has gone through the planning and first early stages, but you take over it young enough to shape it and make it completely your own. I can envision that great room finished, with bright, wide windows overlooking the lake, a fire roaring in the woodstove in the corner. I’ve totally fallen head over heels in love with the idea of this place.

Unfortunately, there is no “For Sale” sign out front. Not that this is necessarily a roadblock to owning the home, but it does complicate things. I suppose talking it over with Dan and getting him on board would also be important. We’re getting a bit tired of doing the renting thing, for various reasons, and it would be good to invest in the real estate market, the most secure investment one can make over the long-term. We’re locked into our lease till next summer anyway, so wouldn’t be looking to move anytime soon, but that would give us time to complete the house…

Okay, so it’s all pretty much in the realm of fantasy and daydream right now, but boy, how I would love to own that place and finish it up.

There were lots of birds about there. Mostly chickadees, which seem to be ubiquitous even after most other birds have cleared out (this one seems to have dropped a couple of tail feathers and is in the middle of growing in replacements). With them I found a number of other species. Red-breasted and White-breasted Nuthatches were usually in the flocks, often several together. One flock had a couple of Golden-crowned Kinglets traveling with them. Kinglets are later migrants, but I was still surprised to see them there. Some do actually stick around southern Ontario in the winter, where there’s enough food. They tend to favour conifers, and I found this group in a patch of hemlock along the creek edge. Still, they’re such tiny, delicate little birds, it’s amazing they can weather the cold so well.

Also a few Brown Creepers, I think I counted four total. Creepers, like kinglets, are small birds that I tend to think of wintering further south but that do stay in Ontario in small numbers over the winter. They get their name from their habit of creeping up the trunks of trees, peering into crevices, looking for food. It’s an interesting evolutionary process, complementing that of nuthatches, which crawl downwards on trunks, head first. Nuthatches find all the prey in the cracks as they go down, and the creepers find all the prey on the other side, going up, that the nuthatches miss. This one’s checking out some Shelving Tooth fungi.

I saw a few woodpeckers, too, mostly Hairys. Lots of old and downed wood in the forest gave them ample foraging substrate for food. I saw evidence of Pileateds having worked some trees in the area, too, though no sign of the birds themselves. Along the driveway I flushed a Ruffed Grouse that was wandering underneath the pines, there were Canada Geese on the lake near the shore, and a group of Blue Jays calling from the trees near the house. I was surprised by the amount of bird activity I encountered, outside of the presence of any feeders.

Infatuation with the property aside, it was a lovely walk, and a whole lot nicer than hiking along the road. I’m toying with the idea of contacting the land registry office for this region to see if I can find out who owns it, to ask for permission to hike there regularly.

And to know who to talk to about eventually buying it…

Preparing for the winter

I haven’t featured a wild mammal here in quite a while (white horses and new pets count as mammals but it’s a long time since they’ve been wild). Certainly the last wild mammal I remember writing about was the opossum that visited my parents’ feeders last winter. Perhaps not coincidentally, today’s critter has also been coming to our feeders. That’s the whole point of feeders, after all – to draw the animals to you, so you don’t have to go looking for them.

Generally the target group for feeders is birds, but rodents are big fans of the seed put out, as well. Squirrels get most of the attention, but chipmunks are just as frequently seen. In fact, when we first put our feeders out, the chipmunks found the seed within a couple days, but it took a few weeks before we saw the first squirrel there. Chipmunks are abundant in this neck of the woods. My parents have lots of chipmunks around, but up here we seem to have LOTS of chipmunks around.

The Eastern Chipmunk (Tamias striatus) is a forest species preferring deciduous and mixed woodlands, though urban parks will quite readily do as long as there are sufficient mature trees for food. It’s the only species of chipmunk (members of the genus Tamias) found in eastern North America. There’s one species that occurs in Eurasia, and the remaining 23 of the 25 species of Tamias are all native to western North America.

The Eastern Chipmunk’s scientific name, T. striatus, reflects its strongly striped back. It’s often described as having nine stripes, or five dark stripes interspersed with light ones, and technically that’s true, but to me the more intuitive way of describing it would be that it has a dark dorsal stripe, and two dark-bordered white stripes, one on each side.

The origin of the word chipmunk is less clear. One source says it’s from the Algonkian word for “head first”, for the way it descends trees, a second suggests it’s from an Odawa word for “red squirrel”. Another indicates that the “chip” part of chipmunk is in reference to the sound the critters make when alarmed (in the 1830s they were in fact called “chip squirrels”).

Chipmunks are notorious food-hoarders. They spend virtually their whole day searching out food and tucking it away for winter provisions. It’s possible for an individual, if they stumble across an especially rich food source (such as a birdfeeder) to pack away enough food to last their lifetime, nevermind just the winter, in just a single season. Though we tend to think of them as nut and seed eaters, they also eat berries, conifer cones, mushrooms and insects, and even small frogs or birds’ eggs. There’s usually enough food in a single acre of a good-quality forest to support up to 30 individuals, and the only reason there aren’t 30 chipmunks in every acre of woods is that they’re extremely territorial (Alvin, Simon and Theodore being the exception). This is why when you see two chipmunks together they’re nearly always chasing each other.

Just like with the Blue Jays, to aid in their efforts of hoarding food they have pouches on the inside of their cheeks into which they tuck the seed and other foodstuffs they collect. They use their tongue to manoeuver the seeds into the pouches, which together can hold as many as 70 sunflower seeds at once! When full, the pouches bulge in a pretty good imitation of the mumps, nearly doubling the width of the rodent’s face. When they get back to the burrow and want to empty out the pouches they use their paws to push the back of the outside of their cheeks, dislodging the seeds.

They’re pseudo-hibernators, spending the winter holed up and sleeping for most of it. They do enter a torpid state, where their body temperature might drop as low as 5-7 oC (41-45 oF) for periods, but they don’t go into the same deep state of torpor that bears and other true hibernators do, and therefore don’t need to pack on the pounds of fat. When they wake up in the middle of winter they’re able to easily feed from the food they collected over the fall and stored in their burrow. They dig a football-sized burrow about three feet (1 m) underground, and line it with leaves. The lead-in tunnel while they’re working on the burrow can be as much as 10 to 15 m (32 to 50 ft) long, putting the entrance hole quite some distance from the main burrow, which guards against predators so that they can’t just dig around the entrance hole if they find it. Once the burrow is done, they dig a new entry tunnel, and push all the dirt from the new hole back up the old one to plug it so that the mound of dirt on the surface is no longer an indication of an entrance. If they feel like getting fancy, they may add a storage chamber, a “dump” and a restroom to their burrow system.

Most western chipmunks have just one litter per year, but the Eastern has two, one in early spring just after thaw, and the other in mid-summer. When the male chipmunks wake up from their long winter’s sleep in the spring, they’re feeling pretty horny and the first thing they do, after perhaps grabbing a bite to eat so their growling stomach doesn’t embarrass them, is call upon the burrow of a nearby female. If the female hasn’t done her hair and makeup yet she may turn him away until she’s ready. Then all that territoriality that’s maintained over the rest of the year is forgotten, and the couple spend hours cuddling and playing (and mating) together. If two males come to court the same female at the same time, they’ll spend the day chasing each other until one wears out. The victor, the one who lasted the longest, is the one who gets the girl. The same thing plays out in the summer (minus the waking up from hibernation).

Each litter may contain up to 4-5 young. An individual chipmunk, if it survives the learning curve of its first year, may live 2-3 years on average in the wild (a captive chipmunk can reach 8 years) and could produce up to 30 youngsters. The majority of these will be taken by predators, or starve over the winter, and not make it to the following mating season, so populations don’t get overrun by the prolific breeding production. Young are driven off in late spring and early fall, at age 6 to 8 weeks, to fend for themselves. They will either find an old abandoned burrow or dig their own new one to spend the winter.

I don’t mind sharing some of our seed with one or two of these little guys to help them make it through the winter – they’re such characters, the forest would be duller without them!

Today at Kingsford – First snow

We got our first snow of the winter this afternoon. A large storm system rolled through much of the northeast, with portions of eastern Ontario, western Quebec, New York and surrounding areas bearing the brunt of it. If it had been the middle of winter we may have ended up with a few inches of accumulation on the ground in some areas. As it was, being the tail-end of fall, the ground was still warm enough to melt most of the snow before it accumulated. As of now (midnight) the ambient temperature has finally dropped to freezing, and some surfaces are cold enough to collect a light dusting, including the deck railing and my car, though it still melts on the ground. It creates a funny pattern, like someone deliberately dusted these surfaces in preparation for some fancy Christmas party.

At some points this afternoon it was falling so thickly that it obscured the park on the far shore of the lake, except for the white birches that shone through. It’s about the right time of year for our first snowfall – not too early that we’re cursing, not too late that we’re wondering where it is. I recall a few Hallowe’ens growing up where we went trick-or-treating with a light cover of snow on the ground. There may be a little of the snow left over tomorrow morning, but I suspect it won’t last very long. It looks like the last of the system has nearly moved out of our area, so we’re unlikely to accumulate much more.

I enjoy these early snows. The novelty is still fresh, and I can look out and be excited to see snowflakes falling. I enjoy watching them drift in waves across distant landscapes, such as the lake’s far shore, the wind billowing them and pushing them around like it would a field of grass. Dan tossed a couple of snowballs at the window when he went out with the dog this evening, catching me by surprise. Chances are we’ll be feeling much less enamoured with the white stuff come February…

More on Blue Jays

Since Dan got his Master banding permit, we’ve put up a few nets to get a start on some of our planned projects. I mentioned the owl monitoring already in an earlier post. This morning we opened a net that we set up near our feeders. Dan goes into more detail on the purpose of the project, but essentially it’s to learn more about the local winter ecology of our resident birds – things like population sizes and demographics, survivorship over the winter, and general health of individuals (hopefully if we’re supplementing their diet with feed they’ll all be in good health, but it may lend some insight into the food resource abundance outside of the feeders).

There’s a lot of information that’s either extremely difficult or impossible to obtain without using banding studies. Two such pieces of info were evident from our efforts this morning. The first was that there were a lot more Blue Jays visiting our feeders than we’d first thought. By visual counts, simply watching the feeders and seeing who was around, we guessed there were perhaps 5 or 6 coming for seed. This morning, however, we caught no fewer than 8 separate individuals in the net, and later on, once we’d closed the net for the day, saw an additional 3 together at the feeder who had no bands, making a minimum of 11. We observed some of the banded individuals coming to the feeder again a short while later. Free food is hard to pass up! Evidently they weren’t too put off by the quick banding process.

The second thing we learned is that there’s an unusual proportion of adults to young birds among them. In an average fall, at an average banding location, one might expect to capture about 80-90% hatch-year (HY) birds – that is, birds that were hatched in this calendar year. The remaining 10-20% are after-hatch-years (AHY) – the adults who were parents this calendar year. Among our 8 Blue Jays captured this morning, a whopping 6 – 75% – were adults. This could mean either it was an exceptionally poor breeding year for Blue Jays in our woods and they didn’t raise many offspring, or the offspring have all dispersed or flown south, leaving just the adults to spend the winter here. It’s hard to know the reason for sure, although seeing what the proportions are come spring (after any migrants have presumably returned) will help to answer the question.

You can tell the difference between the age classes of Blue Jays fairly easily. HY birds still have many of their “baby feathers”, that is, the set of feathers that they grew in while they were in the nest. They grow these feathers very quickly, because they want to limit the amount of time that they’re flightless and vulnerable to predation. However, because they grow them in all at once, and feathers are very energetically costly to grow, these “baby feathers” are of very poor quality. They’re generally rather coarse and dull, and will fade and wear down rapidly. Most songbird species have a pattern of moult whereby the HY birds will replace a portion of their feathers before the winter to see them through until their next moult (for some birds, this will be spring, but for many others they’ll have to wait until next fall). You can examine the feathers of a bird’s wing to see if it’s got any “baby feathers” – and most species have a very specific replacement pattern so it’s easy to know what to look for.

In the case of Blue Jays, the characteristic feathers are these small, outer feathers mid-way up the wing. They’re the little feathers that cover the sheathes of the long primary feathers (appropriately called the primary coverts), and the feather that comes from the thumb (the alula). In the above photo, you can see the left-hand bird, the AHY or adult, has very distinct barring to these outer feathers, and the colour is approximately the same as the larger neighbouring white-tipped feathers (the greater coverts, which cover the sheaths of the long inner secondary feathers). The right-hand bird, the HY or youngster, has relatively unmarked outer feathers which are a duller colour than the rich blues of the white-tipped greater coverts.

I love Blue Jays’ wings, the blue colour in them is simply surreal. While most feather colours are created through various pigments, blue and green different. Like the sky, blue is created through the refraction of light, not the absorption of it. A red feather will still look red when lit from underneath, but a blue feather loses all of its colour – check out this page for some neat photos demonstrating this. Likewise, if you grind up a red feather, you have a pile of red dust, but grinding up a blue feather does not produce blue dust (it will more likely be brownish or grayish).

The exact light-scattering mechanism employed in these blue feathers has traditionally been assumed to be similar to what happens in the sky – the light hits the microscopic structures and then scatters in all directions, with just the blue coming back to your eye (so why don’t you see red or orange when viewed at a sharp angle, like sunsets, you ask? Good question, and I don’t know the answer.) A paper published in 1998 argued that the blue was created through a different scattering method, called interference or coherent scattering, whereby the light wavelengths break up and then come back together again, and the way they meet up again all the colours cancel themselves out except for the blue.

Whichever it is, the end result is that it’s a colour produced through structure, not pigment. And it’s pretty amazing. Can you believe so many people simply look past these guys, desensitized because they’re common?