June 2009 – Seabrooke Leckie

Scheduled post: Moving day!

Today was moving day! If everything went well (which, fingers crossed, it did), Raven is one happy puppy. The cats, most likely, are not so happy, but they’ll settle in quickly to their new surroundings. It will take Dan and I a little while to get completely unpacked and settled in, but once the last box is put away we’ll be happy, too. And I’ll especially be happy to return that truck to the rental office. At 26 feet, that thing is a beast!

I couldn’t think of a catchy way to tie this in with the first photo, so I won’t. I found this insect at Rock Ridge this week. I’ve only ever seen one other, which I’d spotted at my parents’ old house in Halton County. It’s a scorpionfly (family Panorpidae), its name obviously taken from the similarity of the curled tail to the desert invertebrates. In North America, scorpionflies are only found in the east. Their habitat can be quite variable, from woodlands to grassy fields, often but not always near open water or seeps. They’re usually seen low, a few feet off the ground, resting on leaves. They use that long “beak” to scavenge dead or dying insects, though sometimes will take nectar from flowers. Despite their appearance, scorpionflies do not sting – the bulbous end to their curled tail is used in mating.

Scheduled post: Rose Pogonia

On our way into and out of Rock Ridge, we walk along the edge of the northern section of Rock Lake, where it joins up with Lilypad Lake (both my names). In the centre of this area there’s a largeish bog, complete with Black Spruce and other more northern bog specialties. For the most part these species are contained along that edge. However, as we walked along the lake edge in the pre-dawn light we spotted a number of small pink flowers growing beside the water. On our way out we paused to take a closer look.

They turned out to be orchids. Known as Rose Pogonia (Pogonia ophioglossoides), also known as Snakemouth for its shape, this species is usually associated with bogs and boggy shores. It’s most often found growing in pockets of sphagnum moss, but I didn’t notice that to be the case with this group. They bloom for a few weeks from late June to mid-July, and are fairly common in appropriate habitat.

Garden beetles

We’ve hit the moving crunch. Our moving truck is booked for Tuesday, though I plan to call tomorrow morning to see if we might be able to pick it up at closing tomorrow, instead of opening on Tuesday (it’s all the same to them, as far as rental potential – they don’t lose any business by giving it to us when they lock up Monday night). That would allow us a few extra hours to load it so we wouldn’t have as much to do the day of.

Although our internet won’t officially be disconnected till either late Monday or Tuesday morning, I probably won’t have any free time for blogging again until after we’re moved in. We’re not sure when our internet will be hooked up at the new house, they seem to put you on an order list and then give you a call a few days in advance once they know when they can fit you in. We hope it might be by the end of the week, though there’s the potential for it to be later than that.

Because I won’t be online to be able to post during that period, I thought I would schedule a few short posts to go up in my absence. These will be just a couple of photos each, a week-long Monday Miscellany. Fingers crossed that I’m back on the web quickly.

Today’s photos are of a bunch of beetles that I found hanging about my garden recently. This first one is Clytus ruricola. I noticed it when I was loading some plants in to the car to drop off at the new house this afternoon. I’m not sure what plant it was on, I just happened to spot it after it had fallen off and was crawling around the floor. Thinking it was a wasp, I left the door open and hoped it would leave. When I came back with the next plant it was at the edge of the seat and tumbled out to the ground.

That’s when I noticed it wasn’t a wasp. It’s an excellent mimic, however, right down to the way it moves. Most beetles move in a relatively fluid motion, but this one was very jerky, in a perfect imitation of how a wasp moves. Had me fooled! The species is found through the northeast in May through July. Its host trees are decaying hardwoods such as maples.

This one is Trigonarthris proxima, a flower longhorn in the subfamily Lepturinae. I found it while admiring my garden one morning, sitting on the Sweet Williams. The flower longhorns, as their name implies, are often come to flower blossoms to eat the pollen.

This final one was also on the Sweet Williams. I flipped back and forth through my Kaufman Insects (the only guide not yet packed away) and investigated possible genera on BugGuide.net, and finally found a match among the flower longhorns as well (not terribly surprising). Apparently with this group the broad “shoulders” where the thorax meets the wings and the tapering toward the end of the abdomen are characteristic field marks (it’s very pronounced in the species in the second photo, but the angle that I took the photo at doesn’t show it). This species is Analeptura lineola. The adults are around from May to August. The larvae are associated with a variety of hardwoods.

Families from Maplewood

We’re off to Rock Ridge tomorrow for visit number three, and I thought before I collect more MAPS photos I should post what I had from Maplewood Bog earlier this week. It’s a nice break from packing, too, which is well underway. A few dozen boxes are already filled and stacked against the wall, awaiting the moving truck we’ve rented next week. It’s amazing how you can pack and pack and pack, though, and until you start moving the furniture out into the truck and emptying the space it still doesn’t look like you’ve accomplished very much.

The first half of the summer is predominantly comprised of adults that are either incubating or tending young in the nest. Beginning as you start approaching the end of June, though, you start to find recently fledged young and post-breeding adults moving about (I spoke in a bit more detail about that a couple of posts ago when discussing chickadees). At Maplewood earlier in the week we caught a family of American Robins. Above is dad, with his clean black hood and solid orange breast.

Mom is more subdued, with a dark gray hood, sometimes bordering on brownish, and her orange breast suffused with hoary fringes. This particular individual seems to have a fair amount of white on her throat and face, but I don’t think that’s sex-related.

And finally, the baby, sex unknown. Young robins show the spotted breasts typical of adults in most other thrush species. They also sport the thrushy shaft streaks on the feathers of their back and scapulae. In a month or two the baby, now an adolescent, will go through its puberty plumage change, moulting out a lot of its baby body feathers and replacing them with adult-looking teenage feathers. Although in the fall and winter it can be hard to tell the youngsters apart from their adult, sometimes you’ll see the teenagers have retained a couple of these streaky feathers on their shoulders.

Speaking of retaining teenage features, this Red-eyed Vireo had a distinctly brownish iris, which is a characteristic of young Red-eyes (compare to the adult in this post). Usually their eyes gradually turn red over the winter and by the time they come back as first-time breeders they’ve got eyes the same colour as the older birds. However, a very small percentage of Red-eyed Vireos may retain their brownish eyes through the spring and occasionally even into their first summer. An even smaller percentage may never get a red eye. Red-eyes can be tricky to age by other features so I wasn’t sure whether this was one of the small percentage or smaller percentage.

We caught a family of Song Sparrows late in the morning, in the same net with the baby chickadees. One adult (dad, if I remember correctly) with three youngsters in tow. This is one of the youngsters. Fledgling Song Sparrows look different from the adults, often with a golden wash that gives them a more diffused pattern. They also lack the central breast spot the adults have. However, they do show some features the adults also have, such as that thick malar stripe (the dark moustache that comes down from the bill).

In the net with them was a fifth sparrow, which I initially mistook for another member of the family. However, this one was different – the malar stripe was indistinct, the breast streaks were thinner, it had a smaller bill and the facial structure was slightly different. It was, in fact, a fledgling Swamp Sparrow, now independent and on his own. There are Swamps in the bogs in the site, and I suspect that this youngster came out of a nest hidden down there in the willows and sphagnum moss.

That’s it for Maplewood – tomorrow, Rock Ridge, undoubtedly with plenty of surprises of its own!

It’s a bug-eat-bug world

Over the last few weeks I’ve collected up quite a number of photos of predator-prey interactions in the invertebrate world. I’ve been doing a bit of “housecleaning” in my computer’s file folders, going back and revisiting photos I took at the beginning of June and trying to sort things out into some semblance of an organized filing system (the jury’s still out on how effective it actually is). I came across these and thought I’d throw them all into a post together.

Most of the photos could actually be “it’s a spider-eat-bug world”. Jumping spiders, such as this one, are one of the groups I see most often with prey. Perhaps this is partially because they’re one of the groups I see more often in general. Perhaps it has to do with their method of hunting (since they don’t use webs, they have to hold on to their prey).

Spiders are like flies for me – if I can put it into a general family, I feel I’ve done good. There are a few distinctive species, by by and large a lot of them look the same to me. The large, forward-facing eyes and stocky build identify it as a jumping spider, family Salticidae. My best guess for this is a member of the genus Eris, maybe Eris militaris, the Bronze Jumper, aka Bronze Lake Jumper, which seems to be a fairly common and widespread species. It’s eating a cricket. I spotted it a couple of weeks ago on an open rock at Rock Ridge.

On the same visit, I snapped this photo. It’s of an unidentified clubtail, munching away at a deer fly. The dragonfly had snagged the fly out of the air as it buzzed about my head, and then settled on the rocks only a few feet away to enjoy it. It’s too bad you can’t train the dragonflies to buzz around your head patrolling for deer flies.

This spider also has a deer fly, but it didn’t catch it out of the air. I’d been wearing that sticky tape that you put on the back of your hat, which snags the deer flies when they land on it. However, it seems to decrease in efficiency as it fills up, so I’d been pulling the caught flies off the tape and tossing them on to the rock. I can’t bring myself to crush them with my fingers, but as I pulled them off often a wing would remain stuck to the tape (it’s very effective stuff), and the spider snagged one of the flightless flies. I think it might be a type of wolf spider, many species of which are hunters rather than web-builders.

Another one of those discarded flies got picked up by this ant. The fly was easily twice the size of the ant, but she was marching along with it like it weighed nothing at all. She couldn’t even really see where she was going, and I wonder if she was following a pheromone trail or if she was just wandering blindly.

Another jumping spider, this one spotted on the trunk of a tree with an unidentified fly prey. It could be a female Maevia inclemens, Dimorphic Jumper, which seem to have that pale abdomen with two red stripes. The males, true to the species’ name, are either black or grayish, with white legs.

And the last one is of the Goldenrod Crab Spider, Misumena vatia, that has been sitting in the Allium in my garden. One day when I checked on it, she had caught something. That something was a bee, possibly a mason bee (genus Osmia) of some sort. My favourite part of this photo is that you can see the bee’s tongue still hanging out, the tapered, orange-tipped appendage hanging from its head.