March 2011 – Page 2 – Seabrooke Leckie

The start of the mothing season

Yesterday was beautiful, with gorgeous clear skies during the first half of the day and lovely mild temperatures. It was the first such day we’ve had this year. I took the dogs out for a walk around the property, my coat tied about my waist and my sleeves rolled up my wrists. It was that nice out. If I didn’t have things I needed to take care of back at the house, I could’ve spent the afternoon sitting out in the sun, soaking it in.

The first warm, sunny day usually brings out the insects, too. There wasn’t too much happening out in the fields yet – a few spiders, some flies – but I had a pretty good feeling that I might get a moth or two to the lights. I wasn’t disappointed. When Dan went out to check, early in the evening, there was already one there. By the time I’d located my moth jars and stepped out myself, another had joined it.

Officially, the first one to arrive is the guy up top: a Morrison’s Sallow, Eupsilia morrisoni. So, he gets recorded as the first moth of the year! Interestingly, it was the same species as I got as my first-of-season two years ago, in 2009.

The one that came in to join him was different: Grote’s Pinion, Lithophane grotei, another late-fall/early-spring species that overwinters as an adult. It’s possibly the most common species of pinion I get here.

When I came down to check the light again a bit later, more moths had arrived! Four more, in fact, came in before I went to bed. All four of these latter moths were Straight-toothed Sallows, Eupsilia vinulenta, which, like the previous species, overwinter as adults and come out at the first sign of warm weather. The Straight-toothed has two colour morphs: one with a white spot, and the other with an orange spot. I got two of each. I didn’t bother jarring the last white one, though, so only took photos of three of them.

Considering I’d been crossing my fingers to get even one macro species, I was pretty stoked with this haul! Well overdue, in my mind – the last two years have seen the first moth of the season on March 6th and 8th respectively. The winter cold was very persistent this year.

I feel I can officially recognize the start of spring now!

Last stop, headed north

It’s been a good winter for northern birds, between the Bohemian Waxwings that have stopped to visit, and the Evening Grosbeaks that came by a few times early in the season. We didn’t see the grosbeaks again after those first visits, but the waxwings were semi-regular visitors over the winter. They move around an area, spending time first here, then there, so we’d see them daily for a few days or up to a week, and then they’d disappear for a few weeks, foraging in other spots.

Earlier this week, we had a couple of days, back-to-back, where the waxwings stopped by again. On previous visits it had always been overcast, and the birds backlit against the cloudy sky. Hardly ideal photography conditions. This week, though, they paused in the big maples in our front yard, late in the afternoon with the sun slanting in at an angle that lit them up against a clear blue sky. They were pretty high, so it still wasn’t ideal, but it was considerably better than previous encounters I’ve had with them here.

I used the super-zoom on Dan’s camera to get a few photos of these beauties while they were here, because how many more chances will I get this winter? Odds are, this is probably the last time we’ll see them until next winter. Soon they’ll start making their way north, following the advancing spring, till they reach their breeding territories up along Hudson Bay and points east and west.

Bohemians have the distinctive habit of perching in flocks at the tip-tops of tall trees and just sitting there for minutes at a stretch, sometimes as long as ten or fifteen. They churr to each other, and preen, and doze, and hop about between branches, maybe move to the next tree for a bit. And then at some mysterious signal, they all decide they’re sufficiently rested to move on and they take off all at once. Even silent and backlit, this behaviour is enough for me to know what I’m looking at when I spot a flock of them.

The first day they dropped by our front yard, the mysterious signal seemed to be linked to the fetching of my camera, but on the second afternoon they stayed for a little while. There were a couple dozen of them, but the only one that wasn’t tucked away behind some branches (at least from where I was standing in the house) was this individual. I can’t say I’m an expert on Bohemian Waxwings, but I believe this one is a female: the “bander’s bible”, an amazing tome filled with the sum of everything we know about bird moult and plumage, indicates that in female Bohemians the black chin gradually fades into the gray breast, while in males the black chin ends in a sharp line (like this photo, I guess?).

It was nice of them to stop in one last time before they head north. I hope we see them again next winter!

Star-nosed Mole

The second-most interesting thing of the seed-exchange weekend was the rather unfortunate encounter with this creature. My mom and I had spent a half hour or so at the mudpuppy event, then, because the night was still young and we weren’t too far, decided to drop by my sister’s place to meet her new puppy, which she’d brought home only the day before.

She lives on a horse farm on a rural sideroad, surrounded by many acres of both natural and cultivated habitats. As we were pulling up her long driveway, I noticed a dark shape waddling in circles in one of the tire tracks. Unfortunately, the driveway was icy and slippery, and while we might have stopped the car in time in dry conditions, on the ice the wheels locked and it slid. I hopped out to check on the animal, but we hadn’t been able to avoid him.

Making the best of sad circumstances, however, I grabbed my camera from the car and took a couple dozen shots of the creature. The dark bundle of fur turned out to be a Star-nosed Mole, Condylura cristata. Despite the poor thing’s untimely demise, I was pretty excited to actually see one up close and be able to get a good look at it. I’d only ever seen a mole once before, and it was a fleeting glimpse insufficient to identify the animal to species. I’d never been able to check it out in detail.

The mole is, of course, named for the wildly unique appendage found at the end of its snout. There are 22 fleshy “fingers”, 11 on each side of the nose. The mole is effectively blind, visually, and the star acts as the mole’s eyes. Over its surface are spread some 25,000 mechanoreceptors that are exceptionally sensitive to touch (consider that in our entire hand we have about 17,000 similar receptors).

These receptors are linked directly to the brain, and signals from the star are received and interpreted at lightning speed. It takes the mole only about 25 milliseconds (1/40th of a second) to detect a potential food item and decide if it’s good to eat. Consider that it takes us about 600 milliseconds (3/5ths of a second) to detect something jumping out on the road in front of our car and stomp on the brake. Nearly half of the mole’s brain is dedicated to interpreting the signals from its sensory star. Some scientists have also hypothesized that these receptors might also be able to detect the natural electrical impulses that living creatures produce, though there is currently little data to back this up.

(These facts primarily taken from, and more info on the mole’s fascinating nervous system arrangement available at, this excellent ScienceBlogs post.)

Star-nosed Moles are active all year. They’re excellent swimmers and spend a lot of time in or near water, especially during the winter months when the ground’s too hard to do any foraging in the soil. Because of their amazing nose, they’re the only known creature able to smell underwater. They accomplish this by blowing out tiny bubbles then re-inhaling them, detecting the scents that the bubbles pick up from the water. They have long, relatively thick tails that they use to store fat during the leaner winter months.

They’re also pretty darn good diggers, too, as expected with paws like that. The oversized forelimbs are broader than long and angled sideways, equipped with massive claws for tearing through dirt. They function as big scoops, allowing the mole to move large quantities of earth quickly. They can and do make molehills, though these are more typically the product of its land-dwelling cousin species, the Eastern Mole, Scalopus aquaticus (the scientific name is clearly a misnomer; the original specimen from which the species was named had been found dead in water).

I spent much longer than intended reading up on the Star-nosed Mole – what a fascinating species! A shame about this unfortunate individual, but at least you and I got to benefit from it.

Snow print

One of the hardest things to photograph is a track or print in the snow. All the same colour, with virtually no contrast. But I did my best with this one, tweaking it a bit in Photoshop to help bring out the details.

Dan found this near the tractor shed while out with Raven a couple of days ago, before we got flooded with rain. The area is at the edge of the fields that surround our house, in a narrow strip of deciduous woods that separates our property from that of our neighbours.

It was obviously made by a bird, most likely swooping down to the ground to pounce on something, although I’ve seen marks like this made by startled grouse that pop up from the ground to take off. There weren’t any tracks leading up to it, though, and it wasn’t close enough to cover for it to have been a grouse asleep in a snow hollow.

The size of it (see next photo) and these circumstances led Dan and I to believe this print was made by a Northern Saw-whet Owl. These little owls are chunky birds, their bodies roughly the length and breadth of your flat palm. They’ve got relatively stubby wings, short and broad. And they typically forage from a low perch, pouncing on prey that’s traveling on or underneath the snow.

Lending strength to our hypothesis is the fact that on a couple of nights just recently we’ve heard a saw-whet calling from the woods bordering our property. While it’s possible that the calling individual might be one that’s passing through, there are patches of ideal habitat on the neighbouring land, and saw-whets were recorded breeding in the region during the most recent bird atlas. Saw-whets, like most owls, are also early breeders, though not quite as early as some of our local species, such as the Great Horned. Saw-whets would be starting to court now, and find and establish nest sites. Eggs will likely be laid in three to four weeks.

Though these little owls will take a variety of small vertebrates as prey, their primary food item is voles. We have no shortage of voles around here, which like the wide meadow habitat. When food is plentiful, saw-whets may catch more than they need and cache some instead of eating it immediately. When they’re ready to return to it, they thaw it out by holding it in their feet on a branch and sitting on it, tucking it into their belly feathers like they would do with an egg they were brooding.

A pretty neat find! We’ll keep our ears open in the evenings to see if we can determine where the bird has set up a territory, if it is indeed breeding here, and then in a few weeks try to locate its nest cavity.

Mudpuppies!

This weekend I joined my mom to attend the Seedy Saturday event up in Ottawa. Although I have quite a few seeds left over from last spring, I had a few I was hoping to get, and I like the opportunity to buy heritage, organic varieties rather than the commercial ones available in stores. I also took some of my own seeds that I’d saved for the swap table, where you can trade seeds like baseball cards. The event was busy and I didn’t do too badly there. There’re so many interesting vendors and products that I could have spent quite a lot of money if I had money to burn on such things.

But despite the success of our trip there, that wasn’t the most interesting part of the weekend. Not even the second most interesting, as it turned out.

The number one most interesting thing happened Friday night, the day before the seed swap. Mom had asked if I’d be interested in joining her at “Mudpuppy Night in Oxford Mills” (the name a play on Hockey Night in Canada). After some initial indecision resulting from poor weather forecasts and ambiguous results of the organizers when they scouted the site the day before, we decided to go.

And I’m so glad we did! These evenings are very informal affairs, organized and executed by Fred Scheuler and, I gather, regularly helped by his daughter Jennifer, both of whom were in attendance this weekend. Also present was fisheries biologist Naomi Langlois-Anderson and her children, though I gather she’s not a regular attendee. Every Friday night from Thanksgiving to spring thaw Fred and Jennifer visit Kemptville Creek at the foot of the dam in Oxford Mills to count the mudpuppies present there. In this photo Fred and Naomi use a dipnet to try to catch one.

These foot-long, entirely-aquatic salamanders are active year-round, feeding on just about anything that might be called food, including small vertebrates. In the winter it seems that river populations will move to shallow, slower-moving water where it’s easier for them to catch prey. The site in Oxford Mills turns out to have the best known winter population of mudpuppies in eastern Ontario. The reason is unclear, but may be a combination of the creek being particularly rich with the species and the placement of the dam preventing the creatures from moving any farther upstream. The creek habitat at the foot of the dam happens to be ideal anyway: shallow and rocky, and sufficiently wide that during the winter the water flow isn’t too fast.

Fred used a dipnet to catch the mudpuppies, but Naomi, wearing hipwaders, sauntered right in, pushed her sleeves to her elbows, and grabbed them from the water with her bare hands. I didn’t really appreciate this until they had caught a couple and allowed the visitors to try holding them. To prevent our dry hands from stripping the amphibians of their slimy coating we had to wet our hands in the bucket’s water first. The water had simply been taken out of the creek when they got the first mudpuppy. I dipped my hands in and ohmygoshisthatwatereverCOLD! Though I had no way to measure it, it couldn’t have been much above freezing. The shores were both lined with ice shelves, as were the gates of the dam where the water passed through.

And here were these coldblooded creatures slithering about in the shallow depth of the bucket as if it were sun-warmed summer water. It was rather astounding. Presumably they’re able to do it because of a suite of cold-hardy enzymes and proteins (which typically work best within a range of temperatures, and start to denature outside of this range; risk of hypothermia aside, our own proteins would most definitely not be able to function properly at these temperatures). Look at Naomi’s hands in this photo! Red with heavy blood flow, trying to keep their temperature up after repeated dippings in the ice water.

Our species of mudpuppies (Necturus maculosus) are generally brownish with spots. The shade of brown varies with the clarity of the water they inhabit, and the pattern of spots is unique to each individual. In theory, a graduate student with a good deal of patience could learn to identify individuals by their spot patterns, which would be useful in determining site fidelity and activity levels during the winter, among other things. The fourth mudpuppy they brought to the bucket was noticeably darker and with smaller spots than the other three. I don’t know whether their colour reflects their summer home or their winter home. It’s possible if the former that she (I don’t actually know the sex, though females are usually smaller than males; I don’t think colour is sex-linked) originated from a different part of the creek than the first three.

Her gills were also darker and smaller than those of the other three. This reflects the oxygen saturation of the water she lives in. When living in water with low oxygen content their gills grow large and are flush with blood to carry as much of it back into the body as possible. In oxygen-rich waters the gills don’t need to be as big. Since all four of these individuals came out of the same stretch of creek, I would be inclined to believe the gills are also a reflection of their summer homes, but perhaps her spot in the creek just happened to be easier to draw oxygen from.

Another hypothesis to explain her colour and gill size is that she’s a younger individual while the other three are adults. Mudpuppies can live up to 11 years or more, and don’t actually reach sexual maturity until age six. I didn’t see any information to suggest this, however, so it would just be a guess on my part. I think it’s more probable it reflects her origins rather than her age.

They caught three more after we left for a total of seven for the evening. On really good nights, however, they often record several dozen. Their highest count ever was somewhere close to 180 individuals. The variation in the numbers from one visit to the next suggests that the animals do still move around a bit, perhaps partly due to periodic rains or melts that temporarily increase the creek’s volume. Once the spring thaws arrive the water becomes too high and fast for the amphibians and they effectively disappear from the site until the fall.

Fred has been doing this since 1998. He’s not associated with any formal organization; this is just something he’s been doing on his own and which has grown into something slightly larger. After more than a decade, Fred’s got a really good set of data on the mudpuppy population in the creek. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only such data in existence for mudpuppies in eastern Ontario, and the best information we have on population changes over that period. This is why keeping track of your own local flora and fauna can be such a good thing! Especially if you record data from the same location over many years. It may turn out to be unique and invaluable.

If you’re interested in reading more about the Oxford Mills mudpuppy nights, check out their website. Also swing by my mom’s blog to see her post about the same evening; she goes into more depth about their life history than I did here.