October 2011 – Seabrooke Leckie

Moth Surprises

It’s starting to get late in the season for moths. I’ll still see the odd one through mid-November, probably, but the numbers and diversity are rapidly decreasing. Most nights are single-digits Celsius and the warmer nights tend to be rainy, so I don’t put my light out often – the return isn’t usually worth the energy expended (mine or the electricity). That said, though, every now and then I’m happily surprised at what turns up.

Last week, for instance, I put my light out one warmish evening. I only got a dozen moths or so, but one of them was the above. I didn’t immediately recognize it – itself a sign that it’s probably something unusual, or at least a new species for me (still being a relative youngster in the mothing world, at just four and a half seasons’ experience, this still happens with some regularity). So I jarred it up and put it in the fridge to get a photo and ID the following day.

I had my suspicions about the ID – my gut instinct was a type of groundling. I opened my folder of guidebook jpgs in Windows Explorer and searched the images for ‘groundling’… but neither seemed right. So I tried a few other possibilities that were my second guesses, and when they proved unsuccessful I went back to the start of the noctuids and began scanning one by one. It turned out I’d been right – it was a type of groundling, but its common name didn’t contain the word groundling so it didn’t come up in my search. This is The Cobbler, Condica sutor, indeed a species I hadn’t seen yet. Happy with the ID, I labeled it and filed it away.

The following day I was working some more on the moth guide proofs and happened to notice the species account for The Cobbler. Its map, I noted, seemed to indicate that the species was Carolinian and south in distribution. It only snuck into Ontario in the southwest. My Ontario annotated checklist confirmed this. I’m quite some distance from southwestern Ontario… did I have the ID wrong?

Chris Schmidt at the Canadian National Collection in Ottawa (with whom I’d been corresponding about some stuff for the guide proofs) confirmed it for me: yes, it was The Cobbler. The species is migratory and prone to wandering in the fall, with records occasionally outside of its usual range. And while my house is quite a long way out of its range, it’s not impossible. Still, the Ontario checklist gives Guelph as the closest Ontario record; the guide to Québec moths has no records at all. The records from BugGuide are all mostly southern, with the exception of one in Illinois. So that’s pretty cool.

Then a couple of nights ago I noticed a moth hanging on the screen of one of our ground floor windows, attracted to the light from the floor lamp there. It was clearly a geometer by the spread wings, but it wasn’t the shape of any of the geos that are familiarly flying right now, so I went around to check it out. This one was easier to ID, since it’s a common enough moth: it’s a Four-barred Gray, Aethalura intertexta.

What’s unusual about it is the timing. I haven’t seen a gray in weeks, going on months. Curious, I checked the flight period indicated in our guide: April through August, it said. BugGuide has images from April through July. All but one of my personal records are from April and May; that one exception is from August. Sooo…. mid-October? What was it thinking?

This one was unusual only in that I’d never seen the species before. This is a Dark Grass-Tubeworm, Acrolophus morus. It had been sitting on the outside of the back door at Dan’s mom’s house when we were there at Thanksgiving. We were preparing to head back home after an enjoyable weekend of visiting, so there was some activity as we went in and out of the house, but the moth didn’t seem to mind. Dan was the one to point it out to me. I had a feeling what it was but had to wait till I got home to confirm.

And finally… this one is a Juniper Carpet, Thera juniperata. It was hanging out on the front door of Dan’s mom’s house (seems to be a mothy place there). It’s uncommon, but not unusual, seen annually in small numbers. I mostly include it because this was the first individual I’d seen this season; I’ve since seen one additional here at home, but that’s been all. And they’re nice-looking moths, don’t you think?

Leopard Frog

It’s mid-October and most of our summer wildlife has disappeared for the winter: birds south, insects dead or tucked away, herpetiles and cold-sensitive mammals holed up. We still get the occasional warm day, though; Thanksgiving weekend, for instance, was beautiful with highs in the mid-20s C (mid-70s F). Some hibernators, snakes in particular, will take advantage of these lovely afternoons to soak up a last few rays.

It was on one such day that I came across this Northern Leopard Frog (Rana pipiens). I nearly stepped on him, in fact. He was in a hollow of moss, back in our little bog-fen. I must admit, I was rather surprised to see him so late; aside from one or two lonely Spring Peepers peeping in the nearby swamps, it’s been weeks since I saw a frog. I’d sort of forgotten about them, assumed they were all snugged away for the winter. It was a nice day, but it still wasn’t exceptionally warm, particularly in the shaded dampness of the bog-fen. The frog, being an exotherm, wasn’t feeling his most chipper self as a result. He flinched a bit as I reached down, but didn’t make any effort to leap away. When I gently picked him up he sat calmly, his throat puffing as he breathed, hunched close to my hand.

According to this site, Northern Leopard Frogs will start to head for hibernation sites at the bottom of ponds or lake edges once air temperatures fall below 2°C (36°F)… though it doesn’t specify daytime or nighttime temps, or whether those temps need to be sustained. Definitely we’ve already had quite a number of nights that have gotten that low, at the end of September. Our daytime highs have for the most part remained in the double-digits Celsius, though.

That website happens to be one for the Canadian Species At Risk registry; I was a little surprised to see that the Northern Leopard Frog had a page there. The species is certainly no less abundant than any of our other frogs, either here or where I grew up, in the Toronto area. It turned out the SAR registry listing was for the western boreal and prairie populations, which have suffered noticeable and serious declines since the 1970s. Although the reasons for the decline are not clear and probably include several different contributing factors, one of the key players is thought to be the acid rain of the 70s, 80s and 90s, the effects of which were especially pronounced in boreal regions where the granite bedrock was unable to neutralize the acidity of the rain (compared to the limestone bedrock south of the Canadian Shield, which is basic and therefore could to some extent). In the prairies, it’s more likely that habitat loss has been the largest factor in their decline.

Giant Leopard Caterpillar

A little while ago Dan brought a caterpillar up to my study where I was working at my computer. It was a big guy, the size of my thumb, fuzzy black with bright red bands between the body segments. It was a Giant Leopard Moth (Hypercompe scribonia), perhaps my favourite caterpillar species. The first time I encountered this species was at the lake house a few years ago. I got the adults to my moth light, first, and later found a caterpillar in our yard. For whatever reason the species was high on my must-see list, so I was pretty stoked when I found the first one.

When we moved I was a little disappointed to be leaving them behind. The lake house was in a unique area where the habitat has many Carolinian characteristics and a number of typically more southern species are present, but our new house, about 35 km north, was outside of that pocket. We don’t have Cerulean Warblers or Black Rat Snakes here, no Yellow-throated Vireos or Five-lined Skinks. Or Giant Leopard Moths, I thought.

But then, a couple months after we’d moved, Dan brought me a fuzzy black caterpillar with red bands. I was surprised and delighted, but also puzzled. At the time I was just getting started on the range maps for the moth field guide. To draw them I’d comb the printed and online data I had available for each species and compile the data points into an understanding of the ecoregions each moth was associated with. All of the data I had indicated that Giant Leopard Moth was a species of Carolinian forests and those southward. In Ontario, the Carolinian region is restricted to the southwest, with some species also present in the Kingston region (the area of our lake house) at the east end of Lake Ontario. Our new house is most definitely not in the Carolinian zone; it straddles the St. Lawrence/Great Lakes and Southern Shield ecoregions, with a little bit of both habitats. So what was the Giant Leopard Moth doing all the way up here?

I still don’t have an answer to that. But I’m happy they’re here.

When Dan brought it to me, the caterpillar was curled into itself in the typical defensive position of most tiger moth (fuzzy) caterpillars. The spines can irritate soft skin and mucus membranes, so the posture is a defense mechanism, dissuading potential predators from picking them up. Wanting to get photos, I let the caterpillar sit on my desk while I continued working, and after about five minutes it decided the threat had passed and uncurled itself. It crawled up on my hand when I placed it in its path, and I grabbed my camera to head outside.

And then the caterpillar did a funny thing: it paused in its crawling and started pinching my skin with its mandibles as if I were a leaf it wanted to chew a piece off of. Though great for ripping through leaves, the little mandibles weren’t large or strong enough to do anything; it felt as though someone was trying to lightly pinch my skin with a pair of tweezers. It tried briefly at one spot then crawled to another and tried there… I’m not sure what it was trying to accomplish. Was it really trying to feed? Or was it trying to persuade me to put it down? I didn’t keep it long, in any case. I took a few photos, then let it go at the base of a tree. It was probably on its way to find a secure nook to curl up for the winter; it’ll awake in the spring, finish feeding and pupate, and then emerge as an adult in June.

Scotch Pine wasps

This Thanksgiving weekend Dan and I returned to the Toronto area for dinner with his family. The weather was gorgeous, and while there we took the dogs for a walk to a bit of natural habitat just down the road. The house is in a suburban area but backs onto a nice patch of woodland habitat, one of the largest such patches in the immediate vicinity, so there’s often some interesting goings-on there. I heard Carolina Wrens, which don’t really occur out here (they’re rare and very local), and Red-bellied Woodpecker which is also rare this far east but relatively common there. We have Northern Cardinals here but they’re sparse and in low numbers; down there, you hear them nearly every time you step out.

Despite that, there wasn’t a lot of time for naturalizing, but I did pause to ponder this tree when I came across it in a small meadow. It wasn’t the tree that caught my interest so much as what was going on with it: it was crawling with wasps. (The tree itself is a Scotch Pine, a non-native species that’s often planted in plantations or urban areas because it’s hardy and fast-growing. This one seems to have planted itself naturally.)

It’s a shame my camera doesn’t do video, because only video could have captured the numbers of wasps really well: the branches were alive with them, crawling between the needles and flying from one spot to another. There are seven wasps in this photo alone – multiply that by so many branches. I presumed that they were all converging on this tree because it was exuding sap for some reason, perhaps the way new buds are sticky to the touch. I wasn’t keen to stick my hand into the branches to find out if the twigs were sticky, however, so I just took a number of photos and then hurried to catch up with Dan, who by that time had made it halfway across the meadow.

But when I got home and started looking more closely at the photos, I noticed small brown bumps on the twigs. On some of the twigs, but not all of them. And the twigs with the most wasps seemed also to have the most bumps. Coincidence?

Some poking about Google and a quick reference of my Tracks and Sign of Insects, and I think I have an answer. I suspect these bumps to actually be scale insects, which are usually small, featureless domes scattered along twigs. They could be Pine Tortoise Scale, Toumeyella parvicornis, which is small and reddish and includes Scotch Pine among its targets. Like aphids, as they feed scale insects will produce honeydew, a sweet secretion resulting from their diet of sap. This honeydew, in turn, is very attractive to nectar-feeding insects such as bees and wasps.

The most common species of wasp on the tree was Eastern Yellowjacket, but I noticed at least one other yellow-and-black species, one mostly black species with a single yellow band, possibly two species of metallic green sweat bee, and the above, which I think is a species of spider wasp (family Pompilidae), though none of the ones shown in my Kaufman Guide to Insects or in the group’s photos on BugGuide seem to match. The Kaufman Guide does note about the family, though, that “Many visit aphid colonies for honeydew secreted by those insects.” Also present on the tree were quite a number of ladybugs. Ladybugs may be interested in the honeydew, but are probably there to feed on the scale insects themselves.

Bear sign

A few weeks ago I noticed that a couple of the large rocks that sit beside the trail in our back fields had been shifted out of the ground. These are not small rocks, as Jack demonstrates, and there’s only one animal that would have done this: a Black Bear. Although we’ve never seen a bear around here in the couple of years we’ve lived here, we know they’re around just from the sign they leave. Shifting rocks is one of the easiest and most frequently spotted. Bears typically flip or move rocks to see what might be living underneath. Anything that doesn’t get out of sight quickly enough is fair game, but typically ants and grubs would be among the most common food items found this way.

I’ve also noticed a few random holes dug in the grass which I’ve wondered if bears might have created. They’ve been in the areas that I know the bears have been traveling, so it wouldn’t be a stretch. A number of weeks ago, around the time that I noticed the holes appear or maybe just before, we’d had some flights of citronella ants, so I wondered if the animal had been digging to unearth citronella ant colonies. Could they smell anything else from the surface? The other possibility for these holes is that they were made by skunks, which also root around in the earth looking for food. I don’t know enough about the physical sign of skunks to be able to say what their holes look like, though the photos I turn up on Google look a little different.

Scat photos coming up, so those grossed out by that sort of thing might want to stop reading here… :)

The discovery of bear poop on the property really drives home that these animals have been passing through unseen, though. I found the first pile a few weeks ago. Dark, and filled with some sort of reddish fruit that I couldn’t readily identify. Nothing that I knew was fruiting at that time seemed like a good match. However, something someone posted to Facebook about the same time commented on finding bear scat with black cherry remains in it, and in Googling that it looks like that might be what this is. The reddish bits are the skins, and the lighter things are the pits. I tend to forget about wild cherry species because they’re usually in the woods and their fruit aren’t especially showy.

Then yesterday, as I was heading out with the dogs, Dan suggested I check out a pile of scat he’d noticed on one of our trails. It hadn’t been there the day before, so the animal that had left it had passed through overnight. It was also bear, simply from the size of it. What was curious about this was that it was full of apple skins – prodding it with a stick to break it apart so I could examine its contents, it even smelled strongly of apple.

We’ve got a small grove of apple trees near the house, and Dan commented that he’s heard animals eating the apples there on occasion in recent evenings, and the dogs certainly show an interest in something that’s been foraging there when they’re let out the next morning. Could it have been the bears? There are also a couple feral apple trees on the 100-acre woods and no doubt our neighbours’ properties, so they could easily have been feeding there, too.

Not far down the trail there was another little bit of scat. This was darker, and quite a bit smaller, but it was just as full of apples as the first one was. The only other wildlife that I know for sure will eat apples is deer, and they, like most herbivores, create pelleted droppings, not tubular. Omnivores and carnivores typically create tubular droppings, and of those candidates the size of this could perhaps be raccoon. Would they eat apples? I don’t know; they’re pretty opportunistic.

What I actually thought these might be, though, given their proximity to the other scat and the identical content, were the droppings of a bear cub; the larger pile would be from its mother. Bears give birth in late winter, Jan-Feb, and by the early fall they’re already weaned from their mother’s milk. However, usually they’ll stick with her for another year, learning how to forage and live on their own. Females only mate every second year, with the between year being used to continue raising their half-grown cub.

I don’t worry that there are bears around, even mama bears with cubs, because, as the Peterson Field Guide to Mammals says, “Many are killed in the misguided belief that they pose a threat to humans. Black Bears are usually shy and retiring and very seldom dangerous.” If there is a bear around, no doubt she’ll have heard me and departed looong before I even realize there’s one in the area, if I ever do. Instead, I just find the sign she’s left behind.