Seabrooke

Pipevine

I have a few dozen more photos from the biothon, but I want to interrupt briefly to share this photo. We have a vine growing up the side of our screen porch. It wasn’t blooming during July, when we moved in, and though I watched it for the rest of that year and all of the next, I never saw any flowers. I assumed it must be a non-flowering vine, or perhaps just grown too old to be very productive. I couldn’t tell what it was by the foliage, and while I apparently asked my mom her opinion I didn’t remember that I had and certainly didn’t remember her answer.

Then yesterday I was helping Dan with some yard stuff that required climbing under another individual of the same species of vine, this one behind our shed. And while I was crawling around down there I discovered – a flower! But not just any flower; these were the coolest flowers.

Residents of eastern North America south of the Great Lakes might recognize this as pipevine or Dutchman’s pipe, and more specifically Woolly Pipevine, Aristolochia tomentosa. In more southern regions it’s a native plant, but here in Ontario it occurs only as ours does, as an artificially-planted garden ornamental. Of course, the pipevines, members of the genus Aristolochia, take their name from the shape of the flowers. Each flower is about an inch or so long from top to bottom, curved into the shape of an old (Dutch?) pipe. The flowers are designed to be temporary fly traps: the flies, attracted to the flowers’ strong scent, climb inside; small hairs point backward toward the reproductive organ and prevent the fly from leaving until it’s reached the female bits – then the flower releases its pollen and the hairs wither, allowing the fly to leave to pollinate another flower.

This species is one of the host plants of the Pipevine Swallowtail. Like Monarchs do from their host plant, milkweed, Pipevine Swallowtail catterpillars ingest unpalatable chemicals from the pipevine leaves that in turn make them distasteful to predators. We don’t have Pipevine Swallowtails up here, though, and I’m not sure if anything else will brave the toxins in the leaves to use it.

Still, the flowers are pretty nifty. Which is a good thing, because the vine is overrunning that section of garden and until I discovered the blooms I was quite prepared to pull it out!

The Frontenac Biothon: Part 1

So as I said in my last post, this weekend I was in Frontenac Provincial Park participating in the Frontenac Biothon. Dan started the biothon last year with the intention of it being an annual fundraiser for his bird research and monitoring project, Frontenac Bird Studies. Dan is the only employee of FBS; I’m it’s only regular volunteer (he’s had a couple other people come to help out on a few occasions, but he doesn’t have a full established core of volunteers). It’s a small project with a correspondingly small budget, which makes fundraisers like this useful and valuable. The amount that we’ll raise through the biothon may not be much for a larger organization, but it goes a long way here.

Frontenac Provincial Park covers a huge area, more than 5200 hectares (nearly 13,000 acres), and there is only one official road going into it, at the south. There is camping in the park, but it’s all backcountry, and some of the sites are a pretty good hike in (a few are accessible by boat, if you have one, but even some of those require a fair amount of paddling to reach). This provides for some fabulously beautiful scenery at the camp site and a whole lot of privacy – no camp site contains more than four reservable units. The Park has been extremely generous and supportive of FBS and Dan’s research efforts, including the biothon, and we were able to reserve an entire camp site for the weekend of our biothon. We selected camp site 6, which is set at the north end of Little Salmon Lake. Aside from the park ranger who dropped by shortly after I arrived to service the outhouse, and a few people back at the parking lot as we were leaving on Sunday, I didn’t see a single other person all weekend, only our group of biothoners. Just another reason Frontenac is such a glorious park.

There was Dan and I, of course, but we also had two friends of ours up from the Toronto area to help out. They’d joined us last year, too, and now that Dan and I live some distance away this is the only time of year we usually get to see them, so it was great to have them out. We were missing one additional teammate this year who stayed at home with a newborn. Unfortunately, she was our designated Plant Expert, but the rest of us were determined to do our best in her absence.

Dan and the two guys all headed out to another part of the park early Saturday morning while I hiked in to the campsite to get started there. I arrived at the site mid-morning after an hour and a half hike from the parking lot. The park ranger who stopped by said I was welcome to let the dogs off leash while at the campsite to swim, since there was no one else they might bother, as long as they didn’t run off and leave the campsite. Raven was delighted by this. She spent a good chunk of the day paddling in the shallows, chasing minnows, or maybe just the shadows of ripples, I couldn’t really tell. As long as there’s water to paddle in, you can take Raven anywhere and she’ll be happy.

Jack, meanwhile, is not yet so enamoured with water. He went down and checked it out, decided it wasn’t all that interesting, and retired to a patch of poison ivy to watch. The camp site opened up into a weedy, open bank that sloped down to the water’s edge. Unsurprisingly, almost half of it was covered in poison ivy, a plant that likes sunny, exposed forest edges. It’s a good thing that neither Dan nor I react to poison ivy. I sure hope the same is true for our friends; they weren’t complaining of extensive rashes on Sunday morning, at least.

All four of us have the most expertise in birds, but I have a fair bit of experience with insects and plants and was nominated as the biothoner in charge of those groups. While the park checklist does include plants, it doesn’t have insects, so I kept track of everything I saw in a notebook that I carried around with me all weekend. I marked taxonomic headers at the top of each page – “Birds”, “Butterflies”, “Dragonflies”, “Other Insects”, “Mammals”, “Plants”, etc – and then slowly started walking along the path from the campsite, writing down the names of each species I encountered in the appropriate spot. That first hour is a bit overwhelming, where you have to pause every step or two to write down six new names. But once you get all the common stuff listed, it gets easier, and you can start watching for new species. Your eye slides over all the poison ivy and raspberry cane and past the bumblebees and corporals to pick out the less common things. I carried my camera with me and took photos of stuff I didn’t know and needed to look up in my field guides later in the evening, or of things I found interesting.

Such as these mating caddisflies, one of the first photos I took Saturday morning. I don’t really know much about caddisfly ID other than to say that there are a lot more species of them than you’d think there were. At my moth sheets in the evening I’m always surprised at the variety. Some are quite tiny, while others are rather large. This pair fall into that latter group. Each was more than an inch long in body (obviously nearly double that when you include the antennae). I always find observing behaviours interesting, so this mating pair caught my eye more than a single individual might have.

A common viney plant that I think was Hedge Bindweed was riddled with holes. The holes were all in the middles of the leaves, rather than cut from the edges, which usually points to adult leaf beetles rather than caterpillars, in my experience. Sure enough, after turning over half a dozen leaves I discovered this guy. I believe it’s a Mottled Tortoise Beetle, Deloyala guttata, which is a relatively common and widespread tortoise beetle. Tortoise beetles typically feed on members of the morning glory family, of which Hedge Bindweed is a part.

In the shaded area around the camping pads I found this guy, the first moth of the biothon for me (if you don’t include all the pale flutterers disturbed from the ground but not positively ID’d while I hiked in). Perched in plain site on the upper side of a leaf, it was doing its best to mimic a bird dropping. It is, in fact, named the Pale Gray Bird-dropping Moth (Antaeotricha leucillana), which is appropriate. I’ve got these from time to time at my sheets, but it’s always interesting to encounter moths in their natural habitat. They seem different somehow, as if out of context, although really it’s the blacklight and sheet that are out of the moth’s natural context.

In the grasses along the sloping banks of the lake there were many dragonflies. Most of them were Chalk-fronted Corporals or Common Whitetails, but I paused to check each one I saw just in case. In doing so I turned up this individual, which I believe is an immature male Calico Pennant. I tend to forget about the pennants, I don’t know why. Every time I find one I’m excited all over again. A pennant! Wow! As it turned out, when I visited some meadow habitat on Sunday I found lots of pennants cruising over the grass there, but this first one got me excited.

Also down along the shore were a number of these plants. They were growing in patches, at the base of the rocks that I imagine would be near the high-water mark. The water was well below that now, but I figured they were water species of some sort. The flowers seemed pretty distinctive and I thought it would be easy to find a match in my wildflower guide, but no luck. Polling my knowledgable Facebook friends later, upon our return, this turns out to be Tufted Loosestrife, Lysimachia thyrsiflora. I did think the leaves had a loosestrifey look to them, but the flowers were completely throwing me off.

Continuing along the shore a bit farther, I was stopped by a sudden rattling of insect wings. A pair of dragonflies fell from the air to the ground just in front of me. At first I thought it was two trying to mate, but peering closer it seemed to be two different species: what I took to be a clubtail and a whiteface. They wrestled on the ground for a few moments and once I decided that they weren’t a male and female of the same species I thought that it must be the larger one was trying to kill and eat the smaller one. I don’t know if he found the smaller one too much to handle, or if I was misinterpreting what was going on, but after some struggle the smaller one managed to get away and fly off. The only dragonfly that I know will attack other dragonflies nearly its own size is the Dragonhunter, but I don’t think that’s what this one is. I need to invest in a better odonate guide.

All that before lunchtime! I have quite a few photos that I’d really like to share, so I think I’ll wrap up there for today. This will probably need to be at least four installments to fit them all in – more tomorrow!

If you’re interested in supporting FBS through our biothon, we’d be extremely grateful for your donation! All donations over $10 are tax-creditable and will receive a receipt for this purpose. More info at the Frontenac Biothon page, or donate through Paypal below. Thank you!

Frontenac Biothon

Sunday Snapshot – Frontenac Biothon highlight

This weekend I was down in Frontenac Provincial Park participating in the Frontenac Biothon, a fundraiser for Frontenac Bird Studies, Dan’s bird research and monitoring project. The weather, which had been forecasted to be rainy all weekend, actually turned out pretty good, and despite a few hiccups (what event ever has no hiccups?) I think everyone had a good time.

Although we all kept track of species from all taxonomic groups, we each focused on different areas according to our “expertise” (which I put in quotes because while we’re all experts on birds, none of us have comparable experience in any other group, really, except perhaps for moths in my case). I focused on plants and insects. My personal final species tally across all taxonomic groups probably stands somewhere around 350 species, but I’ll have to go through my lists to tally everything up.

I saw many interesting things over the weekend, but the above moth was most definitely the highlight for me. I saw at least a dozen different types of moths moving about the low vegetation during the day, and this individual was one of the ones I flushed up at the forest edge. It wasn’t till it settled that I realized what it was: a Decorated Owlet, Pangrapta decoralis, Hodges #8490.

It was a lifer for me. It’s found throughout the northeast but I get the impression that it’s somewhat uncommon, or perhaps locally common, as this is the first time I’ve encountered the species and also we had to solicit an image for the field guide for it because neither Dave nor I had one ourselves. The caterpillars feed on blueberry, something that doesn’t grow around our house here and wasn’t really common in the area where we lived at the lake house, either. I wish I’d got a better photo, but unfortunately I’d only brought my all-purpose landscape lens, and it was rather flighty anyway (so lacking a fridge there was only so much I could do). Still, better a poor photo than none at all!

Sunday Snapshots: Odonate parade

Right. I think I said something about posting more regularly, didn’t I? This plan would have worked out better if I hadn’t caught a particularly nasty computer virus/malware a couple of days later. A week and a half, two drive reformats and a disgusting number of hours of head-bashing later, I think the system is clean enough to get back to normal functionality (knock on wood). I think this calls for a celebration – how about an odonate parade?

This weekend Dan and I made the first two of our MAPS visits; the first to Blue Lakes, the second to Rock Ridge. The habitat above is from Rock Ridge, near the site where we sit to do the banding. This morning the air above the rocky ledges was thick with dragonflies. Likewise, yesterday at Blue Lakes there were dozens of dragonflies cruising along the water’s edge and over the rocky domes. In between net rounds I spent a fair bit of time stalking dragonflies. I got photos of most of the species I spotted. I’m not 100% certain on a few of these IDs; if anyone knows better, I’m open to correction.

The video here is of the swarms above the rocks at Rock Ridge. It’s hard to capture the numbers the same way one experiences it in person, but I think this gives you an idea…

Four-spotted Skimmer

Chalk-fronted Corporal, male

Chalk-fronted Corporal, immature female

Chalk-fronted Corporal, female with deerfly

Frosted Whiteface, male

Common Baskettail

Common Whitetail, male

Common Whitetail, immature male

Common Whitetail, female

Stream Cruiser

Dot-tailed Whiteface, male (prob. imm.)

Dot-tailed Whiteface, female

Belted Whiteface female?

American Emerald

American Emerald, saying hello

Beaverpond Clubtail female?

Beaverpond Clubtail male?

Beaverpond Clubtail? mating pair
Many of the clubtails look similar, and Dragonflies Through Binoculars has tiny photos. This was my best guess.

Toadflax Brocade

Goodness, is it really that late already? Just a quickie this evening, then. Still working on computer issues…

I discovered this guy on the weekend while browsing my garden. The lilac is one that I dug from the house I grew up in, before my parents moved out a couple of years ago. It didn’t put out any blossoms that spring, probably just trying to recover from suddenly finding itself independent, its sucker root back to the main plant now severed. It settled in well to its new location, and last year it put out half a dozen blooms. This year it’s feeling even better, with double that number. I almost feel bad that in a year or two it’s going to be dug up and moved again, just when it’s really getting comfortable; but Dan and I hope to buy our own place in the next few years, and my garden plants, including this childhood lilac, will be coming with me.

So I was peering closely at the blossoms, both to admire them and to inhale that beautiful lilac scent, when I noticed this moth hidden among the flowers. This is a Toadflax Brocade, Calophasia lunula. I haven’t seen one yet this year, so it was a pleasant surprise. They’re easily recognizable by their small size and tented shape, and the small white crescent set in the buffy wing. They’re not a native species to here. They were first introduced in 1962 in Belleville, Ontario, which is not that far from here. Several subsequent releases through the 60s and onward have established their populations across much of the continent. They were brought over with the intention of acting as a biocontrol for Yellow Toadflax aka Butter-and-eggs, that ubiquitous roadside wildflower which is also non-native. Studies have shown that the caterpillars will defoliate about 20% of plants, but that’s not really enough to do much for population control. Ah well. They tried.