The Marvelous in Nature

Start of the season

Contrary to the forecast made for yesterday, the weather wasn’t actually all that bad. While there was rain in the city, by the time I drove the ten minutes down to the spit, there was no rain down on the lakeshore, and there was even some patches of blue sky struggling to show through the blanket of grey cloud. It’s a funny thing about the research station, that the weather conditions that affect the city can often be quite different than what’s happening out on the spit. Usually, it’s that it’s raining, sometimes heavily, in the city with little to no precipitation on the lake. Strange.

Today dawned clear, beautiful and sunny, but c-c-cold. Well, for this time of year. It was -5 celcius when we arrived at the crack of dawn, about 6:30am. It took until 9:30 for it to warm up to 0 degrees. Ordinarily we would open the mist nets half an hour before sunrise, and run for 6 hours, but both yesterday and today, due to weather, we opened halfway through the morning and put in just a half day’s worth of effort.

The first bird banded of the spring season was this impatient American Tree Sparrow (can you see the look he’s giving me? “Are you done there yet, missy?”). After my comments about expecting migrants to be late this year, they all seemed to come in on the warm front Monday night. We had Golden-crowned Kinglets and Eastern Phoebes, in good numbers. Song Sparrows, juncos, a few Brown Creepers. A Winter Wren was around, as was a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker and a Belted Kingfisher, all firsts for the spring.

We totaled a huge 41 species on the morning, which I think is more than any other opening day in past years. One of the birds present was this little Northern Saw-whet Owl. They’re not often seen in the spring, so it was a real delight to find. Saw-whets are funny migrants, they come through in largeish numbers in the fall, spread out for the winter, and then seem to just disappear come spring. We run a saw-whet owl monitoring program in the fall which is pretty successful (we banded over 300 owls last fall), but don’t run in the spring because there’s no owls around to band!

The trails are still partially covered in snow. This photo was from yesterday, and the rain and wind yesterday helped to melt some of it, but there’s still some left yet to go. It can be a little bleak down there on cloudy days in late fall or early spring, with the grey skies and empty trees. The trees take a while to leaf out, longer than on the shore, because of cooler temperatures due to lake effects. We can just be seeing the start of greening when trees are already well-progressed in town. The dogwoods really help add a pop of colour to the landscape there. I’m going to try to do a once-a-week photo series documenting the greening of the station this spring.

As I was leaving yesterday, this woodcock wandered across the road in front of my car. Naturally, I had my camera already packed away, and of course it had the short lens on it. So while it was a rare opportunity to see a woodcock out in the open, this was the best shot I could manage. I love these birds, they’re so bizarre-looking! They’ve been doing their beautiful twittery sky-flights in the mornings when we arrive, I wish it was brighter when they do it so that I could capture some of it to film, but they only fly at dusk and dawn.

I’ve been busy lately, wrapped up in an interesting and hopefully promising project that will hopefully be the subject of some future post if it all works out, so haven’t had much time for research – I’ve got a small backlog of such photos that I need to get to. It’s amazing to me how much there’s been to talk about during the winter, the months that I figured would be the hardest to fill… My camera will be overflowing when life really starts stirring in a few weeks!

On your mark… get set…

The last day of March, and this morning found me down at the Tommy Thompson Park Bird Research Station, helping to set up the site for the start of another fabulous spring migration season. The research station’s primary goals are to collect data on local and migratory bird populations to aid with conservation efforts here and afar, to promote awareness of birds and conservation through education programs and demonstrations, and to contribute to research initiatives by helping to collect data or providing a location or means for someone else to do so.

The primary, and initial, project run by the research station, through which these objectives are achieved, is the migration monitoring program. It involves constant-effort bird banding and surveys (that is, we’re out there every single morning for the entire migration period, weather permitting), which provides data on bird population numbers and demographics, including information such as adult:young and male:female ratios in the population, stuff that can’t be easily (or sometimes at all) obtained through non-banding means but that gives you an idea of, for instance, how successful the breeding season was this year. There are some 25 or so similar stations across Canada, each contributing valuable data to fill in their local piece of the puzzle. The birds are banded, measurements collected, and then safely released to return to their regular activities. The Palm Warbler in the top photo popped nearly straight up out of the hand before taking off for the nearby trees.

I’ve been volunteering since 2003. I love being down there, and would happily volunteer all season if I had some other means of making ends meet (who’s seen/read About A Boy? perhaps all I need to do is write a hit holiday song and I’ll be set). I like seeing who’s about every day, watching the migration ebb and flow across the season, the composition of species progressing and changing from week to week. On a daily basis, I like turning the corner to check a net, not knowing what we’ll find this time around. We’ve had some marvelous surprises show up, such as the above Yellow-throated Warbler, the only bird of this species I’ve seen (they’re normally more southerly in range).

I love the opportunity to hold such fragile, but beautiful, life in my hands, to feel the wonder of it. I enjoy seeing the birds up close, at a distance where you can marvel at the intricate feather patterns or subtle plumage details often lost in the field. Who’s seen the orange crown of an Orange-crowned Warbler? I have, but only with the bird in my hand. And who’s paid much attention to a Mourning Dove’s face, the subtle colours of the eye ring, the bright pink at the corner of its mouth, the small patch of iridescence on its neck? But you get a chance to see this when you study the bird up close.

Yes, I’m looking forward to returning. Ironically, tomorrow, the first day of banding, has been rained out (we don’t run in conditions that would threaten the welfare of the birds, though surveys are still a go – we’re less concerned about our own comfort). So we’ll be starting on Wednesday instead.

The setup this morning went smoothly, but was quiet for birds. We had a group of a dozen chickadees moving back and forth through the area, and there were some blackbirds and a few grackles that flew overhead throughout the morning, but not much moving in yet. Perhaps this warm spell will encourage some more movement from the south. Hermit Thrush, American Tree Sparrow, Dark-eyed Junco, perhaps even Eastern Phoebe or Ruby-crowned Kinglet – they should all be around in the first week during a normal season, but the unusually cold weather might delay their arrival this year.

The park and station are open to the public on weekends and holidays, and anybody in the Toronto area who’s interested is invited to swing by Tommy Thompson Park on the Leslie Street Spit, and drop in during a spring or fall morning to check us out, learn about what we’re doing, and get a chance to see a little bird up close and personal.

Earth Hour in Toronto

Earth Hour took place yesterday around the globe, locally at 8pm. By early afternoon yesterday, the first photos and stories were coming in from New Zealand and other countries on the far side of the world from here. Ours, of course, took place at 8pm our time, and I nearly forgot about it even after all the lead-up earlier in the day. We shut down our lights and then I headed down to a spot on the lakeshore to check out the cityscape.

The above photo was taken last fall, showing a city of light and colour, brightly illuminated. The spotlights are coming from the Air Canada Centre, home to the Toronto Maple Leafs and Raptors. All of the downtown office buildings are lit up, despite that it’s nearly 10 at night and one would presume even the overtime workers would have headed home. At one point I think I heard that building owners and/or the businesses renting space left the lights on as a security measure or something like that, but there’s got to be a better solution.

This is the skyline last night, taken at about 8:50pm. When I was down there I recall being underwhelmed by the difference at the time. There was still considerable glow from the city illuminating the sky, though it did seem reduced. I could still see the beaver I’d disturbed from the shore swimming across the water a few metres out, in clear silhouette. I really got the best sense of the difference when I came home and opened the two files side by side on my monitor. I know that streetlights remained on during the hour, as did businesses that were still open at 8pm, for security and safety reasons. There were a few planes and a helicopter circling over the city while I was there, presumably news stations getting shots of the event from the air.

On the other hand, the camera settings have a huge influence on how you perceive the scene. The below photo was taken only five minutes earlier, also during Earth Hour. Yet it looks like the city’s as bright as ever. The above photo was taken at F/8.0 for 20 seconds, the below photo was at F/4.0 for 30 seconds. The slightly wider aperture and longer shutter makes a huge difference in the image. I’d say my perception of the scene, by eye, was probably between the two, but closer to the first photo.

Toronto during Earth Hour, wide aperture

The Toronto Star reports that energy consumption during that hour was down nearly 9% from comparable late-March Saturday nights. It was only down 5% from levels just prior to the start of Earth Hour, but that was likely because a number of businesses and buildings, such as the CN Tower and some of the office towers, had already turned their lights off earlier in the afternoon. Across the province as a whole (bearing in mind that many cities and rural areas didn’t actively participate the way Toronto did), energy draw was down 5.2% from normal.

The Earth Hour’s launch point, Christchurch, New Zealand, had a 13% lower consumption during the hour. In Sydney, Australia, it was down 10%. I did get the impression that a lot of people didn’t participate, though, through numerous valid reasons but also some half-hearted excuses.

The Toronto Star states, “Ireland’s more than 7,000 pubs elected not to take part – in part because of the risk that Saturday night revellers could end up smashing glasses, falling down stairs, or setting themselves on fire with candles.

Likewise, much of Europe – including France, Germany, Spain and European Union institutions – planned nothing to mark Earth Hour.

That didn’t dismay organizers, who said there’s a powerful message in the fact that the usual powerhouse countries aren’t leading the way, and that even in wealthy places like Canada it’s very much a grassroots phenomenon.”

The Toronto Star had a great slide show of scenes from the different participating cities around the world. Many are very subtle before-and-afters, but I liked a number of them, including one of Sydney Harbour, from across the water. It doesn’t seem to let you grab the address for the individual images or I’d post a linked one here.

Peering in the pond, part 2: Signs of life

I picked my way across the little patches of grass and stone, the few areas that aren’t submerged, till I reached the point where the water began to deepen. I squatted down on my heels, peered into the water and saw……

….nothing.

At least, not at first. The water looked still and quiet and empty. I can’t say this surprised me a whole lot; if I lived in a pond year-round, I certainly wouldn’t come out of wherever I was spending the winter until the water was a civilized temperature. Some bubbles floating on the surface cast some interesting star-shaped light patterns on the pond bottom, but that was about all I saw.

And then…

…a bright red water mite zipped across a little depression in the mud. It was the only one, and it didn’t stay out in the open long enough for me to study it or get a good photo. But it did tell me that things were actually awake in the icy water.

So I carefully studied the pond bottom with a bit more scrutiny than the casual scan I’d given it initially. The first thing I noticed were tiny little organisms moving about suspended in the water column (the short amount of it there was). I couldn’t make out a whole lot of detail on them. As I was considering these, a larger movement caught my eye. I also couldn’t make out enough to say what this was, but it was brown and seemed to have a shiny silver eye.

I tried taking some photos of the creatures in the pond, but it was hard to get a good clear shot while they were swimming around, over and under vegetation and detritus. So I ended up getting a bucket and tall yogurt container from the house and scooping out a few containers’ worth of water and pond muck. I couldn’t tell if I’d gotten the creatures of interest or not, but there was really only one way to find out.

The water was very cloudy for the first little while. Gradually as the evening progressed the silt settled out to the bottom of the bucket, but it was still difficult to see the bottom even by the time I went to bed. I could see the little creatures swimming about in the water column, but not the silver-eyed things. I wondered if maybe I hadn’t scooped any up.

When I got up this morning I was delighted to see that the silt had all cleared and I had in fact caught a number of the silver-eyes. The challenge was then how to get them somewhere where I could study them, since I had six inches of water sitting atop the muddy bottom. I ended up using a turkey baster, which was large enough that I could aim the end over the creature and suck it and a bit of water up and deposit it in a little white measuring cup that would allow me to see more details. I set the cup under a bright lamp and poised my camera, firmly attached to a tripod, directly above so I could get some macro shots.

The silver-eyed creatures resembled tiny shrimp, once I got them out of the muck and against a clean background. Less than 2mm wide and no more than a centimetre long for the largest, they had long antennae and many long legs, and curled their tails under their bodies. They scooted about quickly, on their sides just as often as on their “feet”.

This locomotive habit gives them one of their two common names, “sideswimmers”. Their other name is “scud”, which comes from the Norwegian “skudda”, meaning to push. They’re a type of crustacean, belonging to the same family as crabs, lobsters and shrimp, and in fact are sometimes called “freshwater shrimp”, even though they belong to a different group than the shrimp you eat.

They come in all sorts of colours: orange, brown, green, and even silver. These individuals are all likely of the same species, despite the colour differences. There are a few different species of sideswimmer around here, representing a range of different aquatic habitats. I suspect these to belong to the genus Hyalella, which are one of the most common groups. They are so common, in fact, that their conspicuous absence is sometimes used as an easy indicator of lake acidification below pH 6.5 (their tolerance limit). In some streams with ample cover and food it’s possible to record up to 10,000 of these little guys in just one square metre. They eat primarly detritus and help to tidy up pond bottoms. They’re also mostly nocturnal, hiding in the mud during the day, which explains why I didn’t see any while I had the bright light suspended over the water to warm it yesterday evening.

This is the other creature I saw in the pond. If the scuds are tiny, then it’s itsy-bitsy. Only 2mm long, it’s hard to distinguish much detail without a microscope, which I don’t have. The macro lens on my camera allowed me to get a bit closer, but you still can’t make out much detail.

This is a copepod, another type of crustacean. The name means “oar-foot”, and reflects their use of their long antennae as a means of propulsion. This one belongs to the suborder Cyclopoida, the “cyclops” part of the name referencing their “eyespot” (actually two close together when looked at under high magnification), which is used for detecting light. You can just see the small dark dot at the front of the head. The above individual is a female, identified by the two prominent egg-sacs on either side of the body. When she lays the eggs they drop to the bottom of the pool. Some may hatch right away, but depending on conditions, others may settle into the mud and wait. They can survive long periods of drought, and scientists have even discovered and successfully hatched 300-year-old eggs.

I believe this is a male of the same species (although it could be a different species altogether). Males don’t carry the egg sacs and so can look fairly different, particularly when you can’t get a good sense of the whole body shape without a microscope. I’m not sure why the dark upper body; it may be food that it’s ingested recently (the organisms are somewhat transparent and their inner contents can usually be seen fairly easily; for instance, the dark-coloured eggs the female is carrying can clearly be seen through the sacs).

Different species can be either predators of smaller plankton in the water column, or grazers of algae on vegetation or other surfaces. Copepods in general will undertake daily vertical migrations, usually coming to the surface for the night and returning to the bottom during the day.

Flatworm (Turbellaria, genus Hymanella?)

As I was poking around with the turkey baster sucking up little creatures to put in the cup and examine, I spotted something else moving slowly, worm-like, along the top of the mud. I stuck it in the cup with all the rest to have a closer look.

I recognized it right away from my Invertebrate Zoology classes as a member of the group Platyhelminthes, and observed that it was a flatworm, but I couldn’t get much further than that without additional reference. There’s a number of different types of flatworms, many of which have triangular heads. This one didn’t, which helped narrow down the options. I think it may be a member of the genus Hymanella or Phagocata, but who knows, really; my Invert Zoo text is packed away somewhere at the moment, and the other guides I have on hand don’t give enough detail.

Flatworms are incredible contortionists. This one went from being stretched out, perhaps nearly a centimetre long but only a millimetre wide, to short and squat, nearly round and almost 3mm across. They don’t actually swim, but rather move on hair-like cilia on their underside. They’re typically predators or scavengers of microorganisms or other protein sources. They don’t have teeth, but instead use an extendable mouthpart that acts as a suction tube to suck fluids from their prey, or ingest small ones whole. One of the neat things about these guys, that you can actually see in the first picture, is their “crossed eyes”. Like with the copepods, these spots are actually simply photo-sensors, used for detecting light. Another cool factoid: they’re regenerative, and if you cut one into multiple pieces, nearly every piece will regenerate into a new complete flatworm.

That seemed to be about it for my haul, and after I’d taken a few pictures I returned everything to the bucket and then took the bucket back out to the pond where I’d gotten it. I’ll go back in a little bit, once the spring peepers start to peep, to see if the fairy shrimp are out yet, and perhaps to look for vertebrate life.

Peering in the pond, part 1: Don’t fall in!

With the days getting longer, and the turning forward of the clocks a few weeks ago, daylight lingers well into the evenings these days. When I finished the day’s house renovation tasks today there was still ample light to go padding about outside, and I wanted to get out for a bit to enjoy the relatively mild temperatures. It was beautiful and sunny all day today, and with the combination of the two factors the snow was doing its best to melt. Of course, with the giant snowpiles we have it’s hard to notice much of a difference, but there was a steady rivulet of water running down the tire-tracks in the driveway all day, as if there was a spring welling up near the house and feeding it.

I decided to go down and see if the warm sun had awakened anything in the ice-free water of the little vernal ponds in the backyard. There’s two small ponds, connected through small channels, both of which mostly or entirely dry up in the thick heat of summer. One I remember skating on when I was quite young. It’s since grown in with seedlings from the Silver Maples in the front yard, creating a miniature maple swamp. The largest of the young trees are now a good 10 cm (roughly 4 in) in diameter-at-breast-height, and while it’s a pretty, picturesque scene, the leaf fall has mostly choked the waters so that the pond that I recall being too deep to wade in even with our rubber boots is now fairly shallow through most of its length. Very little inhabits this pond anymore, although I regularly return to look.

The other pond is in the middle of the fenced-in field the horses get turned out in, but despite the disturbance it sometimes gets as a result, the horses generally aren’t all that interested in it and life does well there. (There’s actually two much larger swamps close nearby, but they’re harder to access without a pair of hipwaders.) It was to this little pond that I headed this afternoon.

The snow still lies thick over much of the pond. Portions of it have melted to expose the water, which was free of ice in the warm sunshine and mild air, but more than half is still concealed by snow. The crusty layer over the surface of the snow allowed me to gently pick my way across without breaking through to my knees, which was generally appreciated. The snow mounds up around the vegetation, creating little hummocks from which the red dogwood branches poke up, reminding me a bit of anthills.

There was a fair bit of bird activity in the area. Behind me, in the larger true swamp, the Red-winged Blackbirds were perched at the top of the small trees calling loudly their familiar “oak-a-lee!” (despite that in most field guides it’s phoneticized as “konk-a-ree”, this is how I learned it growing up). There were a couple of Common Grackles up there with them, doing their best rusty creak.

The dogwood clumps are a favourite foraging spot of both the overwintering sparrows and the local chickadees. I’m not really sure what they’re eating when they’re foraging in or under these bushes, but there’s often a lot of little birds hopping among the branches. There were a few chickadees in the area while I was standing in the middle of the pond, and I watched them for a little bit.

This one came down and had a bath while I was standing there. Naturally, I had my short lens on the camera, and by the time I got the long lens switched over he’d finished up and hopped up to a branch in the back of the clump of dogwood to fluff up and dry off. The water through most of the melted area is quite shallow and perfect for bathing. Well, for the birds, anyway. I think I’d find it a little muddy and cold at the moment.

A couple of American Tree Sparrows were hanging out in the dogwood as well. This one gave me a rather pensive stare before moving into the thicker cover of the bushes. In the areas where the snow has now melted I could imagine there being a fair bit of grass seed and other such food items exposed that had been buried through the winter.

After watching the birds for a bit I turned my attention back to the water. What I was specifically looking for was fairy shrimp. While growing up, we’d come down to look for these every spring once the snow melted, but I think I’m perhaps a tad early yet. Nonetheless, it’s worth a check.

I was a little hasty and forgot that I was standing on an ice ledge. As I moved to the water’s edge to peer in, the snow under my feet cracked and I nearly fell in. Whoops! I did manage to catch my balance without falling and back away from the danger zone. And then circled around to approach from the open, muddy area.

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