abiotic – Page 4

New Year’s introspection

I planned to take a leisurely hike this afternoon, perhaps over to the 100-acre woods, but was thwarted by the weather, which was gray and drizzly all day. I did still go out, but it was just a quick stroll to the back of the property and back. My tolerance for being wet runs about even with that of a cat, and it’s only either great discipline or guilt that drives me outside in the rain. It’s too bad about the rain, which meant not only did I leave my camera in the house but also there wasn’t much to photograph, because the mild temperature this afternoon probably would have encouraged some interesting insects or other observations. Oh well. In lieu of that, I’m revisiting the lists I made last year.

I was quite ambitious in my New Year’s undertaking last year, writing an epic ten top-10 lists on 2009 observations and 2010 goals. It took me two days to complete, and quite a lot of brainpower, a surprising amount for what really didn’t require very much research. I’m afraid I’m not going to go to that depth this year.

I led with a list of my first 10 species of birds observed last year, on January 1. I made the same list again this year. Both years the majority of my observations have been made at our feeders, so it’s not much of a surprise that the lists look very similar…

2009:
1. Black-capped Chickadee
2. Downy Woodpecker
3. White-breasted Nuthatch
4. Northern Cardinal
5. Dark-eyed Junco
6. Hairy Woodpecker
7. American Goldfinch
8. Blue Jay
9. American Tree Sparrow
10. European Starling

2010:
1. Black-capped Chickadee (surprise!)
2. Red-breasted Nuthatch
3. Blue Jay
4. American Tree Sparrow
5. White-breasted Nuthatch
6. Downy Woodpecker
7. Dark-eyed Junco
8. American Goldfinch
9. Hairy Woodpecker
10. Common Raven

Last year I saw a cardinal and a starling in my first ten; this year I’ve thus far seen neither, but I have, instead, seen Red-breasted Nuthatch and raven (not the dog, though her too). These lists have little meaning beyond simple curiosity, a fun game to play on New Year’s Day, and this will likely be the extent of my listing for the year (any attempts I make to keep a list usually fall quickly by the wayside). But that’s okay.

Of my targets that I laid out for 2010, I met surprisingly few of them. I only made it to two of my ten target destinations; I saw just three of ten target bird species, two non-bird targets, and one moth target; and I met only two of the goals I set for myself for the year. So really, there isn’t much need to do up new lists – I could just repeat last year’s!

Of course, my biggest achievement last year was the submission of the manuscript for the field guide to moths. We’re still working on it, and will be involved with it for a while yet, but the largest body of effort is completed. I’m looking forward to watching it come together. I also have a few other projects on the go that I hope will come to fruition, with a bit of luck and/or perseverance. It should be a fun year!

I hope 2011 looks equally promising for all of you!

Avens seed heads

My great aunt gave me a bit of money for Christmas this year, as she does every year. It took me all of about two milliseconds for me to decide what to do with it.

I bought new snowshoes!

Last winter I’d been using the landlord’s traditional wood-and-catgut snowshoes, which she’d left behind for our use. From the time I discovered them in January through the end of the winter, I was out on them nearly every time I went hiking. By the end of the season, what waterproofing there had been on the laces (had there been any to begin with) seemed gone and the catgut would be soft by the time I returned. The leather bindings snapped on one mid-winter, and I had to switch them out for a pair of nylon bindings that were on the other, larger snowshoes (which Dan rarely used). These had a tendency to slip so my foot would end up on the shoe crooked, and I’d have to tie the straps to my bootlaces to make it stay straight.

Knowing they were going to need some winterizing to prepare for this season, combined with how much use I got out of the snowshoes last winter, though, it was pretty easy to talk myself into getting a pair of new aluminum-framed snowshoes as a Christmas gift to myself (courtesy of my great aunt, who will be receiving photos in the mail soon). I picked them up on my way home from my parents’ place earlier this week, and took them for their first spin yesterday.

They’re wooooonderful. So light I could barely feel them, so narrow I barely had to think about them, but with good flotation to keep me above the snow (not that we have a lot yet, but I made a point of stepping in the drifts…). The bindings held my foot securely and it didn’t slip sideways once. And, bonus, the company is Canadian, and their manufacturing facilities are next door in Québec.

(I should, incidentally, add that my parents gave me a gift certificate to Mark’s Work Wearhouse, which also took me two milliseconds to decide what to do with – I bought new boots! Mine from last year had rather large holes in them, and I’d so far this winter been wearing my summer hikers, which have been fine since we’ve had little snow but weren’t going to hold up once things got deeper. Now my feet are both warm and snow-free. Both necessary for enjoyable hiking in Canadian winters.)

So as I was hiking around the edges of the property in areas I haven’t been to since the grass was green, I came across these interesting remains of a plant. Small, round seed heads on long stalks, under which was a huge scattering of seeds. Curious, I thought. As I bent closer, I noticed that the seed heads were covered in small burr-like hooks. But they weren’t burrdocks, which are round and which come off as the whole spherical head, not as individual seeds like this was doing. Not to mention they’re very stocky plants, and this one was relatively delicate in comparison. I took a bunch of photos, as I always do when I come across a mystery, and came home to look it up.

A Google search for “flower Ontario meadow seed hook” produced an immediate hit on Andy’s northern wildflower page. (Andy’s pages, incidentally, have been a really useful reference for me when looking up wildflowers in the past, because s/he covers a really good range of species, organized by habitat type, and much of the flora overlaps with what we have here. Proven again now with this search.)

From Andy’s page, I identified the seed heads as belonging to a species of avens (Geum sp.). For Yellow Avens, Andy notes: “each flower head turns into a nearly spherical brown to dark brown bur about 2 cm in diameter; the seed in the bur has a sharply hooked tip which clings to fur, clothes and skin; burs present into winter”. That definitely sounds like my plant!

Yellow Avens by Ontario Wanderer on Flickr; CC licenced

I Googled “Yellow Avens” to see what information there was on them. One website I found noted that the native Yellow Avens looked very similar to the introduced Wood Avens, Geum urbanum. The ways that the author gave for telling the two species apart didn’t include seed heads, unfortunately, and I’m not sure there’s enough left on the plant of the leaves to be able to tell from those.

The unremarkable five-petaled yellow flower would blend in with the other five-petaled yellow flowers in our fields, such as the common cinquefoils. I thought at first of a few flowers that had grown in our lawn last summer that I hadn’t been able to ID, but helpful reader Rosemary identified that one for me as just a different type of cinquefoil. So, I’ll have to keep an eye open for these next summer, now that I know where they’re growing. Perhaps I’ll be able to determine if it’s the native or non-native species of avens.

Sunday Snapshots: Frozen rain

It’s been freezing rain outside all day, except for a couple of hours in the afternoon where the thermometer finally inched up over zero. It’s been steady, and heavy, which meant no walk for poor Raven. Also made it hard to get out to take any photos. I finally snuck out to snap a few from the cover of the porch overhang at l’heure bleue.

Blogging for the Gulf

"bp = brown pelican" by kbaird on Flickr; CC licenced

It wasn’t even a year ago, and yet for those of us who don’t live close enough to be directly affected, already the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico (I refuse to call it an oil spill, as if someone accidentally knocked over a bucket) has faded from our immediate consciousness. Every day while the well continued to leak there was news on the radio or television or newspaper outlets about the latest kill failure or the recent statistics on observed and expected damage. We as a continent, as a globe, were angry and indignant first that this could happen at all, and second that there seemed to be collective feet-dragging to do anything about it.

The devastating leak was finally capped July 15, after raw crude had continued to flow into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico for three long months. Three months. And on every day of those three months, roughly 8,400 m³ (11,000 y³) of oil spilled out from the wellhead.

This is such a huge number, it’s hard to understand. Let’s put it another way: it would be the equivalent of having three-and-a-half 53-foot transport-truck rigs dump the entire volume of their trailer on your front yard every hour. Eighty-four truckloads of crude every day. Eight thousand trucks over the course of three months. Try to imagine what that would look like dumped in your yard, spilling into your street and neighbourhood. Imagine what impact it would have on your neighbourhood. The fact that it happened at the ocean floor within a large body of water makes it no less significant.

Did you know that, more than 21 years later, there is still oil in the shoreline habitats of Prince William Sound, the legacy of the Exxon Valdez disaster? That Exxon weaseled out of paying most of the court-awarded damages through successive appeals that lasted nigh on 20 years? That a study done 15 years post-spill showed that many species of wildlife had still not appreciably recovered? This includes Pacific herring, once abundant enough to support local fisheries, which have still not opened again. Think of how devastating this was, and continues to be, for those communities.

I won’t presume to suggest that I know anything about US politics (or even Canadian politics, for that matter), so I’ll quote from the intelligent and knowledgeable N8 of the Nature Blog Network:

Congress comes back this week for the short lame-duck session. They failed to pass a oil spill bill before the election, and if they don’t do it during lame duck, it’s not likely to happen next year, or the year after, which would mean that they failed to address the biggest marine oil disaster in our history. Dwell on that.

They will have done nothing to hold BP legally accountable for the environmental destruction they’ve wrought. Nothing for the ecosystems. Nothing for the threatened and endangered species. Nothing for those of us who care about them.

During the 2010 lame-duck congressional session, the U.S. Senate should pass legislation dedicating Deepwater Horizon disaster Clean Water Act (CWA) penalties to environmental restoration of the Gulf Coast. Without Senate action, billions of penalty dollars will likely disappear into the federal treasury and never reach the Gulf Coast. But clearly, this money should be used for environmental restoration in the region that was most directly affected by the oil disaster.

The point of this whole post is therefore this: the squeaky wheel gets the grease. We need to make that wheel squeak like heck.

We as bloggers have the ability to spread the word in a way that didn’t exist 21 years ago, when the Exxon Valdez ran aground. Don’t let the Gulf become another Valdez disaster – don’t let BP get away with it the way Exxon did. Contact your senator, your local papers, whomever else might make a difference. And spread the word: on your blog, on Facebook, on Twitter.

The Nature Blog Network is leading a Blogging for the Gulf campaign to raise awareness and encourage action on the subject.

In this post, N8 puts forth several ways you can help, and important links to aid you.

And in this post he offers a bit of clarification, in case you found the first post a bit confusing. :)

(And if you blog about it, make sure to send N8 your link so it can be added to the NBN compilation of Gulf posts!)

The meeting place

A quick announcement, first off, for the folks who use Facebook and might be interested. Starting today I’ve taken over day-to-day management of the Peterson Field Guide fan page on Facebook. I’ll be posting photographs with associated bits of information. If this blog is, let’s say, mostly lunch- or dinner-sized servings, the Facebook items will be snack-sized tidbits. The content will be otherwise largely similar, though. If you’re a Facebook user and want to follow my posts there, go to this page and click on “Like” at the top, and it’ll show up on your Facebook friends page. And if you’re not a Facebook user but still want to check in, I’m pretty sure you can go to that link and it’ll still show you everything even if you don’t have a Facebook account.

And a second announcement, regarding the Nature Blog Network. We (or, I should say, primarily the hard-working Wren of Wrennaissance Reflections) have been planning a reinvigorating of the NBN blog and community. One of the things NBN members indicated they’d like to see was an RSS feed of all of the posts from the NBN members’ blogs. Something similar to that Blogger sidebar widget what will show you the latest posts from a person’s blogroll contacts. The feed was launched today and can be found here. A Google Reader version containing complete posts is here. If you’re a Twitterer, new member posts will be tweeted at the NBN Twitter page. Unfortunately, blogs have to be added manually (we couldn’t find a bulk import option) and with over 1200 blogs in the NBN it’ll take a little while to get everyone added, but they’ll all get there eventually! It’ll be a great way to find new and engaging nature content.

I’ve noticed just recently a proliferation of trails in our meadows. They cut through the long grass, flattening it down with the creature’s passage. They criss and cross and double back and come together. Can you see them, in the photo above? Two trails, leading out of the forest and converging in a compressed patch of grass. A meeting place? Friendly hellos, or irritated confrontation?

I don’t know for sure who they’re made by, but I suspect porcupines. I came across a little pile of the distinctive macaroni-shaped droppings at the side of our human-made trail, where a creature-made trail intersected it, a few days ago (discovered primarily because Raven was rolling in it, otherwise it might have escaped my attention). Also, I think it’s more likely these trails were made by a low-bellied animal such as a porcupine or raccoon than by something taller like a coyote or a deer. When Raven wades (bounds) through the grass, or even, for that matter, when I do, we don’t leave such a distinct trail. Grass stands back up fairly quickly from a swishing-through, but takes more time to recover if it’s been flattened.

I’m not certain why there would suddenly be such an apparent exodus of porcupines from the forest just now. It’s possible that youngsters, who to this point have been able to share feeding territories with their parents, are now dispersing to find their own den sites and associated winter feeding grounds. Or, maybe it’s just a single individual or two who’s taken a liking to the shrubs growing in the field, and has been making trips back and forth and between plants.

(I was photographing a moth in the dark forest and set my camera to Manual mode while using the flash so the image wouldn’t get washed out. And then I forgot to change the setting back. So this image got washed out instead. I still like it, though.)