flora – Page 12

Monday Miscellany

It’s that time of year again: the time of year where my quantity of photos taken begins to exceed the quantity of photos I can work onto the blog. I take my camera with me virtually everywhere: every time I go out on a walk with Raven down the road, or a hike with Dan out in the park, or out to visit friends or family. I even take my camera when I go grocery shopping in town, just in case I should happen to encounter something along the way (this was prompted by encountering a young snapping turtle in the middle of the road last summer, so I stopped the car to get out to help it across, and I was kicking myself for not bringing my camera). If there’s anything that catches my eye or even slightly piques my interest, I take a picture. Many of these, the odds and ends that I can’t work into a full-length post very easily, languish in my computer’s annals. During the winter the problem isn’t pronounced, but as soon as spring starts to break, my backlog of photos really begins to build, and I just can’t keep up with all the subjects I take photos of.

Last year I tried addressing this through Today at Kingsford. I felt it was mildly successful, but ultimately still left lots unshared. This year I decided a better way to approach it would be to emulate the day-labeled themes such as “Skywatch Friday” or “Wordless Wednesday”, and start a regular series called Monday Miscellany. Although in my head Saturday is the most logical day for a week-end round-up, “Saturday Miscellany” just didn’t have the same sort of appealing alliteration. So Monday it is.

This week’s header image is of a Green-margined Tiger Beetle, Cicindela limbalis. At least, I think that’s who it is; tiger beetles tend to be somewhat similar in their markings and general colours, and I’m certainly no expert, unlike fellow blogger Ted of Beetles in the Bush. It doesn’t help that my primary reference for all things six-legged, the Kaufman guide to Insects, only covers a subset of the more common tigers. So I turned to a book that I haven’t used a whole lot recently, largely due to its tome-like size: Stephen Marshall’s Insects: Their Natural History and Diversity. This is a great book, with a much greater breadth of diversity than can be offered in the smaller Kaufman guide (Marshall’s book is hardly a “field” guide, but makes a great coffee-table reference). I rarely fail to find what I’m looking for in there.

In this case, Marshall notes, “The Green-margined Tiger Beetle lives on clay soils across Canada and the northeastern states.” BugGuide.net, my number one online reference for all things six-legged, adds that the habitat is “usually steep, moist bare clay soil, including… dirt roads”. They’re out in the spring and then again in the fall. I spotted it moving along our dirt road one warm afternoon last week as I was returning with Raven. She was very good as I asked her to sit-stay while I photographed the critter. The beetle was also very good, though I doubt it paid any attention to my command to sit-stay. Prior to this I had only ever seen Six-spotted Tiger Beetles (C. sexguttata), so I was rather excited to discover this one.

Insects figure heavy in this post. I’ve been seeing quite a few about recently, particularly late last week on perhaps the most gorgeous afternoons we’ve had so far this spring. This one is a bee fly, probably Greater Bee Fly, Bombylius major. This is a widespread species that flies in early spring (BugGuide.net says they’re most common in April), usually found near wooded areas, in sunny clearings either sunning themselves or visiting spring wildflowers. Last spring I noted one visiting the forget-me-nots in my parents’ garden. I saw four in various spots that day last week; this one was at the side of the road.

Photo number three is an unidentified weevil. I think weevils are cool, with their long snouty appearances. Although weevils are actually a type of beetle, they are generally thought of as separate organisms. Rarely any larger than a quarter of an inch, weevils are small beetles and this guy was as well. I was sitting in the leaves at the edge of a forest clearing, hoping for a bee fly like the guy in #2 (but not actually that individual) to come land near me, and I noticed this guy crawling through the litter and then up a grass stem where he helpfully sat and wiggled his antennae for a few moments while I took a photo.

On the evening that followed that beautiful day, I set up my moth sheet with great anticipation of what might arrive. I was not disappointed; I had a few hundred moths come in, of upwards of three dozen species. But they weren’t the only things to come to the sheet. There were also small beetles, a couple of ichneumonid wasps, and these guys, Giant Water Bugs, Lethocerus americanus. I encountered them for the first time last spring, at my parents’ place. They are the creepiest bugs, huge, some three inches long, with giant forearms that look fearsome. They are in fact capable of giving a good nip, and I haven’t tried handling them. They’re capable of flying, although they’re a bit lumbering as befits something of their size, and as I was standing out by the sheet it was hard not to get a little anxious with these huge bugs buzzing by me. There must have been at least 20 that arrived, drawn in by the blacklight. The leaf litter was alive with them.

At the abandoned property that I visit from time to time, some years ago the owner must have planted some spring bulbs, looking forward to a time when they would be moved in to the completed house and would have a full garden. The house was never completed, the owners never moved in, but the bulbs remain. There were crocuses, tulips, and a couple of patches of mini daffodils, all of which have grown over the years into small clumps. Two daffodils were blooming when I was there last, and were being visited by a few little insects, including this small bee (I think).

Speaking of yellow flowers, our roadside, or at least portions of it, are awash in yellow Coltsfoot, Tussilago farfara. These are one of the earliest spring flowers, and at least for the past few years, have been the first one I see in the spring. They’re such cheerful flowers, bright and sunny, it’s too bad they’re non-native.

As Raven has gotten older, she’s taken a greater interest in sticks. She never eats them, but she likes to carefully and methodically shred them to bits. No bit of wood is too small for consideration. And few sticks, it seems, are too big.

Today at Kingsford – Round-lobed Hepatica

Earlier in the winter I wrote about evergreen ferns, which remained green-leaved all through the winter, even under the snow. They weren’t the only evergreen plant I was seeing. There were also the above, but I was unable to put a name to them, and uncertain even where to start a Google search to ID them. So I made a note of them, but essentially left them at that. Perhaps when they bloomed in the spring I’d be able to get further features for an identification, and didn’t give it any further thought.

The other day, then, I was browsing through my photos from earlier in the year, looking for moth photos from last spring. Mixed in with all my other photos were the wildflower photos I took at around Mother’s Day. And there, in the middle of them, was my mystery plant, abloom with lovely six-petaled white flowers. Naturally, I hadn’t bothered labeling the photo after it had been identified, and it was simply called “wildflowers6”. But I recalled that Jennifer at A Passion for Nature had left a comment on that post with the IDs of all my flowers, so I went back to look it up.

And there it was: Round-lobed Hepatica, Hepatica americana. Thank you, Jennifer! They’re an early-bloomer of deciduous forests. Their evergreen leaves allow them a head start in the spring as they can start photosynthesizing as soon as the winter snow melts off, while other plants need to grow out leaves first. They can be one of the first plants to have flowers out, which allows them to monopolize the early pollinators. Slightly further south from me the first flowers may be out as early as mid-March, but up here they’re more likely to be blooming mid-April to mid-May. Jennifer, who is in New York state, went out last year during the first week of April to look for flowers. Last year she just found buds, but she did actually find some blooms the year before in the waning days of March.

There is a sister species, Sharp-lobed Hepatica, Hepatica acutiloba, and in looking at last year’s photo and compare it to this year’s, I begin to think that’s probably what it was. The leaves come to a tapered point compared to the winter leaves in the first photo, and they also match the images Jennifer posted at her site. Depending on who you ask, these two species are sometimes lumped into a single species and simply treated as varieties.

An interesting side-note about Hepatica: the name comes from the three-lobed leaves’ resemblance to the three lobes of the human liver. Early medicine followed the “doctrine of signatures” – they believed that plants would bear a resemblance to the part of the body they treated, and so the liver-like leaves of this plant were used to treat liver ailments. The leaves could be used as an astringent and as a diuretic. I don’t know if it was ultimately effective or not, although some patients may have been cured simply through the power of the placebo. On the other hand, the leaves are toxic in large amounts, so one wouldn’t want to get overzealous…

A year in photos

The final installment of my blogoversary series is a selection of my favourite photos from the past year, two or three per month. I had planned on choosing just one per month, but just couldn’t make up my mind. In fact, in the summer months, when we had just moved to the new house and the lake and forest were green and verdant I had several dozen I could have picked out, but I settled for three a month. Some of these have been used in posts over the year, others are new, photos I liked but that didn’t fit into a post.

They’ve got some gall

Here’s a topic that is frequently written about at this time of year: goldenrod galls. They’re common and they’re conspicuous, and they tend to grab people’s attention. Last winter I remember reading a few posts by various people on the galls. Most of the time the ones that are written about are the round ones that resemble a snake that has swallowed a ping pong ball. But there’s actually four different types of goldenrod galls, of which the ping-pong sort are just one. One affects the foliage at the growing tip of the plant, and the other two are also stem galls, but elliptical in shape, as if the ball the snake swallowed got deflated. It was while out walking Raven this afternoon that I came across a few of these. Strangely, no ping-pong galls, which were ubiquitous in the GTA (and perhaps here, too, just not along the road section I chose to walk).

I picked up three and brought them home with me to check out. Ping-pong galls are often the target of chickadees and woodpeckers, which bore into the gall to get the tasty grub inside, but you don’t see that as much with the smaller galls. I saw no real evidence of predation, so I figured the gall’s contents were likely still intact, although it’s possible that the small hole, as in the photo above, was evidence that the adult had left.

When I opened up the first one, there was an empty pupal case inside. This had obviously belonged to a moth, now departed. You can see the segments of the abdomen clearly defined in the case, as well as the wings, which wrapped around the front of the moth’s body. The ping-pong galls are the product of a fly larvae, but both elliptical galls host moth larvae, but different species. The moth in this one is the Goldenrod Elliptical-gall Moth, Gnorimoschema gallaesolidaginis. This moth lays its eggs on dead foliage around goldenrod, and in the spring the larva hatches and crawls up a goldenrod plant, where it bores into the growing tip and down a few inches through the centre of the stem, where settles down for the summer. The plant, in response, forms a thick layer of stem tissue around the invader. The larva pupates in the late summer and then emerges from its home in the fall to mate and start the cycle over again.

In order to make it easier for the adult to leave, the larva will bore a hole out to the outdoors and then plug it with a silk trapdoor that is shaped the same way you would carve the lid on a jack-o-lantern – beveled, with the inside smaller, so that the lid can’t fall inside. This makes it easy for the moth to leave when it’s time, but hard for a predator to get inside. You can see the round plug in this gall, and also the one in the second photo. You can also notice in the photo with the pupal case that it is attached to a mat of silk at one end. The silk actually blocks the entrance that the larva came in by, which helps the adult to find the plugged exit hole and not go out the wrong way.

I was a bit surprised to discover the second elliptical gall had a larva in it, not an empty pupal case. Poking around the ‘net a bit, it turns out there are two species that create elliptical galls. The second one is the Goldenrod Gall Moth, Epiblema scudderiana. This species is different in that it overwinters as a larva and pupates in the spring, emerging as an adult in May and June. The galls are hard to tell apart from those of the Elliptical-gall Moth, the main feature being that they lack the exit plugs that the other species makes. They can both occur in the same patches of goldenrod, and sometimes even on the same goldenrod stem. Next time you see a goldenrod stem with two elliptical galls you can check to see if they’re different species.

The third gall held neither a pupa nor a larva. Instead, it appeared to hold the cocoon of another species, perhaps a type of wasp larva that had usurped the chamber and fed on the moth larva. There are four species that will parasitize the moth larva, but it may be Calliephialtes notandus, which targets the Goldenrod Elliptical-gall Moth and other stem-living moth larva. The wasp larva eats the moth larva from the outside (as opposed to some wasp larvae where the egg is laid on or in the host and the larva eats the host from the inside out), and eventually pupates in a tough, light brown cocoon shaped like a fat grain of rice. The adults emerge in September, so this winter case, like the moth one above, is also empty. You can see the tunnel at the top of the gall (on the right) where the adult would probably have emerged from.

I really lucked out with the three that each one contained something different, completely by chance. It’s funny that I’d never stopped to check out the inhabitants before, although you see the galls all the time, aside from one lab project we did in first-year biology where the class trooped out to the field behind the campus to collect some ping-pong galls and assess the contents. Primarily what I remember from that afternoon was how bloody cold it was outside that day…

Seasonal waterfront homes

Following a week of sub-freezing temperatures, Kingsford Lake is now completely iced over from shore to shore. The lake is shallow, actually mostly man-made in that it started out life a hundred years ago as a small lake on a river. The river was dammed and the shallow river basin and surrounding floodplain flooded to form the lake. Most of the lake is ten feet deep at most, with just the original small lake being very deep. Because the lake is so shallow, it freezes quickly, and even the small current that still exists along the river’s original bed, which stayed open till the last, is now solidly closed up.

We haven’t been able to cross to the other side of the lake for about a month, since ice started to form on the water and we pulled the boat up onto shore. Today, we took Raven and headed out across the ice to wander about the lake. We headed first to the island that’s in the centre of my blog header, on the east side of the lake. Dan wanted to look for owls there, but with so much habitat available to them we didn’t find any while we were out. From there we crossed back over the open expanse of the lake to the west shore, our second destination the large marshes that fill in the shallow western bays.

While the water was open we weren’t able to go in here; the water was sufficiently shallow, and the lily pads and pond weeds sufficiently dense, as to prevent any sort of meaningful boat traffic through the area. It might be possible in the spring and early summer for me to bring my canoe over, which would be a little more maneuverable than the punt boat, the water level should be higher then, and the plant life won’t have begun to fill in yet.

Now that the water has frozen over, however, we can easily walk among the cattails. Dan commented that he thought it might be the first time he’s actually walked through a marsh. It was a reasonably large wetland, especially for our area where wetlands are sparsely scattered and tend to be small.

The history of the lake is apparent in these shallow areas. There are many aged, weathered stumps, and tangled root masses from dead trees that had toppled over in the softened soil. When the river was dammed this area would have been forest, and much like with beaver ponds, the result of the newly-formed lake was a lot of dead trees. It amazes me that so many of these stumps still persist, given their presumed age.

Some of the root tangles make fabulous natural sculptures. You can see why they really appeal to some people as art pieces (check out these amazing driftwood horses by artist Heather Jansch I found while looking for a driftwood sculptures link; I would love one of these, but where would I put it?).

The cattails in the marsh here appear to be Narrowleaf Cattail, Typha angustifolia, separate from the Common Cattail (or Broadleaf Cattail), T. latifolia. I can’t remember consciously noting unusually narrow cattails before, though I would be surprised if I hadn’t encountered the species prior to now. In the Toronto area I only really recall encountering the latter, certainly the most common cattail species there. Here, everything seemed to be the former species, so far as I could tell from their dead, broken stalks. There were also a few reeds and sedges mixed in with them, but fortunately no sign of the invasive phragmites.

We poked around looking for nests. Nests are definitely easiest to find in the winter, when they become exposed as the vegetation that concealed them in the summer dies back. Many don’t make it through the fall and winter weather, but some that are particularly well-constructed or protected may survive without too much damage. Searching for nests in the marsh is definitely easiest at this time of year, as you can just walk through the dead vegetation looking for dense clumps.

We found five in the area we covered; not as many as I expected considering that Red-winged Blackbirds will probably be dime-a-dozen there come spring, and then you’ll also have other marsh nesters in there as well, but a good collection nonetheless. Most of them looked like this as you approached – a dark mass topped with a distinct white crown of snow. It was hard to tell what you’d found until you approached and brushed the snow off the top to assess the size and shape of the nest. The size of this one, along with the coarseness of the materials used in its construction, leads me to believe it’s one of the many Red-winged Blackbird nests that were probably built there last summer.

Here’s another Red-wing nest. I’ve found, at least in the nests I’ve observed, that they tend to use broader grasses and other materials when they’re building the outside of the nest, giving theirs a distinctly coarse appearance that you don’t really see in other cup-shaped nests of marsh species. I’m always amazed when I look closely at these just how well they’re woven around the supporting vegetation – so snug, you can’t remove it without a pair of scissors to snip off the vertical stalks. A human would require some skill to produce something like this, and a human has opposable thumbs!

This one is a Marsh Wren’s nest. We haven’t observed any Marsh Wrens here since we moved in; they’re most easily detected by their distinctive, chattery mechanical song. By the time of our arrival in August they would have all stopped singing. But here is clear evidence of their presence last summer. Marsh Wrens build domed nests, completely enclosed except for a small wren-sized entrance hole near the top on one side. The interior is deep; if you stick your fingers in one (as I’ve done a few times when checking the contents of an active nest), your fingers will just barely reach the bottom to be able to count the eggs. Not too many species build enclosed nests like this, and as far as marsh nesters go their nest style is unique.

Finally, another cup nest, woven into the cattails and suspended above the water in the manner of the Red-wings. It differed from the blackbird nests, however, in the coarseness of the grass used to construct the outer walls. It’s got a tidier, finer appearance to it, subtle enough that it could possibly just be a fastidious blackbird, but I think it may actually be the nest of a Swamp Sparrow or Common Yellowthroat. I’m leaning toward the latter, based on the wider vegetation woven into it. It resembles this yellowthroat nest to me more than it does this Swamp Sparrow nest.

Whatever it was, the youngsters fledged successfully. How can I tell this? If you look closely, you’ll see some droppings on the rim of the nest. The nest was actually tipped down toward that side, I righted it a bit for the purposes of a good photo. Nestlings, as they’re preparing to take that great leap of faith that will turn them into fledglings, will perch on the rim of the nest. Their weight as they all do this will often cause that lip of the nest to fold down, or sometimes for the whole nest to tip. Also, just before they leave they’ll often poop, a reflexive habit birds have that may perhaps be to “lighten their load” for flight. The presence of droppings on the lowered rim suggests that the youngsters at least made it as far as that stage of life. Hopefully they’ll make it through the winter and we’ll get to see them return come spring.