flowers – Page 3

The best of 2009

Yesterday was my two-year “blogoversary”. (I actually thought today was, which is why I didn’t post yesterday; it was only in going back to review last year’s post that I realized my error.) I first put metaphorical pen to paper here at The Marvelous in Nature on January 12, 2008. It’s hard to believe two years have flown by already. Not including this one, I have written 449 posts here to date; 222 of those were since my one-year blogoversary post. That works out to about one every 1.6 days. This was probably boosted considerably by my habit of writing more frequently – sometimes up to five times a week – during the summer. I can’t sustain that sort of pace during the winter, when it’s more like one post every 2.3 days.

I thought in celebration of reaching the two-year mark I’d select my favourite posts from 2009 and re-share them here for those who might have missed them the first time, or would just like to enjoy them again. I did this last year, as well; for me, it’s fun to have a chance to review the past year and remember all of my interesting and exciting observations. Two-hundred twenty-two posts is a lot of writing; it was hard to select just twelve as my favourites, but I finally narrowed it down. So without further ado: the best of 2009!

January – I and the Bird #92 – The Picnic Party
I looked through all of my January posts from last year, and I had some interesting observations, but I finally settled on this one. I had a lot of fun when writing the poem, and I still have fun when I go back to read it. I’m hosting I and the Bird #117 next Thursday, nearly one year to the day from the picnic party edition.

February – The old man redpoll
We had a couple of Hoary Redpolls visit our feeders in February, and I discussed a bit about them, as well as identification tips to tell them from Commons.

March – A place to call home
While out wandering the woods with Raven I came across a female Pileated Woodpecker working on excavating her nest. She was very unconcerned with us, and kept working away even as I ran off dozens of photos from just below.

April – Wood frog love
While visiting some crown land north of the previous house I found a couple of female Wood Frogs being mauled by amorous suitors.

May – Flowers of the heart
Columbine are among my favourite wildflowers, and they were fairly common in the rocky habitat around the lake house. I hope we have some around here, too! We arrived too late last summer for them to still be in bloom. My sister got me one for my birthday last year, so I can enjoy them close to the house.

June – It’s a bug-eat-bug world
I collected up a number of photos of invertebrates I had encountered with prey (mostly spiders), and shared them together.

July – The plant that eats meat
Sundew are one of my favourite native plants, but are so rarely encountered because of their specialized habitat requirements that make them very local in distribution. I got a chance to check some out with the canoe on one visit to Rock Ridge this summer.

August – L’otter fun
One morning, while I was sitting at the banding site at the Rock Ridge MAPS station, a family of otters swam by, through the water lilies and along the small lake below.

September – Black and blue and wet all over
When our landlord came to shut down the pool for the summer, he found a Blue-spotted Salamander in the filter intake, and brought it to share with me.

October – Eau de la viande pourrie
My coolest mycological find of the year was this Netted Stinkhorn, one of a small handful I found over in the 100-acre woods.

November – Winterizing the brain
November’s a tough month for nature blogger – you’re suffering the post-summer letdown from the biological high you were riding for the last seven months, and in your slightly stupefied state of wildlife withdrawal it’s hard to come up with good content. As an exercise to help overcome the naturalist’s-block, I examine the small square of lichen-covered rock above.

December – All dressed in red
The cardinal that I first wrote about in this post still continues to grace us with his presence at the feeders. It’s good to see him doing so well!

Tuesday Miscellany

An assorted collection of photos this week. Getting out to do the MAPS fieldwork with Dan has been a great opportunity for me to see things I wouldn’t normally encounter; not just birds, but bugs and flowers and such as well. It’s almost too good – I come home at the end of the day with a couple hundred photos, and enough blog fodder to last me a couple of weeks. I’ve been hoarding some photos that I hope to put into a full-length post, and hopefully I actually get around to doing that.

This week’s first photo is of a Scarlet Tanager we banded at one of the MAPS sites over the weekend. He’s fine, don’t worry – some birds, if you open your hand slowly, don’t realize they’re free at first, and will just sit on your open palm for a few moments before flying away. Male Scarlet Tanagers are striking birds, and their red can sometimes be so bright and vibrant as to overwhelm the camera. This was a particularly spiffy bird, an after-second-year, meaning it was hatched in at least 2007 or earlier. Birds in their first summer as a breeding adult (second-year birds) can look a little ratty because their wing feathers, which are the same ones they grew in the nest, wear and fade more than seasoned adults.

It was a toss-up over which photo I wanted to use for my headliner image. This Luna Moth was in such pristine condition, unusual for larger moths. I’ve been getting quite a number of these coming to the trap the last few times I’ve set it out – sometimes up to three or four in a night. Yesterday night we accidentally left the porch light on when we went to bed, and when we arose in the wee hours of this morning, in among the great numbers of smaller moths were two Lunas hanging on to the nearby wall. Most people are probably familiar with this species from a number of sleep-aid commercials and other advertising. However, it is a common moth of the east, flying in early summer at northern latitudes, a wider window farther south as it’s able to raise multiple broods. However, because adults live for only about a week, they may not be regularly encountered. Like with so many characteristics of animals, the purpose of the long, showy tails isn’t definitively known, but is believed to be a form of protection by focusing a predator’s attention away from vital body parts.

This was probably third runner-up for header photo. This is a nest stuffed full of Veery chicks. The nest itself is one from Maplewood Bog that Dan profiled on his Frontenac Birds blog. On our last visit the female was still incubating the eggs. Although only nine days elapsed between our first and second visit, already the chicks – who weren’t even hatched last time – are alert, eyes open, and begging for food as you carefully lift the overhanging branch to peer in. It’s amazing how fast chicks grow. For most songbird species, it only takes two weeks or so for the young to grow from naked, blind hatchling to feathered fledgling, and leave the nest. This nest will be empty on our next visit.

Back over at Hemlock Lake, we spotted a number of these interesting and colourful fungi growing on the trunks of dead hemlocks. The site is full of dead trees, mostly hemlock though possibly some pine – my dead-bark identification skill is still being refined – so there’s certainly lots of great growing location for this fungus. I believe this to be Ganoderma tsugae, also known as Hemlock Varnish Shelf. These are young specimens; as they grow they’ll lose the bold white outer rim, and will attain a slick gloss, the reason for the word “varnish” in the name. The fruiting bodies themselves, the part you actually see, are annual; they grow anew every year. However, the mycelium, the network of “roots” that exist within the dead tree, is longer-lived and is the source of new brackets each year. It’s a species that can be found across a large portion of North America.

I haven’t noticed these around our home, but there were quite a few at Maplewood Bog, and a handful at Hemlock Lake as well. This is Wood Lily, Lilium philadelphicum. It seems to grow at the edge of clearings in dry deciduous woods, and will grow in loose congregations of a handful of individuals scattered together. It’s very widespread, found just about everywhere in North America east of the Rocky Mountains, except for the Maritimes and Florida. It grows from tuberous bulbs, which Native Americans would gather for eating. I imagine, however, that this would need to be done sustainably, as removing the bulb essentially removes the plant.

I haven’t been able to come up with an ID for this fly. One of the rare instances that my trusty Kaufman Insects wasn’t able to provide me with the answer. There are so many species of flies that flipping through my Stephen Marshall’s Insects leaves me a little overwhelmed, though I think it might be a species of Tachinomyia, a relatively common group that develop as parasites of tent caterpillars – something we have no shortage of around here. I thought the yellow foot pads might be useful, but there are a number of species that have those. This poor fly had got caught up in one of our nets. I was able to untangle the fine mesh and let it go, although often with flies and wasps they get it so tightly wound around their tiny necks that you don’t have much choice but to pop their head off to get them out of the net.

And the last photo, a little bit of rainbow hiding in a juniper shrub. The sites are usually very dewy first thing in the morning, and I wear rainpants just till the sun is up high enough to dry off the vegetation. The dew drops make for some beautiful images. In this case, the dew had lightly coated a spider web, and I walked past it, the sunlight refracting through the millions of tiny water droplets cast a lovely rainbow.

That’s it for this week. There’s so much going on, though, I’ve already started working on next week’s miscellany post!

Tuesday Miscellany

I’m a day late with my weekly miscellaneous wrap-up. We had some internet issues yesterday that took most of the day to sort out, which prevented me from doing anything online. It’s somewhat eye-opening to see just how much time is spent on the internet – or how much one relies on it for reference – by way of how inconvenienced one is when it’s no longer available.

The forest has completely greened up over the last few weeks, and the landscape around here is very much beginning to resemble the high-summer state that we first saw it in when we arrived last summer. It’s beginning to look like we’ll be moving at the beginning of July, not quite a month shy of the date we moved in last year. I have to admit, I am really going to miss being on the water. This house has spoiled me, and despite having spent the first 96% of my life not on waterfront, I suddenly feel like I can’t bear to move away from it. However, our prospective new house reminds me a lot of where I grew up, and I’m sure I’ll feel right at home there, too, once we’re moved and settled.

Our landlord came by this afternoon to mow the lawn, which Dan and I had been dutifully ignoring. We have no lawnmower, in part because we both prefer to have long-grassed “meadows” rather than lawns, which are much more beneficial to wildlife. I personally think they’re more interesting to look at than a mowed lawn, too. However, long grass does have a certain unkempt feel that can put off many prospective house-buyers. I was a bit sad to see it mowed, because the wildflowers in it were just starting to appear and bloom. One of the first to come out were these Blue-eyed Grass (Sisyrinchium angustifolium) flowers. If everyone’s lawn turned into these when left to grow, do you think anyone would mow it?

Our neighbour up the lake started some seeds indoors this winter, and was extremely generous, sharing some of her extras with me for my “garden”. Among the plants she gave me were these johnny jump-ups, members of the violet family (the common name has been applied to a number of species, but I think these are probably Viola tricolor). They’re just beginning to bloom, the first one opened yesterday. As I was inspecting the plants one day earlier this week, something caught my eye. Can you see it?

It’s a cluster of small, pale green eggs. I assume these are lepidopteran eggs, but what species, or even whether moth or butterfly, I don’t know. There are a few species that feed on violets as caterpillars – several species of fritillary target violets exclusively, for instance, or the Giant Leopard Moth which we saw caterpillars of around here last fall. I’m planning to let them hatch, and then when the caterpillars come out moving them into another container with some violet leaves and seeing if they’ll eat those. If so, I’ll try to raise them that way; if not, I guess I’ll reluctantly give them back (some of) my johnny jump-ups. Hopefully the plants will have grown up a bit more by then.

I spotted this Goldenrod Crab Spider, Misumena vatia, “hiding” out among the flowers of my Allium. It was so well hidden, it immediately caught my eye when I looked at the flowers (as I do every day to admire them). I’m not sure she was having any luck in catching anything, as I never saw her with a meal… but given that she doesn’t make a web, perhaps she ate at other times of the day.

Speaking of eating… Last weekend I bought some Japanese Lanterns, Physalis alkekengi, perennials that produce really neat orange “paper” seed pods in the fall. I remember, growing up, my mom used to have a patch that we’d sometimes collect the “lanterns” from for flower arrangements. I always really liked them, so when I stumbled across them in the nursery I couldn’t resist buying a pack. When I got home I planted them into a nice big pot and set them in the sun. As I do with all my plants, every day I’d check on them to see how they were doing. A few days ago I noticed they had been found by a few beetles, who were sitting in a nook in the leaves. I didn’t think much of it, until yesterday I noticed that holes were starting to appear in the leaves. Hey! Those are my plants! Sure enough, it turns out the beetles (left) are Three-lined Potato Beetles, Lema daturaphila. They favour plants in the family Solanaceae. And guess what family Japanese Lanterns belong to? I’m debating whether to just let them munch, or to try to remove them (repeatedly; I assume they’ll return). So far the damage seems to be restricted to just a couple of leaves on a couple of plants.

With him is a Clavate Tortoise Beetle, Plagiometriona clavata. There are also two of these on my little plants. They also eat plants of the Solanaceae. Now it’s starting to get a bit crowded…

This morning Dan and I went out to do a bit of final site scouting for the first of our three MAPS stations, Hemlock Lake. Although it wasn’t strictly necessary for me to tag along (I won’t really be “needed” until the actual banding begins, whereupon you really need two people in order to operate efficiently and safely), I chose to come so I could help out a bit, but also so that I could do a bit of early-morning birding. I so rarely get up at dawn these days, by the time I’m awake and going, the birdsong is starting to slow down for the day. I take Raven out later in the afternoon usually, hardly the best time of day for birding.

It turned out to be an unusually quiet morning, possibly because it was also a rather cool morning by recent standards. However, we did still encounter a good variety of nice species, including the Chestnut-sided Warbler, above, and the Northern Waterthrush, below, both of whom will be breeding at the site this summer. Who knows, in a few weeks these guys may even be sporting a shiny new band.

W Week – Wildflowers

Sessile Bellwort, Uvularia sessilifolia

May is my second-favourite month, behind only September. And it’s not just that May is my birth month. It’s the month where the earth really begins to wake up, at least here in my home province of Ontario. The month where the trees start to leaf out, and the insects really begin to emerge, and the birds start to flock back, and the garden starts to fill out, and the temperatures start to rise. And the woods are all abloom with wildflowers.

Early Meadow Rue, Thalictrum dioicum

Often called spring ephemerals for their fleeting appearance in the brief window between snow melt and closed canopy, most of these species have evolved to spring up relatively quickly to take advantage of the sunlight that pours through the leafless branches onto the forest floor in early spring. So many of these species start blooming before the trees are noticeably in bud. Many continue to bloom even after the leaves have started to fill out, but very few forest wildflowers start to bloom once the canopy has closed up for the summer. By that point, the forest floor is too shady for any but the most shade-tolerant of species.

Common Blue Violet, Viola sororia

I’ve already profiled one of my favourite wildflowers, the Red/Wild/Canadian Columbine (Aquilegia canadensis), and I talked a bit about some of the first ones to appear in our semi-wooded yard. Here are a few more that I’ve noticed have sprung up in the forests around us over the last couple of weeks.

Trout Lily, Erythronium americanum

Early Lowbush Blueberry, Vaccinium angustifolium (I think; this one was challenging to ID. Some bushes were pinkish like this, some were whiteish. Growing on the rock barrens on the east side of the Park. Note the grasshopper nymph on the lefthand side, which I only noticed when editing the photo.)

Wild Blue Phlox, Phlox divaricata

Downy Yellow Violet, Viola pubescens

Common Strawberry, Fragaria virginiana

Miterwort, Mitella diphylla, above and below

Flowers of the heart

Columbine are one of my favourite wildflowers. I think it’s their beautiful red colour combined with their interesting shape that really appeals to me. I’m rather partial to red, and it’s not a very common colour among wildflowers. I can think of only a few species from our area that sport striking red blossoms.

I don’t recall columbine being very abundant where I grew up, except for a couple plants in my mom’s garden. My wildflower guide states their preferred habitat to be “Rocky, wooded, or open slopes.” That seems to cover most types of habitat, but the last word, slopes, might be the key. The sloping habitat is reiterated at this site, with the additional description of thin soils over rock. At least on my parents’ property, there weren’t too many of those.

Certainly there’s lots here, however, of all three types. On the slope in front of our house – semi-open, semi-wooded, partially rocky – there seem to be quite a number of plants growing. I’m delighted because, as I said, columbine are one of my favourites. Every time I happen to pass by the patch of rocky slope where they’re growing I pause to admire them.

The wild columbine we have growing here has the common name of Wild Columbine, or sometimes Canadian Columbine, as its scientific name is Aquilegia canadensis. Despite that, it’s actually rather widespread, growing from the east coast as far west as Saskatchewan and Texas. Really, Canadian Columbine is a more appropriate name, as there is more than just one species of wild columbine. There are perhaps 60-70 species in the genus Aquilegia, of which 20 are native to North America. They are found in virtually every corner of the continent, where suitable habitat conditions exist.

They come in many colours, too. Our eastern variety is red, but they are also found in blue, white, pink, yellow or purple. Most, including the wild species, are bi-tone, or two-coloured. The ones we have here are mostly red, but with yellow inside. It’s an interesting pattern of colours. The flower itself is an interesting pattern of structures. There are five long, curving spurs; it’s possible that the group’s Latin name, Aquilegia, comes from the Latin “aquilinum”, meaning “eagle-like”, in reference to their resemblance to eagle talons. These spurs hold the flower’s nectar in their base, and the other possible origin for the genus name might come from the Latin for “water collector” because of this.

Columbine are members of the buttercup family, Ranunculaceae, which are characterized by having five-petaled flowers. The five spurs open up into the yellow mouths, and each tube is formed from a single petal. In between each spur flares out the sepal. In most flowers the sepal is green, but in some it is pigmented in petal-like coloration. Sepals are modified leaves and serve the purpose of protecting the petals while the flower is still closed and growing.

In the centre of the flower cluster the reproductive bits. The stamens, the male parts which bear the pollen, mature before the styles, the female parts which receive the pollen, so that flowers don’t self-fertilize. Instead, they’re pollinated by hummingbirds and bumblebees, and other long-tongued nectar-feeders. The hummers are no surprise, as their long, tubular, red flowers are the sort that tend to be associated with cases of coevolution between plants and hummingbirds. The flowers rely on these species for reproduction; to thwart smaller insects that might steal the nectar without transferring pollen, the spurs are constricted right near the end, and the nectar sits in the little bubble beyond the constriction, which prevents access by small bees.

The plants contain a cardiogenic toxin which, depending on the quantity ingested, can result in either an uncomfortable night of stomach cramps, or a quick trip to the hospital with serious heart problems (unless you’re a moth; there are several species that feed on columbine as a host plant). Native Americans would use infusions from the plants to treat a number of ailments, including, ironically, heart troubles. Flowers were eaten in small quantities as a sweet addition to salads. Apparently, the pulverized seeds, when rubbed on the hands, were also considered a love charm.

Their most common role these days, however, is as a garden plant. A number of species have been cultivated for the garden (the first ones being brought out of the forest in the 1600s), with artificial hybrids producing a variety of eye-catching colour combinations. They readily adapt to most garden conditions, providing they have the right lighting (not too shady, not too sunny), and are hardy plants that easily seed themselves.

Now that I’m back in a setting where I have the opportunity to do a bit of gardening, columbine will be among the first additions. Hopefully I will find it as easy to grow as it’s purported to be!