mammals – Page 11

Monday Miscellany

It’s amazing just how fast the trees leaf out once they start. Just two weeks ago I was noting the late afternoon sun glowing through the sprinkling of leaves on the saplings across the road from the house. Now, I can barely make out the neighbour’s house, which was so apparent in winter. By June, I won’t be able to see it at all. All manner of plant life has greened up or is hard at work at it. Some shrubs are completely leafed out, while the tall ash trees are only just starting. Like the creeks that start tumbling over their rocky beds at spring melt, once spring arrived, time seems to have picked up speed and is rushing by.

We’ve had a fair bit of rain over the course of the last week. It seems to have gotten all the wet out of its system now, however, and we’re forecasted to have mostly clear skies the rest of the week (whether it remains that way remains to be seen). Although all that rain was undoubtedly part of the reason behind the green explosion, the animals were less than happy about it. This Blue Jay, for instance, was looking a bit bedraggled as it visited the feeders one afternoon.

The rain has made the ground near our dock rather soggy. As Dan was flipping his boat over one day last week to try to locate a leak that had gotten worse over the winter, he disturbed this guy from the pool of water around the boat. I spent a lot of time debating the identity of this guy. The bright green upper lip and speckled underbelly should make it easy to ID, I figured. I think that it’s a Mink Frog, Rana septentrionalis, but it could also be a Green Frog, Rana clamitans. I couldn’t figure out a definitive ID characteristic that would rule one out based on the photos I have. A Mink Frog would be a “lifer” for me, a species that I’d never encountered previously. In Ontario they tend to be found further north than the GTA where I grew up, but we’d be at the southern edge of their range, here. They’ve been recorded over in the Park. I’m leaning toward Mink because of the small eardrums, dorsal ridges that terminate halfway down the back, and lack of strong barring on the back legs, but I get the impression these are all somewhat variable features.

Before Dan flipped over his boat, he bailed out some of the water. And sitting in the water was this guy. I believe it’s a water bug in the genus Belostoma. It was rather large, about an inch long, and quite active within the container Dan had scooped it into. This group of water bugs are among those where the female lays her eggs on the male’s back in the spring. He “broods” the eggs, keeping them clean of fungus, protecting them from predators, and making sure they’re well oxygenated (by doing “push-ups” at the surface of the water). I’m not sure if the lack of eggs on this one means it’s a female, or just a male that hasn’t been laid on yet. I did notice, however, in examining the photos on my computer, that it’s sporting a bunch of red mites.

I found this strange beetle clinging to a piece of driftwood beside my moth trap one morning. I wasn’t sure if it was alive, as it fell off the wood when I touched it, and sat with its legs curled under it. I set it on a shelf in a vial for a couple of hours as I sorted through my trap and photographed the moths I’d caught. When I returned to it, it was sitting in a different spot in the vial, and its legs appeared to be out. As soon as I picked up the vial again, however, it fell over and its legs curled underneath it again.

I pulled out my trusty Kaufman Guide to Insects (I love that book, have I mentioned that?), and there it was at the bottom of page 193: Bolitotherus cornutus. Looking it up on BugGuide.net reveals its common name to be Forked Fungus Beetle, or sometimes Horned Darkling Beetle. The two horns are projections from its thorax, and are used in “battle” with other males to win females (I’m not sure the purpose of the orange “hairs”). They are associated with bracket fungi of hardwoods such as maple and beech. The Kaufman guide makes a note that they are adept at “playing dead”, so I guess that’s what my beetle was doing whenever I disturbed it. Was pretty convincing!

While out with Raven today I encountered this bracket fungus projecting from the side of a stump. Just recently I had read over at Huckleberry Days about Dryad’s Saddle, Polyporus squamosus, a stalked bracket fungus that appears about now, so I thought, “Aha! A Dryad’s Saddle!”. I took a documenting photo and returned home. I pulled out my mushroom guide just to confirm and look up a couple of life history details about the species, and now I’m not convinced that it’s Dryad’s Saddle after all. All the photos I can find on the web for the species show it being concave where it attaches to the stalk, rather than convex like my fungus. I searched through the guide a couple of times and poked about the ‘net, but couldn’t come up with an identity.

Very close to the same spot, I stood and watched this bee fly hovering at several Spring Beauties at the side of the road. It was much oranger than previous individuals I’ve seen, and I wondered if it was just a dark Bombylius major, the species I’ve seen before, or a different species. I gather the half-light/half-dark wing markings are fairly distinctive, and seem to only be shared by B. major and B. mexicanus. It’s hard to make out the specific pattern of dark, but I’m leaning toward B. major.

I have no idea what this spider is. Not being insects, they’re not usually treated in much depth in the usual insect guides, although Stephen Marshall’s Insects doesn’t do too badly. It looks like it might be a type of crab spider, but I’m not sure. I’d knocked it off the branch of a tree onto a white sheet when I was out looking for beetles (as per a post by Ted of Beetles in the Bush that suggested if you go around thwacking some branches in the spring, it’s possible to discover some beetles you might not normally encounter). I’ve only gone out the once and thwacked half a dozen branches before I was disrupted by the arrival of a real estate agent who was coming to take photos of the house, and then it rained much of last week. Now that the weather is nice again I plan to give it another try.

A few animals from a little closer to home… with the nicer spring weather the cats have been allowed to go outside in their harnesses to sit in the long grass, enjoy the sunshine, and watch the birds. They’re tied to the deck with short 10-foot leads, so they’re not really a threat to anything except perhaps the odd bug. Both for the safety of wildlife and the cats themselves, I never let my cats roam about outdoors, so this is about as outdoor-cat as these guys will get. They enjoy it, though. Despite the chipmunk who thumbs its nose at them by foraging on fallen seeds under the birdfeeder five feet away.

Fish eats cat. Fish spits up cat.

Since late winter, when the snow was just starting to melt, Raven has been taking an increased interest in water. At the first start of ice breakup, she’d paddle her feet in the shallows of the lake, but it’s taken her a while of gradually working up to letting her feet leave the security of the ground. Even when she started doing that, she’d only push forward half a body length, and then quickly turn around to paddle back. After once or twice of that, she wouldn’t go after sticks that were further out anymore, she’d just look at you and whine. We’d taken her out in the boat a couple times and “thrown” her overboard, and she’d paddle back to shore just fine, but was reluctant to go in of her own accord.

Then, a couple days ago, it was like she had an epiphany. We’d thrown a couple of sticks for her just out of reach from where her feet could touch bottom, and she’d pushed off to grab them, but turn quickly back around. She showed a bit of willingness to go a bit further, and so we got her to do two body lengths, and then three. Then Dan suggested throwing the stick way out and seeing if she’d go for it. So I tossed it four or five meters out, and she struck right out to retrieve it.

Within the course of five minutes, she was suddenly paddling all over the place like a bonafide water dog. Not only that, but once she realized she wasn’t going to drown if her feet left the bottom, she discovered that hey – I actually like this! Now when we take her down to throw sticks for her, she’ll jump right in the water and start paddling out before you’ve even tossed the stick out. Quite a change from the puppy who was reluctant to even get her feet wet last fall!

Monday Miscellany

Is it just me, or has the spring, once it finally arrived, really been flying by? Here we are in May already. I think April must have disappeared when I blinked.

A varied assortment of miscellaneous photos this week. We did a bit of hiking about the last few days, which resulted in a number of them. This White-tailed Deer was actually observed as we were returning from one of our several outings. As we were coming down our dirt road, there were a group of five deer standing in the middle of the road. I’m not sure what they were doing – it’s too late in the season for them to be getting road salt, and I don’t think our road gets salted anyway. But there they were, nonetheless, and slow to clear out. Even once they did, they paused at the road edge to watch us drive by. This photo, cropped only slightly for composition, was taken with my wide-angle lens, through the car window.

The stream of returning migrants has started to get heavier. In the last week I’ve had nearly as many new arrivals as I’d had through all of the rest of April. One of the more recent species to show up has been the Rose-breasted Grosbeak. These gorgeous birds have been singing in our woods, and we even had a couple of them visiting our feeders, where they come for the sunflower seed. This particular individual was the first one I saw at the feeder. Naturally, as soon as I grabbed my camera he took off and sat in a nearby tree for a bit where he was a bit farther away. It was a dreary day, with a bit of drizzle, but he really added a splash of colour to the landscape.

While out hiking the last few days, we’ve noticed quite a number of these dark little skippers flouncing around a few feet above the forest floor. They hardly settled at all, barely long enough for a quick look, nevermind a photo. It was just by chance that while walking Raven today I this one skipped across in front of us. Raven sat-stayed (she’s been very good with that lately) while I sloooowly slouched over toward where the butterfly landed. I managed to get a couple of serviceable shots before it took off again. It’s got an interesting pattern, with the centre parts of the wings very dark, such that they look like they’re in shadow. These dark wings help to identify it as a duskywing, and the single small white spot in the centre of the forewing makes it a Juvenal’s Duskywing, a fairly common spring butterfly of oak woods.

Dan and I came across this scene in the park on one of our hikes last week. This Garter Snake was strung over the log, dead but otherwise untouched. The injuries to the snake are all near its head, and the way the head lies over the log while the rest dangles off the side suggests that this was the kill of a hawk. It could have been one of a number of hawk species that live in our area, but the most likely hunter was probably a Red-shouldered Hawk, which are reasonably common in the forests around here. They hunt in the forest, sitting on a branch in a tree to spot their prey, then swooping down from the perch to snatch it. Since the most dangerous part of the snake is its head, the first thing a hawk does is dispatch it quickly by severing its spine. The bird may have been disturbed by something (probably not us, as we didn’t notice any hawks in the area) before it was able to consume its meal.

My second tiger beetle of the spring, a different species than the first one. This one, I believe, is the common Six-spotted Tiger Beetle, Cicindela sexguttata. It’s the only species we have that is entirely bright green, with pale spots on the elytra. The only other species in Ontario that resembles it is Cicindela denikei, which is also all green, but with either no or almost no pale markings. Although my beetle resembled C. denikei more than the traditional C. sexguttata, I know it had to be the latter if for no other reason than location – C. denikei is virtually endemic to northwestern Ontario.

Another recent arrival is this Baltimore Oriole. Although they’ve been back in the area for about a week now, this is the first individual I’ve spotted. It was singing in our front yard, from high up in our mature maple tree. It was foraging among the buds, and pausing periodically to sing in cheerful outbursts of melody. I had the window open, and could hear it from where I sat at my desk, so I grabbed my camera and went out to watch and admire it a while.

I’ve noticed a few dragonflies around just over the last couple of days. Today I had a Green Darner zipping along the road, quickly out of sight before I could do much more than have the ID register in my brain. All of the rest of the dragonflies I’ve seen have belonged to this species. I’m reasonably certain this is an American Emerald, Cordulia shurtleffii. Most emeralds have bright green eyes, but the immature females have brown eyes. The diagnostic characteristic of this species seems to be the pale ring around the base of the abdomen. Although some dragonflies will have green markings, the emeralds are the only group where the green is iridescent. American Emeralds are often found along forest edges around bogs and fens, and sometimes vernal ponds in forest interiors. We actually found these in juniper rock barren clearings, without any water immediately nearby. This one was sitting in a juniper shrub, with its wing caught among the needles, so I was able to easily pick it up for a photograph.

There are some wild Canis sp. in the park, but whether they are Canis latrans, the Coyote, or Canis lupus, the Gray Wolf, seems to be a matter of some debate. Coyotes and wolves can interbreed freely, and both can mate with the domestic dog, Canis lupus familiaris, technically a subspecies of the Gray Wolf (with the point of divergence having taken place some 15,000 years ago), so it’s possible that the wild canids that roam the park are even a cross-breed between any one of these groups. Regardless of their taxonomy (the animals themselves don’t really care, do they?), these packs are the primary predators in the park. Every now and then you’ll see evidence of their activities. Scat is most common, but while out recently, we came across the bleached remains of a deer kill. This is the skull and upper mandible of a White-tailed Deer. You can see the bony knobs behind the eyes which the antlers are affixed to.

And the last photo in this installment is of a cocoon. It just happened to be hanging from a low branch immediately over the path Dan and I were walking along. Curled up and secured with silk, the leaf was also attached to the branch by silken glue to prevent it from falling off in the blustery winter months. I don’t know who the architect is for this home, but they seemed to still be in residence. I briefly considered plucking it from the branch and bringing it home with me to see who emerged, but we still had a few kilometers left to hike, and I didn’t have a safe way to protect it from being jostled or crunched while we made our way back to the car, so I reluctantly left it.

Porc and pine

So I started out yesterday not with the intention of posting about the new Frontenac Bird Studies MAPS program, but rather to write about this guy, who we startled as we were hiking through the bush. We were far enough off the trails, and the trails are infrequently hiked to begin with, that there’s a good chance that this particular individual almost never saw people, and was probably quite alarmed when we came over the hill. He scurried over to the nearest tree and quickly started hauling himself up the trunk.

It is, of course, a porcupine. More specifically, it’s a North American Porcupine, Erethizon dorsatum. There are 27 species of porcupines, found in both the “old” and “new” worlds. In the Americas, there are 16 species, most of which are found in South America. The only one to occur north of Mexico is this one, which is mainly a northern species. It also happens to be the largest of them all, growing up to 40 lbs (18 kg), an adaptation to the colder climate. Most are smaller, since they live in warmer regions – for example, the prehensile-tailed porcupines of South America are only about a foot long and weigh less than a kilogram (around 2 lbs).

Our “neighbour” at the north of the lake told us to be on the lookout for them, as this is “porcupine weekend”, so I wasn’t entirely surprised to find it. It was, in fact, the second one we’d seen – we’d already startled one shortly after we’d started out from the car. That one disappeared after cresting a hill, and must have either gone into a den or behind some rocks or something. Porcupines spend the winter in dens, often in the ground. They do not hibernate, but do spend a lot of the cold months sleeping. As they start to get more active in the spring, you start to see more evidence of them.

Deer droppings and porcupine poop.

In particular, you’ll likely start noticing piles of their poop on the forest floor. The first time Dan and I found one we had no idea what it was. In the same way that you find little piles of rabbit or deer droppings, these were a pile of pellets, but pale brownish, the colour of sawdust, and shaped like macaroni. The sawdust colour isn’t all that surprising, as that is essentially the bulk of a porcupine’s diet. In the winter they mostly chew on the outer bark layer, denuding the trunks of trees but leaving the tree itself intact. However, they do also eat twigs and buds, particularly in the spring when there is tender new growth.

Those tender buds can get them into trouble. According to Wikipedia (which references a printed book called “The North American Porcupine”), porcupines occasionally fall out of trees in their attempts to get at these delectably tender new buds. This would be dangerous enough for the average animal, but is even more so for the porcs because they may fall on and stab themselves with their own quills. This is common enough, in fact, that porcupines have evolved to have an antibiotic coating on the quills which helps to prevent infection and speed healing.

This is also good news for Fido, should his curiosity get the better of him. The danger for Fido is more in quill tips breaking off under the skin, since these can potentially get infected. Like a fishing hook, the quills have microscopic backwards-pointing barbs that prevent the quill from easily being pulled out. However, if the tip does break off, it should eventually work its way out of the skin on its own, like a splinter might. A single porcupine might sport up to 30,000 quills, ranging in length from half an inch to four inches (1.2 to 10 cm), so it won’t miss a few dozen should it need to shed them in defense.

The quills are really just modified hairs, made of the same materials that form our fingernails. And like our hairs, they are controlled by tiny muscles in the skin attached to connective tissue around their bases. When these muscles are pulled tight, the quills stand on end, just like the hairs on your arm do when you’re cold. Porcupines have more control over these muscles than we do of ours, however.

Contrary to popular myth, porcupines can’t throw their quills, but they do release very easily. When the porcupine is relaxed and the quills flat, there is a fair bit of give in the connective tissue and muscles, but when tightened, the connective tissue tears easily. When a predator (or curious dog) applies pressure to the quill when it is standing upright, it pushes the quill backwards into the skin slightly, just enough to tear the connective tissue, which releases the quill from the skin. Studies have shown that it requires 40% less force to pull a quill out when the muscles are tight than when they are relaxed, a mechanism that helps prevent the porcupine from stabbing itself in climbing accidents.

Porcupines are rodents, and the North American Porcupine is the third largest rodent, behind capybaras and beavers. They have the same big rodent teeth that beavers do, and they put them to good use. Trees are their natural diet, of course, but of human wood products, they are partial to plywood, because of the salts added to it during the curing process. They’ll also target road salt used in the winter, both at the side of the road and where it accumulates on soft parts of vehicles.

And, of course, the answer to the question I know you’ve all been asking – how do porcupines mate? Well, let’s just say there’s not a lot of cuddling going on. The female, when she is receptive to a suitor, will curl her broad tail over her back. The underside is barbless, and if the male porcupine, who stands on his hind legs during the act, touches anything of the female it’s only the underside of her tail. On a related note, baby porcupines do have quills when born, but they’re soft, like your fingernails when you climb out of the shower. Within a few hours they have hardened enough to be effective protection.

Today at Kingsford – Technical difficulties

I apologize for my longer-than-usual absence. This weekend I was away at my parents’, for an early Easter dinner timed to coincide with my sister’s birthday. I had hoped to get another post up on Friday before heading out, but ran out of time, as it usually goes. And now, I return home and sit down to put something together this evening from photos I’ve taken in the last few days, and it appears the socket on my camera where the data transfer cable plugs into is broken. The computer recognizes there’s something at the end of the cable, but can’t identify what it is (both my PC and Dan’s Mac do this, so it’s not just Windows being stupid). Soooo… I suppose I’ll need to get myself a card reader or otherwise figure out an alternative means of getting the photos off of the card. In the meantime, I will probably see what I’ve got kicking around in the archives of my computer, and perhaps share some photos of subjects I took mid-winter and stored away for lean times that fortunately never came.

Here is one such set. Last week when I took Raven out for her daily walk we were joined by a neighbour’s beagle. He hooked up with us about 500 meters into the walk, and came with us for the next kilometer out, and then the 1.5 kilometers all the way back to our house. The three of us all traipsed down to the dock, where the water was melted enough I could put the canoe in (for the first time this spring!) and invite the dogs in to join me for a short paddle. Amusingly, the beagle jumped right in with little need for encouragement, while Raven required quite a bit of coaxing.

The poor little guy was game but really needed longer legs to keep up with Raven the Rocket Dog. And Raven wasn’t about to wait up for any short guys. However, they still seemed to have a good time together. I felt bad sending him away when it was time for Raven and I to go inside (so I could give her a much-needed bath). Raven doesn’t often get an opportunity to interact with other dogs (or people) out here, so it’s nice when she gets to play with one of the neighbours.

Today at Kingsford – Rusty the Squirrel

Meet Rusty. He is one of four or five “Gray” Squirrels we have visiting our feeders on a regular basis. He’s been coming for at least half the winter. He stands out from the rest by his strangely coloured tail, which looks a bit like a hair-bleaching job gone bad. It makes him easy to track, even when we see him away from the feeders in the yard or across the street.

The second is Blackie. Blackie may actually be two squirrels, I haven’t been able to determine that for certain. He generally keeps to himself when he is here, keeping out of trouble. He’s also the only one to show up alone later in the day (which is what makes me think there may actually be two black individuals). The third is Hi-ho-Silver. I don’t happen to have a photo of Silver, he doesn’t come around too often, although he’s here regularly enough to have garnered a name. (Note I’m referring to them all as “he” but I really don’t know their respective sexes.)

And then there’s Brownie. I think of Brownie as a youngster, the baby of the group. He seems subordinate to the rest, although he is also stubborn and persistent. “No” doesn’t really seem to mean a lot to him. In particular, he has his eye on the platform feeder.

However, the platform feeder is Rusty’s domain. Rusty is definitely the dominant squirrel of the group. He doesn’t take kindly to other squirrels invading his personal space while he is eating (he hates the sound their teeth make, clicking together while they chew). Most of the squirrels respect this, and will eat at the small hanging feeder (which requires some acrobatics to reach, but isn’t that hard) or on the ground under the platform.

But not Brownie. Brownie pushes his luck. I watched him try to climb on to the platform feeder five times in the space of as many minutes, perhaps trying to sneak over a corner while Rusty’s back was turned. Maybe if he was lucky grabbing a mouthful of seeds. Rusty was having none of it. He was more alert than that, and the minute Brownie landed on the platform Rusty was after him.

He’d chase him around the platform and then over the edge, where Brownie would leap to the supporting pole and scurry to the ground, or over to the deck railing and then away, depending on the direction Rusty forced him.

His personal space secured, Rusty gets back to the serious business of enjoying his lunch.