Ohio Birds and Biodiversity

A blizzard of gulls!

2012-01-30T00:18:00.003-05:00

Photo: Chuck Slusarczyk, Jr.

A seemingly impenetrable thicket of gulls fills the air over Lorain Harbor. Lorain is a Lake Erie port city not far west of Cleveland, and is a legendary site for gull-watchers. As of late, Lorain has been especially dense with gulls, and Chuck Slusarczyk was there today, camera in tow. When I saw Chuck's amazing series of photos I had to beg permission to share them. Larophile (gull fanatic) or not, I think you'll be impressed!

I made this photo of the Lorain Harbor several years ago, while helping on an aerial waterbird survey. The Black River enters Lake Erie here, and wherever large rivers confluence with the lake, large numbers of ducks and gulls often congregate. The interaction of river and lake seems to supercharge prey populations such as shiners and other small fish, and the birds are there to feast on the bounty.

Lake Erie is world class when it comes to gulls. An incredible twenty species have been found in Ohio's Lake Erie waters thus far, and there'll be more. We'll eventually get an indisputable Slaty-backed Gull, and there are other potential first state record candidates. The most recent addition to our slate of gulls is the famous Black-tailed Gull, which is still present.

Photo: Chuck Slusarczyk, Jr.

When you arrive at Lorain Harbor and it looks like this, you know the gulling will be good. Back in the day, we called this area the "hot waters", as a nearby now decommisioned power plant piped warm water into the lake. No matter how cold and ice-choked Lake Erie got, the harbor always remained open.

Photo: Chuck Slusarczyk, Jr.

An obvious challenge when tens of thousands of gulls are milling around in one harbor is picking out the goodies. This is the sort of challenge that Larophiles live for. The vast majority of gulls currently at Lorain are Ring-billed Gulls, which under most circumstances is the most frequent gull in Ohio. Herring Gulls are a distant second right now, although in tough, frigid winters they can dominate (the lake is completely ice-free this winter). Between these two species, we've got 99% of the gull biomass at this season. So you'll have to have a trained eye to pick out the rarities.

Lorain certainly does attract the uncommon gulls, and mega-rarities. This is the site that hosted our only Ohio record of Heermann's Gull, back in the winters of 1980, and 1981. Same bird, almost certainly, that liked Lorain so much it had to come back.

Photo: Chuck Slusarczyk, Jr.

An ideal situation for picking through this many gulls is to have them all peacefully loafing on placid waters, where one can scope through the flocks looking for non-Herring/Ring-billed birds. A collective groan often goes up from observers when something spooks the horde, and all of the birds reshuffle themselves. If you had something good, say an Iceland Gull, and were pointing it out to people, you'll have your work cut out refinding it.

Photo: Chuck Slusarczyk, Jr.

Forgetting about needle-in-the-haystack rarity-seeking for a second, to me one of the great pleasures of birding gull-choked harbors is the sheer ambience created by this many birds. The collective din of so many large gulls bugling their yelping wails, fighting, stealing fish, and gracefully performing all manner of aeronautics is a sight to behold.

Photo: Chuck Slusarczyk, Jr.

But of course it is the rare and uncommon that keep birders eye-balling the gray and white masses, and here Chuck has lensed one of the uncommon species. It's an adult Lesser Black-backed Gull, easily standing out from the Ring-billeds and Herrings by its much darker charcoal-colored mantle. Lesser Black-backeds used to be a big deal when I first began making trips to The Lake. The first Ohio record dates to 1977, and that bird was a huge deal. This European species has increased tremendously in North America in the intervening years, and now small numbers are to be expected at gull hotspots along Lake Erie.

Photo: Chuck Slusarczyk, Jr.

Cool photo showing the beautiful sooty mantle of the Lesser Black-backed Gull as it plunges for a gizzard shad or some such tasty morsel.

In recent days Lorain has hosted Great Black-backed Gull, Glaucous Gull, Iceland Gull, Thayer's Gull, Bonaparte's Gull, and at least two California Gulls, in addition to the aforementioned species. I wouldn't be surprised if someone turns up a Mew Gull or some other really rare larid.

Should you get the chance, visit the gullapalooza at Lorain while the getting is good. Thanks a million to Chck Slusarczyk for sharing his amazing photos!

Cecropia cocoon

2012-01-28T21:26:00.002-05:00

On a recent foray in search of winter birds, I found myself crashing through a dense thicket of gray dogwood, various well-thorned Rubus blackberries, and sundry other saplings and shrubs. I didn't produce any exciting avifauna during my brush wading, but the effort was time well spent. At one point I paused to look and listen, and there, nearly in front of my face, was the cocoon of a cecropia moth!

The cecropia, Hyalophora cecropia, is one of our silkmoths and every aspect of their life cycle is of great interest. Excepting the eggs, their cocoons are the least conspicuous phase of this moth's four-part life cycle. It's a hefty cocoon, but looks just like a leaf that has fallen and draped itself over a twig.

I was sorely tempted to carefully open it to photo-document the pupa within, but decided against it. Better to leave well enough alone and not hinder the stunning transformation that will take place this spring. Although the cocoon looks like nothing more than a dead leaf, its contents are very much alive albeit in a state of suspension for the winter. However, Nina of Nature Remains did successfully reveal the contents of a cecropia cocoon, photo-document the whole thing, and put it back together and eventually hatched the moth. See that spread HERE.

Photo: Shawn Hanrahan, Wiki Commons

Few people notice the eggs of the cecropia, which are laid on one of the myriad woody plants that serve as host plants. The eggs aren't there long - in short order tiny first instar caterpillars will hatch.

Photo: Michael Hodge, Wiki Commons

By the time the caterpillars have molted into their fifth and final instar, they have become behemoths adorned with spiky clubs. A mature cecropia cat is an eating machine, and stuffs itself with foliage to prepare for the long winter's siesta in its cocoon.

Photo: Tom Peterson, Wiki Commons

Finally, if all goes well and none of the moth's numerous predators takes it out at some early stage, a gorgeous moth will emerge. The cecropia is the largest moth species that commonly occurs in North America and an adult is an unforgettable sight. Last year seemed to be a good year for cecropias in Ohio, and I fielded several queries about them from people who had never seen one. In every case, these cecropia newbies were floored by the size of the moth, and typically described them as the size of a bird or bat. Big females can have a wing spread that spans over 6 inches!

Silkmoths have no functional mouthparts, and live only to mate and produce eggs. Thus, the ultimate phase of this complex life cycle, the moth, lives for only a week or so.

American Alligator

2012-01-27T06:53:00.000-05:00

An American Alligator, Alligator mississippiensis, cruises slowly down a blackwater canal in southern Georgia's Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge.

This post is a bit of a blast from the post - from my November 2011 trip to the Okefenokee. I had intended to share some gator photos shortly after the trip, but a crush of other subjects nearly relegated the giant reptiles to the scrap bin.

There are several thousand alligators in the Okefenokee's 438,000 acres, and if you visit, you're almost sure to see some. This stegosaurus-tailed bruiser was hauled out on a muddy embankment, and gave us his best repilian grin as we slowly cruised by in our swamp boat.

This old boy was in repose along a road, and apparently some fool tossed a pebble on its head. A "sleeping" gator looks dead and still as stone, but only an idiot would closely approach one. While attacks on people are very rare, only Darwin Award candidates test their luck.

An exceptionally massive old male can reach 14 feet in length and weigh half a ton. In spite of their bulk, big gators can move with astonishing speed, and become scaly Esther Williams' when in the water. They'll occasionally attempt to snap perched birds from limbs overhanging the water, and can nearly lunge free of the water. There is a great story of an Okefenokee swampman who was cruising a canal in his motorized johnboat when he rounded a bend only to meet a big gator that was hotfooting it right at his boat. The spooked reptile leapt free of the water and right into the guy's boat! After a wild tussle the boatman managed to lever it over the side with a pole, nearly capsizing in the process. He got a cool story out of that encounter!

Ohio Rules the Roost!

2012-01-25T22:57:00.003-05:00

A young Eastern Bluebird, Sialia sialis, peers from its abode. Someone kindly made and placed this nest box, to the benefit of these Vinton County bluebirds.

One of the many valuable projects spearheaded by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is Project NestWatch. Participants in this program register nests with the Lab, thus helping to create a database of North America's nesting avifauna. The NestWatch e-newsletter just arrived today, and Ohioans can be proud.

This is the top 20 list - the species for which the most nests were reported. The Eastern Bluebird is Numero Uno and no surprise there. People love these gentle little thrushes, and have placed thousands and thousands of next boxes for them. And monitor the boxes diligently. I see the dastardly House Sparrow (one of my favorite birds, Shhh, don't tell anyone) checks in at #6. I suspect a good chunk of those sparrow nests were in boxes built for bluebirds and other far more desirable native species.

This chart lists the top 20 states in regards to nest submissions, and looky there! Ohio is smack on top of the pyramid! The Buckeye State probably doesn't get its due in terms of landscape diversity, and the sheer number of natural history enthusiasts that are doing wonderful things within our borders. Thus, it's immensely pleasing to see a stat like this.

Here we have the nuts and bolts of who is doing what and where. Ohio takes five of the twenty slots, including #1. I suspect that most of those 721 nests that were submitted by the Ohio Bluebird Society - Delaware Chapter were built and placed by Dick Tuttle, a local legend and major frind of the bluebird, Tree Swallow, and other cavity-nesting songbirds.

Holden Arboretum, a national and local treasure, is also high on the list. If you haven't visited Holden, be sure and get there soon. The place is utterly spectacular. Darlene Sillick, who is involved with the aforementioned Tuttle and the Delaware Bird Club has contributed an impressive number of nests.

And Charlie Bombaci, setting all kinds of records in the world of Prothonotary Warbler nest box trails. Where would the Golden Swamp Warblers be without Charlie, at least in central Ohio? He slots in at #10 and is cited for 160 nests, and I bet most of them are of our only eastern cavity-nesting warbler. Most of these nests are probably in boxes that Charlie placed for the birds at Hoover Reservoir, just north of Columbus.

I made the above video a few springs back, of a Prothonotary Warbler investigating a natural cavity along the bird trail at Magee Marsh Wildlife Area. It offers a taste of the spring that will be on us before we know it, and a nice look at the species that Bombaci has done so much to help. Who wouldn't want more Golden Swamp Warblers?

The Undertaker in action

2012-01-25T21:32:00.001-05:00

Photo: Hallie Mason

Hallie Mason, who lives in the northeastern portion of Ohio, saw my last post on the American burying beetle and sent along this photo. She walked out of her house to see this epic struggle taking place in her driveway. We should all be so lucky!

It's another species of burying beetle, and it looks like a roundneck sexton beetle, Nicrophorus orbicollis. I wrote about those last fall, HERE. The beetle has found an expired eastern mole and is grappling with the corpse in an effort to transport it to a suitable burial ground. Hallie reports: "I watched him valiantly move the carcass toward an area of dirt. I finally went to bed and when I arose the next day, there was no sign of either rodent or insect."

Keep in mind the mole probably weighed 50 grams or so - dozens of times more than the beetle! In the strength department, one of these bugs makes Arnold Schwarzenegger at his prime look like an anemic Richard Simmons. Proportionately, a burying beetle is far stronger than that, actually. For one of us to match the mole-toting feat, we'd probably have to do something like toss a full-sized telephone pole over each shoulder and run a hundred yard dash.

Thanks to Hallie for sharing her photo and story!

American Burying Beetle

2012-01-24T22:48:00.000-05:00

What a bug! Clad in the colors of Halloween and sporting a huge pair of intimidating mandibles, an American burying beetle, Nicrophorus americanus, poses for my camera. These giant beetles have a lifestyle that those prone to anthropomorphism might regard as ghoulish. But Nature seemingly evolves an animal to fill every role, and burying beetles play an important part as Mother Earth's undertakers. Just about anyone who clapped eyes on one of these goggle-eyed chaps would prclaim it a handsome insect, although they might revise their opinion once they learn of the beetles' habits.

While at the Wilds back in December - see previous post - I begged conservation science director Jenise Bauman to give me the nickel tour of their burying beetle restoration project. She obliged, and into that unassuming little building we went.

The Wilds does not confine their research and conservation efforts only to the charismatic mega-fauna featured in the previous post. American burying beetles are about as obscure and far from the average citizens' mind as it is possible to get in the animal world. To my mind, the Wilds deserves major kudos for working with an insect that is certainly not going to draw the accolades and attention that, say, their cheetah program does.

Why American burying beetles? Because they've become incredibly rare over their entire range, and at least until this project was initiated, had disappeared from the wild in Ohio. Historically, these inch-and-a-half bugs ranged throughout the eastern half of North America, living primarily in the imprint of our vast temperate deciduous forest. Today, small populations exist only in Rhode Island and a very limited area of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and Texas.

Prior to European settlement, as many as five billion Passenger Pigeons dwelt in the primeval eastern forests. Wild Turkey abounded, and interwoven prairie regions contained an abundance of Greater Prairie-Chickens. These species all produced chicks that are/were of the perfect dimensions for burying beetle food. Mortality among the pigeon squabs, in particular, was probably high and dead chicks on the forest floor were probably a frequent occurrence. If the beetles' fortunes were tightly linked to that of the Passenger Pigeon, it may well be tough to successfully aid in a rebound of the beetle. A ray of hope lies with Wild Turkeys, which abetted by wildlife managers have increased dramatically. Perhaps doomed turkey poults will provide adequate sustenance to maintain American burying beetle populations.

Upon entering the beetle house, we saw these spartan beetle condos. Each container holds an adult.

This aquarium is full of another species of beetle: the mealworm beetle, Tenebrio molitor. The larvae of these darkling beetles are commonly used to feed all manner of grub-noshing pets such as lizards and birds. In this case, they provide a source of nourishment to overwintering burying beetles in the Wilds' beetle house.

An adult beetle would quickly make mincemeat of a mealworm with those powerful mandibles. They'll eat 'em in a pinch, but it isn't grubs that they thirst for - freshly dead birds and mammals is what floats the beetle boat. Those impressive whisk broom appendages that cap the antennae no doubt function as corpse radars, helping carrion-seeking beetles to home in on their meal.

An integral part of the Wilds' beetle operation involves breeding the beetles. In order to stimulate reproduction, a male and female are placed within a dirt-filled bucket, along with a quail carcass. The dead bird spurs the beetles to action. In this shot, one of the pair was busily tunneling under the quail's head - you can see its posterior protruding from the bird's lower left side.

Once the reproductive cycle is set in motion, things get interesting. American burying beetles possess Herculean strength, and it was amazing to see how the insects easily jostled the much larger corpse around. Eventually, the pair will at least partially bury their grisly fodder, and prepare it by stripping much of the feathers away from the carcass. The beetles then slather the body with bacteria and fungus retarding chemicals. By this point or soon after, Mrs. Beetle will deposit her eggs in a nearby brood chamber. Once the first instar grublets hatch, the doting parents gently transport them to the carrion. As the grubs are as yet unable to feed themselves, they stroke one of the parent's mandibles when hungry. Excellent providers that they are, the Mr. or Mrs. promptly regurgitates a snack of masticated dead meat.

The grubs grow through three instar stages, and then enter a month-long pupation after which they emerge as colorful adults ready to start this beetle magic all over again.

I hope the Wilds is successful in reestablishing American burying beetles in Ohio. Even though I'll probably never see one in the wild, I take great satisfaction in knowing that such creatures are on the landscape, and equal pleasure in the fact that people care enough to go to these lengths to try and ensure their survival.

Thanks to Jenise Bauman for touring me through the beetle house, and kudos to the Wilds and its affiliate the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, and partners the Ohio Division of Wildlife, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and the Ohio State University for supporting this program.

Big mammals make for interesting birding

2012-01-22T22:45:00.004-05:00

If you want a novel Ohio birding experience, visit the 10,000+ acre former strip mine lands known as the Wilds. Located in Muskingum County, this site is buffered by thousands of additional acres of strip mine reclamation grasslands, and the overall ambience suggests the plains of Africa.

I was there in late December to participate in the Chandlersville Christmas Bird Count - one of umpteen trips that I've made to this area over the years.

Wintertime on the Wilds. It does look rather bleak and inhospitable, and cold temperatures and unrelenting winds mean one had better bundle up. But the birding can be stellar, and raptors are the star of the wintertime show. Rough-legged Hawks, Northern Harriers, Merlin, Red-tailed Hawks, Short-eared Owls and more. Golden Eagles have wintered here for many years now, and one of Ohio's few Prairie Falcons returned to winter for two consecutive years (2004-05).

In regards to our bird count, I drew a plum assignment. Nina Harfmann and I were paired with Jenise Bauman, who is the Wilds' director of conservation science training, and that meant we had access to the fenced off grasslands. Vast tracts are surrounded by fences for a good reason, as we shall see. There's lots of great birds to be found within the Wilds' inner core and we found some goodies, but many an interesting mammal also lurks within the fenced confines.

Birders have long made the pilgrimage to the Wilds in winter, seeking owls and eagles and other feathered quarry. For seven years now, the Ohio Ornithological Society has hosted a winter raptor day in January, which has drawn upwards of 150 enthusiasts some years. Here, some birders take advantage of the massive birding platform which overlooks an enormous expanse of grassland dappled by ponds. The Ohio Division of Wildlife funded the platform to the tune of $55,000, and it is known as the Birding Station at Jeffrey Point. Oh, that's Bill of the Birds scoping things in the foreground.

Birding the core of the Wilds can be a surreal experience. Yes, those are camels on the crest of that distant ridge, Bactrian Camels to be specific. The Wilds' primary mission is as a wildlife conservation and research center, and they maintain about 30 species of large mammals, many of which are imperiled in their native ranges. As birders, we use landmarks to get our fellows on birds, and that makes for some interesting dialogue in this place: "Rough-legged Hawk, one o'clock and flying left - just shot by the camels!"

One of the most numerous mammals is one of our natives, the White-tailed Deer. They're everywhere, and their ranks include some impressively racked big bucks.

Here's a much smaller ungulate, the Sika Deer, which was once found throughout much of Eurasia. It has declined or disappeared from most of its original range. These are adults, which unlike our white-tailed deer retain their speckling into adulthood.

These lumbering brutes are my personal favorites at the Wilds: the Sichuan Takin. The musk-ox-looking mammals are indigenous to the slopes of the Himalayas, and are utterly impervious to cold. Even the most brutal winter day at the Wilds is nothing to them.

A Takin is rather charming in its own special way. Big bulls can weigh over 700 lbs, and they're not possessed of a very friendly temperament.

Cute as buttons, a pair of Persian Onagers buddy up. These asiatic wild asses are nearly gone from the wild, with only a few hundred left in two regions of Iran. Onagers are incredibly tolerant of temperature extremes, and can endure temperatures of well over 100 degrees - not an uncommon occurrence in their native range. In winter, they grow a thick coat of insulating fur and have no troubles dealing with frigid temperatures.

Completing the surrealistic Wilds landscape is the stunning Grevy's Zebra, which occurs in Ethiopia and Kenya. Less than 6,000 of these gorgeous mammals are thought to remain in the wild. This is the largest of the three zebra species, and a mature male can weigh nearly 1,000 pounds.

This is but a sampling of the mammals that the Wilds works with. Birders who recently attended the Ohio Ornithological Society's raptor day were delighted by a special visit to see a baby rhinoceros. The Wilds has successfully bred rhinos on a number of occasions, as they have several other species of imperiled animals. There are also Fringe-eared Oryx, Cheetah, African Wild Dog, and many more. While we visitors delight at seeing such beasts in a huge landscape where the animals can free-range over vast areas, the major mission of the Wilds is research and conservation. Understanding the basic biology of animals is key to successfully protecting these animals in the wild, and the Wilds is working with the rarest of the rare.

If you've not been to the Wilds, plan a visit. Consider becoming a member, too - their work is some of the most important and innovative animal conservation and research in the world. Not only that, but they're protecting outstanding habitat for wild birds, and the staff of the Wilds strongly supports bird conservation and the birding community.

Winter flowers

2012-01-19T21:24:00.001-05:00

This was the scene when I departed the office today. Winter has roared back into town, complete with icy temperatures and snow. But up until now, it's been unseasonably balmy in central Ohio and we've been completely lacking in snow cover.

So, yesterday I got a call from Ben Gelber (be sure and click his name!), legendary weatherman for NBC 4 tv. Ben is a total natural history buff and a great proponent of the environment. He regularly does little snippets about nature and once in a while he'll connect with me to do something. Because of the relatively Floridian weather around here, we did a thing about the response of plants to the balminess. I was able to find a few species in bloom right outside my office building, and brought my camera in today to photograph them, right before the snow hit.

In a funny coincidence, at the very time that Ben and I were outside filming our spot, Dave Horn emailed me the above photo of snowdrops, Galanthus nivalis, ready to burst into bloom in his Clintonville garden. Just about everything that you'll find flowering in the dead of winter around here is, like snowdrops, of Eurasian origin. The native plants seem much more tied to photoperiod - the length of daylight - for their trigger to erupt from the soil and start to flower. The hardy Eurasian invaders quickly respond to favorable weather conditions.

Looking every bit as bright as your lovely salad greens is this prostrate mat of common chickweed, Stellaria media. This chickweed is a very short-lived perennial and colors up quickly with the advent of mild weather. A few more warm days and it may well have started pushing out flowers.

You've probably got this one in your yard. It's hairy bittercress, Cardamine hirsuta, a tiny winter-annual mustard. Like all of the other plants in this post, it is naturalized from Eurasia. I couldn't find any blooms yet, but like the chickweed, had the weather remained warm and snowfree it wouldn't have been long before its little white flowers popped.

Another soon to bloom weed and - excepting the snowdrops, which tends to remain pent up in the garden - the showiest of this lot is this hen's-bit, Lamium amplexicaule. These beautiful little mints can always be found in bloom in February in southernmost Ohio in any year, and I saw a few today that had the beginnings of buds.

Mark my words, this homely little weed is one of our toughest plants - a real botanical cockroach. It's common groundsel, Senecio vulgaris, and this specimen is in full bloom. Common groundsel inherited few of the charms of many of its brethren in the ragwort group (Asteraceae). What it lacks in looks, it makes up for in sheer tenacity. This species can grow nearly anywhere and flower at any time. It'll long outlast humans, easily surviving the worst of our ravages: nuclear holocausts, Walmart parking lots, possibly even fracking.

We move in close so that you can appreciate the true glory of common groundsel flowers. That's it. There are no showy petals, only tubular discoid flowers tightly enwrapped by a cup of leafy phyllaries. One wants to wait around and see if the flowers might do something a little more spectacular, but they don't.

Finally, that bane of every well-groomed yard, the dandelion, Taraxacum officinale. Like the groundsel, dandelions are ultra-tough members of the aster family and prone to blooming all winter long if given even a slight chance.

I've got to confess to liking these ugly little weeds, if for no other reason than they offer hope of the impending spring. And right now, with blowing snow and temps in the 20's, spring seems quite distant.

Kentucky Coffee Tree

2012-01-19T01:18:00.005-05:00

A fine specimen of a Kentucky coffee tree, Gymnocladus dioicus, towers skyward at Columbus, Ohio's sprawling Green Lawn Cemetery. The 360-acre Green Lawn - 2nd largest cemetery in the state! - is a virtual arboretum, with some 90% of the Buckeye State's native tree species in residence. Many of the natives, such as this coffee tree, were not planted; rather they are part of the indigenous flora that has been incidentally conserved by the establishment of the cemetery.

Of all of the trees at Green Lawn, the Kentucky coffee trees may be my favorites. They may seem a bit homely, perhaps, especially when contrasted with the stately columnar trunks of nearby tulip trees, or the soft elegance of eastern hemlocks. In the company of the runway model trees, the coffee trees might be considered ugly ducklings but to me that is part of their allure.

If you were to paint the quintessential spooky Halloween scene - full moon in the corner, haunted house in the backdrop, bat winging by, owl glaring from a tree - it's the Kentucky coffee tree that you'll want to star as the centerpiece. Its wildly contorted branches twist and jag crazily, and the thick stubby twigs create the effect of ill-kept witch's brooms.

The trunk is broken into long furrows, as if tectonic plates of bark have collided and ruptured against one another. Like the rest of the tree, even the bark has a messy charm to it.

The long persistent seed pods instantly reveal the coffee tree's allegiance to the Fabaceae: the bean family. Stunted and stubby like the branches they hang from, coffee tree pods suggest fat little locust seed pods. You'll only find the fruit adorning female trees, though - the specific epithet of this plant, Gymnocladus dioicus, means = diocecious. Dioecious plants have separate male and female plants, so if you've got a Kentucky coffee tree that never produces fruit, it's likely a male.

Your blogger took the liberty of plucking a pod from the Kentucky coffee tree, and it protested not a bit.

Split open, we can see the thick greenish-yellow pulp that the fingernail-sized seeds nest in. The tree's common name stems from the sometimes use of the seeds as a coffee substitute, at least in days gone by. I would NOT recommend brewing up drink from this stuff, though - the seeds, leaves, and other parts of this tree are at least mildly toxic and you'll get more bang than you probably wanted.

Ohio Division of Forestry forester Brian Riley holds a Kentucky coffee tree leaf. I took this photo at Green Lawn several summers ago, and if you visit these trees during leafout, you'll be rewarded by the spectacle of the largest leaf of any Ohio plant. The whole assemblage in Brian's hand is just one very large leaf, and in botanicospeak it is termed twice pinnate. Each unit is a leaflet, and collectively it is all of those little leaflets that comprise the leaf in toto.

Kentucky coffee trees are not especially common, and never form dominant stands, at least insofar as I have seen. They prefer alkaline soils and are most likely found where limestone beds jut near the earth's surface in central and western Ohio. Green Lawn Cemetery is without doubt one of the best places to easily find coffee trees and admire their rather homely charms.

Ohio Natural History Conference

2012-01-17T23:08:00.001-05:00

Mark your calendars for Saturday, February 11th - the date of the 9th annual Ohio Natural History Conference. This is a particularly auspicious occasion, as the conference also celebrates the 100th year of the Ohio Biological Survey (OBS), the main sponsor. Together with the Ohio Division of Wildlife, OBS has crafted an interesting and diverse meeting that gets better every year.

The cost is $20.00 - $10.00 for students - and CLICK HERE to be whisked to the online registration. Of course, you can just show up and register at the door, but an additional $5.00 will be plucked from your wallet. This year's shindig will be held at the fabulous ODOT Conference Center at 1980 West Broad Street, Columbus 43223. I've been to a number of events here and the venue is perfect for such affairs.

Following are a few of the conference highlights:

This year's keynote speaker is Dr. David Bonter with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Bonter works primarily with the lab's citizen science initiatives, and that includes such well known efforts as eBird, Project Feederwatch, and the Great Backyard Bird Count.

One of Ohio's rarer breeding birds is the Chuck-will's-widow, and here we are face to face with one of the jumbo goatsuckers sitting on its nest. See it? Paul Rodewald and Matt Shumar will summarize the Ohio Breeding Bird Atlas, which has concluded after six years of intensive statewide surveys. Their report will be interesting as all the facts are in, and lots of interesting birds were found.

A giant six-spotted fishing spider rests in a tranquil pool, its legs dimpling the surface but not breaking the surface tension. This species is but one of about 650 species of Ohio spiders, and every one of them is fascinating in its own way. Dr. Richard Bradley, spider expert extraordinaire and author of an upcoming field guide to North American spiders, will give an overview of our arachnids. No one talks up the virtues of spiders like Rich, and this talk alone is worth the price of admission.

This female blue dasher is a miniature objet d'art, as are all of the other dragonflies and damselflies. Ohio has a wealth of Odonate diversity, and who better than to talk about these winged predators than Bob Glotzhober and Dave McShaffrey? These two have devoted much of their lives to the study of these fascinating insects and pitch a powerful message about the insect world's most spectacular flyboys.

Suze Prange with the Division of Wildlife will discuss the distribution of mammals in Ohio, and that includes this giant lumbering brute, the beaver, caught here in the act of shredding an eastern cottonwood. Most of our mammal species are usually out of sight and out of mind, but all are fascinating and this will be an eye-opening talk.

If you can make the event, you'll be in for an interesting and informative day, I'll promise you that. Hope to see you there!

Long-eared Owl

2012-01-16T22:44:00.006-05:00

Excellent habitat for wintering Long-eared Owls, Asio otus: dense roosting cover bordering a large expanse of old meadows. Long-eareds hunt in much the same habitat as does the closely related Short-eared Owl, Asio flammeus, but unlike its stubby-eared brethren, Long-ears are strictly nocturnal.

Bill Lindauer, an Ohio Certified Volunteer Naturalist, found a Long-eared Owl roosting in one of those red cedar trees buffering the meadow's edge in the above photo. I met up with Bill and his fellow OCVN'ers Dave Woehr and Nina Harfmann this morning to take a gander at the owl.

Long-eared Owls are secretive in the extreme, and are very good at hiding themselves in thick cover during the day. They do not like to be disturbed. Oftentimes if you find one, there'll be more - Long-eared Owls are frequent communal roosters and I have seen up to 20 in one tree before. This bird is apparently a loner, but this site, on the edge of the sprawling Caesar Creek State Park, contains an abundance of suitable habitat. You can bet there are probably other Long-eared Owls in the area.

We had a distinct advantage in that Bill knew exactly which cedar the owl was roosting in. We cautiously advanced, and spotted the white-washed branch, above, from a good 75 feet away. A quick scan with the binocs revealed the owl - producer of the guano - sitting a few feet higher in the tree.

Spotting the big-eared beast so far away was good, as we didn't have to approach so closely as to impinge on the owl's comfort zone. This photo was taken with my 300 mm lens, and cropped. It's no award winner, but shows the animal well enough. As is so often the case when word gets out about roosting Long-eared Owls, there was a well trampled trail leading directly to the base of the cedar tree. Fawning admirers standing at the base of the tree would be within 15 feet of the roosting owl, and that's too close.

A very good strategy for observing roosting Long-eared Owls, once their roost tree is known, is to carefully search for gaps in the foliage from a long ways back. That's what we did, and by sidling back and forth in the meadow we eventually discovered an opening in the cedar - like a little window to the owl. We could then set up my scope and beam right in on the bird, and although we were at least 75 feet away, our views were probably better than one would have by standing under the tree and looking up at the nervous owl.

Another benefit to the observer of remaining well outside the owl's comfort zone is that it will act naturally. If you are looking at a roosting Long-eared Owl and it is rigidly upright, body sleeked to impossibly thin dimensions and looking all the world like a broken snag, it is because the bird is on high alert. You've spooked it. Its next course of action would be to flush, and that's a bad deal for one of these highly nocturnal creatures. If a sharp-eyed crow or other songbirds spot it flying off, the poor owl is in for a lengthy torment, and its persecutors will probably summon all their buddies to join in. Worse yet, the owl becomes exposed to other predators, mainly larger birds of prey, who might wish to make a snack of it.

So, we were able to leisurely admire the Long-eared Owl through the scope as it sat fat, fluffed and droopy-eyed. It paid us no mind, and we could ooh and aah over its jumbo ear tufts, burnt-orange facial discs, and cryptic coloration. At one point a nearby Blue Jay let loose with a scream, and the owl snapped to full alert. I'd rather have the jay annoy the owl than us.

I think much consideration should be taken when deciding to report roosting Long-eared Owls. Revealing their location far and wide, such as through bird listservs, is sure to cause a stampede to the site. That's understandable, as Long-eared Owls are hard to find and quite charismatic. I personally want every person on earth to see one, as a personal experience with such a bird may well win converts to birds and conservation.

On the other hand, the owls' welfare comes first. If it appears that the owls are in a situation where excessive visitation may cause the birds problems, it may be better to keep them under your hat and not reveal their whereabouts. But in some situations, such as the one featured here, it is possible to have your cake and eat it too, so to speak. It takes a bit more time and effort, and a spotting scope, but distant views can be every bit as rewarding as getting right up in the owl's face.

Golden Eagle - Knox County, Ohio

2012-01-16T14:13:00.000-05:00

Photo: Joel & Valerie Moore

Yesterday, January 15th, Joel & Valerie Moore were taking an early afternoon stroll along the Kokosing Gap Trail in Knox County, when they glanced skyward and saw this massive beast. A juvenile Golden Eagle, Aquila chrysaetos! Fortunately they were able to get the camera lens up in time to fire off this nice shot. Golden Eagles take five years to attain full adult plumage, and this bird looks like a first-year, given the amount of white in the tail and wings. Golden Eagles are always major rarities in Ohio, and winter reports are few and far between. This eagle may be overwintering, and refindable.

The Moores saw the bird about one mile east of Gambier, along the north side of the Kokosing River. The Kokosing Gap Trail parallels the north side of the river. They were near Killduff Road (County Rd. 230) when they saw the eagle, and this is probably the place to start searching.

Thanks to the Moores for sharing their sighting and photo, and best of luck to anyone who seeks the eagle. Let us know if you relocate it.

The Blue Jay: An Avian Johnny Appleseed

2012-01-15T11:17:00.002-05:00

A bold Blue Jay sweeps into a backyard feeding station. Some feeder-watchers bemoan the brash jays. These blue beauties are known for their brazen behavior. The little corvids do know how to make an entrance, often roaring into the yard full of bluster and bravado, scattering the lesser birds and appropriating the feeders for themselves. John James Audubon captured the devilish impudence of these saucy birds masterfully, his painting of Cyanocitta cristata quite literally depicting a jay with egg on its face.

Of course, I am describing the Blue Jay far too anthropomorphically. They do what they do, because evolution and natural selection have shaped and defined their behavior. While some people may find some of their behavioral traits less than admirable, the blue screamers are probably among the most important songbirds in the ecology of the eastern deciduous forest. Following is a brief article I penned about jays a few years back for the Ohio Division of Wildlife's On Ohio's Wild Side series:

Blue Jays: Down But Not Out

Anyone who feeds birds is familiar with the antics of blue jays, one of our most common and easily recognized songbirds. Bold and full of bluster, jays roar into the feeding station like a ton of bricks wrapped in feathers, startling more passive birds back into the shrubs.

According to Project FeederWatch, sponsored by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, blue jays are the sixth most common species to visit Ohio feeders. Of the 373 backyard feeding stations that reported results to Cornell, jays visited over 91 percent.

So, what’s going on this winter? Many Ohioans have reported seeing few if any blue jays, especially in the extensively forested regions of southern and eastern Ohio. West Nile Virus had a detrimental impact on this species back in the early 2000s, and some fear that West Nile has reared its ugly head once again.

Fortunately, the answer to our current shortage of jays is probably much less scary than the ravages of disease. When not plundering your feeders, blue jays are highly dependent upon the nuts of oak trees – acorns. These hard, woody fruit are like vegetative M & Ms to a jay, and collectively, blue jays harvest staggering numbers of acorns in fall and winter. Fully two thirds of a jay’s diet at this time is comprised of acorns and other tree mast such as hickories and beechnuts.

A hard-working blue jay can collect several thousand nuts in one season. If the nuts are small, such as pin oak acorns or beechnuts, a skilled jay can make off with five or more at a time. They’ll quickly consume plenty of their loot, but jays are inveterate hoarders, caching far more acorns than they can immediately eat. Like a feathered pirate hiding his treasure, a jay stockpiles acorns by burying them in the ground.

While jays remember the location of many of their nut caches, they also forget about others. As a consequence, the blustery blue birds are the avian Johnny Appleseeds of the oak world, planting untold scores of oaks each year. So prolific are they in burying – and losing – acorns that some scientists think that blue jays were the primary factor in the swift northward expansion of oaks following the last glacial period.

Oaks are cyclical in their production of acorns: there are boom and bust years. In 2008, scads of acorns were produced, and jays seemed to be everywhere. Last season’s acorn crop was pretty lean, especially in southern Ohio. As a consequence, there was less food for blue jays, and thus fewer screaming bolts of blue in our woodlands. Next winter, it’ll likely be a different story.

Snowy Owl makes front page!

2012-01-13T07:12:00.000-05:00

This is the front page of the Columbus Dispatch, yesterday January 12th, 2012. A striking photo of a Snowy Owl, taken by Nina Harfmann in north-central Ohio, dominates. CLICK HERE for the story. The owl shunted aside all of the politics, war, crime and other typical newsfare of the day. If you saw the paper yesterday, you saw the owl - it just couldn't be missed. As a result, word of birds and birding probably reached a few hundred thousand people in one fell swoop.

Props to Nina for her excellent photo, and kudos to the Dispatch for their consistent coverage of nature and the environment. By the way, Nina's beautiful photo of a spotted salamander will be featured on the 2012 Ohio Wildlife Legacy Stamp (OWLS). CLICK HERE for a look.

As a sad footnote, the owl in Nina's photo was found dead yesterday, the apparent victim of starvation. That fate, unfortunately, probably awaits all too many of these juvenile owls that venture this far south in search of food. On the upside, three new Snowy Owls were reported in Ohio yesterday (the reports need confirmation) and may they thrive.

A bizarre bilateral gynandromorph

2012-01-11T23:27:00.001-05:00

My posts on aberrant plumages of Northern Cardinals, HERE, HERE, and HERE, brought a lot of interesting feedback and put me on to other strange cardinals. But the one that follows may take the cake in sheer weirdness. Someone tipped me to Larry Ammann's website, which is full of beautiful imagery. Check it out HERE. Amongst Larry's treasure trove of photos was a beast the likes of which few people have ever seen. Read on...

Photo: Larry Ammann ©

Welcome to the wacky world of bilateral gynandromorphism. This feathered oddity appeared at Larry's feeders at his Texas abode about a year ago. I can only imagine his surprise upon sighting this Northern Cardinal. Gynandromorphy is a genetic aberration that causes an organism to have both male (andro) and female (gyn) parts. Occasionally gynandromorphic animals turn up that appear to be cleaved into separate sexes right down the middle, hence the bilateral modifier.

Photo: Larry Ammann ©

He/she turns her/his best side to the camera. I have seen photos of bilaterally gynandromorphic butterflies before, and they can be spectacular. One wing is that of male; the other wing is of a female. But apparently this condition is very rare in the bird world. While Larry's cardinal isn't unerringly and exactly split down the middle, plumagewise, it's close. In the photo above, we're looking at the female side of things, obviously.

Photo: Larry Ammann ©

So, what causes gynandromorphy? It's somewhat complicated and certainly not my field of expertise, so if you want to plumb the depths of gynandromorphism and its causes, GO HERE. That site also has some cool photos of gynandromorphic butterflies.

Photo: Larry Ammann ©

The only finishing touch that could have made this bird look any cooler would have been if its crest was also bicolored. But any way you shake it, this is one strange and stunning cardinal.

Thanks to Larry Ammann for sharing his images with us.

Snowy Owl on NPR

2012-01-10T22:27:00.001-05:00

Photo: Dane Adams

Yesterday turned into a bit of an unexpected but exciting whirlwind when I received a phone call from Carol Klinger with National Public Radio. Turns out that the NPR folks wanted to do a spot on this winter's invasion of Snowy Owls. They turned first to regular NPR commentator Julie Zickefoose, who in turn put Carol onto me. Thanks for the tipoff, Jules!

I ran down to NPR affiliate WCBE's station near downtown Columbus, and settled in the booth with Alison Holm, whose voice I was intimately familiar with as I'm a longtime NPR listener via WCBE. At 2 pm, All Things Considered host Melissa Block patched through and off we went! This was a thrill for me, as I've listenened to Melissa for years; NPR is my standard radio fare for the work commute.

So off we went into the world of Snowy Owls and this year's invasion. Trying to encapsulate the gist of such a large subject into a few minutes of radio time is a challenge, but we did the best that we could and hopefully it came out alright. Because NPR beams out nationwide, I heard about the spot from friends all over the country, which was cool. My favorite comment came from a dear friend on the east coast, which said in part: "... and you didn't sound at all geeky!". Hmmm...

Anyway, should you wish to listen to Melissa and I discussing owls, CLICK HERE.

And now, a white-headed cardinal!

2012-01-09T22:21:00.002-05:00

My recent posts on Northern Cardinals with aberrant coloration seemed to spark a fair bit of interest, and I've received many notes about other strange-looking cardinals. Here's yet another, and it was so odd in appearance that I begged permission to use the photos here.

Photo courtesy of Jane Simcox

Jane Simcox has had this (for simplicity's sake we'll call it a partial albino) female Northern Cardinal at her Akron-area feeders for a while now, and it's a charmer.

Photo courtesy of Jane Simcox

The bird looks as if it flew headlong into a snow bank! A very strange and distinctive animal, to be sure. I would love to cross it with Mr. Yellowbird in THIS POST. I'm sure the offspring would be remarkable.

Big thanks to Jane for sharing her elegant cardinal.

New River Birding & Nature Festival

2012-01-07T00:01:00.004-05:00

Well, we've ushered out 2011 and successfully managed the arrival of 2012. A new year means new opportunities, and it's time to start planning one's calendar. With that in mind, I will periodically present bulletins about some bona fide fun and educational events.

One of the very best festivals out there is the New River Birding & Nature Festival, based in scenic Fayetteville, West Virginia. I've been down for this one for about seven years now - leading trips and speaking - and it's a legitimate blast. This year's dates are April 30 - May 5. Come for some, or all. It's the festival's 10th anniversary, and the organizers have pulled out all the stops.

And now, for a tiny pictorial peek into a little sliver of what we can expect...

The spectacular New River bridge, the dominant manmade feature of this region. It passes over the New River, some 900 feet up. For those bold enough, one of this year's offerings is a "bridge walk" - on narrow catwalks under the bridge deck! You'll get up close and personal with the resident Peregrine Falcons, and probably some Rock Pigeons, too.

A group scopes out an unusually cooperative, teed up Great Crested Flycatcher at Hawk's Nest State Park. We hadn't even made it out of the parking lot at this point, but once we did, many more excellent sightings were made. An incredible cast of guides - and I'm not saying I'm one of 'em! - are deployed at New River, and they know where all the goodies are. You can expect to see a LOT of different species. CLICK HERE for the New River cast of guiding characters.

A cooperative male Canada Warbler investigates one of my groups. I pretty much know this guy. He comes out, with no prompting, each year to have a gander at us. We'll see many other species of warblers, and get looks like this at most of them.

A crowd favorite and major target is the Swainson's Warbler. We'll get 'em. They breed along picturesque streams buffered by tangles of great rhododendron and overshadowed by towering hemlock.

Mist-cloaked mountains form the backdrop to Cranberry Glades Botanical Area. Occasionally, a black bear comes shuffling down that boardwalk. The birding at this high-elevation locale is beyond incredible.

The corrugated leaves of green hellebore, Veratrum viride, punctuate the swampy woods at Cranberry Glades. Nearly all of the boreal breeding songbirds nest here, near the southern limits of their ranges in these high Appalachian mountains. Winter Wren, Blackburnian Warbler, Red-breasted Nuthatch and many more. There are even resident Red Crossbills!

If the Dark-eyed Juncos have departed your feeders by the time of the New River festival, you'll renew contact with them at Cranberry Glades. These slaty little sparrows nest there commonly.

They do have indoor plumbing in West Virginia, and that goes for any of the places that you might be staying. But there are outhouses, too, and this one has become famous. It's at Burnwood State Park, where we eat breakfast and stage field trips each morning. They leave the lights on, and by morning blizzards of interesting moths have gathered. Word has it that this is where the incredible Luna-Hawk was discovered. As a special treat, moth expert Seabrooke Leckie will be part of this year's festival. She illustrated the brand spanking new Peterson Field Guide to Moths. I'm sure she'll have a ball at this outhouse.

While birds are always prioritized - they can fly away, after all! - we don't shun the flora. This beauty is a painted trillium, Trillium undulatum. Even the nonplantpeople often find themselves becoming smitten with all of the sensational plants that brighten the spring West Virginia woods.

Your blogger helps to form a human chain around one of West Virginia's largest plants, the state champion tulip tree, Liriodendron tulipifera. For those who make the Muddlety field trip, stopping to pay homage to this sylvan giant is a must.

Bright, shiny, and gimlet-eyed, this brilliant orange red eft ventures out on a damp day. We'll see these fascinating amphibians, and probably lots of them. Efts, as strongly suggested by their day-glo coloration, are highly toxic. Don't eat any.

The Mountaineer State's namesake butterfly, the West Virginia white. We'll see butterflies galore, including more showy pipevine swallowtails than you've probably ever seen before.

The New River Birding & Nature Festival is all about seeing lots of birds, other critters, and plants, all while having a great time. This group is celebrating some great find, maybe a Cerulean Warbler. Speaking of which, Katie Fallon, author of the newly released book Cerulean Blues, will also be with us. The surprises just never end!

To cap it all off, the Rain Crows will be performing, hot on the heels of their brand new CD which will debut in March. Some of you may know band members Bill Thompson and Julie Zickefoose, who will do double duty as guides and speakers. Far left is Wendy Eller, and in the back beating on the bass is Craig Gibbs.

You just don't want to miss this shindig. All of the New River Birding & Nature Festival details are RIGHT HERE. Hope to see you down in the mountains this spring!

Ovenbird, in snow

2012-01-05T23:36:00.002-05:00

A frosty-footed Ovenbird, Seiurus aurocapilla, peers quizzically at your blogger. Perhaps the thrushlike little warbler was amused by the large clicking appendage that I sported.

It's been a bit of a warblerpalooza this winter in central Ohio. First, this tough little Ovenbird turns up at Inniswood Metro Gardens on December 7, as reported HERE and HERE. Then comes word of an American Redstart, Setophaga ruticilla, that was found on the Columbus Christmas Bird Count back on December 18. That's really an amazing find, and would set the record late date for an Ohio redstart. Finally, Rob Thorn turned up a Northern Waterthrush, Parkesia noveboracensis, in southern Delaware County two days ago.

I could stand no more, and off I shot at lunch today to try and hunt down that waterthrush and shoot it with my camera. No cigar. Rob found the bird in a land of plenty for foraging waterthrushes, and it has apparently moved off the spot where he saw it.

Fortunately for me and my prospects of a multiple species warbler list for January in Ohio, the Inniswood Ovenbird was directly en route on my return trip. Tom Bain and I arrived at the Innis House simultaneously, sauntered on in, and had to wait about 0.005 seconds before seeing the bird. There it was, the jaunty little tail-cocker, boldly strutting about the wooden deck picking at shards of seed cast from the feeders above. A rather surreal scene, this summertime warbler strolling about an ice and snow covered deck, keeping a sharp eye on a trio of bruiser gray squirrels who were also vaccuuming seeds from the planking.

Senor (Senora?) Ovenbird's injury is obvious in this photo (dark blotch, mid flank), and it's the effects of that wound that probably led to it forgoing the long flight to the tropics, where most of its ilk are currently residing. Ovenbirds rank high on the (literal) hit list of bird species tallied beneath buildings and towers, but I don't think that injury is the result of striking an unforgiving inanimate object. Perhaps a Sharp-shinned Hawk got in a swipe. The bird can still run like a trailer park tart chasing the new lottery winner two double-wides down, and flies like a bullet, so it's in at least reasonable health. Whatever the cause of its yen to stick in the north, we've got an Ovenbird well on its way to overwintering in central Ohio, and providing an unlikely tick for all of those twitchers going after a Big January List.

Try and get out to Inniswood and become a member of Eskimo Ovenbird's fan club. And when you do, allot some time to give this 123-acre park/arboretum/natural area the once over. It is one of the most beautiful patches in central Ohio and is chock full of wildlife. You'll exit with a good-sized bird list, and an appreciation for the vision of the grounds' original owners, Grace and Mary Innis.

Major props to Jen Snyder and Jennifer Kleinrichert for bringing our unexpected wintertime visitor to light, and to Jennifer for so diligently keeping the birding community up to date on the Ovenbird's status.

And now, a white\pink cardinal!

2012-01-04T23:36:00.000-05:00

Photo: Paul Hurtado

Back on December 29, Paul Hurtado was strolling through some woods along the Olentangy River here in Columbus when he encountered a most interesting beast (Ohio birders will probably remember last May's famous Kirtland's Warbler, which Paul also found here in Columbus). The female Northern Cardinal in the photo is a fully leucistic individual, which means that it has a genetic trait that blocks the production of melanin. Melanins are pigments that manifest themselves as dark colorations in feathers, but they also serve a whole host of other functions. David Sibley has done a thorough and scholarly job of detailing pigment abnormalities in birds RIGHT HERE.

This pink & white cardinal is just about as crazy looking as the yellow one in the preceding post, and thanks to Paul for brining it to light.

The yellow cardinal lives on

2012-01-03T21:14:00.000-05:00

Photo: Tom Ruggles

One of the most popular posts that I've ever made on this blog involved the spectacular bird in these photos. Almost exactly three years ago, Tom Ruggles of Zanesville sent along photos of this striking North Cardinal, Cardinalis cardinalis, but it wasn't just any old run of the mill redbird. In fact, it wasn't red at all - it was a "yellowbird"! Technically speaking, this cardinal is xanthochroic (zan-tho-kro-ik). That fancy term describes a genetic anomaly that creates yellowish overtones in birds. Rather than rehash the workings of xanthochroism here, should you be interested, don your propeller-topped beanie and see MY ORIGINAL POST.

Photo: Tom Ruggles

The lutino cardinal shares the feeding station with a male House Finch and an American Goldfinch. Without doubt, this is the coolest cardinal that I've seen.

Last Friday, I participated in the Chandlersville Christmas Bird Count, which covers the Wilds and nearby rural Muskingum County. And there I finally met Mr. Ruggles, who brought this strange cardinal to light and has no doubt fed it many pounds of seed. And to my great surprise and pleasure, Tom reported that the yellow cardinal was still very much alive and well, and remains a regular visitor at his feeders!

Finding this to be rather awesome news, I asked Tom to please send along some recent photos and he was kind enough to oblige. And here we have it - the famous yellow cardinal of Muskingum County, at least three plus years of age and still kicking. I hope that this cardinal that was touched by Midas continues on for a LONG time!

Thanks much to Tom Ruggles for sharing his photos, and doing his part to support this bird!

Great Gray Owl

2012-01-01T17:19:00.005-05:00

Photo: Dane Adams

What may be North America's biggest celebrity owl glares balefully at the camera. This Great Gray Owl, Strix nebulosa, turned up near Kingsville, Ontario, Canada on December 23rd. Only very rarely does one of these giant killer puffballs turn up in the southern Great Lakes region - Kingsville is just west of Point Pelee and only some 20 miles north of the Ohio border, on the other side of Lake Erie.

Lots of people have made the trip to see this charismatic owl, photographer Dane Adams among them. Dane sent along a few of his characteristically excellent photos, and allowed me to post them here.

As an aside, Ohio has only two confirmed records of this boreal hooter, the last of which dates to 1947 on a tiny Lake Erie islet dubbed Starve Island. Legendary Ohio ornithologist and bird collector Milton B. Trautman made the observation as he boated from his home on South Bass Island in Lake Erie on a late October day. Starve Island is about 25 miles south of where the Kingsville owl is being seen. That'd be something if this owl decided to island hop into Ohio waters. If it ends up on one of our islands, ferry ticket sales will spike big time, I'll tell you that!

Photo: Dane Adams

As they usually are, this Great Gray Owl is quite tame, and getting good looks presents no problems. Unfortunately, when Great Grays venture this far south, and are active during the day, it sometimes means they are starved and desperate for food. But it should also be noted that owls that breed in the northernmost reaches of the boreal forest belt are often diurnally active during the short days of winter, and excessive tameness and daylight activity do not necessarily mean that the owl is unhealthy. Hopefully this one will fare well and eventually make its way back to its northern haunts.

Great Gray Owls look utterly massive, and they are in terms of physical dimensions. This bird is over two feet in length and its outstretched wings span 4 1/2 feet. That's noticeably larger than a Great Horned Owl. But, the Great Gray Owl only weighs about 2/3rds of the Great Horned, or about the same as The Sibley Guide to Birds.

As would be expected, the Kingsville owl is garnering lots of attention, and not just from birders. CLICK HERE for an article in The Windsor Star about the bird. Be sure and read the comments following the article for a taste of some of the people-related issues that have arisen. Much more in the way of flaming comments have come out on various listservs such as THIS ONE. Some of what is being said is certainly factual, other bits are definitely exaggerated, but the bottom line is everyone should give the owl its space and put the bird's welfare first.

I greatly admire and respect the work of photographers such as Dane Adams, who provided these photos. He and most other lensmen that I know do not harass their subjects, nor do they interfere with birders or other interested people who may also be present. And the results of their work bring the beauty and magic of birds to legions of people who might otherwise never see these species. Frankly, I'm also a little jealous of their 600 or 800 mm lens which allow them to knock off gorgeous shots from afar!

Thanks as always to Dane for sharing his wonderful work.

Raptor stamps coming soon!

2011-12-29T17:51:00.003-05:00

In a beautiful tribute to five of the coolest birds of prey soaring about the globe, the U.S. Postal Service will release a series of raptor stamps on January 20, 2012.

Artist Robert Giusti created the beautiful images that will embolden your letters. All five species - Northern Goshawk, Peregrine Falcon, Golden Eagle, Osprey, and Northern Harrier - can be seen right here in Ohio, and far beyond.

I applaud the postal service for promoting birds through this eye-catching collection. Be sure to pick some up. For a bit more on the back story, CLICK HERE.

Pomarine Jaeger: An Avian Pirate

2011-12-28T23:05:00.007-05:00

I was pleased to recently receive a raft of wonderful photos, courtesy photographer Chuck Slusarczyk of Cleveland. His stunning images of a Pomarine Jaeger, Stercorarius pomarinus, bear sharing and Chuck was good enough to allow me permission to post them here.

Photo: Chuck Slusarczyk

A beautiful, fierce subadult Pomarine Jaeger wings by Wendy Park near downtown Cleveland. This bird has been hanging out in this area for a while. In general, jaegers are rare in Ohio and nearly all records come from Lake Erie. Most birds are in rapid transit in fall and early winter, and probably quickly move west to east down the lake and remain out of sight to land-bound observers. Occasionally a "Pom" finds a desirable locale, and sticks around, like this bird is doing.

Photo: Chuck Slusarczyk

Immature jaegers can be tough to ID, and this is a group where lots of comparative experience with the three species is very helpful (Great and South Polar Skua are also in genus Stercorarius, but they are very different beasts, and strictly marine. About zero chance for either in Ohio). Long-tailed Jaeger, Stercorarius longicaudus, is by far the rarest of the lot in Ohio. Long-taileds are the smallest, lightest and consequently most bouyant of the jaegers. One weighs less than half that of the much sturdier Pomarine. They appear ternlike in flight, especially when compared to the burly purposeful flight of a Pom. Perhaps one Long-tailed is reported every year or two in Ohio, and they're early birds - usually seen in September or October.

SIDEBAR: I've said this before and I'll say it again. One of the great, simple innovations of the landmark 2000 Sibley Guide to Birds is David's inclusion of weight for each species. I suppose other guides omit that vital statistic under the premise that one can't see weight. Not true - the weight of the bird can effect its overall look and flight characteristics, especially in comparison with similar species.

Separating Pomarine Jaeger from Parasitic Jaeger, S. parasiticus, is often problematic. The two are fairly close in size, although if we go back to the Sibley weight reports, an average Parasitic weighs about 1/3rd less than a Pomarine. In comparison with the ever present Ring-billed Gull, a Parasitic should appear slightly smaller, while the more massive Pomarine will appear larger. Pomarines also show a nice "double flash" of white at the base of the underside of the primary flight feathers, as Chuck's first photo beautifully illustrates. A Parasitic normally has a single broad band of white.

Photo: Chuck Slusarczyk

All of the identification issues aside, jaegers are just VERY COOL BIRDS. Jaeger is an English spelling of the German word Jager, which means "hunter". It's an apt moniker for these warlike birds that make their living by pursuing gulls and terns that have caught prey, and harassing them until the legitmate earner of the fish is forced to drop its prey, which is then quickly snatched up by the jaeger. Such bullying behavior is termed kleptoparasitism. No one likes a bully, and the gulls seemingly detest the presence of a jaeger. When a jaeger enters the scene, it often causes an electric ripple of palpable tension among the gulls, who will often rise in mass. Observing a jaeger single out a gull and acrobatically pursue it until the bird disgorges its fish is a thing of beauty, no matter what one thinks of avian bullies.

Jaegers nest in the high reaches of the Arctic tundra, and there they subdue their thuggish instincts somewhat and become highly dependent upon a small mammal, the brown lemming. So wedded are breeding Pomarine Jaegers to these furry little sausages that their breeding success correlates closely with lemming population booms and busts. In fact, Poms will actually locate lemming burrows and dig the little beasts out! But once a hood, always a hood, and they also grab eggs and nestling birds.

The vast majority of jaegers are pelagic in winter, spending the season far out at sea. Thus, a wintertime Pomarine Jaeger on Ohio's freshwater "sea", Lake Erie, is always a treat. Thanks to Chuck for sharing his excellent photos.

American Tree Sparrow

2011-12-26T22:59:00.001-05:00

While traipsing through the winter-browned Sandusky Plains prairies today, I crossed the path of some American Tree Sparrows, Spizella arborea. Lucky me, and I had my camera in tow. These jaunty little sparrows rank high among my favorite birds, and I settled in to watch the little flocks as they worked over the seeds of goldenrod, switch grass and other ripenings.

I'm usually first alerted to foraging tree sparrows by their thin wispy tseet notes - contact calls by which they talk to each other. Sooner or later, the flock will take wing, blowing low over the ochre prairie like delicate little leaves on the wind. Their sweetly musical flight notes sound like tiny icicles shattering. The tree sparrow and its subtle melodies mesh perfectly with the barren prairies of winter.

Should you have an interest, I wrote in more detail about American Tree Sparrows HERE.

The beauty of starlings

2011-12-24T22:07:00.000-05:00

Photo: Paul Lomax/Wiki Commons

The good ole European Starling, Sturnus vulgaris, in nonbreeding plumage. This species, handsome as it may be, is one of the most reviled of North American birds.

Photo: Dick Daniels/Wiki Commons

In its breeding finery, the European Starling is actually a showy bird. Fronted with a bright lemon-yellow bill, the starling is a study in glossy iridescence, reflecting rich purples and deep greens depending on how the light strikes the bird.

European Starlings, however, have no place in North America. They were intentionally released in the early 1890's in New York City by the ecologically ignorant Shakespearean Society. These avid buffs of all things Bill got it in their minds that all animals mentioned by the legendary bard should be established here, so that these beasts might enrich our lives on a daily basis. Fortunately most of their introduction efforts failed, but the starling was a grand success and is now one of the most common birds in the lower 48 states. Starlings' cavity-nesting habits and aggressive demeanor have allowed them to displace many native hole-dwelling birds.

So starlings' reputations have been tarred by the American experience. But there are about 220 species in the family Sturnidae worldwide, and many of them rank high among the most beautiful birds on the planet. I was recently birding with Bernie Master, who had just returned from an Africa trip, and we got on the subject of starlings. Bernie had made some great photographs of some of the showier species, and allowed me to share some with you. I lifted a few other beauties from Wiki Commons to further illustrate the gorgeous diversity of the starling family.

Photo: Dr. Bernard Master

Cape Glossy Starling, Lamprotornis nitens. The specific epithet nitens means shining. Found throughout much of southern Africa.

Photo: Wiki Commons

Hildebrandt's Starling, Lamprotornis hildebrandti. Found in Kenya and Tanzania.

Photo: Dr. Bernard Master

Chestnut-bellied Starling, Lamprotornis pulcher. Ranges throughout much of northern Africa.

Photo: Dr. Bernard Master

White-collared Starling, Grafisia torquata. Found throughout much of western and central Africa.

Photo: Emma Dusepo/Wiki Commons

Superb Starling, Lamprotornis superbus. Ranges throughout much of eastern Africa. The animal is indeed superb in appearance.

Photo: Dr. Bernard Master

Meve's Glossy-Starling, Lamprotornis mevesii. Found throughout much of South Africa.

Photo: Dr. Bernard Master

Pale-winged Starling, Onychognathus nabouroup, another South African species.

There are many other beautiful starlings in the world, from Eurasia to Australia to remote Pacific islands. The family also includes the Mynas of eastern Asia.

A gathering of starlings is termed a mumuration. A large murmuration of European Starlings can be a beautiful thing, the swirling cloudlike flocks moving as one, as if a collective brain controls the entire group. CLICK HERE for an utterly amazing murmuration experience.

Big bucks and big racks

2011-12-23T15:22:00.001-05:00

Last Sunday, Bernie Master and I were patrolling the expansive Green Lawn Cemetery on the south side of Columbus, Ohio, tallying birds for the local Christmas Bird Count. Suddenly a bonus trotted into view - these three buck white-tailed deer, Odocoileus virginianus. They were accompanied by five anterless deer, does apparently.

These two were the studs, without doubt. Anytime the antlers (rack) flares outward beyond the ears, the animal will look impressive. By my reckoning, both of these beasts are 10-point deer. The terminus of each antler branch, or tine, counts as a point and in the eastern U.S. the custom is to add all of the points up for the point score. In the west, they typically count only one side, so on the other side of the Mississippi these would be five-pointers.

Eight of the points are obvious (the small central brow tines count). Look closely and you'll see a small spur tine on the forward right beam of the deer on the left side of the photo. Both of the big bucks had these small spurs on both of their beams, and by Boone & Crocket rules a tine must be at least one inch to qualify as a point. By my eyeball reckoning, they were, thus the animals are ten-pointers.

A big white-tail buck can go 250 pounds or more, and I'd say these two were in that range. You can see a lesser male in the backdrop, peeking between the studs. I'm sure many a hunter would dearly love to harvest one of these animals, but these deer are completely off limits within the confines of the 360-acre cemetery.

A wintertime orchid

2011-12-21T21:26:00.002-05:00

Looks can be deceiving. This trash-strewn Jackson County, Ohio gorge is actually a beautiful place, and would look nearly pristine were it not for the cascade of old appliances, bottles, mattresses, fast food containers and various and sundry other junk. It never fails to amaze me how people can so thoughtlessly abuse their own environment. But this is an all too common garbage disposal technique in southern Ohio - cast the rubbish down the steepest slope around.

We - Nina, Heather, and I - were standing roadside here last Saturday, doing our best to pick up the nasal tinhorn trumpets of a Red-breasted Nuthatch. We were tallying avifauna for the Beaver Christmas Bird Count, and our mission was to find as many birds as possible, and the little nuthatch had thus far eluded us. Across the steep-sided ravine was a wall of stately Eastern hemlock trees, their lacey evergreen boughs providing a jarring contrast to the avalanche of litter on our slope.

Suddenly, sharp-eyed Nina announced a nice find, but not of the feathered kind. She had spotted a small colony of one of our most interesting orchids, the puttyroot, Aplectrum hyemale, far down the hill. This find is proof that binoculars come in quite handy when botanizing, as our optics allowed for good views and confirmation of the identity.

Distant views through the bins simply was not good enough, and we slip-slidingly wallowed our way down the treacherous slope. Not only was there jaggedly dangerous rubbish to contend with, but damp leaves cast over muddy ground on a 1 to 1 grade makes for tough hiking. But we eventually arrived at the orchid patch, and I was able to make some photos.

Here we see the distinctive overwintering oval-shaped puttyroot leaves. They are blue-green and thinly pin-striped, like the fabric of some fashion-challenged pimp's zoot suit. The color and pattern look quite nice on these leaves, though. As is so often the case with flora and fauna, the scientific name is instructive: Aplectrum = "without spur", which refers to the flowers' anatomy. The specific epithet hyemale is more telling - it means "of winter".

Puttyroot - and its ally the cranefly orchid, Tipularia discolor - are unusual in that they are more easily found in the dead of winter. Their leaves push from the rich humus of mature forests in fall, and persist throughout the winter, doing their photosynthetic magic and pumping sugars to the underground parts.

Here is the source of the orchid's common name. The tuberous root does indeed resemble a glob of putty. Within this subterranean structure all manner of orchidological magic is taking place, even when northern plant enthusiasts' minds are far from flowering plants, let alone tropical orchids. Throughout our coldest snowiest months, the puttyroot leaf is capturing the feeble short-lived rays of the winter sun, and building up steam for next spring's botanical eruption. We of course replanted this specimen back in its niche after taking photos.

Photo courtesy Delaware Wildflowers: http://www.delawarewildflowers.org/

Voila! Come mid-May, after the pinstriped leaves have largely withered to nothingness, the puttyroot sends forth a beautiful spire of delicate orchid blooms. Their flowering takes place in a very different landscape than the winter scene in which the leaves are found. Nina's plants, when they blossom, will be serenaded by Louisiana Waterthrush, Hooded and Worm-eating warblers, Scarlet Tanagers, and myriad other songbirds. The orchids will add their radiance to a sea of showy spring wildflowers such as toothworts, large-flowered trillium, and wild blue phlox.

That's Nina on the left and Heather on the right, deep within the puttyroot gorge. As we inspected the area, we were delighted to notice many of the massive leaves of the very rare umbrella magnolia, Magnolia tripetala, littering the forest floor. This exotic treelet is at its extreme northern limits here, and is listed as threatened in Ohio. We probably would not have noticed the magnolias had not the orchids' allure enticed us down the slope.

Merlins

2011-12-20T01:05:00.001-05:00

A female Merlin, Falco columbarius, sits high atop a dead snag in Green Lawn Cemetery on Columbus, Ohio's south side. Bernie Master and I were canvassing the cemetery yesterday, doing our part to tally birds for the Columbus Christmas Bird Count.

This is now the 5th or 6th winter in a row that Merlins have returned to Green Lawn. They're generally a snap to find; just patrol the area immediately south of the bridge towards the cemetery's southwest corner, and you should spot one or more of the birds teed up on the most prominent dead snags.

I glanced over at another, more distant snag and there was yet another Merlin, an adult male, or tiercel.

And then, wham! An immature tiercel (falcon-speak for males) shot in like a cannonball and mixed it up a bit with the other male. So, three different Merlins were all in sight simultaneously - the largest number of birds that I have yet seen at Green Lawn. One must wonder if this is a family unit, and if so, where they nested. I believe it is just a matter of time before this species is found nesting in the cemetery.

One of the males speeds off, looking rather nighthawkesque. Merlins are the ultimate "bird hawks", flying down and whacking songbirds with ease. You would not want to be a cardinal or junco and find yourself in the sights of one of these sleek avian missiles.

I find the personalities of Merlins interesting and charismatic. The adult female will sit like a queen atop her snag, seemingly looking with great disdain at all that is beneath her. You can walk right under the tree, and she'll scarcely even bother to cast a glance your way. Mere ground-bound humans are not worth the bother of of even a sideways look. At one point, one of the males returned from a foray, and couldn't resist roaring in low over the perched female, nearly whacking her in the head. She didn't even flinch, or even acknowledge his presence. Total cool.

Courtesy of the National Audubon Society's immense treasure trove of over a century's worth of Christmas Bird Count data, I was able to assemble some instructive charts. The one above depicts the last 50 years of CBC data for Merlin from the entire U.S. A steady upwards climb - Merlins are doing well, and we see this success reflected in the number of birds that are reported each year in Ohio.

Here's the last 50 years of CBC data of Merlin in Ohio. Some prominent peaks and valleys, but a steady and rather dramatic upwards surge. It'll be interesting to see how many are found on statewide CBC's this winter.

Photo: Dr. Bernard Master

Bernie and I were quite pleased to find this stunning male American Kestrel, Falco sparverius, mousing in a large open field near the new police impoundment lot on the south side. These little falcons are increasingly hard to find, especially in the Columbus area, where development has eaten up much of the kestrel-friendly countryside.

Photo: Dr. Bernard Master

In short order, the male's mate appeared and joined him in hunting. Hopefully this is a local pair and is nesting nearby. We found another Merlin not far from where these kestrels were hunting, for a total of four. And only two American Kestrels. Until very recently, I would never have predicted that the day would come when it would be easier to find Merlins than it would American Kestrels on this CBC.

American Kestrels are not doing well. This chart shows the 50-year trend from CBC's nationwide.

Here's the graph of the last 50 years of kestrel numbers from all Ohio CBC's. Again, not encouraging. The counts at the beginning of the graph, which date to the early 1960's, are about the same as recent years. The early data may reflect a lack of birder coverage, though - there were fewer counts and fewer people out conducting counts back then. Last year, a total of 819 kestrels were reported from all Ohio CBC's. The annual average over the last decade was 963 birds. The annual average of the decade prior to that - 1991 - 2001 - was 1,342 kestrels, or 40% more birds than were reported on last year's CBC's.

This graph depicts the last 50 years of kestrel CBC data from the Columbus count. A real nosedive here, and not surprising given how much of the open meadow and field habitat has been lost in this area. Habitat loss, in tandem with much "cleaner" agricultural practices are certainly one of the great factors that is adversely impacting kestrels. Some people think that the boom in Cooper's Hawks is also an issue, as these accipiters will prey on kestrels. Another pinch point for kestrels is the availability of suitable nest holes. They're cavity nesters, and in general good holes are probably becoming harder to find and the competition for them from other cavity-nesters is fierce.

A massive murder of crows

2011-12-18T23:42:00.002-05:00

"The dusky bird is a notorious mischief-maker, but he is not quite so black as he has been painted" (William L. Dawson, 1903)

At the conclusion of a long day of birding in the remote hills of northern Jackson County yesterday, Heather, Nina and I found ourselves heading back north on route 35, not far south of the Ross County line. As twilight's gloom settled in, we glanced up to a distant ridge and saw some American Crows. Well, not just "some". Oodles, actually. "Stop! Turn around"! shouted your blogger, and we soon jagged off the highway onto a rural lane, and motored to a spot that offered a commanding view of the spectacle.

Crows have long had a big roost in this area. We were down there to participated in the Beaver Christmas Bird Count, and I've done nearly every count since its inception many years ago. On my yearly crack of dawn drives, I'd often see massive numbers of crows radiating out from their hilltop roosts on the high ridges just southeast of Chillicothe. This year, they've apparently relocated the party several miles to the south, and in our count circle. So, Nina, Heather and I watched the day's closure along with an estimated 6,000 crows, although we weren't nearly as loud.

Here's a brief video of a small portion of the roost. It can be really hard to pinpoint exact numbers of birds in roosts such as this, but 6,000 was our best shot and it may well be low. The din created by this pack of birds was impressive. Seemingly every one of them had a report to give on the day's activities, and the birds even drowned out the drone of the eighteen-wheelers passing by on the interstate.

Crows are highly social, and large winter roosts are a regular occurrence. Although 6,000 birds seems like a lot, it pales in comparison to some of the larger Ohio roosts. Long-lasting roosts in Springfield, Cambridge, and other Ohio locales have hosted 25,000 or more crows.

I imagine the spectacle of thousands of loudly cackling, cawing crows streaming in and bedecking the trees is a bit unnerving to some of the citizenry. To me, the birds are totally impressive and a thing of beauty. And just to be clear, a "murder" of crows is just an odd term for an assemblage of these wily mischief-makers.

Sharp-shinned Hawk

2011-12-17T20:59:00.002-05:00

Today was the always interesting Beaver Christmas Bird Count, which covers a very rural section of Jackson County in southeastern Ohio. I've been covering the same tract within this count for a decade or more, and today I had the good fortune of having Nina Harfmann and Heather Aubke along. We had a blast, saw lots of birds, and even some noteworthy plants. More on those later, perhaps.

At one point, Heather spotted a small raptor winging over a gap in the forest. We quickly glanced up to see a gorgeous adult Sharp-shinned Hawk, Accipiter striatus, tracing rapid circles. Note I did not say "languid" circles, as I might if the bird were a buteo such as a Red-shouldered Hawk. There is nothing even remotely languid about one of these little death-dealers.

This bird was almost certainly a male, as it was tiny. I managed to lunge skyward with the camera and manage this one OK shot. Note the bird's nicely squared off tail. In life, much more was evident that painted the raptor as a "sharpie": tiny size, rapid, almost frantic wingbeats, elfin head and bill.

I was delighted by this find, as sharpies are easy to miss. And although I think that the 112 years of Christmas Bird Count data is a veritable goldmine of avian information, and much of it is of great use, I am very distrustful of Sharp-shinned Hawk records. Many of them, I am confident, are misidentified Cooper's Hawks. And to a lesser extent, Cooper's Hawks which are actually sharpies.

Anyway, Sharp-shinned Hawks are 220 pounds of Mike Tyson at his prime packaged in Tiny Tim's frame. They're psychotic bundles of testosterone; full of vim and vinegar. No songbird is safe around one. The sharpie is without doubt one of my favorite birds, and it was a pleasure to see one today.

I'm too tired this evening to write more, but HERE IS A LINK to a previous posting about these little toughs.

Blast from the past: Ocellated Turkey

2011-12-15T22:35:00.002-05:00

I was delighted to pick up my new issue of Winging It today, and see an article by Ohio's own Ashli Gorbet plastered across the front page. Winging It is the newsletter - "official!" - of the American Birding Association and as such, is probably the largest circulation birding info-sheet in the Americas.

Ashli, who was hatched in Westlake, Ohio, now hails from Albuquerque, New Mexico where she is secretary of the New Mexico Ornithological Society and works with the Rio Grande Bird Research, Inc. She's smitten with the tropics, and her Winging It article was all about birding in the tiny country of Belize, the northernmost Central American country. Belize is little more than 1/5th the size of Ohio, and its population is only 1/3rd that of my city, Columbus - about 330,000 people, the lowest population density of any Central American country.

A visit to Belize is high on my list, and I hope to finally make it there next year. Ashli's article mentioned some of the fabulous birds that can be found in exotic Belizean haunts, such as White-collared Manakin, Black-headed Trogon, and Keel-billed Toucan. Those birds are old friends from other tropical excursions, but I'd like to see them again, in addition to other possibilities that I haven't seen.

One of the species that Ashli mentions is this splendid glittering chunk of a beast, the Ocellated Turkey, Meleagris ocellata. I took this photo in 2010, in the country just to Belize's south, Guatemala. This is the other turkey; one of only two species in the genus Meleagris. Its sibling species is, of course, the Wild Turkey, M. gallopavo, which is so familiar to North American gringos. Ocellated Turkeys have a far more limited distribution, being found only on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and its immediate environs.

Here is a short video of a tom Ocellated Turkey "singing" as it pulls out all the stops to impress the hens at Tikal in Guatemala. It impressed your blogger.

In addition to Belize, another Central American trip you may find of interest is the Ohio Ornithological Society's upcoming expedition to Guatemala, March 4th thru 13th, 2012. You'll see the gaudy Ocellated Turkey and much more. All of the details are RIGHT HERE.

Congrats to Ashli on a fine article, and I'm sure I'm not the only one she's inspired to jet south to Belize.

Osage-orange

2011-12-13T22:58:00.004-05:00

I have known this gnarled line of sentinels ever since I was a little kid, and old enough to range a mile away from the familial homestead. They're osage-orange trees, Maclura pomifera, and to me they exude a certain twisted charm. When I was just a lad, these trees stood tall, buffering one of Worthington, Ohio's main arteries. I've always harbored a niggling fear that the neighboring office complex maintenance staff would one day hack them down, disgusted with the trees' annual dump of large pulpy fruit.

But apparently others in the area have succumbed to the charm of the "hedge-apple", and so they remain.

As osage-orange trees go, these are titans. The state champ - biggest known specimen in Ohio - is a Coshocton County resident, and it stretches 60 feet skyward. These trees aren't all that far behind. Our line of trees was planted many decades ago, back when neighboring Wilson Bridge Road was just a rural lane. Now, the amoebic ever-expanding suburban sprawl has long eaten the farm fields that these windbreak trees once sheltered. Many of my boyhood wildlands have been consumed by pavement, homes, offices, and box stores, but somehow these tough-wooded trees have survived the axe.

The brains of the tree - in botanicospeak, an aggregation of fleshy drupes. We'll call it a fruit :-) These hedge-apples resemble the lobes of a brain, with the tightly packed drupes forming a random squiggly mass. One of these things weighs a lot, too, and I can tell you that osage-orange fruit make formidable projectiles when opposing gangs of young boys dispatch them against the opposition.

For the most part, animals shun the pulpy hedge-apples, probably in part because they are well-saturated with a foul whitish latex somewhat like the goo found in milkweed plants. But some animals go for them. When I wheeled into the neighboring office complex's back lot, which was strewn with fruit, I surprised two gray squirrels which were industriously tearing the hedge-apples apart.

Apparently squirrels find it worth their while to do battle with the gummy pulp in order to get at the (presumably) tasty seeds buried within. Thus, squirrels may be agents of dispersal for this tree, but they probably aren't the animals that co-evolved with osage-oranges and once acted as the prime transporter of its seeds.

This is the boot-shaped native range of osage-orange - just a limited portion of Texas, and a wee nip of Arkansas and Oklahoma. All the trees that one sees out of this area were brought there by people. A theory has it that now extinct large mammals, possibly giant ground sloths and other large Pleistocene mammals, were the primary consumers of osage-orange fruit. These animals went extinct not long after the first humans colonized North America, and thus the tree's spread was sharply arrested. That's a cool hypothesis.

One animal that still does use the tree heavily are Loggerhead Shrikes. Ones study of nesting shrikes not far from the native range of osage-orange found that nearly 70% of the 57 located nests were nestled within the dense gnarly boughs of Maclura pomifera. Such a tree is an Eden for the "butcherbird". The thick branching provides wonderful cover and support, and the thorny twigs offer plenty of spears on which these feathered impalers can skewer their victims.

Ovenbird continues

2011-12-11T18:17:00.000-05:00

As reported here on December 8th, this Ovenbird, a Neotropical migrant warbler, was found at Inniswood Metro Gardens on December 7th by Jen Snyder and Jennifer Kleinrichert. As I am especially interested in warblers and their ways, I resolved to go visit the animal if it stuck around long enough for me to work it in.

Jennifer has been great about providing status updates on the Ovenbird, as it does not seem to have a Facebook page. As she reported that the warbler was still present yesterday, it was off to the gardens for me bright and early this morning. And a frosty morning it was, with rime glazing the earth's crust and temperatures hovering around the 21 degree mark.

The beautiful Innis House, located smack in the middle of this botanically diverse 123 acre metropark. Over 2,000 plant species can be found; an interesting palette of nonnative ornamentals mixed with native flora and habitats. Our destination? The backyard of this dwelling, which is to your left.

A battery of feeders lures an excellent range of songbirds and others, and the backyard overlooks a well-wooded ravine carpeted in mature white oak and other native trees. An ideal setup for attracting birds, and a likely spot to host a rarity.

We didn't have to wait but a few minutes, and out sashayed the chilly little Ovenbird, waltzing from the cover of a yew as if it were a fine spring morning. In this photo, the animal has assumed its typical tail-cocked look. I did notice that every now and again, the Ovenbird would tuck one or the other of its legs up, no doubt in an attempt to warm its appendages.

The bird feeds on seed cast to the deck from other feeder visitors, and also spends time scratching in the leaf litter under nearby shrubbery. Ovenbirds are habitual ground feeders that pick through leaves seeking various small arthropods, and cold as it is, the hard-working Ovenbird no doubt is able to find some spiders and other tiny animals.

We observed a wound or injury of some sort - not too surprising, as one would not think a healthy, highly migratory Ovenbird would remain into a cold, tough Ohio winter. Although the bird can fly, and I couldn't detect any handicaps, it has suffered some sort of apparent trauma to its left flank. That blackened patch below its wing that is evident in this photo may be the result of an encounter with a raptor, an injury suffered from a building strike, or who knows what. Whatever its cause, I suspect our Inniswood Ovenbird has health issues that are preventing it from making the long journey to its tropical wintering grounds.

At least a few Ovenbirds have been known to survive the entirety of an Ohio winter, and I hope this bird does too. Thanks to Jennifer Kleinrichert for keeping us current with its status via the Ohio Birds listserv.

Rufous Hummingbird in Central Ohio!

2011-12-10T14:59:00.002-05:00

I get lots of calls about this or that; often from people wondering about some odd animal or plant. In the vast majority of cases, their "mystery" organism is something common, at least to me. But I'm always glad to try and help, and what's common to me may not be to others. Anyway, a few days ago I received a call from a lady who started out by saying "I'm worried about my hummingbird..."! Whoa! My ears pricked up like a jackrabbit, knowing that the bird was likely a Rufous Hummingbird, with a remote possibility of some other western species. Our only breeding species, the Ruby-throated Hummingbird, should be long gome by now and hummingbirds seen after mid-October should be closely scrutinized.

Following is a pictorial story of this hummingbird, which is frequenting a feeder near Marysville, Ohio.

I knew I was in the right place when I wheeled up to the house and saw a hummingbird stenciled on the mailbox. The homeowners are crazy about birds, especially hummingbirds, so it is especially fitting that this little rarity chose ther home to fixate on.

Today was the first day I could get to the site, but Tim Daniel, photographer for the Ohio Division of Wildlife, was able to get there two days ago and make some stunning images. From those, I knew it was a hummingbird in the genus Selasphorus - either a Rufous Hummingbird or an Allen's Hummingbird. Separating females and immature birds in the field is very tough, and our bird fit into this category. I got on the horn with expert hummingbird bander Allen Chartier of Michigan immediately after seeing Tim's images, and he was able to arrange to visit the site this morning. Capturing the bird not only reveals its identity for certain, it allows for the bird to be banded and other useful data points to be collected.

In the photo above is Allen's specially designed capture cage. The wire enclosure is hung in the same spot as the feeder that the bird visits, and the feeder then hung inside the cage. The open door is on the right side. Normally this contraption doesn't deter the hummer at all, and it'll shoot right up, circle the cage until it spots the opening, and dart right in.

Aha! About three minutes after Allen set the rig in place, our hummingbird shot onto the scene. I managed to capture this image a split second before the bird flew through the open trapdoor. That's right - trapdoor. Allen was lurking nearby with a remote trigger, and as soon as the hummingbird was in the cage and drinking from the feeder, he triggered the remote which drops that trapdoor. And we had our hummer.

You'd think placing a large cagelike structure around the feeder might raise a red flag for the hummingbird, and cause it to stay away. Not so, and it usually doesn't even slow them down. As you can see, our hummer is now within the confines of the trap.

Here comes the tricky part - extracting the elfin bird safely and without incident. I've been on numerous hummingbird bandings with Chartier, and am always impressed with how quickly he can gently remove them. Experience counts, and Allen has caught scores of hummingbirds over the last decade. He is one of very few licensed hummingbird banders in this region, and we're lucky to have access to him as a resource in Ohio.

Once the bird is in hand, it's off to the makeshift lab which has already been set up nearby. Allen first places an impossibly tiny little metal band around one of the hummer's legs, then quickly gathers other information such as weight, fat content, bill characteristics, tail features, etc. Banders keep a keen eye on the bird's behavior, watching for signs of stress, and even keep a supply of sugar water at hand. Sometimes its good to allow the bird to lap up some of the liquid during the data collecting operation, just to ensure the bird keeps its metabolism at full rev.

Here's the little beauty, up close and personal. By now we know it is an adult female Rufous Hummingbird, Selasphorus rufus, with a weight of 3.65 grams. For comparison, a new copper penny weighs 3.11 grams. In order to separate immature/female Rufous and Allen's hummingbirds, S. sasin, one must be able to carefully inspect the tail feathers, or retrices. That isn't easy to do on a hyperactive free-flying hummingbird. But in the hand, there is no problem and the characteristic features of a Rufous are obvious in this photo. The tail feathers - each is a rectrix; plural, retrices - are numbered from inner to outer. On a Rufous, retrix 2 is slightly notched, but is entire or unnotched in Allen's. Retrix 5, closer to the outer edge of the tail, is broader than the almost needlike narrow R5 of an Allen's.

When it was time to liberate the hummingbird, Allen carefully placed it in the homeowner's hand.

Sometimes the newly freed hummer will instantly dart off; other times, such as in this case, it'll just sit there for a bit looking around. After nearly a minute, little Ms. Rufous suddenly blasted off as if shot from a cannon. She roared by within inches of your blogger's ear, uttering squeaky little profanities all the while. But as always, I am prepared to put my life on the line and deal with dangerous beasts such as this hummingbird to bring you the story.

Within minutes, the Rufous Hummingbird was back at the feeder as if nothing had happened.

Ohio's first Rufous Hummingbird dates to 1985, and we've had something like 70 records since. This species' breeding range is from Oregon and Idaho north through western Canada and as far north as Anchorage, Alaska. They are exceedingly tough little birds, and quite able to deal with cold temperatures. It dipped to the high teens here last night, and it was 22 degrees when Allen caught the bird.

Banding has revealed that some of these seemingly wayward western hummingbirds will return to the same eastern locale for one or even more years. As the ones that appear at our latitude don't overwinter - this bird will probably leave before long - they obviously head to warmer climes whether it is the Gulf Coast, or the typical wintering grounds of western Mexico. Presumably they then head north to the breeding range for the summer.

The reasons for the upward surge in western and southern hummingbird species well east and north of their normal ranges is unsettled, but there are some likely explanations. That's another post however, but I'll try to put up some theories on this topic later.

One tough Ovenbird!

2011-12-08T21:30:00.001-05:00

Photo: Jennifer Kleinrichert

Yesterday, December 7, Jennifer Kleinrichert, who is an environmental educator at Inniswood Metro Gardens in Westerville, Ohio, got a tip from Jen Snyder about an odd bird at Inniswood. Jennifer went to the locale, glanced out the window of the Innis House and spotted an early Christmas present: an Ovenbird, Seiurus aurocapilla!

One does not expect to see an Ovenbird in Ohio in December. These odd ground-walking thrushlike warblers are quite common as breeders in Ohio and throughout much of eastern North America, but sensible warblers that they are, most beat feet to the tropics to ride out the winter.

Map courtesy Birds of North America Online

As can be seen from the parts of this map that are dipped in orange, Ovenbirds largely vacate the United States and Canada in winter, with most departing the Midwest by early October. The motherlode of Ovenbirds end up in the tropics of Central America and southern Mexico, although they also radiate throughout the Caribbean, and a very few even make it to northern South America. Southern Florida is the only place in the United States that one can go and expect to find Ovenbirds in winter.

The jungles of Tikal in Guatemala, as seen from the summit of Temple IV. I was last here in 2010, when I made this photo, and we saw Ovenbirds strolling about these tropical forests. I would think Jennifer's Ovenbird would find Tikal a more hospitable climate than central Ohio in December. It would definitely be amongst more of its peers.

Photo: Jennifer Kleinrichert

Surprisingly, early winter Ohio Ovenbirds are not unprecedented. In fact, there have been perhaps 15 December records in the past 50 years, and at least three of those birds stuck it out for the entire winter. Nonetheless, a wintertime Ovenbird is still quite the rarity and a fantastic find.

Congratulations to Jennifer for finding this bird, and photo-documenting it. I appreciate her sharing her images with us, too. It'll be interesting to see how long this wayward eskimo wannabe Ovenbird sticks around.

Julie Zickefoose speaks! Columbus, 12/12

2011-12-07T18:59:00.001-05:00

Julie Zickefoose, author, blogger, and in-demand speaker holds one of her beloved bluebirds. That'd be hubby Bill Thompson to the rear, threatening to go all Ozzy on the cute little thrush.

Next Monday evening, December 12 at 7:30 pm, right here in Ohio's capital city of Columbus, Julie Zickefoose will be speaking to the Columbus Natural History Society. YOU WILL NOT WANT TO MISS THIS. If you live anywhere within an 83 km radius or even farther, you'll want to make the drive in.

Julie's talk is entitled "Rooted in Appalachia", and it's a brand spanking new program. Bill & Julie dwell on an 80-acre slice of Appalachia, high on a Washington County ridge, and their property and surrounding lands abound with interesting flora and fauna. Julie studies, paints, and photographs all of it, so we can expect a richly illustrated and interesting virtual foray into the natural world that she occupies. I am especially looking forward to this talk, as I have been all over their property and can attest firsthand to its many natural charms.

This is Julie's book, Letters from Eden, and I'm sure they'll be available at the program (her next book will be out soon!).

Be there or be square! The meeting is held in the auditorium at the Ohio State University's Museum of Biological Diversity, 1315 Kinnear Road, Columbus. Doors open at 7:00 pm.

Purple Sandpiper (with notes on Black-tailed Gull)

2011-12-04T14:02:00.002-05:00

The scene at Ashtabula's Lakeshore Park yesterday morning. Peter King and I headed up to Lake Erie bright and early yesterday, to bask in the aura of Ohio's first state record Black-tailed Gull, and look for other rarities. I should have snapped this photo earlier. When we arrived, there were so many birders that I couldn't even slot my scope into a favorable position. I took this shot shortly after the gull made an appearance and rewarded everyone with excellent looks. Much of the crowd then moved on.

All of us who are interested in rare birds owe a debt of gratitude to Craig Holt, who found the Black-tailed Gull back on November 16th. Since then, hundreds of people have seen this beautiful bird, and I'd bet it was a life bird - not just a state bird - for nearly all of them. Craig's find has made its way into the media numerous times, including the first (HERE) and second (HERE) largest circulation Ohio papers, and of course the Ashtabula Star Beacon. All of this attention has surely piqued nonbirders' curiosity about birds, and that can only be a good thing.

Major thanks also go to Jen Brumfield, who has diligently kept the birding community aware of the Black-tailed Gull's every movement. The bird blinks, Jen reports it :-) She even created a mapping system of the Ashtabula lakefront to help people better navigate to the best viewing spots. Also, props to Jerry Talkington, who is a lakefront legend and an extraordinary birder, who has been a major asset to birders on the scene. Jerry is great about helping everyone find the gull, and other interesting birds in the area.

That litter of gulls on yon distant roof hosts the Black-tailed Gull, trust me. The elongate red arrow points directly down at the bird. The range was too much for my camera, but through scopes and binoculars we were treated to outstanding views. There was also a Snowy Owl sitting on the distant breakwall, and two first-cycle Glaucous Gulls were cavorting in the surf just beyond. One later wandered over and landed on the red arrow roof. A Peregrine Falcon also spent quality time basking on a limestone chunk on the breakwall, and Jerry Talkington spotted a Red-throated Loon whipping by low over the lake. To top it off, someone found a Purple Sandpiper nearby, on another distant breakwall. The latter was a LONG ways off, but certainly recognizable. But it surely would have been nice to see this latter Ohio rarity a bit closer...

After savoring Ashtabula's avifauna, Peter and I headed over to nearby Conneaut Harbor, and headed out to the sands of the impoundment. Upon arrival, we saw this curious little knot of birders, seemingly looking at their feet. Aha! I knew this weird behavior could pretty much mean but one thing!

Purple Sandpiper! This species is extraordinarily tame, and I have absolutely no doubt that if someone lay down on the beach and didn't move a muscle, the bird would have just clambered right up and over them. At times, this purple piper bumbled to within ten feet of our group, seldom even casting a glance in our direction. Far more satisfactory views than the distant Ashtabula bird offered!

Note the extraordinary rotundness of the bird. I imagine a healthy Purple Sandpiper is a little blubber cart, the insulating fat helping it to deal with the frigid temperatures and hostile climates that these small beasts must endure.

We see only a relative handful of Purple Sandpipers in Ohio, and nearly all occur along Lake Erie in early winter. This has been a lean year, with only two or three reports. If one is expecting a neon-purple bird ala Barney the Dinosaur, they'll be mildly disappointed. Purple Sandpipers are a beautiful shade of smooth slate on the breast and head, and the tone is quite stunning in good light. Seen very well, a purplish sheen glints from the back feathers. The bright yellowish-orange bill base and feet and legs create a faintly jarring contrast to the soft tones of the plumage.

Map courtesy Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Make no mistake, these Purple Sandpipers are tough customers. They breed in the highest reaches of the Arctic, some 1,800 miles or more north of Conneaut, Ohio. Unlike many of their long-billed shorebird brethren, the purples don't peregrinate to the balmy climes of the southern U.S., the Caribbean, or Central or South America. These plump little toughs ride out the winter in the northern Atlantic maritime region along with Common Eiders and Harlequin Ducks. Chances are this Conneaut bird will soon end up in a place like Barnegat Light, New Jersey.

I was a bit disappointed at the greeting we gave this purple. It was foraging in a rack of non-native zebra mussel shells, intermixed with the washed up rhizomes of invasive giant reed plants, Phragmites australis. Yet the bird appeared happy as a, well, clam and eagerly rooted about the shells like a feathered piglet. I can't imagine the remnants of long-dead zebra mussels pried from their shells is all that appetizing, but apparently the purples are not picky eaters.

A well seen Purple Sandpiper is an objet d' art; a study in beautiful intricacies of color and pattern. The broad frosty tips to this bird's wing and back feathers mark it as a juvenile, meaning this individual was probably born in June. In a miracle of genetic coding, first-year Arctic-nesting sandpipers make the long journey south to their wintering grounds without guidance from older birds. The adults normally depart the Arctic well before the crop of juveniles.

This Purple Sandpiper has survived long odds to make it this far. A great many shorebirds never make it beyond the egg stage, as nests are plundered in great numbers by predators such as Arctic foxes. If they do make it to hatching, young sandpipers are precocial, meaning that they can run about and begin feeding themselves within hours. At this stage, they become exceptionally vulnerable to aerial threats such as jaegers. But if all goes well, we see the stunning results of the parent's labors, as above.

Conneaut Harbor. This protected Lake Erie impoundment is a major port of call for an enormous number and diversity of migrant shorebirds. The harbor also serves scores of ships, which ply the waters of the Great Lakes and far beyond. However, the nautical journeys of vessels stopping at Conneaut pale in comparison to the global wanderings of the sandpipers and plovers that stop here to rest and refuel. At least 33 species have been found at Conneaut, and collectively they will continue on to wintering grounds throughout the Americas. Some will travel as far as southern South America, the other end of the globe.

Click on the photo, and you'll see the new framework of an observation tower that the city is erecting. Conneaut's leaders know that the harbor is a big draw for birders and nature enthusiasts, and they are taking steps to accommodate people with such interests. But in this same photo, you'll see a pickup truck. Were you there, you couldn't have missed it as the idiot behind the wheel spun high speed donuts through the sand, scattering all of the gulls and other birds and disrupting everyone who was on the flats for legitimate purposes. Such motorized mayhem is quite common here. Not exactly the sort of thing that one wants to observe from the new lookout tower.

It would be great if the port authority would close off the sand flats to motorized vehicles, and permit birds and people their peace.

I'll leave you with a short video of the Purple Sandpiper putting on a show for its admirers.

A fly in the pitcher

2011-12-02T20:24:00.002-05:00

In response to my last post, on the carnivorous hooded pitcher plant, Brian Menker sent along an interesting email and a great photo. He reminded me of the 2006 Ohio Botanical Symposium, where we heard Dr. Greg Dahlem of Northern Kentucky University give an interesting talk entitled "Critters in Pitchers". Dahlem delivered a fascinating pictorial expose of the various small animals who cheat the fate of most of their kin, and have evolved strategies for living and breeding within pitcher plants.

A small fly regards your narrator with inscrutable blood-red eyes while perched on a giant ragweed leaf. I took this shot on August 16, 2009 in Miami County, Ohio. It is one of the legions of species in the fly family Sarcophagidae; the "flesh flies". Although it resembles the common house fly, note its foot pads - probably an adaptation to help it avoid sinking into unspeakable substances.

If there's one thing you don't want to come back as, it is a flesh fly. These insects are tasked with some of Nature's most gruesome roles. They flock to the nastiest of the nasty: decomposing animals, dung in every form, even the raw bleeding wounds of mammals. Once a suitably hideous substrate has been located, the female flesh fly deposits her eggs into the foul gruel. They quickly hatch, and it is the wriggling white grub's lot in life to consume whatever mess Mother Fly has stuck them in.

Photo: Brian Menker

So, how does Brian Menker play into this morbid tale? Does Brian even want to factor into this story? Well, yes, he does. A keen biologist and ranger with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Brian remembered the aforementioned Dr. Dahlem's pitcher plant lecture, and knew that a few species of Sarcophagid flies have evolved to utilize the decaying gunk found within a pitcher plant leaf. On a 2007 trip to the Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge in South Carolina, Brian and company found themselves in a colony of yellow trumpets, Sarracenia flava, one of our most striking species of pitcher plant. While admiring the plants, he noticed a fly lurking below one of the plant's hoods, and made the photo above.

Brian's fly is one of the flesh flies that plies its trade within the normally fatal realm of the pitcher plant. For most bugs, entering one of these vegetative traps means its curtains, sure doom, lights out, baby. But not for the fly. It manages to successfully deposit its eggs within the rotting mass of undigested bug debris at the bottom of the pitcher. In short order, the grubs pop from the eggs, and snap to life in this viscous smelly goo. It is their fate to wallow about in the chitinous mire, consuming whatever it is that is edible down there. After a few days, suitably fattened, the grub prepares to pupate. It somehow extricates itself from the botanical death chamber - or perhaps pupates in the wastes of the pitcher plant - and eventually transforms into an adult fly and carries on its species' gruesome lifestyle.

The fantastically complex web of Nature goes far beyond even the most vivid imagination. There are myriad animals out there, doing their thing, and we have no idea they even exist. And somehow, even if seemingly unfathomable to our constrained minds, each of them plays some vital role in the whole shebang of Mothership Earth. Even these flies.

But, I told you that you probably wouldn't want to return as a flesh fly.

A plant that would like to eat you

2011-12-02T01:17:00.002-05:00

One of my goals while in the Okefenokee Swamp was to see carnivorous plants. This vast 400,000 acre wetland abounds with them. November is not the ideal month for peak glory in the meat-eating plant world, but one species still looks cool even in early winter. To reach the really robust populations involved a lengthy boat trip, skiffing over the shallow black waters of the swamp, and ultimately poling the craft through shallows that would have gummed the boat's prop with gunk. We then debarked and set out on foot through the expansive sedge mats to explore the margins of shrubby copses, such as above.

Many fine animals were seen on the journey, including this especially tame Sandhill Crane. Boats are always effective vehicles for viewing wildlife, as animals often permit much closer approach than they would if one were on foot.

It was a pleasure to encounter this American Bittern actively stalking its prey. At one point, we registered on its radar, and it went into its reed-bending-in-the-wind display, holding its neck skyward and gently swaying back and forth.

Ah! The real botanizing began once we jammed the boat against a peaty shore and hopped out to cast around on foot. It wasn't long before we encountered a platoon of spathulate-leaved sundew, Drosera intermedia. Click the photo and admire the glistening "dew drops" tipping the hairs of the leaves. While each drop resembles a water droplet, it is actually a viscous secretion produced by the plant. These tiny herbaceous carnivores use the droplets, and probably other chemical cues, to lure small insects. When a naive bug alights on a leaf, expecting a tasty snack or a refreshing draught, it is instantly snared and held fast by the gluey drops. This triggers the leaf to begin folding over in a relentless death clutch, bringing yet more dew-tipped hairs into contact with the victim. In short order, the insect's soft parts are drained of its proteins and nitrogen - a clever evolutionary adaptation to surving in substrates largely bereft of such necessities.

Looking like baskets of rearing cobras, a luxuriant colony of hooded pitcher plants, Sarracenia minor, thrusts from the mire. It was this spectacular botanical carnivore that I had come to see, and I wanted to see them in luxuriance, deep in the "swamp".

The hooded pitcher plant is truly one of North America's most sensational carnivorous plants. Chances are you'll have to travel to see it in its wild haunts. It's confined to the Atlantic coastal plain, and nearby areas, of Florida, Georgia, and South and North Carolina.

A closeup of the summit of the highly modified leaf, showing the cobralike hood. Note the translucent dots on the back of the pitcher. They may serve to draw in flying insects.

An old flower head, held by our guide Jen. Note her Okefenokee tat.

Seed production is prolific in Sarracenia minor. The seeds are rather hard and pelletlike; possibly an adaptation for long-term seed banking in the rich peaty soils.

This winged flange that extends the entire length of the pitcher leaf is essentially the highway to doom for insects foolish enough to be drawn in by the plant's trickery. We observed many ants clambering up these pitchers, and an enormous variety of other insects will make the climb. The pitcher secretes chemical lures that are concentrated along that flange, which is also painted with anthocyanic (purplish) pigments that provide a visual lure. The upshot is that bugs are deceived into believing that there is a food reward to be had by scaling to the summit of the pitcher. Once the hapless victim has summited, it is likely to enter the gaping maw of the plant, and tumble in.

Pitcher plant sludge - the residue of the undigestable portions of scores of insect victims. The plant has extracted the nutritious portions of the animals, leaving only exoskeletons. Carnivorous plants are a strange, fascinating part of our plant world, and seeing these hooded pitcher plants in the wilds of the Okefenokee was a real treat.

Red-headed Meadow Katydid

2011-11-29T23:07:00.001-05:00

Your narrator at work in the saw palmetto, photographing one of the coolest insects in the southern pine woods. Shortly into my recent foray into the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, I was distracted by a very distinctive singing insect, the likes of which I had never heard. It was clearly one of the meadow katydids, but this species possessed an incredible booming voice. It sounded like a hopped industrial strength automated lawn sprinkler, and even with the distraction of chortling Red-headed Woodpeckers and the odd squeakabilly Brown-headed Nuthatches piping away, I easily noticed the bug's solos.

Being a bit of a student of these sorts of things, I figured the little singer must be the red-headed meadow katydid, Orchelimum erythrocephalum.

Into the scrub I plunged, and rather quickly hunted down the little fiddler. Bingo! A "life" insect, and one that I had wanted to see ever since crossing the red-headed meadow katydid's path in the lush pages of The Songs of Insects. In this dorsal, or top view, the animal may not look like much, but just you wait.

Wow! What's not to like about a red-headed meadow katydid? The deep blood-red face is an incredible contrast to the bug's lime and forest green overall wash, and the rear abdominal segments are also striped in red, creating an artistic complement to the fore part of the katydid.

I was instantly smitten with these red-headed meadow katydids, and hunted up and photographed several of them. The six-legged extroverts are not hard to find, once one is tuned in to their melody. LISTEN HERE. The singing males, such as above, typically mount the highest leafy perch available, and belt their song out to the masses. You could easily hear a singer from 75 feet away.

Meadow katydids, and this species in particular, are rather easy to befriend. Just slowly extend a finger towards the animal, and as it comes into range, the katydid will investigate you with its long wiry antennae. Detecting the presence of salts and other nutrients on your skin, presumably, it'll climb right aboard. Handling the animals in this way makes for fabulous photo ops.

I would like to know more of the variation in the red-headed meadow katydid. The Okefenokee insects appear more colorful and boldly marked than most of the images that I've seen, and the eyes seem more strongly blue. But the song is spot on with all of the recordings that I've heard.

Of course, befriending one of the larger katydids - and red-headed meadow katydids are bruisers in comparison with most of the others - brings on its risks. The reason they like to climb aboard us is to rasp at our skin. Katydids are facultative feeders, tending to graze on whatever is handy, and that's usually plant material. They have very powerful mandibles for crushing seeds and other hard objects, and occasionally can really put the pinch on, especially when they go for your cuticles. It's always fun to help encourage a katydid onto an uninitiated person's finger, and watch their reaction with the first strong nibble.

As I write this entry, the temperature outside is in the low 30's, and there are intermittent snow flurries. I wish I were back in Georgia's piney flatwoods, where the red-headed meadow katydid song resonates!

Red-cockaded Woodpecker

2011-11-27T23:19:00.001-05:00

A beautifully maintained stand of longleaf pine, Pinus palustris, in the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, southern Georgia. The scrubby palmlike understory is saw palmetto, Serenoa repens. This habitat is home to the rarest of North American woodpeckers, the Red-cockaded Woodpecker, Picoides borealis.

On my recent foray into the Okefenokee, finding Red-cockaded Woodpeckers was high on the list. As a consequence, I spent much time roaming the sandy pine flats. One of the first birds that will greet the pinewoods explorer is this charmer, the Brown-headed Nuthatch, Sitta pusilla. These inquisitive gleaners display great fidelity to one another, and a pair will forage together throughout the year. The birds more or less constantly emit a stream of squeaky chatters, and the notes sound like a dog's squeak toy ball.

A Brown-headed Nuthatch is truly elfin, weighing about ten grams and measuring only 4.5 inches. That's not much larger than a kinglet, and less than half the weight of a White-breasted Nuthatch.

It would be harder to find a more woodpecker-rich habitat than a Georgia pine woods. Red-headed Woodpeckers, such as above, were very common. We also had scads of Red-bellied, Downy, Hairy, and Pileated woodpeckers, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, and Northern Flicker. In addition to, of course, our target woodpecker. At times, I would see or hear six species of woodpecker simultaneously.

A towering longleaf pine, the Red-cockaded Woodpecker's tree of choice. Longleaf pine forests have suffered terribly, with only an estimated 3% of the original stands remaining. The wood of this species is especially durable and valuable, hence the lumberlust by the timber industry. Many stands have been replanted to faster growing slash pine or other species that will generate a pulpwood crop within a few decades.

The massive cone of a longleaf pine, set off against its incredibly long, almost silky needles. To my eye, this may be the best looking of any of our native pines, and it has some serious competition in the beauty department.

Finding colonies of Red-cockaded Woodpeckers isn't difficult. Active nest or den trees or conspicuously banded with a white stripe. That doesn't necessarily mean the birds are easy to find, outside of the active nesting season. RCW's are social animals, and will forage in loose groups, but often wander some distance from colony sites. The trick is to get oneself in the vicinity of an active denning area BEFORE dawn. Then just stand quietly, and enjoy the animals as they emerge and begin calling back and forth and foraging. Chances are, within five or ten minutes they'll have flown off to distant feeding areas. At least that was my experience. Only once, in all of our pinewoods roaming, did we stumble into a foraging group at midday, and they were much harder to observe.

This is a natural RCW cavity. RCW's are the only North American woodpecker that excavates nest holes in living conifers. This habit is thought to be an adaptation that ups the odds of their survival in a habitat that is regularly subject to scorching fires. Older-growth pines are fire-resistant, thus the tree - and woodpecker nest - are likely to survive conflagrations.

Another interesting aspect of RCW nest cavities is the birds' propensity for drilling sap wells around the cavity's perimeter. By doing so, the woodpeckers trigger a sheet flow of gummy, sticky sap all around the nest site. The likely theory for this is that the tarry sap impedes the ability of predators such as high-climbing rat snakes to gain access to the hole. Plenty of viscous white pine sap is evident in the photo above.

This is a nonnatural RCW nest cavity. A box with an appropriately sized entrance hole is placed high on a pine, in an excavated cavity. The biologists who install these are quite good at it, and the structure can blend remarkably well with the tree. It is thought that artificial cavities have helped to bolster RCW populations. There still aren't many birds. About 14,000 birds are all that's left.

Finally, the Red-cockaded Woodpecker. Sorry for the lack of National Geographic quality images, but I made these photos at the cusp of dawn, when light was dim and the birds were not very close. We can see the complete ladder-backed appearance here; RCW's lack the central pure white back of Downy or Hairy woodpeckers, which are the most likely source of confusion. The RCW slots in between those two species in the size department.

No mistaking an RCW from this angle. That big white cheek is a dead giveaway. Like most woodpeckers, RCW's are also rather vociferous and its likely you'll hear them before making visual contact. They give a loud, rather sharp but nasal squeak, suggestive of an effeminate Hairy Woodpecker.

Red-cockaded Woodpeckers are intimately linked with fire, one of scores of species that in effect rise from the ashes. Fire maintains the open savanna-like pine groves that is optimal breeding and foraging habitat. For as long as there have been longleaf pine forests, fire has been a factor, regularly sweeping through and clearing the habitat. As foresters entered their 20th century love affair with Smokey Bear, fire suppression became the norm, and lots of fire-dependent animals and plants suffered. The science of fire ecology has made great strides and we have a much better understanding of the role of fire in ecosystems. As a result, RCW's, Karner blue butterflies, wild lupine and many other species are rebounding.

The Red-cockaded Woodpecker was listed as an endangered species in 1970; thus it was among the first group of animals to gain protection under the federal Endangered Species Act with its passage in 1973. At that time, fewer than 10,000 RCW's existed. With protection of its habitat and management techniques, the woodpecker population has grown by one-third. That's still precious few birds. I certainly hope this iconic bird of the southern pinewoods never goes the way of its larger cousin, the now extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

Green Lynx Spider

2011-11-25T22:10:00.002-05:00

A fiercely protective female green lynx spider, Peucetia viridans, stands guard on her nest. This one had chosen a fruiting cluster of seedbox, Ludwigia alternifolia, in which to weave her saclike structure. The females are big spiders. Her body is nearly an inch in length, and throw in the legspan and you've got an animal that would pretty much cover a silver dollar. You'd notice this thing if you felt the tickle of one crawling up your arm.

We found this spider and several others of its species in a bramble patch in an open longleaf pine flatwoods bordering the Okefenokee Swamp in south Georgia. I had never seen a green lynx spider before, but figured that it must be some type of lynx spider as soon as I clapped eyes on the beast. We've got a much smaller species in Ohio, the common lynx spider, Oxyopes salticus, and it is widespread and often abundant. It too is colorful and has impressively spined legs.

Note all of the spiderlings surrounding mom. If nothing too big and menacing happens by, they're probably in good hands. As I moved in close for these shots, the female spider would move with me and even seem to make hostile advances. Lynx spiders are active hunters, stalking the shrubs and attacking prey. They use those formidable spines that armor their legs to snare and box in their victims; sort of an Iron Maiden embrace of doom.

To my eyes, the green lynx spider is an impressive, good-looking arachnid. I'm glad that I was able to spend some quality time with these brutish animals.

Some Okefenokee scenics

2011-11-24T23:06:00.000-05:00

Before long, I want to share some up close and personal accounts of some of the interesting critters and plants that I encountered on my recent foray into the Okefenokee Swamp. But whether one knows the names of any of this vast wetland's flora and fauna, they'd certainly be impressed by the scenic grandeur of the place. Following are a few photos of the Okefenokee's picturesque beauty. As always, clicking on a photo will enlarge it.

An Okefenokee skiff. Boats with shallow drafts are essential for navigating the marshes and waterways. A big thanks to guide Jennifer Iona Hogan with Okefenokee Adventures for showing me some off-the-beaten-path places. Look her up and take a tour if you make it to the Okefenokee.

Stately cypress trees draped with Spanish moss create lush walls of vegetation along blackwater canals.

Cypress trees are deciduous conifers, and most have dropped their needles by now. However, in places the trees were still burnt-orange with old needles.

Big skies over wet prairies. Such places abound in life, both plant and animal.

Okefenokee "prairies" are really vast sedge meadows. An indescribable bounty of wetland animals call these marshes home, at least seasonally. I saw everything from tiny citrine forktail dragonflies to massive Sandhill Cranes.

An abundance of pine flatwoods surround and intersperse the wetlands. Spiny-stemmed saw palmetto underlays the pines. This habitat supports a different cast of characters, including the federally endangered Red-cockaded Woodpecker.

Into the Okefenokee

2011-11-24T14:08:00.000-05:00

I'm just returned from an immersion into one of our country's most iconic wetlands, the sprawling 400,000+ acre Okefenokee Swamp of southern Georgia and northern Florida. An in-depth look into the Okefenokee had long been on my list, and after spending three days exploring its fabulous habitats, I have a much better understanding of this incredible place. As always, many photos were made, and plenty of interesting creatures were found.

The still black waters of the Suwanee Canal are often described as "mysterious". I suppose that's an understandable thought, as one can't see more than a few inches below the surface. As gators, moccasins, and other potentially scary critters lurk in the depths, the Okefenokee waters are indeed mysterious to most.

I was able to penetrate a fair ways into the swamp on a skiff, and see lots of interesting terrain. The Okefenokee is a place of great beauty, its tannin-stained waters refecting the images of golden-needled cypress and blue skies. Excepting the occasional boatload of touristos traveling down the canal, there are no people and the swamp is far from the hubbub of highways and towns.

Alligators aplenty roam the Okefonokee. An estimated 10,000+ of the massive reptiles swim in the swamp, and if the temperatures crest 60 degrees, you're sure to see some.

Your blogger far out in one of the Okefenokee's "prairies". It was a real treat to have the chance to wander far off the beaten path and into some of the massive wet meadows of the Okefenokee. I am standing in a sea of horned beakrush, Rhynchospora inundata, and other wetland sedges.

Okefenokee is a Choctaw word meaning "quivering earth", and it isn't hard to see why it's called that when walking across the soggy quaking peat. I saw some great plants out in the prairies, including a fabulous botanical carnivore.

I'll be back soon with some closer views of some of the Okefenokee's extraordinary flora and fauna.

Okefenokee Swamp

2011-11-22T19:36:00.000-05:00

I'm deep in south Georgia, in the heart of Okefenokee Swamp country. Laptop/Internet issues prevent a detailed photo post, but those will come soon. I'm seeing all manner of cool stuff, and obtaining scads of images. Everything from gators to Red-cockaded Woodpeckers! Posts to follow soon.

Wheel bugs rule!

2011-11-18T21:02:00.000-05:00

A wheel bug, Arilus cristatus, in repose. These beneficial native assassin bugs are ten kinds of cool, squared. I always consider it a treat to encounter one, and have shown many people their "life" wheel bug. Invariably, they are impressed. Of course, I would explain the valuable roles that they play in nature, and the incredible mechanics of the beast. These prehistoric-looking insects truly are miniature works of art, and deserve our respect.

Thus, I was mortified when I encountered an alleged "news story" about the fearsome wheel bug. The reporter used bizarre inflammatory rhetoric to describe these small insects, such as "The horrific monster or insect..." I'm not kidding. As he spouted this sort of nonsense, he whipped up some local Pittsburgians into a frenzy of fear over the terrifying wheel bugs. It was as if an army of six-legged Vlad the Impalers had descended upon the bucolic Pennsylvania neighborhood.

WATCH THIS SILLY VIDEO HERE. Then, on behalf of wheel bugs everywhere, I would encourage you to leave a comment on their website that protests this ridiculous bit of "journalism", and stick in a good word for the bug!

Black-tailed Gull in Ohio!

2011-11-16T23:15:00.001-05:00

Photo: John Pogacnik

A first state record Black-tailed Gull was found this morning by Craig Holt at the harbor at Ashtabula, Ohio on Lake Erie. Word traveled quickly and a number of people were able to get to the site this afternoon and relocate the bird. Thanks to John Pogacnik for the documentary photo, above.

The Black-tailed Gull, Larus crassirostris, is an Asian species that is a very rare vagrant to North America. There are only a few records from the Great Lakes, and as previously mentioned, no priors from Ohio.

I'll be in Ashtabula bright and early tomorrow, and hope to see the animal. More reports/photos may follow.

Carolina Wren with caterpillar

2011-11-15T22:40:00.000-05:00

Photo: John Howard

John Howard shared this beautiful photo with me a while back, and I wanted to in turn share it with you. He has caught one of the bird world's premier fuss-budgets, a Carolina Wren, Thryothorus ludovicianus, just after it snagged a fat caterpillar. For this little rotund red-brown ball of feathers, eating that cat will be about like one of us scarfing down a footlong hotdog.

The songs have faded...

2011-11-14T22:35:00.000-05:00

I really miss the song of autumn about now. This afternoon, I took a brief wander through the local patch, and heard only the feeble swan songs of Carolina and Allard's ground crickets. These little black crickets are the toughest of our Orthopterans, or singing insects, and we'll hear the odd individual fiddling its wings into early December, if the sun shines brightly enough.

But for the most part, the entomological symphony, that grand wall of sound created by legions of katydids, coneheads, trigs, and crickets is gone. The singers have perished, leaving only their eggs to ride out the winter, and it'll be next summer before their life cycle comes once again to the point of music.

Just two weeks ago, I found myself in some marshy ground on an unseasonably warm day, and the singing insects were going whole hog, every bit as active as a bunch of drunks in a Karaoke bar. This black-legged meadow katydid, Orchelimum nigripes, was especially extroverted so I paused to pay him some mind.

By November, the males are pulling out all the stops in a last ditch effort to woo a female. They know, intuitively, that their days are severely numbered. If they are to leave spawn, it is time to sing with all one's might! Attracting a girl is the ONLY thing that matters at this point.

This black-legged meadow katydid was really going at it, and was not much bothered by your narrator sticking a brightly flashing Nikon in its grill. The paler brown region on the katydid's back is its stridulatory region of the wings, and he was rapidly rubbing them as I took the photo. As were scores of others. That day, October 30, was the last day that I heard a full-bore salvo of insect song.

Meadow katydids might be considered the most charming of their ilk. There are a number of species, but all are neatly packaged and rather showy. As is the case with our melodious insect songsters, they sport exceedingly long antennae - far lengthier and more ornate than any grasshopper. The husky sputtering trills of meadow katydids are a ubiquitous sound of summer and fall, lisping forth from meadows and other unkempt open spaces. To my ear, they sound somewhat like an ill-tuned lawn mower firing up, or perhaps the mechanical clicking-ticking of an automated lawn sprinkler.

Click the short video above, and you can hear the meadow katydid for yourself. We'll have to make due with such digital fare for some time, I'm afraid, if its katydids we wish to hear. July is a long ways off.

Bug Guide rules!

2011-11-13T23:03:00.001-05:00

A tiny European tube wasp, Ancistrocerus gazella, laps nectar from one of the season's last Canada goldenrods. I was out a week ago on a brief photographic interlude, and stumbled across one of these miniature beauties. As is often the case with bugs, I didn't know what it was.

I do know enough about entomology that I realized it was a wasp, and that at least provides a starting point. But just knowing that generality wasn't good enough. I am without doubt a born taxonomist, although I don't say that to mean that I am a good or gifted taxonomist. It's just that I can't stand NOT knowing the name of something. I don't like generic identifications.

Aspiring to know the name of every creature one encounters brings a certain set of problems. Especially in the world of bugs. One would quickly be driven mad, and use every minute of their waking hours, trying to pin names on every insect encountered, at least if you're in the field a lot and looking hard at things.

I was particularly curious about this micro-wasp for two reasons: it was striking in appearance; and it was a species that I was pretty sure I hadn't yet come across. So, after obtaining these so-so images - but they do show diagnostic characters - I set out to name it. Fortunately, I soon stumbled into THIS PAPER, which does an admirable job of delineating our vespid wasps. Largely by matching photos, I came up with an identity of Ancistrocerus gazella.

However, the wasp world is enormous, and there are plenty of look-alike species. Also, in this case, I could find no reference to this introduced species of wasp as being recorded from Ohio. So, where to turn for expert input?

Bug Guide!

This website is certainly the most comprehensive and awesome library of insect information on the Internet. Legions of experts and specialists routinely lurk there, and they are often quick to pin names on photographs of mystery bugs that are submitted. I uploaded my wasp photos, asking for a confirmation of my identification, and eventually Richard Vernier chimed in and reported that it was indeed the European tube wasp, Ancistrocerus gazella. Excellent!

Insects rank high on the list of animals that people wish to name. It's a vast and confusing world, and pinning a tag on that strange beetle that was in your basement can be tough. A trip to Bug Guide can help solve the mystery.

By the way, if anyone knows the status of the European tube wasp in Ohio, please let me know.

Snow Buntings

2011-11-10T22:58:00.002-05:00

Resplendent in their rust and cream feathered finery, three Snow Buntings, Plectrophenax nivalis, pose on a piece of Lake Erie driftwood. I encountered these hardy little "sparrows"* a few weekends back, and spent nearly an hour stalking and observing them. This trio was part of a group of a dozen birds, and by moving slowly and cautiously, I was allowed to infiltrate their ranks and make some interesting observations at arm's reach.

*Dammit one thousand times over! The taxonomy of birds is in an ever-increasing state of upheaval, and snow buntings are now no longer placed in the family of true sparrows, the Emberizidae. They, along with the longspurs, have been segregated into the Calcariidae family, or longspur family. I am still referring to snow buntings as sparrows until I come to accept this change.

As is often the case with birds that are habitual ground foragers, Snow Buntings walk, rather than hop. Walking is a more efficient form of locomotion for ground-bound birds. When a pack of buntings bursts into flight, they become quite conspicuous, as if a sudden gust blew giant snowflakes in to the air and is swirling them about. Bunting flight is invariably accompanied by their dry throaty rattles punctuated by clear musical TSEW! notes. But when on a sandy substrate or in a barren field, the buntings seemingly vanish, their patterns that are so bold and contrasty in flight now serving to match them to the earthy tones of the soil. Their rather sluggish mousy waddling gaits when at ease further serve to make detection difficult.

I was especially interested in the buntings' feeding habits. It wasn't long before one of my subjects ambled into a tuft of grass, and began piggishly plucking the fruit from the plant. This is not just any old grass, though - it is purple sand grass, Triplasis purpurea, which is a rare plant in Ohio. For the most part, this grass is confined to sandy beaches along the Great Lakes in the Midwest, and it in general is not common in the southern reaches of its Great Lakes distribution.

As Snow Buntings are quite fond of foraging along Great Lakes beaches when they make their wintertime peregrinations down to our latitude, they certainly consume a lot of purple sand grass fruit as well as the seeds of other beach plants. And thus, these beautiful sparrows undoubtedly become important agents of dispersal for these plants. A percentage of plant fruit will pass through a bird's digestive tract intact and be expelled, possibly a far distance from where the fruit was eaten. Over the long haul, it is probably birds that are responsible for many plant species' distribution. I believe that sparrows, in particular, are important agents of dispersal for numerous grasses and sedges. I wrote about another likely case of interesting Snow Bunting seed dispersal RIGHT HERE.

The nearest breeding Snow Buntings to Ohio and Lake Erie are some 2,000 miles to our north. I took the photo above last June, showing a male Snow Bunting in his stunning breeding plumage in the barren rocky scree of St. Paul Island in the Pribilof Islands. This chain of volcanic islands is located near the middle of the brutal Bering Sea, several hundred miles west of mainland Alaska. It was a treat to see these birds that I know so well from their wintering grounds, on their nesting grounds. St. Paul Island would be charitably described as a barren place by most people, and the Snow Buntings seek out the bleakest haunts in this lunar landscape.

Fog enshrouds Snow Bunting nesting grounds on St. Paul Island. While most people would think this a harsh place, and rightfully so, the little buntings thrive here. The larking male buntings brought brightness and light to the misty barrens with their rich musical finchlike bubblings. Eternal optimists, the males return weeks in advance of females, and will routinely endure temperatures that plummet far below zero.

To them, the winter beaches of a place such as Lake Erie represents a balmy Floridian vacation.

Meadowhawks

2011-11-08T21:55:00.002-05:00

The last dragonflies to be on the wing, at least in appreciable numbers, are the meadowhawks. And of the eight Sympetrum meadowhawk species that have been found in Ohio, the one above is the hardiest of the lot. It is the autumn meadowhawk (formerly yellow-legged meadowhawk), Sympetrum vicinum. I made the photos above and below yesterday while on a lunchtime stroll around the grounds where my office is located.

Male meadowhawks are striking animals. The cherry-red abdomen is a conspicuous feature, but these are small dragonflies and often dart away with such rapidity that an average hiker may not see them well enough to appreciate their fiery tones. Separating the various species can also constitute an issue of identification, especially with the females. Males are easier, and two of the features to look for on autumn meadowhawk is the blood-red face and the pale straw-colored legs.

It's routine to see autumn meadowhawks on the wing in November, and I've even seen them out and about on cool blustery days with temperatures in the 50's. Yesterday and today was nice, sunny, and in the 60's and the meadowhawks were quite active.

This meadowhawk is a much rarer insect than the species above, at least in these parts. Or at least I think it is. It is a blue-faced meadowhawk, Sympetrum ambiguum, and this specimen was the first one that I had seen. I found it back on September 5th in Green Lawn Cemetery in Columbus. The animal was wary and hard to approach, and would only alight on the lawn, so it made for tough photos. Note its beautiful bluish-white face.

There is a small pond not far from where I observed this blue-faced meadowhawk, and perhaps they use it as breeding habitat. Or it could be that blue-faced meadowhawks wander as do some of the other dragonfly species, and this individual had come from some distance away. Green Lawn Cemetery is an oasis of greenery in a sea of heavily urbanized cityscape, and attracts large numbers of migrant birds and other flighted organisms.

Here's the range map depicting the Ohio distribution for blue-faced meadowhawk, courtesy the Ohio Odonata Society. Records in RED are pre-1950 reports, as is the case with Franklin County, which is where I made the photo above. So unless I've muffed the identification, there is now a modern record of blue-faced meadowhawk for Franklin County.

Interesting Bonaparte's Gull feeding strategy

2011-11-07T20:30:00.002-05:00

Five hundred feet over Lake Erie and looking due south to the mouth of the Huron River at Huron, Ohio. I took this photo about two years ago, during a survey flight to document waterbirds on the lake. Nickel Plate Beach, where I made the Bonaparte's Gull photos that accompanied the preceding post, is the snow-covered bare patch on the photo's upper left corner.

A few hours after I made yesterday's blog entry about Bonaparte's Gulls, Doug Overacker made an interesting post on the Ohio Birds Listserv, as follows:

"Julie Karlson and I stopped near the Corps of Engineers Visitor Center at Buck Creek State Park this morning to scan the lake for waterbirds. I started scanning the lake and spotted some Horned Grebes. A Bonaparte's Gull was there with them. I scanned some more and found another Horned Grebe also accompanied by a Bonaparte's Gull. Then I found a Pied-billed Grebe and it was also accompanied by a Bonaparte's Gull. I watched the grebe dive and the gull flew. Soon the grebe came up and the gull landed right next to it. Again the grebe dove and the gull flew only to land next to the grebe when it came up. It repeated this one more time while I watched. My guess is that if any of the grebes came up with a small fish the gull would try to claim it. Are there any other explanations?"

Common Loon in basic plumage, Lake Erie. Photo courtesy Ernie Cornelius.

Doug's observation is an interesting one, and a phenomenon that I have observed dozens of times. During our Lake Erie surveys, we would fly at an altitude of 200 feet, and follow rigid transect lines that criss-cross the lake. Such a perspective offers a magnificent study of huge swaths of Lake Erie, and a unique angle on its bird life. During late fall surveys, we would encounter as many as several hundred loons resting or feeding far out on the lake. It wasn't long before we noticed that actively diving and feeding Common Loons would usually be attended by small squadrons of Bonaparte's Gulls, anywhere from a few birds to a dozen or more. Indeed, we quickly learned that we could spot feeding loons from far away by the concentrated little clouds of Bonaparte's Gulls. This was most helpful as things happen quickly in a fast-moving airplane and the gulls put us on alert to be prepared for loons.

As with all photos on this blog, you can click the photo to expand it. This photo and the next are not great, but I took them in flight as we passed over loons being attended by Bonaparte's Gulls. In the photo above, the loon is easy to see as the big brown surfaced submarine of a bird. A few gulls are hanging with it waiting for some action.

What sort of action? Gulls are well known kleptoparasites, a term that refers to thievery. It is applied to gulls, jaegers, and other creatures that routinely steal food from another animal. We've probably all seen gulls harassing some hapless tern until it disgorges its catch, which the gull then snaps up and swallows. That's kleptoparasitism.

When we first observed the loon-Bonaparte's Gull interaction, we assumed we were witnessing a case of kleptoparasitism. The loon would surface, and the gulls would attempt to snatch its fish away. Except that it became apparent that the gulls never made contact with the loon - and a Common Loon outweighs a Bonaparte's Gull by 21 times. Rather, the surfacing of the loon would send the pack of gulls into a frenzy and they would alight and dip at the water's surface in the immediate vicinity of the just-surfaced loon.

This photo shows a small mob of Bonaparte's Gulls in a frenzy induced by a surfacing Common Loon. What it turns out is happening is that the loons, obviously, are hunting over schools of small fish. It seems that the entrance of a large fast-swimming underwater avian predator throws the fish into a panic, and small fry such as emerald shiners are flushed to the surface. The gulls have learned this, and are poised and ready to attack the fish that arise along with the loon. Such a relationship is known as commensalism: one species benefits from an interaction while the other is unaffected.

I plumbed the literature to see if anything had been published specific to commensalism involving Bonaparte's Gulls and loons or other diving waterbirds, and sure enough, there are a few snippets of information out there. The Birds of North America account of Bonaparte's Gull has this to say:

"Also forage in association with Hooded Mergansers (Lophodytes cucullatus) and Red-breasted Mergansers (Stedman and Stedman 1989), Common Loons (Gavia immer; Svingen 1999, JB), Double-crested Cormorants (JB, MG), Horned Grebes (Podiceps auritus; Dusi 1968), Red-necked Grebes (P. grisegena; Svingen 1999), and Brown Pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis; Cruickshank and Cruickshank 1958). Bonaparte’s Gull often hovers over the feeding mergansers, cormorants, or grebes, dipping into the water to obtain small items, such as fish, forced up by the diving birds; also swims with loons and grebes, picking up small items from the surface. Feeding with these species is a form of social parasitism." (Burger, Joanna and Michael Gochfeld. 2002. Bonaparte's Gull (Chroicocephalus philadelphia), The Birds of North America Online (A. Poole, Ed.). Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Retrieved from the Birds of North America Online: http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/species/634)

A brief note from The Auk, Vol. 85: 1, 1968 is entitled Feeding interaction between Bonaparte's Gulls and Horned Grebes. It reads as follows:

Several times between 19 and 28 December 1966 at West Panama City Beach, Bay County, Florida, my wife and I saw Bonaparte's Gulls (Larus philadelphia) and Horned Grebes (Colymbus auritus) feeding together, the gulls eating food the grebes brought to the surface. The grebes fed leisurely about 150 feet offshore, usually in groups of three to six. Two to three times as many immature and adult Bonaparte's Gulls usually fed with them. As the grebes dived, the gulls swam or flew above them. When a grebe surfaced, a gull was usually at the spot for any bits of food it could salvage. We observed no physical contact between birds during these encounters. Neither A. C. Bent (U.S. Natl. Mus., Bull. 107, pp. 23-25, 1919, and Bull. 113, pp. 177-179, 1921) nor R. S. Palmer (Handbook of North American birds, vol. 1, New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1962; see p. 79) mention such associations between these species or between either of these species and other species.--Julian L. Dusi, Department of Zoology, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama.

Bonaparte's Gull

2011-11-06T21:12:00.001-05:00

Last weekend, I spent some time on Nickel Plate Beach, which is just east of the Huron River's confluence with Lake Erie. That's the Huron lighthouse in the distance, anchoring the terminus of the Huron Municipal Pier. The lighthouse and its pier are well known to birders, and many a rarity has been spotted over there.

If you hit the pier, you'd do well to drive around to the other side of the river and have a look at Nickel Plate Beach. Lots of interesting birds can be seen just offshore, or on the beach itself.

While stalking some Snow Buntings on the beach, I noticed a few hundred Bonaparte's Gulls, Chroicocephalus philadelphia, loafing and feeding in the nearshore waters. After I was through photographing buntings - more on those in a later post - I turned my lens to the gulls.

Bonaparte's Gulls are very handsome, and elegantly ternlike on the wing. The bird above is an adult, showing its prominent white wing flash on the forewing. In the breeding season, adult "Bonies" have a solid black head, as if someone dipped them in a can of ink. By now, they've lost the dark hood and sport only a bold black dot behind the eye. This is one of the small gulls, and it takes but two years for a Bonaparte's to gain its full adult plumage. The largest gulls, such as Herring or Great Black-backed Gull, require four years to achieve adulthood. While the Bonaparte's Gull is not the smallest of the world's gulls, it's close. It would take almost nine of them to match the weight of a Great Black-backed Gull.

There are always plenty of fish to be found where large rivers meet Lake Erie, which is one reason that sites such as Huron are often bird-filled. This day, the Bonaparte's Gulls were actively fishing just offshore from the beach, and the feeding birds had a regular pattern of foraging. I was able to get fairly close to the small gulls as they would hover over schools of shiners or some other small fish before dipping to the surface and snagging a victim.

The sound effects that accompany a large flock of Bonaparte's Gulls is distinctive, and somewhat comical. They make loud sharp calls that sound like a squeaky growl. Dozens or hundreds concentrated in a small area can create quite a cacophony.

Bonaparte's Gull breeds throughout much of the Canadian and Alaskan taiga - the northerly reaches of the boreal forest. Bonies are unique among the gulls in that they nest in trees. I have seen their arboreal stick platforms, and while in Churchill, Manitoba even climbed a stunted black spruce once to have a look at the eggs. The adults were quite displeased and did their best to knock some new holes in my head.

The Ohio waters of Lake Erie is one of the major staging areas for migrating Bonaparte's Gulls. Last weekend, there were perhaps 1,000 of them in the general vicinity of Huron. Those numbers will continue to grow through November, and will reach a crescendo near month's end. Estimates of up to 100,000 birds have been made in a morning from favored Lake Erie locales. That's just a smattering of the true numbers that are probably present, as many of the gulls will be far from the view of onshore observers, well out in the lake.

Some sources peg the total population of Bonaparte's Gull at a high of around 350,000 birds. Even factoring in a liberal percentage of error on estimates, it's very obvious that a very significant portion of the global Bonaparte's Gull population depends upon Lake Erie.

A very rare plant rediscovered

2011-11-05T17:44:00.003-04:00

For better or worse, I get dozens of emails and calls every month from people who have questions about natural history. Many of these queries relate to mystery plants or animals. Fortunately, with good digital cameras now being ubiquitous, I often get a photo or two to help out in the quest for a name.

The strange looking plant above is not a pipe cleaner vining its way up that sunflower. It is the very odd - and quite rare in these parts - rope dodder, Cuscuta glomerata. Dodders are bizarre parasitic plants that tap their nutrients from host plants, which they usually end up killing. There are eight species of dodders that are native to Ohio, and the rope dodder is perhaps the only one that is easily and instantly recognizable.

From my experience, many field botanists tend to shun dodders, perhaps because recognizing many of them to species is difficult. I've always rather enjoyed them, and even published a paper on the role of fire in germinating rope dodder, Cuscuta glomerata (above). I've also had a bit of luck with finding dodders in the field, and discovered the cuspidate dodder, C. cuspidata in western Ohio in 2002, which was a new record for the state. It has since been found in a few sites near to where I first found it, and is listed as endangered in the state.

Cuspidate dodder is not the only official rarity in Ohio's dodder world. Of the eight natives, two species are endangered, two are listed as threatened, and two are considered extirpated. The latter category refers to plants that have not been seen for at least twenty years in Ohio, and to botanists rediscovering one of them is somewhat akin to finding a Holy Grail.

This is good ole common dodder, Cuscuta gronovii, which is our default dodder. If you see a dodder, chances are enormous that it'll be this species. Some people call it "spaghetti vine" as the orangish stems can twine over host plants in such luxuriance that it indeed looks as if someone tossed a colander of spaghetti over the plants. Separating some of the rarer dodder from this one can be tough.

About a week ago, I was forwarded the photo above from a forester in DNR's Division of Forestry. A Jackson County landowner had sent them a few photos of this odd plant, and he wondered what it was. To me, this was sort of like finding a botanical pot of gold at the rainbow's end. The VAST majority of queries I receive are of common things: Cooper's hawks, ox-eye daisies, garter snakes, chipmunks, and so on. But every thousand or so contacts, BOOM! Something amazing comes to light.

The Jackson County mystery plant was obviously a dodder, and I had a pretty good idea as to what species it was. So, I encouraged the landowner to go out and collect some specimens and ship them to me. And, bless his heart, he did. By the time we reached this point, the dodders were rather far gone, as can be seen in the above photo. But the pertinent parts were all still there, albeit a bit dry and crispy.

Two features stood out in the photos that I saw that sparked this tale. One, the rather dense ropelike growth habit - not that different than the rope dodder in this post's first photo. But these flowers were not bunched that tightly, and the habitat and host plant were all wrong for rope dodder. And it was the host plant that was also a major red flag that something interesting could be afoot. This dodder was growing on smooth alder, Alnus serrulata, in wet soil on the margins of a wetland. Very few of our dodders grow on woody plants, so the host should eliminate most of the species.

Anyway, with the dodder specimen in hand, I could look at the technical characters of the flowers in detail, which is necessary. Above is a close up image of a flower corolla and its bracts and sepals. Close examination of such features is essential to arriving at an identification.

The upshot is that our Jackson County landowner had found compact dodder, Cuscuta compacta, which was one of the species listed as extirpated in Ohio. Compact dodder had only been collected once before, in 1958, in... Jackson County! Although the location data on the 1958 specimen is sparse, it almost certainly was collected within a few miles of the site where it was rediscovered in 2011.

So, a plant thought to be long gone from Ohio has been rediscovered, thanks to the intellectual curiosity of a landowner who wondered about an odd plant and made the effort to get an answer. I'll look forward to visiting this site next fall, when the compact dodder is in full flower and looking good.

By the way, the specimens of compact dodder will not go to waste. I'll provide the material to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History herbarium as a permanent record of this discovery.

The Amazing Monarch

2011-11-03T23:22:00.000-04:00

Despite the late date, and cool temperatures just cresting north of 60 degrees, I saw several monarchs passing through Columbus today. This male - males have the dark glands on a vein of the lower wing - was busily fueling on stilll vibrant shale-barren aster, Symphyotrichum oblongifolium.

This insect still has nearly 2,000 miles to go in order to reach its Mexican wintering grounds. The migration of the monarch never fails to stupefy me. The butterfly in this photo has plunked down in a tiny green oasis in one of Columbus's very urban 'hoods. After refueling, it will launch on an unerring southwestern trajectory. This path will take it right through or at least by downtown Columbus and its towering buildings and on through at least four or five other states before it makes the Mexican border crossing.

If all goes well, our monarch will join millions of others in high elevation fir forests near the village of Angangueo, about a four hour drive west of Mexico City. Once there, the butterflies will ride out the winter, draping fir trees in a living shimmering cloak of burnt orange and black. Seeing "our" monarch butterflies festooning Mexican fir trees must be one of the world's great spectacles of natural history, and a phenomenon I hope to witness personally some day.

A "Silver" Red Fox

2011-11-02T23:01:00.003-04:00

Photo: John Howard

Just about everyone loves red foxes, Vulpes vulpes. Well, maybe not everyone. Chicken farmers who are unsuccessful in defending the coop don't like foxes. Conservationists trying to protect certain species of birds and other small animals may take issue with the bushy-tailed beasts. And the folks who put together the International Union for Conservation of Nature's list of the top 100 species of worst invasive species put the red fox in the lineup.

The red fox is found far and wide; it is distributed more widely than any other animal in the Order Carnivora. They're now found in places where they weren't, historically. In fact, the line between native and non-native foxes in North America is very blurry. Some authorities believe that prior to European settlement, red foxes were found only in regions to the north and west of the once vast eastern deciduous forest, while the woodland-loving gray fox occupied the latter habitat. But as has happened elsewhere, people didn't waste any time introducing red foxes to parts of North America where they probably weren't, and the clever adaptive little mammals quickly ran wild.

But, unless a fox is caught making off with their kitten, puppy, or steak on the grill, most people just love red foxes. I wrote one of my Columbus Dispatch columns on the red fox back in March, HERE, and was fairly inundated with email from infatuated fox enthusiasts.

Photo: Daniel Redfern

But most fox hounds ain't seen nothin' like this! Dan Redfern of rural Geauga County, Ohio sent along some photos of a most amazing fox. I can see why someone would do a doubletake, lunge for the camera, then grab the field guides to sort this one out.

Photo: Daniel Redfern

Quite the handsome fellow, and that's saying something as "normal" red foxes aren't too shabby in the looks department. This is a "silver" red fox; a melanistic form that is apparently quite rare. At least I've never seen one, and I'm not sure I know anyone who has. While this form is selected for and bred on "fox farms", it does occur rarely but regularly in the wild. Chances are that all of this animal's litter mates were of the normal red color.

Photo: Daniel Redfern

Red fox can be quite variable in coloration, although at least in these parts the vast majority are reddish, just as the one in John Howard's beautiful photo at the top of this post. At least eight different consistent color forms have been described, but this silver form may deserve the tiara for winning the beauty contest. Apparently silver fox pelts were highly coveted by European nobility at one time, and an excellent skin was more valuable than 40 beaver pelts. John James Audubon said this of the silver form:

"In the richness and beauty of its splendid fur the Silver-gray Fox surpasses the beaver or sea otter, and the skins are indeed so highly esteemed that the finest command extraordinary prices, and are always in demand."

An extraordinary find indeed, and thanks to Dan Redfern for sharing his photos!

Duck Stamp Winner

2011-11-01T22:59:00.001-04:00

In case you hadn't heard, Joseph Hautman of Plymouth, Minnesota won the competition for the 2012-13 Federal Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamp, which is far better known as just the "Duck Stamp". Hautman's gorgeous rendering of a drake Wood Duck (above) will grace the new stamp, which goes on sale July 1st, 2012.

Incredibly, this win is Joe's 4th - quite a feat. Many cream of the crop artists vie to have their work featured on the stamp, and the competitions are always ferocious. Adam Grimm, a former Ohio resident and well known to many here, placed second with his painting of a Gadwall.

The Duck Stamp was first unveiled in 1934 as a vehicle to raise much needed funds for land acquisition. It's been a successful program, having raised over $750 million to date. Ninety-eight cents of every dollar raised by stamp sales goes to land acquisition - a percentage probably unmatched by any conservation organization. Nearly 5.5 million (MILLION!) acres have been purchased or leased with Duck Stamp dollars. Over 90% of the funds for Ohio's only federal refuge, Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge, came via the stamp program.

While waterfowl conservation is the driving force behind the Duck Stamp program, it's always important to keep in mind that an enormous collage of flora and fauna comprises the wetlands and prairies that are protected through this program. Botanists, birders, entomologists, and even mushroom hunters benefit in addition to waterfowl hunters. If you support conservation, consider buying a $15.00 Duck Stamp. They can be ordered RIGHT HERE. Besides, the stamps are miniature lickable works of art.

Double-crested Cormorants, writ large

2011-10-31T23:13:00.001-04:00

The not always placid waters of Lake Erie lap at the Huron jetty, which encloses a large spoil impoundment. Back in the day, when the dredged muck was still being sprayed into this basin, the impoundment was a huge mudflat and a beacon for birds. Many a rarity was found, including Ohio's only Spotted Redshank (1979), and our first record of Arctic Tern (1980). Even though the impoundment has been swallowed up by a luxuriant cloak of giant reed, Phragmites australis, the Huron Pier and its environs remain one of the most interesting and productive locales on Lake Erie, especially in the fall.

I was here Sunday, on a whirlwind trip from Huron to Magee Marsh. My dream? Discover Ohio's first Ash-throated Flycatcher. I didn't, or this blog would be titled differently. Ash-throated Flycatcher is WAY overdue, with scores of records in eastern North America, including, I believe, every state around Ohio. I figure the inaugural specimen will be found at the tail end of October or in November, and likely at a place such as Huron.

In spite of the Ash-throated choke, I saw lots of interesting birds at Huron. First of season Snow Buntings. Flyover Pine Siskins. Three flyby Surf Scoters. Hundreds of delicate little Bonaparte's Gulls. Six species of sparrows lurking in the Phragmites. And much more.

But the dominant bird, bar none, was Double-crested Cormorant, Phalacrocorax auritus. Great platoons of the fish-eaters constantly streamed by, nearly all of them on a west to east trajectory. In my 2.5 hours at the Huron Pier and nearby Nickel Plate Beach, I estimated that 4-5,000 birds winged by, assuming they were all different and that the flocks weren't circling around.

Of the cormorants that were close enough to see well, nearly all were juveniles with their dusty brown throats and breasts. Less than 10% and probably well under that percentage were adults.

There is no question that Double-crested Cormorants are being cranked out in record numbers on the Great Lakes; perhaps unprecedented numbers. Like some other fish-eating predatorial birds such as Bald Eagle and Osprey, Double-crested Cormorant populations plummeted from the 1950's through the 1970's, as the effects of unregulated use of DDT wreaked havoc on the food chain. Spurred by Rachel Carson's landmark book Silent Spring, environmentalists began railing against DDT and demanding it be banned. President Richard Nixon's newly created Environmental Protection Agency reviewed the issue in 1971 and rejected a ban, declaring that the chemical was not harmful to wildlife or people.

Confronted by overwhelming scientific evidence as to the dangers of DDT, the EPA's hand was forced and in 1972 the agency disallowed nearly all uses of the chemical. Not surprisingly, chemical companies sued over this decision, but a U.S. Appellate Court upheld the ban.

And birds began to recover.

Part of a cormorant concentration that numbered into the thousands skitters across Sandusky Bay, Ottawa County, Ohio yesterday.

I recall from my early days of venturing to Lake Erie, in the mid to late 1970's, that spotting a Double-crested Cormorant was a momentous occasion. There just weren't that many around. According to Bruce Peterjohn's book Birds of Ohio (2001), by the mid-60's observers noted fewer than ten sightings of cormorants annually, and nearly all reports were of fewer than ten birds.

By the 1980's Great Lakes Double-crested Cormorants were booming, and Canadian biologist Chip Weseloh documented increases of nearly 30% annually in breeding populations. While this nearly exponential growth has slowed, cormorants are still thriving.

While crossing the State Route 2 bridge over Sandusky Bay, I glanced over at a rocky islet on the north side of the bridge and saw it was carpeted with probably 1,000+ cormorants. What's more, hundreds and hundreds of others were swimming and flying about, even more birds than I usually see here. I made a detour to a good vantage point and made the video above. It shows but a snippet of the birds that were present. Based on my observations, I would say that as many as 5,000 cormorants were around the mouth of Sandusky Bay yesterday, maybe even far more than that.

Not everyone accepts the presence of all of these fish-eating birds. Fishermen, especially, get their dander up over cormorants. The rod and reel crowd, perhaps understandably, tends to think that the cormorants compete for prized yellow perch and walleye. But the scientific evidence suggests that they don't. A 1997 study, HERE, analyzed the stomach contents of 302 cormorants and found that the primary prey were gizzard shad, freshwater drum, and emerald shiners - fish species of little interest to Lake Erie fishermen.

In recent years, the health of Lake Erie has nose-dived, and that's a topic I hope to find time to write about soon. I wonder if the Double-crested Cormorant population will also begin to fade, as the big birds once again serve as a barometer of Man's ravages to our ecosystems.

Incredible video: Green Heron snags dragonfly!

2011-10-31T12:30:00.000-04:00

You gotta check out this amazing video of a young Green Heron successfully bagging a blue dasher dragonfly. Major props to Clay Taylor for skillful camera work! CLICK HERE FOR VIDEO.

Citrine Forktail

2011-10-29T12:09:00.001-04:00

I photographed this beautiful albeit miniscule citrine forktail, Ischnura hastata, a few weeks ago in southern Ohio. These tiny damselflies are so small that it is quite easy to overlook them. This is the smallest odonate found in North America. A big citrine forktail is barely over an inch in length, and they're prone to lurking in dense vegetation where they fade and appear like will-o'-the-wisps. This one - and a number of others - was hunting in a cedar glade prairie, where it engaged in typical damselfly hunting strategy. Unlike the incredible aerial acrobatics of their brethren, the dragonflies, damselflies patrol low amongst the vegetation, employing a rather sluggish and jerky flight style. They grab tiny bugs from the foliage in a pounce and pick hunting style.

Proportionately huge many-faceted eyes mean that the citrine forktail overlooks very little that enters its sphere. This is a successful damselfly: citrine forktails are common throughout all but the northwest quarter of the United States, and range throughout the Caribbean, Central America, and even dip into South America.

There is a bizarre and noteworthy blip in the citrine forktail's distribution and life history. This map (courtesy Wikipedia) shows the Azores archipelago outlined in red. The Azores are a chain of nine volcanic islands positioned near the middle of the North Atlantic, nearly 2,500 miles east of North America's Atlantic coast. Colonized by sea-going Portuguese explorers in the 15th century, the Azores are home to some 240,000 people.

And, oddly enough, citrine forktails. Some authorities think that these forktails arrived recently, perhaps at the tail end of the 19th century. How did such a seemingly fragile, weak flyer manage to cross over two thousand miles of rough North Atlantic waters? Probably impossible to say with certainty, but several other species of tiny odonates - including other Ischnura forktails - are well known island colonizers. It seems likely that these insects are capable of getting swept up in storm cells and can survive lengthy if unintended aerial journeys to new lands.

But the tale of the Azores' citrine forktails gets much stranger. Researchers began intensive studies of this disjunct forktail population about twenty years ago, and quickly realized that all of the animals were female! It turns out that Azorean citrine forktails reproduce entirely by parthenogenesis, which is a type of asexual reproduction. Many species of animals are known to reproduce by parthenogenesis, and the various mechanisms by which this works are complicated. Thelytokous parthenogenesis is the term for the forktail's reproductive strategy. Suffice to say that embryonic growth and development is possible without direct contribution of sperm from males.

I hope that thelytokous parthenogenesis does not find its way into Homo sapiens.

Blackpoll Warbler kill at wind farm

2011-10-27T20:55:00.001-04:00

AES Corporation's Laurel Mountain Wind Farm, photo from West Virginia Highlands Conservancy website.

The massive Laurel Mountain Wind Farm, near Elkins, West Virginia was just opened officially with a ribbon-cutting ceremony today, but it's already making news in a most ungreenfriendly way. Word is leaking out regarding a massive kill of migratory songbirds that took place about two weeks ago at one of the turbine farm's installations. According to the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources, 484 birds perished after striking a structure associated with this twelve mile string of 61 mountaintop turbines. Most of the birds were Blackpoll Warblers. Blackpolls are champions of long distance migration, breeding to the northern limits of the boreal forest in Canada, Alaska, and in the northeastern lower states, mostly in New England. Their migration is an epic journey that spans much of the Americas, with the birds ending up in South America where they overwinter.

Not all the facts seem to be out yet - and I'm not sure why it took two weeks for this tragedy to come to light - but it appears that the birds were NOT killed by being pureed after flying into a spinning turbine. As the farm was just officially dedicated TODAY, I'm not sure that the turbines were even fired up and spinning two weeks ago.

Apparently a bank of bright lights that are used to provide illumination at a substation were left on overnight during cloudy, low-visibility conditions. The birds became disoriented by the lights - a common occurrence with brightly lit structures - and perished after flying into the building. Even though it apparently was not the turbines themselves that caused this disaster, it should serve as a red flag. Large numbers of songbirds migrate along Allegheny and Appalachian mountain ridges, and clearly lots of birds pass through the Laurel Mountain turbine gauntlet. Future occurrences of this type should be avoidable by merely turning the lights off, at least during peak migratory periods. But it is a huge open question as to whether birds will still strike the spinning turbines at night. I hope that someone conducts diligent monitoring at this farm to determine whether this kill will prove to be an isolated incident, or if indeed we have another Altamont Pass on our hands.

Industry, environmental groups, and politicians alike are rushing pell-mell into the supposedly "green" wind industry. Ohio is one of the front lines, as many a plan is afoot to site turbines along, and in, Lake Erie. And Lake Erie is one of THE major migratory corridors for birds in the Great Lakes region. I think that sites do exist where wind turbines probably will not cause much, if any, bird or bat mortality. But it is becoming increasingly demonstrable that some of the best locations for harvesting wind are also major migratory pathways for birds, and wind farms and birds mix about as well as oil and water.

Poorly sited wind farms are akin to fracking the air. The collateral damage to migratory animals can be unacceptable in terms of outright kills. But another factor that is seldom written about involves the terrestrial fragmentation that comes with the installation of these facilities (this includes fracking, too). Access roads must be carved into forests or Great Plains prairie, large footprints must be stamped out for the physical facilities, and towers and wires strung or buried to transmit the electricity. Individually, it is hard - maybe impossible - to prove ecological damage caused by a single turbine installation. But add them all up and we start to instigate death by a thousand cuts, at least for some species.

Goldenrod Gall Fly garners fame

2011-10-25T20:32:00.002-04:00

A familiar sight in old fields, the golf ball-sized swelling caused by the goldenrod gall fly, Eurosta solidaginis. Female goldenrod flies inject their egg into the goldenrod, triggering an interesting and conspicuous reaction. The afflicted goldenrod plant, sensing the foreigner, is stimulated to wall itself off from the fly larva by producing dense woody tissue.

If you are armed with a knife, you can slice open the gall and view the delectable grub within. Or, if you are a clever and industrious bird, you can just use your bill to get at the tasty morsel.

The relationship of the Downy Woodpecker to the goldenrod gall fly is an interesting tale, and Ohio's own Warren Uxley spins it so well that his article made the COVER of BirdWatching Magazine (formerly Birder's World)!. I just got my issue, and Warren's wordsmithing is stellar, and his story is punctuated with outstanding photos. Be sure to pick up a copy at your newstand, or SUBSCRIBE HERE.

Warren Uxley works with the Crawford County Park District, an up and coming star amongst Ohio's many productive and creative park districts. Their recent role in protecting Daughmer Savanna deserves major kudos. If you live in the Bucyrus area, or even if you don't, be sure to support Crawford County Parks! Congratulations, Warren!

Saw-whet selling telecommunications

2011-10-24T22:03:00.001-04:00

After seeing the last post, about Northern Saw-whet Owls, Joan Campbell dropped me a note to let me know about a saw-whet media star. It turns out that Telus Canada, a telecommunications company up there in the Great White North, uses one of the little hooters in its ad campaign. I'll bet the micro-owl charms those Canadians right out of their igloos, and sells lots of phones.

See one of the owl-ads HERE.