Blue-headed Vireo nests

 

A Blue-headed Vireo (Vireo solitarius) with a piece of redtop grass (Tridens flavus). He or she - males help with nest construction, but the sexes look very similar - was constructing a nest nearby. This was in the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia. I made this image on April 30, 2017.

I gave a talk entitled Natural Ohio: Through the Lens for the Ohio Wildlife Center last Thursday night. We ranged through some of Ohio's best remaining natural areas, and the flora and fauna that make them special. It was a good chance to dust off lots of images from the past, such as the two vireo shots presented here.

I made this shot WAY back when, on May 1, 2011. A pair of Blue-headed Vireos were constructing this nest deep in Shawnee State Forest, in Scioto County, Ohio.

Vireo nests are works of art. I don't think many humans could craft such a fine nest, even with two hands and ten fingers. How these birds do it with their bill, and some assistance from their feet and body, is amazing. The nest is usually located at the fork of two slender twigs, but fairly low in the host tree. They are tough/impossible for many predators to reach, such as Black Ratsnakes (Pantherophis alleghaniensis). 

Yes, I know the snake's name has been changed - so many times it's tough to keep track of. iNaturalist is now calling it the Central Ratsnake. Prior to that, it was the equally stupidly named Gray Ratsnake. C'mon, herpetologists, get your act together. I'd suggest re-renaming it back to Black Ratsnake - the name that it seems most people know and love and persist in using. A nomenclatural rebellion against a particularly dumb series of name changes - an uprisal by the masses that should be listened to.

Anyway, the vireo's artistic cup is cleverly crafted from a variety of grasses and various forbs, and lined with soft plant down and other felty botanical material. Not a bad place for a baby vireo to grow up, and we need all of the baby vireos that we can get.

Upcoming presentation: Natural Ohio: Through the Lens

Sorry for the late notice on this one, but times have been busy and I let it slip. Anyway, this Thursday (August 20) I'll be giving a pictorial lecture about the very best places that remain in the Buckeye State. It'll feature flora and fauna great and small, and sites that are well-known and obscure.

It's for the Ohio Wildlife Center, and it'll take place at their beautiful facility which is not far from the Columbus Zoo in Delaware County. Registration is required, and you can do that at their website: Beautiful Ohio Lecture Series- Jim McCormac - Ohio Wildlife Center

More details, along with registration info, is at the website. Doors open at 6:30 and the talk will commence at 7 pm. Hope to see you there!

As always, click the photo to enlarge

A Sedge Wren (Cistothorus platensis) chatters his mechanical song from the summit of a big bluestem grass in Huffman Prairie. The presentation will feature many such images, covering a wide range of biodiversity.

Frosted Whiteface

 

As always, click the image to enlarge

A male Frosted Whiteface (Leucorrhinia frigida) in repose. On a recent July trip to Michigan's northern limits - the Keweenaw (key-wuh-na) Peninsula, Copper Harbor and vicinity - we saw many northern species that reach their southern limits in northern Ohio. This beautiful dragonfly was one of them, and it was very common in that state up north. So were other northern dragons including the Chalk-fronted Corporal (Ladona julia), which was often in association with the whiteface. Both of these dragonflies are listed as endangered in Ohio, and they occur very sparingly in a few of our northernmost counties.

It isn't hard to see how the Frosted Whiteface got its name. But the name is derived from the appearance of the male, as is so often the case with various faunal species. Females are often showier, though, at least in my estimation, and we shall have a look at a female Frosted Whiteface to see if that might be the case in this species.

Here she is, and she's a showstopper. Look at those gorgeous brown eyes, and black and lemon body. This trip was a wonderful opportunity to become more familiar with these northern dragons, which were everywhere. In Ohio, the odonatologist must make special efforts to clap eyes on a Frosted Whiteface, and he/she will not see very many.

I suspect that this species and its northern brethren that are barely hanging on in Ohio will probably vanish before long, as their ranges shift northward. There is abundant evidence of climate-caused distributional shifts in many insect species, both northern species retreating northward, and southern species rapidly advancing northward. Such range expansions/contractions have always occurred, as climates have always changed. But what we are seeing now seems accelerated and is surely induced by human-caused global warming.

Someday I will try to make time to share more examples of this.

Bristly Sarsaparilla

 

As always, click the photo to enlarge

On our recent trip to northern Michigan, we visited an amazing site known as Wetmore Pond. It's a spectacular natural area near Marquette, in the Upper Peninsula. A fairly short hike takes one back to the wetlands, which is a glacial kettle lake ringed with a wonderful fen. The hike passes through some interesting upland habitats such as the rock outcrops pictured above that overlook the fen.

And who could not notice the showy plant eking out a living in the rocky crevasses? I was quite pleased to see this one, especially in full flower. It is Bristly Sarsaparilla (Aralia hispida), a plant that I had never seen in flower.

The wetlands below, sarsaparilla above. What an incredible site to botanize and anyone with an interest in plants who finds themselves near Marquette would do well to visit Wetmore Pond.

The sarsaparilla is a northern plant, most frequent in a wide east-west belt ranging from about Winnipeg in Manitoba to the east coast, and from the Great Lakes north to the latitude of James Bay. It ranges south sparingly, primarily in the Appalachian Mountains but also in the interior to extreme northern Ohio.

However, Bristly Sarsaparilla has disappeared from some of its southernmost haunts, including Ohio. It has been collected from eight counties in extreme north-central and northeast Ohio but is now known from but one Geauga County locale. I know the Geauga County site, and it is ecologically quite similar to the Michigan locality where my observations were made.

While the flowers and inflorescences strongly suggest a parsley family member (Apiaceae), sarsaparilla belongs to a closely related group, the ginseng family (Araliaceae). 

There is absolutely no question that many southern species are rapidly expanding northward, and perhaps even more are retreating northward from their southern limits. We have lost a number of plant species that barely nipped into Ohio from the north, such as the protagonist of this blog. Long-term natural shifts in mean temperatures have always occurred and have always influenced the migration of plants.

The million-dollar question is how much human alterations and the resultant climate shifts are accelerating plant (and animal) movements. And I wonder how long the sole remaining Bristly Sarsaparilla population in Ohio will survive.

Mothing, along with a talk! Scioto Gardens, August 15

 

A male Polyphemus Moth (Antheraea polyphemus) presents an interesting visage. Big silkmoths such as this are always a hit at the sheets.

Chelsea Gottfried and I will be leading a mothing night on Saturday, August 15th. It'll commence around 8:30 pm, with Chelsea giving a brief program on moths and their importance. We'll have already set up the sheets and lights, and after the talk, we'll head out to see who is coming to visit. We'll stay until at least midnight, but participants are free to come and go as they wish.

The venue, once again, is Scioto Gardens Native Plant Nursery in Delaware County, at 2870 Curve Road. The mothing here is always interesting and can be spectacular. As you might imagine, the grounds are full of all manner of native flora so there are lots of potential host plants.

We'll also use blacklight flashlights to search for caterpillars. "Caterpillaring" is just as fun as the mothing!

One must register for this event with Scioto Gardens, and HERE IS THE LINK to do just that.

Hope to see you there!

The stunning caterpillar of the Io Moth (Automeris io). I'd be surprised if one of these doesn't turn up.

Midwest Native Plant Conference

 

A nymph-stage Snowy Tree Cricket (Oecanthus nivalis) noshes on a disk floret of an Ashy Sunflower (Helianthus mollis). The singing insects (Orthoptera) do not get their fair due for pollination services. This animal has plenty of pollen dusting its face. I have seen pollen-dusted tree crickets snacking on flowers many times.

I took this shot this morning while leading a field trip for the Midwest Native Plant Conference. This was our 17th year for the conference, and as usual it sold out in short order. Thank you to all of the organizers for their hard work in making the conference a success and providing the opportunity to hear lots of interesting speakers, interact with like-minded persons, and access to many of Ohio's top native plant nurseries who bring lots of floral goodies.

Bergamo Center at Mount Saint John in Dayton is our venue and has been for most of the conference's life. It is a perfect site for this type of event, with plenty of lawn space for vendors, a beautiful auditorium, a number of smaller rooms for breakout sessions, dining facilities and lots of lodging. The staff is superb and wonderful to work with. Also, there are plenty of field trip opportunities, both on the expansive grounds and at myriad interesting sites within a half-hour or so of Bergamo.

There were about 150 attendees, in addition to all of the organizers and volunteers. At least nine states were represented, as distant as Delaware and Missouri.

If you have an interest in botany and native plants, I encourage you to attend. The 2027 conference dates have not yet been picked, but it'll be about this time of year. Sometimes it fills with one day of opening registration, so I'd encourage you to use the website to register ASAP. I'll post the 2027 dates as soon as I know them.

The Eurasian Skylarks of Hawaii

 

I made this image on November 20, 2024, on the island of Maui, Hawaii. It is hard to beat Hawaiian sunrises, and even this iPhone snap captures this one well.

Thanks to my buddy Marty Sedluk, we got to go to Maui for a week back in November 2024. He's got a place over there and visits routinely. Shauna and I got to hang out with Marty and Eleanor and see some of the sights of this island. If you search "Hawaii" in the search engine (top left corner of the page) you'll see posts about stilts, turtles, honeycreepers, lizards and probably more.

Hawaii probably struck me differently than it would most first-time visitors. It didn't take long to learn that nearly everything we were seeing (or so it seemed) both floral and faunal was introduced. Especially at the lower elevations; higher mountainous areas seemed much better.

But introduced or not, I wanted to write about the marvelous little creature that inhabits large shortgrass meadows such as the one above. It is the legendary Eurasian Skylark (Alauda arvensis), whose aerial song is one of the great melodies of nature.

A skylark watches his surroundings from a small hillock. From this point - and points like it - skylarks would launch themselves skyward, rapidly ascend to a sufficient altitude, which is often in excess of 300 feet. Especially ambitious singers might rise to over 600 feet.

Once satisfactorily high aloft, the lark faces into the wind and hovers in its aerial display song. The complex, beautiful melody is a swiftly delivered babble of buzzy and squeaky notes interspersed with clear whistles and other notes. I find it impossible to adequately describe the wondrous song produced by this amazing lark. One must hear it for themselves, and you can do so HERE.

The skylark returns to terra firma for a well-deserved rest. Incredibly, one song can go on for 20 minutes or more! This propensity for creating aerial music, and lots of it, was the reason that Eurasian Skylarks were exported to foreign lands. The skylark is indigenous to a huge swath of Asia and Europe, but only very rarely showed up in North America as a vagrant.

Attempts were made to introduce the lark to many areas in North America, including Cincinnati, Ohio. Most of these efforts failed, but the skylarks flourished for a time on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Various land use development has reduced this population to less than 100 birds.

Introductions to the Hawaiian Islands began in 1865, and the birds did pretty well, eventually colonizing all of the islands. They've apparently since disappeared from Kauai Island.

Unlike many invasive species, I suspect introduced Eurasian Skylarks are innocuous in that they probably don't compete much with native species, nor rob the natives of resources.