Common Goldeneye: Aquatic Break-dancer

Photo: John Pogacnik

NATURE
The Columbus Dispatch
February 7th, 2010
Jim McCormac

Goldeneye striking in looks, action

Probably no other group of birds has had the impact on conservation that waterfowl has. Most people are familiar with the mallards and Canada geese that frequent ponds, but there is much more to the ducky crowd. Forty-three species of ducks, geese, and swans have occurred in Ohio, and most of them are common, at least in migration.

In the 1930’s, Dust Bowl droughts had depleted North America’s waterfowl to perilously low levels. From the dusty ashes of near catastrophe arose a group that is now one of the world’s most effective conservation organizations. The year 1937 marked the formation of Ducks Unlimited, and in their 73 year history they’ve raised $3 billion which has gone to protect well over 12 million acres of habitat.

A good thing, as waterfowl rank high among our most interesting, beautiful birds. And protecting their habitat also safeguards scores of other animals, and lots of plants, too.

Hardy beasts, waterfowl are among the very first migrants to push north in spring. Today’s date is February 7th – very much winter in our eyes – but already the spring wanderlust is striking some ducks.

One of the toughest of this crowd is the common goldeneye. These diving ducks will stay about as far north as open water can be found, cavorting in the icy water of open leads as comfortably as if afloat in a tropical sea. Goldeneyes are already chomping at the bit, moving north as fast as thaws open up water, in their quest to reach northern breeding grounds.

Drake goldeneyes are art sculpted in feathers. Black and white is the dominant theme, creating a gorgeous piebald pattern. It’s as if the male’s head was dunked in inky paint, the jet-black noggin marked with an oval white spot just aft of the bill. Brilliant yellow eyes appear as topaz jewels imbedded in coal, their contrast lending the duck a perpetually surprised appearance.

Some ducks merely tip up in shallow water to feed, their butts sticking above the surface. Not so the goldeneye. These are divers, plunging down deep to harvest goodies unavailable to fowl that only dabble at the surface. Watching feeding goldeneyes cavorting among ice floes gives one a real respect for avian engineering and the insulating ability of feathers. A human submerged in such waters would be lucky to last 20 minutes.

About now, hormones flood drake goldeneyes and their thoughts turn to the ladies. Coy and aloof, the somber brown hens require work to woo. So, stud goldeneyes become aquatic break-dancers, pulling out all the stops to get the girl. A courting male throws his head back till his bill is vertical, folding into a floating pretzel. It’ll then scoot forward, thrusting a pair of brilliant orange webbed feet from the water, all the while shaking its head and pirouetting about.

It must work. Common goldeneyes are still common.

Jim McCormac

Further Afield

One of the easiest, most effective ways to help waterfowl and wetlands is by purchasing a Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamp, more popularly known as the “Duck Stamp”. The 2010 stamp features a gorgeous American wigeon . Since its inception in 1934, Duck Stamp sales have generated over $750 million, and protected nearly 5 ½ million acres.

Duck stamps will be available at a waterfowl symposium to be held the weekend of February 27-28 at the new Grange Insurance Audubon Center in Columbus. Keynote speaker is Dr. Azzam Alwash, who leads restoration efforts of the massive wetlands flanked by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq. Conference details are HERE. Stamps can also be purchased at many post offices, and at: http://www.duckstamp.com/mm5/

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Space limitations in the newspaper sometimes lead to editing down my column. I am able to reprint the entire, original column here.

Hummers, gnatcatchers, and lichens

For some time, I've been curious about the specific makeup of the lichen communities of Ruby-throated Hummingbird and Blue-gray Gnatcatcher nests. The literature contains abundant reference to the fact that these species use lichens in nest construction, but I've yet to see a study that analyzed the lichen species and composition.

So, a few weeks back, I put out a request to the Ohio birding community, and was rewarded with a few dozen nests that were made available for study.

Enter Ray Showman, without doubt one of the leading lichenologists in the U.S. Ray lives in Vinton County, Ohio, and recently retired as a biologist with American Electric Power. AEP originally hired him to study lichen populations in the vicinity of coal-burning power plants. Lichens are quite vulnerable to air pollution; thus they serve as readily studied barometers of environmental conditions.

Ray brings real street cred to any project involving lichens. This is his book, co-authored by fellow Ohioan Don Flenniken. This is the gold standard for lichens in these parts. I've spent many an hour in the field with Ray, and can attest to his amazing ability to spot different lichens among a sea of crusts festooning a tree trunk, and quickly identify them. He was quick to accept the challenge of identifying lichens used in hummingbird and gnatcatcher nests. Some of these nests were many decades old, making for a good challenge.

Ruby-throated Hummingbird nest. Truly tiny, a hummer nest could fit comfortably on a 50 cent piece. Hummingbirds tend to place small bits of lichens liberally on the nest's exterior, but don't completely shingle the structure with them.

Blue-gray Gnatcatcher nest. These are elephantine in comparison to a hummer nest, and gnatcatchers tend to thoroughly shingle the exterior with a dense coating of lichens, and the individual lichen pieces are larger than those used by hummers. Gnatcatcher nests are usually more elongate and conical in shape, too, and the birds typically saddle them to a horizontal branch. In the field, they bear an amazing resemblence to a broken off branch stub.

Closeup of the exterior of a Blue-gray Gnatcatcher nest from Licking County, Ohio. This one is shingled with almost equal proportions of Green Shield Lichen, Flavoparmelia caparata, and Hammered Shield Lichen, Parmelia sulcata, together totalling about 40% of the nest's lichens. The remainder were a species of Parmotrema lichen, not identifiable to species.

These artfully crafted, elaborate nests house some of the smallest eggs of any of the North American birds. This is a Blue-gray Gnatcatcher egg. A Ruby-throated Hummingbird egg is somewhat smaller. As both species use spider webbing liberally in nest construction, there is a certain amount of elasticity to the nest. Little hummers and gnatcatchers, just before fledging, are many, many times larger than the egg from which they emerged. The cup nest can expand - bow out - to accommodate the growing birds' bulk.

This is the nest of an Eastern Wood-Pewee, a species that also uses plenty of lichens. However, pewee nests are devilishly hard to come by, probably because of the difficulty of collecting them. Pewees generally place their nests on small horizontal limbs, well out from the trunk and often high off the ground. Such locations are nearly impossible for a person to reach without a bucket truck. When I was researching my book Birds of Ohio, the Eastern Wood-Pewee was the probably the hardest common species on which to find detailed life history information. The relative lack of information is in part due to the difficulty of studying active nests.

Relative size scale of lichen-spackled nests: Eastern Wood-Pewee (left); Ruby-throated Hummingbird (bottom); Blue-gray Gnatcatcher (top).

We found five species of lichens in hummingbird nests, and this one - Hammered Shield Lichen, Parmelia sulcata - was easily the most common. This was also the preferred lichen in gnatcatcher nests, but not favored to the exent as in hummingbird nests.

Hoary Rosette Lichen, Physcia apipifolia, a very common species on trees where the lichen species harvested by hummers and gnatcatchers grow. But, it was not seen at all, at least in the nests that we examined. Why?

Between the gnatcher and hummingbird nests, we found a total of five species, and all but one were used commonly by both species. The Hoary Rosette Lichen pictured above differs in that it grows tightly appressed - flat - to the bark. It would be difficult for a hummer or gnatcatcher to pry pieces of it away from the tree.

Both of these bird species site their nests on small lateral tree branches, typically well away from the trunk. The lichens that we found in their nests are species that thrive on branches, and at least in one instance, don't occur as often on large trunks. It stands to reason that these are the lichens most desirable for nest construction, as they occur in the immediate vicinity of the nest site, thus making for better camouflage.

Also, all of the lichen species used in nest construction produce elongated lobe tips that arc away from the bark. This growth habit makes for easy plucking and removal for birds that have small, delicate bills. All of the lichens we found are very common, too, and readily available to the birds.

Lichens tie these tiny birds to a much larger ecological picture involving plant communities, and man's impact on air pollution. Ray and I are working on a paper for publication in the Ohio Cardinal that will describe our study and findings in detail, and explore the birds' ecological relationship with lichens.

Gone? But not forgotten

With some 1,850 native plant species in Ohio, there are plenty of mysteries. Many plants are poorly known, even some of the common ones; get into the realm of the rare and sometimes hardly anyone seems to know anything. The species that follows ranks high in the botanical mystery world.

While researching gnatcatcher and hummingbird nests at the Ohio State University's Museum of Biological Diversity today, I had occasion to pull this sheet from the herbarium. It is perhaps the last specimen collected in Ohio of an enigmatic plant called Waterplantain Spearwort, Ranunculus ambigens. Dave Spooner took it nearly 29 years ago, in Scioto County. There are a number of other Ohio records, but most are far older than this one.

Waterplantain Spearwort is NOT a shrinking violet. Large and lanky, the plant sports rather showy and conspicuous white flowers, and a robust specimen might be two feet in height. This species first got on my radar screen when my co-authors and I were researching our Floristic Quality Assessment Index of Ohio book. We eventually got to this species, and everyone produced a blank look. Between John Mack, Barb Andreas (co-authors) and myself, we had seen nearly every plant, native or not, that occurs in Ohio. Not this one. I'd share a photo of a real live growing one if I had one, but I've never come across such a photo.

This spearwort (member of the buttercup family) has a broad distribution in eastern North America. It occurs in 19 or 20 states. But I've done some checking, and it is listed as endangered, threatened, or extirpated (locally extinct) in nearly all of them.

Here's the Ohio distribution: specimen records from 19 counties. What happened?

It's much easier to pick up on NEW occurrences: plants or animals that are appearing where they haven't previously. When species gradually slip away over time, especially ones that don't loom large on people's radar screens, detecting their disappearance is harder. Had we not been immersed in looking intimately at every Ohio species of plant for our project, we certainly wouldn't have noticed the riddle of the missing spearwort.

My original theory about this loss involved two factors: habitat, and time of year. Waterplantain Spearwort grows in marshes that are densely vegetated, and might hold a foot or two of water at most seasons. Such haunts are often shunned due to the difficulty of getting around. Two, this plant blooms in the midst of summer, when heat, humidity and bugs are at their worst, further discouraging exploration.

But, especially in the last decade, botanists have done rather heavy exploration of such habitats in summer, and no one has turned up the spearwort. One might attribute its loss to the overall loss of wetlands - Ohio has lost about 90% of its presettlement wetlands - but that's too simplistic an explanation, in my view. There are still plenty of apparently suitable sites, including some of the places that this species was once found in.

My hunch is that a water quality issue is at work here. Increased turbidity - muddying of the waters - or perhaps chemical contaminants such as fertilizers may be impacting the spearwort. It grows,and presumably germinates, in water, and those factors may be inhibiting its ability to grow.

From what I know of Ranunculus ambigens, it is a worthy candidate for Federal listing, and should be the subject of a thorough study to determine its overall status. If anyone knows anything about the plant, I'd love to learn more.

Owls and Ears

I was wading through photos today, working on an upcoming talk, and came across a cool picture. I've probably shared it here sometime in the past, but maybe you haven't seen it.


Long-eared Owl, Asio otus. Or perhaps this individual ought to be called a "Lop-eared Owl". I came across this individual roosting in some white pines, and had spotted him from afar. Thus, I was able to get relatively close before he seemed to become aware of my presence.

Note how his ears are drooping like a basset hound! That's not the typical posture that we humans observe long-ears in. He seemed to become wise to me just seconds before I shot the photo; not long after he snapped to attention.

Photo courtesy Cornell Lab of Ornithology Birds of North America Online.

Long-eared Owl, alert posture. Those "ears" aren't actually ears at all. They are ornaments that help disguise the bird, as when fully erect these appendages help the bird blend with its brushy surroundings and appear more stick-like. Also, when a Long-eared Owl feels a threat lurks, it'll "sleek" its body - compressing its feathers and sitting very upright and at attention. The transformation from relaxed posture to alert posture is quite remarkable. From chubby and lop-eared, to thin and stickish. At a glance, long-ears appear amazingly like a broken-off branch, and it's easy to pass them by.

Bald-faced Hornet

Bald-faced Hornet nest, photo by Jim McCormac

The Columbus Dispatch
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Jim McCormac

Hornets OK unless you're yellow jacket

Winter is a good time to see interesting things that were concealed by summer’s dense cloak of leaves. One of the more conspicuous sights is large papery piñata-like nests that hang from branches.

Many people comment on them, believing they are looking at “honey bee” nests. Not even close. The architects that crafted the football-shaped orbs are related to bees, but otherwise the similarities are few. These engineering marvels are the handiwork of bald-faced hornets, Dolichovespula maculata. Comparing one of these to a honey bee is akin to contrasting Clint Eastwood and Richard Simmons.

You are no doubt familiar with those nasty ill-tempered yellow jackets that swarm your pop can and wreak havoc at picnics. As anyone who has been on the receiving end of their sting knows, the black and yellow beasts pack a punch. They’re intimidating enough to send grown men running, arms flailing and screaming like pansies.

Bald-faced hornets bushwhack, kill, and eat yellow jackets. Now that’s one tough insect; terminators of the wasp world. If the adult hornet doesn’t make its own meal of the yellow jacket, it chews it into pulp and feeds it to young hornet larvae back in the nest.

Perhaps you’re thinking it’s time to eradicate all bald-faced hornets before next summer rolls around. No worries. Fortunately for us, these insects are quite mild-mannered, insofar as people go. Leave them alone and they’ll not mess with you, either. Most of their nests tend to be placed well out of reach, too.

This isn’t to say they won’t protect their nests if under siege. More than one person has discovered that dozens of angry bald-faced hornets are quite effective at protecting their property. Because their nests do resemble piñatas, more than one kid has been tempted to bust one open with a stick. These budding Einsteins quickly discover aversion therapy through the use of pain, and certainly will think twice before launching another hornet attack.

The nests are empty of wasps now; the cold of winter kills all but queens that were fertilized last fall. These survivors overwinter in ground burrows or tree cavities, and each will start a new nest in spring. Their first batch of larvae will become workers, whose main task is expanding the nest. Through successive generations, all working hard, the structure can grow to three feet in length.

Each nest is essentially a tiny paper mill. Like winged lumberjacks, the workers harvest wood, which they chew into pulp mixed with their starchy saliva. They smooth this mixture into ornate overlapping papery shrouds which serve to shelter the larval honeycombs.

If you encounter a bald-faced hornet nest next summer, have no fear. Leave them be; they’ll reciprocate. And think about all of those pesky yellow jackets they’re taking out!

Bald-faced Hornet, photo by John Pogacnik

Waterfowl Symposium!

Late winter and early spring have become a real goldrush of interesting conferences. From time to time, I want to plug some of these events, as anyone interested in natural history should enjoy them.

First, another shout-out about the upcoming Waterfowl Symposium sponsored by the Ohio Ornithological Society and Columbus Audubon. This event features a raft of great speakers, interesting field trip sites, and a special Friday night performance by the Swinging Orangatangs, fronted by Bill Thompson and Julie Zickefoose.

All the details can be found HERE, or just click on the logo below.

Wilds Winter Extravaganza: Part II

To the delight of most, and no doubt to the consternation of others, Ohio Ornithological Society forays often incorporate elements of natural history other than birds. Birds always take precedence, but we believe the feathered crowd is but part of a larger and more complex ecological web, and when the opportunity arises to share bigger pictures we like to take advantage.

In the photos below, you'll see a living, breathing, snorting much bigger picture in the flesh. WARNING: A cuteness overload advisory bulletin must be issued at this point. Should you be put off by chubby little 300 lb. infants with horns, go away now.

Your narrator flirts with death. Posing by one of the world's most dangerous beasts, a Southern White Rhinoceros. Those thick steel bars are no match for such a brute; had I made one misstep the animal would have been all over me.

Yeah, whatever.

This is the newest addition to the Wilds' family, three month old Anan, weighing in at a svelte 300 pounds. She tipped the scales at 70 lbs. when mommy dropped her. Think about that, any human child-bearers that may be reading, and be grateful you are not a rhino. Her darkened forenose is the result of rooting about in the mud, something rhinos greatly enjoy. As a boy, I was scolded for returning home caked in mud; in the rhino world such behavior is encouraged.

The mother, in the background, lending scale to the youthful Anan. Infant rhinos behave much like kittens or puppies, frisking about and investigating all. She was quite curious about all of the birders that came to visit, and would approach closely to have a look at us. The mother, who weighs more than your car, is a formidable guardian. It'll take Anan several years to reach that size, but she's working at it, munching lots of hay and packing on about 5 lbs a day.

It's interesting to watch people's reactions to the pubescent rhino. Scarcely anyone would term one of the adults as "cute"; virtually everyone calls the little one that. And it is. For a critter with skin as tough as rawhide, full of wrinkles, and the texture of tanned leather, fronted with a misshapen horn between two little piglike eyes, and capped with a pair of battered-looking dumbo ears, Anan is cute as the proverbial button.

Sliding up the scale a bit, we visited this one year old white rhino. They fill out considerably by this point; it is several times larger than Anan. Growing rhinos need their rest, and when they tire, they just sort of fall over. Note how it curls its foreleg under and splays the rear legs out to the side, just like a cat at leisure.

I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of that protuberance. Mrs. Rhino horns in, checking us out. While fearsome in appearance, they seem surprisingly docile, although we all still appreciated those massive steel bars that separated us. In addition to rhinos, the Wilds works with some 30 other species of large animals, many of which are imperiled in the wild.

In breaking news, word is out that the Wilds has, for the first time ever, successfully crossed a rhino and an elephant. The big question is what to name the thing. When big game authority Dr. Baba Horn was asked what the new hybrid should be called, he replied: "HellifIknow!"

The foray ended with a Short-eared Owl vigil, from the big overlook deck built just for birders. The Ohio Division of Wildlife footed the bill for the deck - it wasn't cheap! - and we had the official ribbon-cutting back in December 2006, as part of another Ohio Ornithological Society event. Some 150 people jammed the platform for the ceremony, on a windy day with temperatures in the 20's.

It was much balmier - in the 40's - this time, but alas, those odd barking owls with the mothlike flight failed to put in an appearance. Oh well, their primary prey, meadow voles, are way down this winter and there aren't many short-eareds to be had. Next year, it'll probably be different.

Thanks once again to everyone who made this event possible: chief architect Marc Nolls, all of the fabulous trip leaders, and each and every birder who made the trip. And, of course, the staff of the Wilds, who go out of their way to work with the birding community, even to the point of showing us treats like Anan. Please visit the Wilds if you get the chance, and let them know that you appreciate their support of the birding community.