Tiger Spiketail

A well-shaded sandstone gorge in Ohio's Hocking Hills - perfect habitat for one of our most interesting - and rare - dragonflies, the tiger spiketail, Cordulegaster erronia. The small stream at the gorge's bottom essentially originates at the upper end of the photo, where a falls plunges over an impressive several story tall sandstone cliff. Overarching hemlock, birch and other trees insulate the stream from direct sunlight, keeping its waters cool. Hillside seeps add a constant infusion of cold groundwater, and decomposed sandstone forms plenty of saturated soft sandy margins to the stream.

I was in this gorge the other day looking for rare plants, specifically the tiny triangle grapefern, Botrychium lanceolatum. There is a small population here which I hadn't seen for about seven years, and I was able to refind it. This elfin fern only stands perhaps two inches in height - at least these plants - and one can scarcely see them in the gloom of the forest floor when standing upright.

But I got a real bonus on the trek to the fern.

While admiring a small population of rough sedge, Carex scabrata, near the stream's bank, a large black dragonfly prominently banded with yellow and sporting luminescent green eyes zipped by, low over the narrow stream. Tiger spiketail!

This is a fascinating insect; one of my favorites. It is a high-end predator and it probably wouldn't be far afield to compare the dragonfly to the sharp-shinned hawks that nest in this forest. Like the bird, spiketails require large blocks of intact forest, defend large territories, and are sensitive to disturbance such as logging. Plus, they just look VERY COOL. Ohio dragonfly expert Bob Glotzhober says a patrolling tiger spiketail resembles a miniature B-52 bomber. I like that analogy, and they do indeed suggest a small aircraft as they cruise low over the stream's waters, ranging from one end of their turf to the other.

My lucky spiketail day had just begun. After the dragonfly shot by, I readied my camera and prepared to settle in and hope for some shots. My experience with tiger spiketails is that they make systematic patrols, but it may take several minutes before the animal returns to a given spot and you've got to be ready or you'll miss it when it flashes by.

No worries. This spiketail turned out to be a female, and she selected a nice wet sandy flat about ten feet away to place her eggs. She shot in, hovered over the stream, turned to glare at the interloper - me - and then went about her business while I watched quietly from the shadows. Eventually I was able to creep into the center of the stream without disturbing her and make photos and watch the ovipositing process at remarkably close range.

Tiger spiketails place their eggs in permanently saturated sand in or along the margins of small order streams. "Place" might be putting it a bit delicately. Rather, the female violently lunges the tip of her abdomen and the ovipositor into the sand in the manner of a pogo-stick, making about one thrust per second. Forgive the less than crystal clear photos, but shooting rapidly moving dragonflies in deep shade is not the easiest task.

In the above photo, her abdomen tip is in the shallow water and making contact with the substrate. The water at this ovipositing site was not even an inch deep. She drilled in a lot of eggs, making many dozens of lunges in the short time I had to observe. Two other hikers stumbled along and made the stream crossing at this point, spooking the dragon and ending my study.

You can get a sense of the speed and violent force of the spiketail's thrusts in this photo. She singled out a small area - maybe a foot or so square - of apparently prime turf, and would concentrate her efforts in that spot.

This video should speak a thousand words about the tiger spiketail's ovipositing technique. It isn't the greatest video - my camera wanted to focus on the backdrop rather than the dragonfly - but she's clearly visible and you'll certainly see her style.

The tiger spiketail was a great bonus to an already highly productive field day.

Black Rat Snake eats chicken egg

I suppose I ought to put this caveat right up front: if, for some reason, you detest serpents you probably won't like these photos. In fact, I'm sure you won't. So if you are a ophidiophobe, surf no further - turn back, I say! Chances are, you already picked up on the snakiness of this post from the blog's title, and haven't even made it this far. Your loss. This is cool stuff.

My friend Ann Bonner, who is a forester living in Athens County, sends along the following photo. What's more, she thinks this is very cool, and the snake is in HER chicken coop! I love it. Here's what she told me: "Since this guy has been hanging around the last 2 yrs, no rats in the coop. That is worth a few eggs now and again".

When I asked for permission to share this photo, Ann made me guarantee that I wouldn't make the snake out to be a villain. Silly girl! Of course I wouldn't! And I love her mentality regarding the animal. Your average chicken farmer would pulverize that snake with a long-handled rake in the blink of an eye.

The two and a half foot long black rat snake, Pantherophis alleghaniensis, caught in the act of swallowing - whole! - a chicken egg. A small salary to pay, thinks I, for his ratting and mousing services. Black rat snakes are very common in much of Ohio, although like many serpents they've declined considerably in well-settled areas. NOTE: The taxonomy and nomenclature of this species has been somewhat unsettled in recent years, it seems, but these are the common and scientific names that I am using.

We crop down the photo a bit, as I know you really wanted a closer look. Snakes have incredibly flexible lower jaws, and we can see the amazingly elastic expansion of the snake's mouth to accommodate this large chicken egg. That meal would be comparable to you or I swallowing a basketball.

Your narrator holds a black rat snake that I caught a few years ago in Muskingum County. It was crossing a country lane, and I wanted to move it before it got run over. This one was pushing five feet, but black rats can get a lot larger than that. The record is supposedly 8 feet, 4 inches. On two occasions I've seen black rats that were well over six feet in length. Such a big reptile can be understandably intimidating, but normally they are quite docile. The one that I'm holding took one feeble, half-hearted swipe at me when I first picked it up, then settled down and was completely passive.

Thanks to Ann for sharing her photos and story, and I nominate her for the as yet to be created Friend of the Snake Award.

Mississippi Kite update

I was able to stop in at Hide-A-Way Hills briefly yesterday morning, and check out Ohio's only currently known nest of Mississippi Kites. I recently wrote about these kites HERE, and HERE. As previously reported, there is one chick in the nest, and it is continually being stuffed with cicadas and other goodies by the adults. As a consequence, Junior is growing like a weed, but is still heavily beset with white down and is still a ways from making its inaugural flight. It appears that we are still on track to aim for Saturday, August 13, for the 2nd annual Kite Day.

Thanks much to Melissa and Elizabeth for getting me into the high security Hide-A-Way Hills compound so I could make these photos and issue this update. And please forgive the lack of crisp frame-filling photos. My biggest lens is a 300 mm, and we really need the big boys and their 500 and 600 mm's to adequately deal with these high-flying kites.

An adult Mississippi Kite launches from its favorite sentinel tree, just a stone's toss from an active nest. We saw both adults, and one or the other would spend a fair bit of time at the summit of this tree, scrutinizing all of the happenings in the area, including us. At one point, a Pileated Woodpecker foolishly entered the sphere of the large white ash in which the kites have made their aerie. As if shot from a cannon, the guard kite hurtled from its perch and into the ash, bushwhacking the woodpecker and delivering a raking blow. In turn, the woodpecker bolted from the tree is if he had been shot out of a slingshot.

An embarrasingly ungraceful landing. We pretended not to notice. Once airborn, Mississippi Kites are impeccable aviators.

An adult wings towards the nest, carrying prey which is probably an annual cicada. As dramatic evidence of their flying abilities, the kites deftly pluck these fast-flying if somewhat clumsy insects from the air. Much more impressive is ther ability to snag dragonflies on the wing. Few animals can outfly a big dragonfly, but they've more than met their match in these kites.

This shot shows the incredible versatility of the wings and tail of these birds. While a Mississippi Kite is not all that much smaller than a Peregrine Falcon in dimensions, it weighs little more than a third the weight of the falcon. This translates to an incredible bouyancy, and an astonishing ability to jig, jag, dive or accelerate with extreme rapidity. Small tweaks and flicks of the tail or primary flight feathers send the bird onto a new course, instantly. If using a car analogy, the kite would be a Mazda Miata, the falcon, a Bugatti Veyron.

Not every scrumptious cicada is delivered to Junior - the adults have to eat, too. Here, one eats its prey on the wing, adeptly transferring the morsel to its bill while tracing languid circles high in the sky.

It's hard to see through the dense foliage, but that's the nest with an adult kite stuffing something into the young kite. This nest is in a good place, high in the spindly boughs of a white ash, where few predators of substance can get at it, and where the adults can keep an eye on it. Except, they chose an ash. We've not yet seen any sign of the emerald ash borer here, but it's coming. That's another story, though, and we - or the kites - don't have to worry about that issue in Hide-A-Way Hills at least for a while.

Stay tuned for kite updates.

Wall lizard

The mausoleum of Fred Lazarus and family members, Green Lawn Cemetery, Columbus, Ohio. I was down at the cemetery last Wednesday, and snapped this photo as Lazarus is central to this story. Fred was the son of Simon Lazarus, who founded the now extinct F & R Lazarus & Company stores. Fred served as president of the company, and like many of the Lazarus family members, lived part of his life in Cincinnati.

Lazarus later became part of Macy's, which of course still goes strong. I took this photo last Tuesday at a downtown Cincinnati intersection, and the Macy's empire is a dominant fixture of the scene.

Anyway, back in 1952, a then young member of the extended Lazarus clan named George Rau lived in Mt. Lookout, a Cinci suburb. While visiting the area of Lake Garda near Milan, Italy in 1952 on a family vacation, George took a shine to the local lizards and stuffed some in his luggage, importing them back to the Queen City. Upon return to the Mt. Lookout compound, he liberated the reptiles; a species known as the common wall lizard, Podarcis muralis.

They flourished in the Queen City, and have come to be known locally as the "Lazarus Lizards".

Typical wall lizard habitat as seen from Google Earth, this particular neighborhood on Cincinnati's southeast side and not far from the Ohio River.

And here we are at street level. See that wall by the sidewalk? There are wall lizards living in it. And about every other wall, rocky foundation or outcrop, and stony spot in many parts of the city.

Get yourself into a good wall lizard locale, and it won't be long before you see one. Like barely glimpsed wraiths, the wary little lizards scuttle off at lightning speed, causing one to wonder if they were seeing things. Get out on foot and start stalking the little animals and it won't be long before you manage good looks. And a big dose of surprise as to just how many there are.

Herepetologist Jeff Davis holds a wall lizard shortly after capturing it along the street in the previous photo. Ohio has a long and storied history of herpetology, and has been home to some of the country's foremost authorities on amphibians and reptiles. Jeff is one of them, a leading expert on Ohio's herpetofauna and author or coauthor of several publications about the state's amphibians and reptiles.

I was in Cincinnati last Tuesday to speak at a conference, and connected with Jeff beforehand to see if he'd be willing to meet me afterwards to look for wall lizards. Jeff lives in the Cincinnati area and his lab at the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History is just ten minutes from the conference I was at.

So it was a go, and thanks to Jeff I was able to add this scaley oddity to my list, and more importantly learn more about wall lizards and how they operate.

The common wall lizard is a thing of great beauty when seen like this. Most people just get glimpses of linear little streaks dashing over the curb, but we were persistent and finally ran one into the grass, where its progress was impeded. With a quick pounce, Jeff was on it.

Note the lichenlike blotchy dappling of the skin. I would imagine this pattern evolved to help the animal better blend with lichen-encrusted rocks.

Those eyes work very well. These lizards are incredibly wary and impossible to sneak up on. Usually, it was tough to approach one within ten or fifteen feet before the animal would scuttle off into a crevice or dense vegetation.

This is a male, its skin highlighted with a row of beautiful blue dots. Upon close inspection - click the pic for expansion - the skin resembles an ornate tapestry of small woven beads.

Here we can see the reason for the lizard's nearly supernatural ability to zip around vertical surfaces in a manner that would put Spiderman to shame. The toes, especially those of the back feet, are abnormally long and a great adaption for clinging to challenging surfaces.

From its humble start of ten lizards in 1952, the Cincinnati wall lizard population has ballooned to perhaps 200,000, maybe more. They are abundant in many neighborhoods and well known to local citizens, and have expanded very locally into neighboring Indiana and Kentucky. How far they get remains to be seen.

The ecological impacts of having perhaps one-quarter million introduced lizards running about can't be good, but it is difficult to ascertain with certainty exactly what damage they have done. Wall lizards, given their success, must have had a role in reducing native lizards such as eastern fence lizard and five-lined skink, which are rare or absent where the wall lizard occurs although both used to occur in this area.

I appreciate Jeff taking me to see some of these curious little lizards, which certainly qualify as Ohio's oddest tale of reptilian introduction.

Piping Plover update

Photo: Dane Adams

I recently posted about two Piping Plovers that spent a few days in mid-July at Lorain, Ohio. That post is RIGHT HERE. Well, Dave Slager made the effort to run down the band information and received the following information from Alice Van Zoeren, a researcher at the University of Minnnesota. All or nearly all Piping Plovers that breed along the Great Lakes are prominently marked with combinations of colored bands that can be used to identify the individual. Thanks to Dave for posting this information to the Ohio Birds listserv:

*Bird 1 (the bird with no leg flag, an orange band, and a light green band)*


"I can't be as specific for this report since the band combination is one
used for chicks. We reuse these combinations in subsequent years. Breeding
adults, like the other plover you reported, are given unique combinations of
colors that individually identify them for life. This plover was hatched in
07, 09 or 10 at Gulliver, MI in the upper peninsula or possibly (though
probably not as likely) at Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, WI in 2006."

*Bird 2 (the bird with 2 yellow color bands, an orange band, and an orange

leg flag)*

"Thanks for your reports of two Great Lakes Piping Plovers. This male plover
was hatched in 2007 near Escanaba, MI and banded in 2009 at Port Inland, MI
along US-2 in the Upper Peninsula."

Beetles battle loosestrife

I took this photo a few years back, at Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge on the shores of Lake Erie. This marsh was being overrun by a beautiful but dastardly invader, purple loosestrife, Lythrum salicaria. The plant's magenta spikes of flowers are quite attractive, and unfortunately is still all too often sold by nurseries. Purple loosestrife has been here for a long time; it was originally brought to North America from its native Europe for use as a medicinal herb. It probably first jumped the garden wall nearly 200 years ago, but has really run wild the last couple of decades, at least in the Great Lakes, and can thoroughly overrun high quality wetlands. The resultant loss of biodiversity is profound.

Photo: John Pogacnik

On the good news side, I recently got an email and some photos from John Pogacnik, a biologist with Lake Metroparks in northeast Ohio. John's organization manages lots of wetlands, and loosestrife has made its way into some of them, and plenty of other coastal Lake Erie wetlands that John routinely visits.

So I was interested to hear of John's observations on recent infestations of "loosestrife beetles" in the genus Galerucella, such as in the above photo. There are two species of Galerucella used for loosestrife control, and I believe this one is the black-margined loosestrife beetle, G. calmariensis. The other is G. pusilla, and both are indigenous to the native range of purple loosestrife and are natural predators of the plant. The beetles were brought to North America in the early 1990's in an effort to combat the plant.

Photo: John Pogacnik

Both adult beetles and their larvae, which look like caterpillars, consume loosestrife. And they are gluttons for the stuff. John took these photos in wetlands at Conneaut Harbor in Ashtabula County, a famous birding locale. The last time that I was there, there were massive head-high dense stands of loosestrife in places. Well, apparently the hard-working beetles are laying waste to the stuff.

Photo: John Pogacnik

A pack of beetles works over a loosestrife plant. Go get 'em, boys! Apparently these beetles have spread from other introductions, and were not known to be intentionally released at Conneaut. The bugs have had localized successes in the western Lake Erie marshes, too.

Photo: John Pogacnik

That's a nice photo. An almost completely denuded clump of loosestrife, having suffered the wrath of the Galerucella beetles. So far, the beetles have shown no signs of jumping ship, and attacking native plants such as the beautiful, diminutive native winged loosestrife, Lythrum alatum. Hopefully that'll remain the case. All too often, these sorts of biological control schemes go utterly haywire, such as with House Sparrows and the Asian multicolored lady beetle.

With luck, the loosestrife beetles will knock this vegetative invader back far and wide, and keep it in check. But the long-term prognosis remains to be seen. John's photos certainly offer hope, though.

Don't come back as a caterpillar

What a day yesterday was. After attending a conference all day in downtown Cincinnati, I hustled off to meet one of Ohio's preeminent herpetologists. He showed my what is now the Queen City's most famous reptile, and I've got photos of that excursion to share later.

Following that, it was off to Adams County and the Edge of Appalachia preserve for an 8 pm meeting. Why so late? Caterpillars. We had enticed a major newspaper to do a story on caterpillars and their importance to the environment, and as most caterpillars are active nocturnally we had to adopt an owl's schedule. Thanks to whiz-bang naturalists John Howard, Rich McCarty, and Mark Zloba for agreeing to help the reporter and photographer find some cats and learn about their fascinating habits. I'll share more about the article once it emerges.

John, Mark and Rich had been keeping a watchful eye for caterpillars all week, and capturing various interesting ones. By doing so, we'd be assured of having lots of interesting goodies to show off, should our nighttime search efforts not bear much fruit. This is one of the cooler cats: a spotted apatelodes, Apatelodes torrefacta. Apatelodes are common, and generalists that feed on the foliage of a wide variety of common trees.

As you've noticed, this silky cat is heavily beset with long setae, or hairs, and looks like a tiny, tubular Pomeranian dog. There are probably two primary reason for all of the "fur". One, it makes it tougher for birds to snack on Apatelodes, as all of those bristles are unpalatable and it's just not worth the bother for most bird species. Two, all of the hair may make it tougher for the parasitoid insects - flies and wasps - to get at the caterpillar's body and attach their eggs. And as we shall see, the latter fate is a caterpillar's worst nightmare come true.

As we moved through the dark forest, searching the plants with lights for foraging caterpillars, John Howard spotted this spectacle. It is a large sphinx moth caterpillar, covered with the coccoons of braconid wasps.

The Braconidae is an enormous family of parasitoid wasps - some authorities believe there are in excess of 100,000 species worldwide - and we've got scores of them in Ohio. A parasitoid should not be confused with a parasite. The latter is something like lice or ticks. They're a bother, and they take from their host, but they don't kill it. Parasitoids such as braconid wasps ultimately kill their victims.

The female wasp has a long stingerlike ovipositor, and she uses it to inject eggs on or into the tissue of the caterpillar (or other insects, depending on the species of wasp). Along with the eggs comes a special cocktail known as a bracovirus, which serves to infect the caterpillar's immune system and mask detection of the invading eggs. Once the wasp grubs hatch, they begin feeding on non-vital innards within the caterpillar - eating it alive, essentially. It is in the wasp grubs' best interest to keep the caterpillar alive as long as possible, so they have fresh food to see them to maturity, and also a living caterpillar is better able to hide and avoid other predators such as birds.

Finally, when all is ready, the wasp grubs burst through the skin of the caterpillar and form the cyclindrical little coccoons that we see in these photos. Amazingly, this caterpillar was still alive, although barely. Perhaps even by now, a day later, the wasplets have emerged from their coccoons, leaving the dried husk of the sphinx caterpillar. A seemingly terrible fate, but one shared by scores and scores of caterpillars.