Month: September 2019

[This is my last post for a while, because I am off to Tanzania. Enjoy your empty inbox, and watch for a distinct change of ecosystem on my return!] 

You may have noticed a shortage of mammals in these posts this summer. That’s partly because I haven’t seen as many as usual, and partly because some of the ones I have seen were not patient enough to wait for photos. Like the large black bear that crossed the road near my house in early July. Though I did find a rotten tree stump he had ripped apart in a search for ants:

The largest mammal so far this summer was a white-tailed deer in mid-August, crossing the trail under the impression we had now gone past and wouldn’t look her way.

She didn’t run, just lingered in the trees nearby and watched us. I wondered if she had a fawn nearby, but we saw no sign of one.

White-tailed deer females stand about 36 inches at the shoulder, similar to the UK fallow deer.

The smallest mammals are my chipmunks. This one was having a good groom:

These two below may be a mother and young, Chipmunks have young either in the spring, or late summer, and by 6 weeks, when they first venture out,  they look just like adult chipmunks, but are about 2/3 of their size. The one on the right could be one of this year’s second batch. Litters usually number four to five, but I have only seen these two recently. There is a fox about the place…..

They shared a rosehip (excellent source of Vitamin C, as I can attest to from being fed rose-hip syrup in 1950’s England).

I have never seen two chipmunks socializing before. They usually forage alone, and chase each other off food sources, or feed nearby but cast wary glances at each other. (And since I can read your minds, I am pretty sure they weren’t mating. The lefthand one came briefly, gave me an assessing look, greeted the other one and left almost immediately. And no key bodily areas came into contact. ) What is more, one of them showed a glimpse of what I think is a healthy teat:*

The Native Americans have a lovely story about how the chipmunk got its stripes:

http://www.oneidaindiannation.com/how-the-chipmunk-got-its-stripes/

* Cynics may think it is not a teat, but either a penis (!), or even a tick, but I am fairly sure it is a teat.

Continue reading “The Birth of a Monarch: The Movie”

I bent to look at a little bright yellow fungus, and lo and behold, a red eft:

I have never seen one before, and I thought it was a salamander. Close, but no cigar. It is indeed in the salamander family, but newts are a semi-aquatic sub-group whose juveniles are terrestrial. The red eft is the juvenile form of the Eastern Newt, Notophthalmus viridescens. The larva is aquatic, and so is the adult, but the juvenile lives on land for two or three years before eventually returning to water.

Here it is in close-up. It is about 2 inches long.

The neon orange color warns predators that this is an unwise choice of meal, since the animal’s skin produces a poison called tetrodotoxin. What is more, the tetrodotoxin in these orange efts is seven times more concentrated than that of the green adults (Spicer et al 2018) .

Some Eastern Newt larvae have been found in the pitchers of the carnivorous plant, Sarracenia purpurea. 

This cannot possibly be a good choice of home, because even in the unlikely event that the larva survives the gastric juices of the plant and the eft then hatches, when it tries to escape the downward-facing hairs on the inside wall will make the climb out pretty challenging.

I fear the hefty eft effed as it left .. (sorry, I couldn’t resist. Best said out loud in a Cockney accent with no ‘h’) .

* That name ‘eft’ is from Old English efte. ‘an eft’ became ‘a neft‘ and then ‘a newt’. The juveniles kept the old name.

Franz Kafka’s novel Metamorphosis was thought by Vladimir Nabokov to refer to a beetle *, and this is the story of a small beetle that metamorphoses through three distinct stages (post-egg), until it appears as our familiar ladybird (or ladybug in the US).  There are rather a lot of photos today, and little text.

We begin with the larva, this one is I think the fourth of five stages:

It splits its skin (leaving white spiky remnants still visible), to form a pupa:

or two:

The pupa is motionless, and at the mercy of predators:

And from the pupa emerges the soft, spotless adult, head first and wings last:

The empty pupa case is left behind:

and the soft vulnerable ladybird rests with its wings expanded:

Gradually the wing cases harden, and the spots develop. This next photo is taken 2 1/4 hours after emergence:

24 hours later, it has fully darkened and the spots have grown too:

Small miracles, every day. here is a time lapse 3 minute video of the whole process:

To be precise, my photos are of a Harlequin Ladybird, or Harmonia axyridis, photographed in Maine, USA, but an immigrant from Eurasia. It is a member of the family Coccinelidae.

* Kafka’s beetle is sometimes referred to as a cockroach, but Nabokov, who was a renowned lepidopterist, thought it was just a “big beetle”, and drew a picture on his own annotated copy of Metamorphosis. It looks quite like a ladybird to me!

From Josh Jones’ blog: http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/franz-kafka-says-the-insect-in-the-metamorphosis-should-never-be-drawn.html

I love those photos of someone’s dog having a good shake after a swim, water spraying everywhere. But I had never seen a bird shake, until last week. It rained overnight, and in the morning up flew a hummingbird, perched on a twig, and:

Successfully blow-dried, she settled her feathers:

It turns out that until recently birds were known to shake after a bath, but not after rain. In 2011, The Royal Society published a magnificent paper analyzing the kinetics of the Anna Hummingbird’s shake. Here is a diagram that will give you a flavor of their work:

(From Ortega-Jimenez, V., and Dudley, R 2011. Aerial shaking performance of wet Anna’s hummingbirds.)

Astonishingly, they can shake while flying, not just while perching. And while perching they put their wings out to counter-balance the head angle, just as you can see in the first  photo. The shake is super fast: 30 shakes/second. This is because the tinier the animal the faster it has to shake to get rid of the water. A dog shakes at 4-5Hz, but a mouse shakes at 27Hz.

If you see something out of the corner of your eye hovering near red flowers, you automatically think “Hummingbird”, but no, these are Clearwing moths. This one is a Hummingbird Clearwing, Hemaris thysbe. 

They are the size of very large bumblebee, with the long curled tongue typical of moths, and they are quite territorial, very much like actual hummingbirds. These two below had a tiff just after I took this photo, and then one retreated:

The two above are a second species, the Snowberry Clearwing, Hemaris diffinis,  which has dark rather than pale legs, and two dark stripes on its underside. It is sometimes rudely called the flying lobster. I came across these two mating, flying around conjoined, then settling for a short rest on the grass:

The clear wings are supposedly a consequence of losing the usual scales that cover a moth’s wings, because their flight habits are so energetic, though I find this hard to believe.

To see how they mimic hummingbirds, watch this brief video. If a real hummingbird comes close, the moth flees.

Most moths have small bodies and large wings, but these have huge bodies and relatively small wings, so the initial gestalt is very un moth-like.

I am for some reason reminded of a lovely story about Charles Darwin, told by his granddaughter, the author and wood-engraver Gwen Raverat. They were playing Lexicon, a predecessor of Scrabble. He put down ‘moth’, and she added ‘-er’ to the end. Darwin stared at this mysterious word and said “Mow-ther, mow-ther, there’s no such word as mow-ther.”

I was walking with a friend in the woods, when a small brown bird suddenly flew up from the ground in front of us. On a lucky day (for us), this suggests we have disturbed a mother, quietly tending her nest. And there it was, concealed under a few small ferns, right in the middle of the trail:

And containing two stunning blue eggs:

The mother usually doesn’t go far, but she is hard to see in the dappled woodland. This time, we found her, a hermit thrush, Catharus guttatus faxoni:

Ground-nesting birds seem to be running a terrible risk of discovery, and indeed studies show that the best predictor of nest success is how well-concealed and camouflaged the nest and eggs are. So why do they have bright blue eggs?? Search me.

Hermit thrushes may have two or even three broods per year, especially if the first brood fails. This brood is extremely late, although luckily for these chicks this is a species that migrates very late, mid-October being common, so they should make it out before winter closes in. Like many Mainers, they over-winter in Florida.

Hermit thrush song is haunting, with short 1.5 second snatches, called song types, separated by 2.5 second silences. Roach et al (2012) studied Maine Hermit Thrush song in detail. Each song type is slightly different, rather like a nightingale, and a male has a repertoire of up to 12 song types. Each male’s repertoire is entirely different. A song bout can have up to 100 song types in it. Listen here:

Human hermits are usually shown in caves, but here is a ground-nesting human hermit: John Singer Sargent’s The Hermit (Il solitario), 1908