Phoebes often nest under eaves, and these ones nested inside a latticed shed that holds our generator!
The babies have now fledged, and are learning to fend for themselves. The yellow corners of the mouth are the gape that babies have, not yet all gone.
They are insectivores, flycatchers, often catching their prey in mid air. This one has been hanging around my beaver pond, perching in the overhanging trees,
and is hunting successfully:
They also snatch bugs from twigs, hovering the while.
I have been enjoying bath time. This fledgling has been well brought up, and starts its day with ablutions. According to Cornell’s Birds of the World, Eastern Phoebes swoop down from a perch and wet their head and breast, keeping their wings as dry as possible, then return to the perch to groom. This is incredibly hard for me to film, because you don’t know when they are going to launch, where they are going to hit the water, and the return trip perch-water-perch takes less than one second. This sequence is the best I have got, but it will give you a rough idea of their technique.
You can see that the top of its head, chin and breast are still damp.
As a linguist, I never met a new word I didn’t like, and “guttation” is no exception.*
I unearthed this splendid word when I was trying to understand what I was seeing on the surface of a crusty fungus growing all over a dead log:
It was oozing droplets, a few clear, many amber, and some black and tarry:
I eventually identified this fungus tentatively as Ionotus glomeratus. It doesn’t seem to have a common name.
The mechanism of guttation in plants is better studied than in fungi. Here is a strawberry leaf, exuding droplets of sap from the tips of its leaves:
When the ground is saturated, and the leaf is still growing the water pressure forces the sap up through the xylem until it sweats droplets from small structures called hydathodes. It happens mainly at night, when transpiration is suppressed, so it is best seen early in the morning. The liquid is not plain water, but is rich in sugars and potassium, so many insects consume it as an important part of their diet.
In fungi, we know less, but it is clear that the liquid here is also not just water, but contains a range of secondary metabolites. This unidentified mushroom is exuding a clear liquid.
And this Hemlock Varnish Shelf seems to be bleeding:
PS * The word “guttation” comes from the Latin gutta, meaning a drop of liquid. It has survived with its meaning essentially unchanged in many Romance languages: French as goutte, Spanish as gota, and Italian as goccia.
PS Not all plants do this, and nor do most fungi. The reasons are mysterious. In fungi, the droplets contain all sorts of chemicals, some of which seem to be poisonous to competing fungi. But their place in the ecosystem is still largely a mystery. Krain and Siupka 2021 say “researchers have already found numerous mycotoxins, antimicrobials, insecticides, bioherbicides, antiviral, andanticancer agents in exudate droplets. They belong to either secondary metabolites (SMs) or proteinsand are secreted with different intensities.“
My game camera, positioned on a beaver trail, caught no beavers at all, but instead it caught a raccoon family hunting.
For anyone unfamiliar with raccoons, they are charming:
Nevertheless I know many people loathe them because they get into their trash and cause havoc, or indeed attack their bird feeders, as this video shows:
But those clever hands are designed for a different kind of foraging. In their natural habitat they eat aquatic invertebrates, like crayfish. They hunt at night, and have very sensitive forepaws, or hands, which they use to search in shallow water for their prey.
The video below was taken deep in the woods in the pool just downstream of a beaver dam. I have spliced together several videos. At first you see a single adult, questing for food at the water’s edge. Half way through, the adult is joined by four babies, each of whom is copying its parent’s technique. The mother and first baby appear together briefly at 22 or 23 seconds in, at the left of the frame, and then wander off, but there are three more babies to come.
You can see that they are not looking into the water (and anyway it’s nighttime!), but trusting entirely to their hands.
The moral of this tale is that if raccoons still have access to natural habitats, they sensibly prefer crayfish to garbage, as do the French, who particularly like theirs in a bisque .
PS The five fingered raccoon forepaw, or hand, has no opposable thumb, but it can be used to grasp in several ways.
The diagonal lines show the different ways the hand can fold to grasp something, and the asterisk shows how they use a scissor grasp between two and three digits. (Drawing from Iwaniuk and Whishaw 1999.)
In addition they use both hands together, and roll food between them. The hand is especially sensitive when wet, and the fingers end in tiny vibrissae, or whiskers, that allow the raccoon to sense food without actually touching it. For those who enjoy a little more detail, Welker and Seidenstein 1959 studied how much of the sensory area in the cerebral cortex of a raccoon is devoted to its hands. The answer is a lot, nearly 4 times as much proportionately as in a rhesus monkey, for example. The brain has specialized areas for each digit, and also for five different areas of the palm. You can see why it is sometimes said that raccoons “see” with their hands.
Yellow-legged Mud-dauber Wasps, Sceliphron cementarium, were diligently collecting mud from small puddles in an abandoned rock quarry near me. They would spit into the mud, and push it together into a tiny ball (by her front left legs):
in their enthusiasm they go head-down in the mud:
Once it was formed into a nice ball:
they clutch it to their abdomen, and fly off:
I tried but failed to get a mid-air shot!
I never found their nests, but a similar technique is used by the Catskill Potter Wasp, Ancistrocerus catskill, who used her mud to sculpt two of these tiny edifices in the corners by my back door.
They are destined to be the sarcophagi for paralyzed sawfly larvae, onto which the wasp lays an egg, after which she seals the whole thing up.
The egg will hatch into a larva which will then feed on the sawfly larva, pupate, and emerge as an adult wasp.
Now that the next generation was fully incarcerated, I was trying to decide whether to slice it open to inspect the contents, when something unexpected happened.
The wasp built an addition, and poking out of it was a tiny grub.
Then the wasp herself appeared, all 1/2″ of her, dangling a paralyzed grub of some kind as food for her offspring.
She stuffed it into the chamber, and once she had left I took a photo through the tiny opening:
It looks rather ferocious…
The food supply was evidently complete, because less than two hours later she had sealed it all up, and started to construct another cell.
This time I got photos of the process. She carried in her lumps of mud:
and used wet liquid mud laid down in rows rather like making a coiled pot.
Once she had inspected it,
she then settled in bottom first, and stayed for some time, presumably laying an egg.
She emerged, one last check, then left for the day. Next morning, she returned, and sealed this one up too:
Then she started another:
In aggregate she built six or eight chambers, and then finally the process seemed to have come to an end. The entire condo was given an additional mud cladding. It is 1″ across at the top, and 1 3/4″ long.
And she left, job done.
I read that the adult wasps would not emerge till the spring, but I was keeping watch just in case, and blow me if one morning I glanced at these muddy storage units, and discovered that two of the cells had escape hatches:
By my estimate, this was about a month from when the eggs were laid. One week later, there were four holes:
Eyes on the Wild 