Author: myip2014

How to survive in winter

[May they live through this winter to delight me next summer. Happy 2026 everyone.]

Beside our house is a venerable Shagbark Hickory tree. It was 2019 joint champion for the tallest one in Oxford County, Maine. It is the favorite home of two species of Nuthatch, especially the White-breasted Nuthatches. They live here year-round, and in weather like this (3F, or -16C), they shelter in a crevice on the south side of the tree, out of the wind:

They check for predators:

then make short trips out to the bird-feeder:

where they can be quite aggressive:

They are common birds, resident throughout the US. Their name is somewhat of a misnomer. In the summer they eat almost entirely insects, searching for them under the bark and in crevices, and working their way head-first down, not up, the tree:

The rest of the year they eat seeds (up to 70% of their mid-winter diet), and maybe very tiny nuts like beechnuts, which they hide under tree bark. For this, a Shagbark Hickory is ideal! They are “scatter hoarders”: they hide each seed separately under the bark of the trunk, and in both the top and bottom of larger branches:

while doing elastic backbends to keep a wary eye on things. *

They pair for life, and nest in tree cavities. This fledgling (left) was still being fed by the parent last June:

Their call is raucous, what the poet John Clare called “a skreeking noise”. This recording was made by A.Richardson in Montana, downloaded from Xenocanto:

Clare’s full poem can be found here: https://allpoetry.com/poem/14327871-In-Summer-Showers-A-Skreeking-Noise-Is-Heard-by-John-Clare

They have an insouciant charm that beguiles me:

* One feels that the “upward-facing dog” should be renamed the “upward-facing nuthatch”.

The saga of the stool and the otters

[A year ago I wrote the first part of this, but never posted it; then I added a new installment this fall, and still sat on the story. But now, following on the heels of last week’s otter post, it feels like a story with a happy ending, just right for Christmas.]

In the summer of 2024, I bought a small folding aluminum camping stool, which I kept by my beaver pond. One day it disappeared. I searched the shore thoroughly, no sign of it. I was mystified: only the animals and I go there.

Two days before Christmas 2024, the pond was now thinly frozen except for the nearby otter holes. To my astonishment, about eight feet out on the ice from where I’d last seen my stool, there was the folded stool:

The only explanation I can come up with is that the otters pulled it out of the pond onto the ice, either because the shiny blue metal looked like a fish, or just for fun. And I’ll also never know whether it was them that dragged it into the water in the first place.

The ice was too thin for me to venture out after it. I tried snagging it with a branch, no luck. Shortly after I wrote that post, there was a thaw, the ice melted, and the stool sank beneath the ice. You might assume the story ended there.

[Part 2, October 2025]

But in the fall, after a summer of drought and low water levels, I was out with some fellow walkers when one of them shouted: “Look what I found in the pond!”

At the very edge of the pond was my stool! It might have drifted there, or the otters might have dragged it, I will never know.

After a rinse, it was good as new.

Have a lovely holidays.

The only possible word is sleek

[Back to Lovell, Maine, for now.]

We had had the first proper snowfall of the winter on December 2nd, six inches of lovely fluffy stuff, so on the morning of December 3rd I snowshoed in to our beaver pond. Joy of joys, as I stood on the shoreline two young otters popped out of the ice just a few feet in front of me.

We were all a little startled, but I took a few quick photos:

and after one minute twenty seconds they slid back in:

I stayed put, and ten minutes later they returned, this time checking immediately to see if I was still there:

Since I clearly was, they didn’t hang around, only twenty seconds total this time, but then I saw a third one, on the left, further out on the ice near the beaver lodge.

This one was larger, perhaps the mother, and she was fishing successfully, three different fish over the course of fifteen minutes:

Eating one took a while:

Later, another otter joined her, but she didn’t share her fish. Watch the video here:

After a bit the youngsters appeared, sunbathing:

Looking for the others:

and sliding on the ice:

A communal slide, followed by a dip:

A perfect morning, for me and apparently for them too..

Forests in a land without trees

[This is my last post about our Mongolian trip. After this, back to Lovell, Maine.]

Despite what I have shown you so far, there are places in Mongolia with trees. An hour or so north of Ulaanbaatar, there is a real forest, the southern edge of the taiga that stretches north to Siberia. Called Terelj, the parts closest to the capital have become a major tourist destination, and we only reached a tiny wild corner of it just as the hotels were giving way to forest. It was fall, so the colors were lovely:

and we saw a handsome bird called a Northern Nutcracker, Nucifraga caryocatactes:

eating larch cones:

and hiding from us:

These birds are specialized nut-eaters; their tongue has a “lingual nail,” a long keratin growth that helps to lever up and shell seeds.

The only other woodlands we had seen were an odd little fragment near Chamdani in the Altai. Remember the Altai:

and then imagine how startling it was to encounter this: a wetland threaded with rivulets, dotted with small birches, and grazed into grassy moguls.

Small songbirds loved this place:

Rufous-backed Redstart
Hume’s Leaf Warbler, also probably!

But my enduring memories of Mongolia will still be those wide open spaces. I end my series of Mongolian posts with this poem by the famous modern Mongolian poet Dashdorj Natsagdorj, who says it better than I can; it is quite long, so rather than pasting it , here is a link:

https://newprairiepress.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1117&context=sfh

PS The poet had a very interesting life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashdorjiin_Natsagdorj

PPS The Nature Conservancy has a huge project helping Mongolia preserve its wild grasslands : read here:

https://www.nature.org/en-us/magazine/magazine-articles/mongolias-conservation-horizon/

Nature at the edge of the modern world

In between the Altai and Hustai NP, we usually had a night before or after in or near Ulaanbaatar, the capital. It is now home to 1/2 of Mongolia’s population, 1.7 million people and growing. It is down in a valley and with a big pollution problem:

But there is still nature nearby.

Our hotel was outside Ulaanbaatar, called the Hotel Mongolica. It was near a river, and farmland, all marred by a serious litter problem. But there were flowers and birds in the grounds that made up for this. Here is an Azure Tit, a really delightful little thing:

A black kite:

and an Azure-winged Magpie:

A few wildflowers:

Siberian Larkspur
Spiny Pennywort, Orostachys spinosa

and farmland behind the hotel:

with a watchful dog:

In Hustai we saw an even finer dog, a Bankhar Dog, much to the excitement of our interpreter. This is the dog that went into battle with Genghis Khan, and Marco Polo brought one back to Venice with him. The best of them, like the one below, have spots above the eyes, giving rise to the name Mongolian Four-Eye Dog. Mongolians believe they are thus able to see into the spirit world. Genetic analysis suggests they are the ancestors of all breeds of livestock guard dogs.

I want one.

PS There is a depressing coda to the story of Bankhar dogs. Wikipedia says:

“As infrastructure and travel made the Bankhar dog’s native regions more accessible, non-native dogs began to intermix with the breed. During the Communist era of Mongolia, Bankhar dogs were let loose or exterminated to forcibly relocate nomadic groups into socialist-style settlements. Their pelts became fashionable for stylish Russian coats, and the largest dogs were killed to feed the growing dog coat industry. By the 1980s, the breed had almost disappeared.”

On the upside, they are now much sought-after, and perhaps the breed will recover. Read more here: https://www.bankhar.org/bankhar-dogs/

Small joys in the vastness: Amur Falcons and Gentians

Mongolia’s Hustai National Park is about 500 sq km in size, mainly hilly grasslands with rocky granite outcrops, on a smaller scale than the Altai, but open and empty nonetheless (though apparently in the summer it can get crowded.) At dawn the wolves howled at the rising sun.

We walked a little, sat on the closely-grazed turf,

and admired the remaining wildflowers, all low to the ground:

Dwarf Porcelain-flowered Gentian
Dwarf Statice
Chamaerhodos altaica
Fetid Dragonhead, Dracocephalum foetidum
Ground Thistle, Cirsium esculentum

We drove out of the park to a nearby river, with Ruddy Shelducks on the bank, and an endless herd of sheep and goats passing in the far distance:

In a tiny stream a Meadow Bunting was washing itself :

Everywhere there were Band-winged Grasshoppers that flew up on brightly colored wings, impossible to photograph in flight, but here is one on the ground:

And a very impressive female Armored Ground Cricket, Deracantha onos:

And all around rock piles arranged by giants (our vehicle is to the right of the further rock pile, for scale):

with domestic horses grazing nearby:

As we left the park, an Amur Falcon watched us from a fencepost:

Wapiti, anyone?

[The other large mammal in Mongolia’s Hustai National Park is the wapiti. It took me some considerable time to understand what we were looking for, because our guide used the names wapiti, moose, elk, and red deer interchangeably. In Eurasia, “elk” is often used for what Americans call moose, but there are no moose in Hustai. We were, it turned out, looking for a close relative of the North American elk, Cervus canadensis, but the subspecies sibiricus. To avoid the confusion with moose, the park rangers call them by the Cree name “wapiti”. “Red deer” was in fact a red herring: it was once thought that red deer, Cervus elaphus, and elk were the same species, but that is now known to be incorrect. C. canadensis has a wider rump patch and paler-hued antlers. ]

So, let’s stick with wapiti! Hustai has around 1300 of them, and they are not endangered. Here is a handsome bull wapiti, resting from his day’s exertions. It is the mating season, so he either has a herd of twenty or more females to keep under control, or he is trying to win a herd away from another male. Either way, an exhausting job.

This is a group of females:

Their lord and master rounds them up:

and moves them higher up the hill to a safer spot:

If he senses another male nearby, he may bellow, or rather “bugle”, an eerie sound. He stretches out his neck, and lowers his larynx to make his voice deeper and thus make himself seem bigger.

There was a larger male somewhere off to the left, but there was also a very young male right next to him, a so-called “spike” male (bottom left), whose antlers have not yet branched; eventually, the dominant male will throw him out of the herd.

The male bugled frequently, but best of all was one morning at dawn when we had gone to look for wolves, and we heard wapiti bugling intermingled with wolves howling. Magical.

The herd moved down towards us to drink from a tiny stream.

The male kept a very close eye on both them and us:

When some of them headed across the stream his displeasure was clear:

and they thought better of it:

After all this effort, his reward is near: the tongue licking the air is scenting an enticing female:

A man’s job is never done.

The Unpronounceable Prehistoric Horse

Our second major destination in Mongolia was Hustai National Park, less than two hours drive from the capital Ulaanbaatar, not nearly as isolated as the Altai, and at a lower elevation.

We had two main goals: Pallas’s Cat, and Przewalski’s Horse. Only the second of these wishes came true, and this post is about those horses, known locally as takhi. Below, from a distance, is a typical social unit: the stallion is at right, with two or three mature mares, and their offspring of up to three years old.

Closer up, these are handsome animals:

They are special because their lineage separated from that of domestic horses at least 38,000 years ago, perhaps as much as 160,000 years ago. They have 33 chromosome pairs compared to 32 for ordinary horses. Other “wild” horses are actually feral domestic horses, but these are truly wild. They were extinct in the wild, and were brought back from about twelve animals in zoos, re-released into their ancestral central Asian homelands. The total population is now thought to be around 2000 animals, of which around 120 live in Hustai National Park.

They are stocky, 12-14 hands high, and strong. They weigh about 300Kg.

The stallion keeps a close eye on his females and foals, making sure they stay together:

The affection between mothers and foals is evident:

Przewalski’s horses have a distinctive appearance.

Their overall coloring is something called pangaré, in which there is pale fur around the eyes, muzzle, and belly. This is thought to be protective, and is found in other wild equines such as the African wild ass. Starting with the head, their profile is convex, not to say Roman:

and their stiff upstanding dark mane has paler hairs at the base, and no forelock:

At the rear, their back has a thin dark dorsal stripe, and the base of the tail (the dock) is longer than in domestic horses, while the tail hairs are shorter:

Finally, their legs have horizontal stripes, or bars, easiest to see on the forest of legs in the front group below:

All of these traits are instances of “primitive markings”, found in other wild equines and more rarely in domestic dun horses.

The painting below is from the Lascaux caves in France, dated to about 20,000 years ago, and looks remarkably like a Przewalski’s horse.

PS There are frequent incursions of herds of domestic horses from outside the unfenced national park. A domestic stallion is not strong enough to mount a Przewalski’s mare, so any foal she has will always be pure-blood Przewalski’s. The reverse is not true, so a foal born to a domestic mare could have been sired by a Przewalski’s stallion. The local herders thus encourage their herds to enter the park, and the rangers shoo them out again, in an ongoing game!

PPS For full details of the challenges of bringing back a diverse population from only 12 ancestors, see here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9686875/

Winter is coming

Taking a break from Mongolia, let’s take a look at what’s going on back in Maine

Winter is approaching, time to fill up on food, and get the house in order. A chipmunk was busily downing something delicious, a beetle, I think:

Now stored in those cheek pouches, to transport to its stash.

The Downy Woodpecker does not migrate, so it needs a winter roost. Each bird excavates its own; this one is removing hefty chunks of wood. The red head patch indicates that this one is a male:

They like riparian habitat, and this is a dead tree at the edge of the beaver pond. The wood is clearly soft and punky, and he doesn’t pause to eat any grubs, he just throws the wood over his shoulder:

In the video below you can see that the hole is getting so large that he can almost disappear inside:

The flashy cardinal is lazy, gleaning sunflower seeds from underneath the birdfeeder:

The beaver is renovating the lodge:

I went down at first light, 6am, to try and catch him at work. Too late, though he was still swimming around:

but then he saw me, slapped his tail, and dove:

To end, some earth-bound creatures. A late Wood Frog, looking for insects in the leaf mold before heading off to hibernate.

In a lovely coincidence, we saw a relative, a Siberian Wood Frog, in Mongolia, the northernmost frog in the world, living as far as 71 degrees N.

Both survive underwater in winter, with very little oxygen, and can freeze their bodies and then defrost themselves in the spring.

And finally one of those rare late insect sightings, a Black-sided Pygmy Grasshopper:

Later this month the ground will freeze, and all will go quiet till spring. But these inhabitants of my world will still be out there, somewhere.

Swan, Swan Goose, Goose

[As was often the case on this trip, we couldn’t get close enough to the wildlife for me and my camera to get good shots. I’ve made a decision to write about some things anyway, because they are so interesting (I hope), but first I start with pictures that set the scene in Mongolian rural herding culture]

In the Mongolian Altai, down in the plains, there are large lakes, some of them freshwater and some saline. We visited both types. They’re very beautiful (but with a distressing amount of trash around). Most of these photos are of Khar-Us freshwater lake, 1800 Km2, average depth 2.1m. It is a national park.

The wind can be fierce, whipping up dust spouts:

The next photo is Dörgön Lake, a saline lake at 4% salinity, surrounded by samphire plants:

The local herders bring their livestock down to drink,

while they prefer to share a cup of tea with our drivers and Jane:

Back at Khar-Us lake, the braver waders browse on water plants:

The animals below are a mix of sheep and cashmere goats, now growing their winter coats; your next sweater “on the hoof”:

In the midst of this, there are waterbirds. Whooper Swans, Cygnus cygnus, breed here. They can be seen in the UK, but I have never seen one before. Their total range is from Iceland to Japan, and they only breed in the northern parts of that range. They have lovely yellow bills.

They graze on aquatic plants, in a behavior called, unimaginatively, “upending”!

They are thought to pair for life, but they are not well studied on their breeding grounds. This group of around twenty birds:

included two in the midst of a courting ritual.

Here’s a video:

I am happy to say they are not endangered. Soon after we saw them, they probably left for their wintering grounds further south.

Fifteen minutes later Istvan , with a note of excitement in his voice, said “Look, swan geese.” What? Which? Make up your mind. But I hadn’t misheard, there really is a bird called a Swan Goose, Anser cygnoides, which looks like a goose, but with a longer neck and a black (not orange) bill with a white line around it. In the picture below all but the leftmost goose (in both pictures) are Swan Geese. The outsider is a Greylag Goose.

They flew off before I could get better photos:

Second from left below could be a Swan Goose/Greylag hybrid.,

The reason Istvan was so excited is that Swan Geese are classified as Endangered by the IUCN. * Almost all of their breeding grounds are in Mongolia, the yellow areas on the map below:

They are protected in Mongolia, but in both their breeding grounds and their wintering grounds (mainly in China) their habitat is very much under threat, and hunting is also a problem. Overgrazing by livestock also plays a role, since the swan geese eat sedges and grasses too.

One final picture: a livestock enclosure on the shores, resourcefully and precisely made of mud brick masonry, dry stone walling, and discarded car parts:

In London or New York this would be considered an art installation.

* The Swan Goose conservation status has changed back and forth over the years, but the most recent listing is Endangered, see Birdlife International for details. The Birds of the World entry is out of date and under revision.