Author: myip2014

I have just returned from Botswana, on a trip that turned into more of an adventure than we had planned. I’ll tell the story gradually, and I’ll start in the Makgadikgadi Pan grasslands, a vast plain with a 360 degree horizon:*

The endless vistas were covered in a tapestry of grasses and wildflowers, sometimes with flocks of tiny queleas:

The land is dotted with salt pans, a few with water,

but most dry:

The National Park itself covers nearly 5000 sq km, and the entire pan system is 16,000 sq km.

The flatness produces distorted mirage-like sunets:

I was with five friends, and our guide TJ, camping. For three days we saw not a single other human being or vehicle, our own private wilderness. Jane, who has eagle eyes, found us five giraffe, four of which are in this photo if you look hard:

As we got closer we got the once-over:

There were two adult females, and three youngsters, two of whom were very young indeed.

These are Southern Giraffe, widespread in Southern Africa. Adults can reach 6m (19 feet) and the babies are six feet tall at birth.

The two smallest are roughly the same age, so the likelihood is that they are from the two different mothers, since twins are extremely rare. One of them kept trying to nurse, and eventually its mother let her/him:

You can tell the sex of the adults by the state of their horns, or more precisely their ossicones. The males fight, so the tops of the horns quickly lose their hair and become shiny:

Males like the one above also have a third ossicone in the middle of their forehead that develops as a sort of callus from head-butting their rivals.

This video is of a male, showing both these badges of combat; the third ossicone can be seen in profile at the end of the video:

At birth the ossicones are cartilage, folded down, and then they straighten and harden as the animal grows. Something went amiss for this female, but luckily she doesn’t need them for fighting:

As the sun went down I stuck the camera out of the moving vehicle, and captured the flavor of the place.

PS Jane is using her phone to try and ID birdsong with Merlin, not to make a call. We were several hours drive from cellphone reception. Merlin was, sadly, pretty hopeless in Botswana

On New Year’s Day, still no snow. Beech leaves in a puddle were striped with light refracted through a skim of ice.

Needle ice pushed up through the dead grass, powered by capillary action, with the water freezing as it reached the cold ai:.

The bottom “stalks” pushed up the previous night’s crop to create tiered candelabra:

and tiny air bubbles were trapped inside the stems:

But finally on January 7 it snowed,

and we went exploring:

Four coyotes had wandered across the field by the barn:

The wind had dragged patterns in the crust:

We had three snowstorms in one week, adding up to around two feet of snow. That’s a tough time for birds. This is a Dark-eyed Junco, Junco hyemalis, weighing in at between 0.5 and 1 ounce.

They eat seeds, and are mainly ground feeders.

They spend the winter in small flocks. There were twenty in my garden that day.

Mourning Doves, Zenaida macroura, are much larger,

with a delicate blue-grey wash under their wings.

This one was alone, but pairs are common. It settled down for a rest, fluffed up against the cold.

Then closed its eyes, and went to sleep:

After all those soothing subtle dove-greys, a startling flash of vermilion, a male Cardinal.

I’m leaving for a few weeks for warmer climes. This will go out while I’m gone. And when I return, I’ll show you where I’ve been. Meanwhile, curl up under your duvet and read a good book, with a glass of wine and a warm dog.

There are animals you rarely see, for various reasons. Some are very rare or shy, some are nocturnal, some are tiny, and others are aquatic and therefore usually far away for a land-bound naturalist.

So you set up your CCTV, aka a game camera or a camera trap. The art is in knowing where to put it. In some spots, no animals might pass by for weeks at a time. But if you know your land well, you have learnt to see small signs: scat, tracks, scrapes, etc, that tell you animals come this way more often

My game cameras are run-of-the mill pieces of kit, sold to amateurs and hunters. Professionals attach a seriously good camera to a beam, and get the kind of pictures you see in Wildlife Photographer of the Year.

I start with a place where animals like to cross the stream. And sure enough, a bobcat, an animal I have still never actually seen:

There is a place on the shore of beaver pond where I found fresh otter scat, so I put up the camera. Here is a selection of what I captured First , an otter, on three different days.

Second, a beaver (at night of course) fetching a hemlock branch from a tree he had cut down earlier and dragging it off to the pond:

And the beaver giving itself a thorough face and bib grooming:

Third, a mink (or the rear section of one!):

And last but not least, Robert Burns’ “Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie”,  a mouse:

It’s not the same as seeing the animals for myself, but nonetheless it feels good to know I live and walk amongst them.

(PS If you read my last post, about porcupines, it included a tree whose bark and cambium had been chewed off. A Maine Master Naturalist whom I greatly respect has just told me she thinks I got this wrong, and it is actually beaver after all! It is now under deep snow, so we can’t check, but be skeptical of my earlier claims!)

The beavers are definitely around, but playing hard to get. They have built a new lodge, inconveniently on the opposite shore of the pond, where I can only reach it when the stream’s water level is low enough to cross. These photos show it growing, from November 14 to December 17:

No sooner were they settling in for the winter, than the weather gods turned their normal winter world upside down. We had six inches of rain in 24 hours, and everything flooded. Their beautiful dam, seen here in May:

was overwhelmed by the flood waters:

When the water subsided, much of the dam was gone:

But a few days later, they started to rebuild, rather haphazardly:

Indefatigable.

PS The big rain storm may have badly damaged their new lodge. I can’t reach it to look while the stream is so high, but last year’s lodge, a particularly impressive one, but which they had not repaired in preparation for this winter, has suddenly shown signs of fresh occupation. New mud, and new hemlock branches. So they have may have moved back in.

Happy New Year. It is 2024 as I write this from Maine. It is a worrying year. Instead of snow, we have had rain, and lots of it. The ground is muddy and brown rather than hard and white.

But there are still things to discover out in the woods. I came across this tree, recently gnawed.

Typical porcupine, just shallow bites to reach the cambium, which you can clearly see contains nutritious sap (the little dots):

Unlike beavers, they do not chew into the wood proper. (PS A Maine Master Naturalist whom I greatly respect has just told me she thinks I got this wrong, and it is actually beaver after all! It is now under deep snow, so we can’t check, but be skeptical of my claims!)

Porcupines are common round there, and in early November this one spent a lot of time in my field. Sometimes it was asleep, catching the final rays of an Indian summer, relaxed and unaware of my presence, quills down:

I could get very close before it opened its tiny eyes.

One other occasions it was feeding on the last green plants of the year, before the usual snow cover makes foraging harder and they are reduced to chewing trees.

They don’t hibernate, but they do become less active.

Their incisors are a startling orange color:

The color is caused by iron oxide, which is incorporated into the teeth as they grow. It is thought to harden the teeth, so they can chew wood. The incisors grow throughout their lives.

When a porcupine is disturbed, it erects its quills. As it retreats, you can clearly see the posterior quills in action:

Their other weapon is their claws, visible on lower left:

But their defensive behavior is all about those quills. They will sometimes turn their backs and stand their ground, and in the modern world that doesn’t always work. Pickup trucks, for example, are undeterred, hence the high number of roadkills.

Any animal brave enough or foolish enough to tangle with a porcupine pays a price. Gemma, our beagle, found one in February:

There were quills in her lips, up her nose, and one on her tongue, which she patiently let us extract with tweezers. There were twelve of them, but sometimes dogs get 50 or 60, and a trip to the vet is needed.

I’ll let Ogden Nash have the final word:

The Porcupine, by Ogden Nash (1902-1971)

Any hound a porcupine nudges
Can’t be blamed for harboring grudges.
I know one hound that laughed all winter 
At a porcupine that sat on a splinter.

My posts from British Columbia got very long (sorry!), so I kept having to stop myself adding even more. Now that you are recovered from festive eating, here is something that got left out.

This is a banana slug, Ariolimax columbianus, posed on my hand for scale; they can be up to 25cm (10 inches) long. In many areas they are bright yellow, hence their name, but this was largely black. The striated lower portion is its foot.

Slugs are lopsided. They have just a single lung on the right, and a single orifice for breathing, called a pneumostome on their right side of their mantle. (The dark mark above it is just skin coloration.)

They have four tentacles on their head. The top two (on the left in the photo below) are called eyestalks, and detect light or movement, and also smells. There is a light-sensitive spot on the end, visible on the lower tentacle. The bottom two (on the right in the photo) are for touch and taste. If they get damaged, the slug can grow new ones.

This image from Oregon State University shows the slug’s anatomy really clearly.

Slugs like the rainforest for a reason: they are at risk from dehydration, and so their body is covered in a fascinating (if disgusting) mucus that helps protect from this.

The mucus is neither a liquid nor a solid, but a sort of liquid crystal which can absorb (and store) up to 100 times its volume in water. Apart from its off-putting texture, it contains a chemical that has a numbing effect on predators. The local challenge is to kiss a banana slug, and your lips will then be numb for several hours. I considered it, but declined.

Thank you for reading my musings, and have a wonderful 2024.

Now I’ve shown you the giants of the Great Bear Rain Forest, here are a few extras. When you are sitting around waiting for bears or whales, there is lots of spare time when nothing much is happening, so you pay attention to the smaller stuff. Somehow birds seem an appropriate topic as I prepare my turkey stuffing…

Great Blue Herons stalk their prey in the estuary:

but they also benefit from the leavings of the bears. This one was scavenging in the river:

rather successfully:

Eagles too, despite their noble mien, are scavengers as much as hunters. At one point we had six in view loitering near a favorite grizzly fishing spot. Here is a close-up of a juvenile:

and here is what he/she will grow into:

A local favorite is the Stellar’s Jay, but I got only one good look, in deep shadow:

And an even smaller resident is the American Dipper, searching for tiny invertebrates in the river:

Finally, this gull, seen at low tide from our boat, bit off more than he could chew. We watched him for a good fifteen minutes while he stood motionless, the food apparently stuck in his gullet. It appears to be an octopus, or perhaps a starfish:

Bears are not the only ones stuffing themselves as winter arrives. Enjoy the holidays.

Sea otters, harbor seals, and sea lions are all in my same conceptual filing system as furry water-adapted mammals. Sea-otters were right at the top of animals I had never seen in the wild, and now I have, thanks to a remarkable conservation success story.

Here is a sea otter, Enhydra lutris,

They have the densest coat of any mammal, about 500,000 hairs per square cm, and the fur trade almost exterminated them; in 1911 their population was estimated at about 2000 worldwide. After strenuous protection efforts the world population has rebounded to some 120,000, but they are still considered endangered.

The IUCN says “Between 1969 and 1972, 89 Sea Otters were translocated from Alaska .. to the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, where they established a healthy population. Sea Otter range expansion has continued and in 2008 it was documented that they have left Vancouver Island and moved into northern Queen Charlotte Strait and the adjacent British Columbia mainland coast and in some portions of the central British Columbia mainland coast. The most recent population estimate is 6,754 (Nichol et al.2015), representing around 7–8% of the global population. ”

They are the most endearing creatures, very social and famously playful:

They swim just as comfortably on their back as on their front, nonchalantly corkscrewing through the water:

And when they rest, they bask on their backs, toes in the air,

and they gather in cosy social groups, among the kelp forests that are their homes. How many can you find in this picture?

This one is feeding, I think, but I couldn’t see on what.

[My last post went out too soon, a result of an overenthusiastic keystroke, so I’ve delayed this a bit to give you time to breathe!].

In addition to Spirit bears and Grizzlies, our other goal on this trip was to see a properly black Black Bear, but although a few of the group glimpsed one, we didn’t. Still, those of you who read this regularly know I have them at home ! The temperate rainforest nonetheless showed us other mammals.

We saw several Black-tailed Deer:

It was the time of year when the males begin to fight for a mate, and so their antlers need to be in prime condition. When they are still growing, they are covered in velvet which contains blood vessels, and when growth is complete this velvet is rubbed off. Look closely at this guy:

The most striking thing is the color of his antlers. They are red and shiny, but this is temporary. When the velvet has just been shed, the antlers still retain a coating of blood, which will soon rub or wash off. At the base of the left-hand antler you can see greenery: he has been rubbing his antlers on trees or on the ground to get rid of the last vestiges of velvet.

A much smaller and shyer local resident is the Pacific Marten, Martes caurina, or perhaps an American Marten, Martes americana. Until recently, these were thought to be a single species, but now they are divided into a species native to the Pacific coast, and one spread throughout North America. Since they also interbreed, and they look very similar, I am not entirely sure which this is:

They are related to the European Pine Marten, Martes martes, but distinct. They are about two feet long, and weigh up to 3 lbs. They are predators, eating rodents, rabbits, and birds, but they particularly like voles, preferably three a day!

Pacific Martens face threats from habitat loss due to logging, and from interbreeding with the American Marten (which was introduced by the fur trade).

3. Family

[My last grizzly post.]

In the fall, one can see this year’s cubs, now around seven months old. At Knights Inlet, from a stand, we watched one mother and this spring’s cub cross the river:

The mother climbed on a log, and the cub rather tentatively followed her:

Changing her mind, the mother walked along the log:

and jumped off:

The cub was not at all sure about this:

but eventually he followed, scrambling to catch her up.

The guides told us that he was smaller than he should be at this time of year, so let’s hope he makes it through the winter.

The Spirit Bear Lodge area is also packed with grizzlies, largely on the mainland. If the grizzlies were to cross to the spirit bear islands they would be likely to outcompete them, so this is a case of separation being desirable. There are no viewing stands here, so we took the zodiac up a shallow river, and found this mother grizzly with two of this year’s cubs, moving along the river’s margin. The shore was steep, rocky, and thickly vegetated, so she was swimming (acting as a barrier between us and her cubs), but the cubs were doing a bit of each. The bears let zodiacs get relatively close; people on foot are much more threatening to them.

When they are wet they look like drowned rats,

but after a good shake their coiffures improve .

The cubs played on fallen logs:

And then they all found a shingle bank where they dug for molluscs:

until they strolled off across the strand:

These are the freshest grizzly tracks I have ever seen, or hope to see.

And with my cap, for scale:

Cubs usually leave their mother by the age of three, but no-one told Fauna, below. She apparently did leave around that age, but just like a human boomerang kid, she reappeared at her mother Flora’s side a few months later.

And Flora didn’t have the heart to chase her away. However, once she has another litter she will not tolerate Fauna any longer.

PS I recommend this website specifically about the grizzlies of British Columbia.

The passage below is taken from there:

Click to access grizzly_in_bc.pdf

“…one to four hairless cubs weighing only about 0.5 kg (1 lb.) are born in
the den in January or February. The mother nurses her cubs in the den until they all come out in late April or May.

Grizzly cubs usually stay with their mother and den with her for at least two years. During that time they are fiercely protected and learn where to find food as the seasons change and when, where and how to dig a winter den. Grizzly cubs also play a great deal. The period of dependence on the mother is relatively long compared to other mammals. This prepares the cubs for an independent life. In June of the third year, adult females usually breed again, and they chase the cubs, now quite large, off to become self-sufficient. … Sow Grizzly Bears don’t produce their first litter until they are about five or six years old or even older. Delayed sexual maturity, together with a three-or- more-year interval between litters, results in a low reproductive rate. The maximum life span of Grizzly Bears in the wild is more than 30 years. “