Author: myip2014

We’ve lived in our house in Maine for 38 years. White-tailed Deer are common, but I rarely see them. They eat my flowers, I see tracks, droppings, and signs of browse, but that’s about it.  We have a large field in front of our house, surrounded by woods. Once in a blue moon, a single deer can be glimpsed at the very edge of the meadow, barely out of the woods, but they are very skittish around here, unlike in the suburbs.

On the evening of March 30, four deer emerged from the woods and came some way out into the meadow.

I was, of course, beside myself with excitement. I crept around a corner of the house, and grabbed a few shots, and then something alerted them, and up went the tail:

One was so panicked it crawled underneath the belly of a larger deer,

and off they went:

The tail is a very effective danger signal, even if only glimpsed at speed.

White-tailed deer, Odocoileus virginianus, the only species of deer in New England, can be up to 3 1/2 feet at the shoulder, and weigh up to 400 pounds. A group like this is probably a mother, last year’s fawns, and perhaps even a fawn from the previous year. The fawns are born in June. The following summer, they will leave to forage on their own, but they will return to spend the winter with her, and  perhaps even the following winter.

In New England, deer are often considered pests, and they are widely hunted.  But if they were on the plains of Africa, tourists would badger their guides for photo opportunities of those glorious tails.

P.S. I have since seen a lone deer, on two separate occasions, out in the woods when I was was walking quietly alone.  Perhaps the rarity of my sightings means my particular woods aren’t really very good deer habitat?? I don’t know.

Answer to Mystery Photo from last time: The insect that built itself a house was a Caddisfly. It crawls around on the bottom eating tiny animals and plants. One day, if a fish doesn’t eat it first,  a small fly that looks a bit like a moth will emerge and fly around. 

The tadpoles have grown enormously. Here is how they looked on April 13th, about 1/3 the diameter of a dime:

And here is how they look today, April 18, only five days later, almost as long as the diameter of that same dime:

The tadpoles now have lovely round bodies, and elegant tails with nearly transparent edges that are their fins.  You can sort of see a tiny frog inside. Can you see the eyes?

They swim quite energetically now, here they are:

Here is a new mystery creature for you: what do you think it is? A clue: it turns into something that flies, and it is called after the day of the month when the magic happens and the fly appears …  Answer next time.

And a poem for you: you can read it out loud, or even sing it!

Five little tadpoles swimming near the shore.

The first one said, “Let’s swim some more.”

The second one said, “Let’s rest awhile.”

The third one said, “Swimming makes me smile.”

The fourth one said, “My legs are growing long.”

The fifth one said, “I’m getting very strong.”

Five little tadpoles will soon be frogs.

They’ll jump from the water and sit on logs.

[This is not my usual nature post. Rather than discussing whaling in my other gray whale posts, I though I’d do an entirely separate one. Some people are very interested, others would prefer to move on. Up to you.  This is my last whale post. Next time I return to Maine.]

The Makah Indians of the Pacific Northwest have traditionally hunted grey whales from canoes, as shown in this 1883 drawing:

This photo was taken in 1910.

The numbers they caught were small, and a healthy gray population was not heavily impacted.  In the North Atlantic, however, countries like Iceland hunted them from at least the 1300’s and for whatever reason by the late 1700’s gray whales had disappeared from that ocean.

In the Pacific, when the European settlers came and started to catch gray whales on an industrial scale, things changed. One pivotal event was Captain Charles Scammon’s discovery of the calving lagoons.

Born in Pittston, Maine in 1825, about 90 minutes from where I now sit, he discovered Ojo de Liebre lagoon (now called Guerrero Negro), and caught whales there from around 1857, and then in San Ignacio lagoon (where I was) two years later. Within a few years they had killed so many whales that they had pretty much emptied the calving lagoons. Later in life Scammon wrote an apparently unsuccessful scientific book about whales, which is now ironically highly thought of.

 Scammon, Charles (1968) [1874]. The Marine Mammals of the North-western Coast of North America: Together with an Account of the American Whale-fishery. Dover. ISBN 978-0-486-21976-9.

In Baja California, the whalers were often based on land and went out in small boats. It was a dangerous occupation; the gray whales frequently overturned the boats, or towed them for long distances.

Nonetheless, they caught whales in huge numbers. Between 1845 and 1874 it is estimated that whalers killed over 8000 whales, a disproportionate number of which were mothers with calves.  Dead calves were not counted, so the actual numbers were much higher.

It looks rather charming here, but the reality was quite different.

By 1875, industrial-scale whaling of gray whales was over, and it is thought that no more than 1-2000 whales were left alive, though one estimate was that only 160 remained. In the 20th century only 4 countries continued to hunt gray whales: the USA, USSR, Norway and Japan. They used cannon-fired explosive harpoons, and killed a total of 2407 between 1910 and 1946.

Whaling for gray whales was banned for commercial purposes in the US and Norway in 1937, in the USSR in 1946, and in Japan in 1951. Aboriginal peoples have special quotas for subsistence whaling, about 160 whales per annum worldwide. In 1971, the Mexican government protected the calving lagoons as marine wildlife sanctuaries, and in 1993 they became part of the huge Vizcaino Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World heritage site.

Astonishingly, since whaling stopped and protection began, the Eastern Pacific gray whale population has rebounded to what are thought to be close to their original numbers of around 26,000, and the Eastern Pacific population of gray whales has now been removed from listing under the US Endangered Species Act. They are still protected by CITES.

It seems, then that we are somewhat atoning for our barbaric treatment of gray whales in the 19th century by finally affording them the protection that they desperately needed and deserved. It is heartening to see that recovery on this scale is indeed possible.

Notes:

I am indebted to James Sumich’s wonderful 2014 book E. robustus: The Biology and Human History of Gray Whales. 

The article below came out this month, and is an authoritative overview of what has been done, can be done, and should be done to rebuild marine life in general.

Duarte, C.M., Agusti, S., Barbier, E. et al. Rebuilding marine life.Nature 580, 39–51 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2146-7

 

Last time’s Mystery Photo answer: It is a mosquito larva. In two months it will emerge from the pond  and a mosquito will come out and fly away. Or maybe a tadpole will eat it first?

The tadpoles are flourishing: many of them have come out now and are swimming around the bowl.  It makes them very hard to photograph! They like the edges of the bowl:

And close up they now look like this, with a proper body and a tail. They are about 1/4″ long,  and their body is about the size of a grain of rice.

They often lie still, resting, but if the water moves, they swim around:

I put one in little bowl on its own so you could see how it swims. When we swim, we kick our feet up and down, but a tadpole moves its tail very fast from side to side. You might have to watch this very short video more than once to see what it does.

Once I’d taken the video, I put him back with his friends in the big bowl.

Here is a new mystery creature for you, from the pond. It looks like a collection of bits of reed, but in fact it has been collected by the larva of an insect, to protect itself from predators. From the safety of its armor, this one is venturing halfway out to investigate its surroundings:

Do you know what the insect is?? Answer next time!

My next post won’t be till the tadpoles have either grown much bigger, or are changing in interesting ways.  Up till now they haven’t eaten anything, but soon they will be hungry, and I will tell you some time what they like to eat. I’m not sure how long it will take for them to grow, but meanwhile I will go on doing posts for grownups about other things entirely, but all about nature, and maybe you would like some of the photos in those too?

Things are moving fast!! I don’t think these eggs are going to take 20 days to become tadpoles!

One day after I put the eggs in a bowl, they had already begun to transform. Last time, they looked like black dots, or periods.  But now they look like commas. I put a few eggs in a smaller bowl so I could take a close-up photo more easily:

You can sort of see a tail, and two bumps on each side of the head that will become eyes, or maybe gills. One egg doesn’t seem to be growing at all. There may be something wrong with it, or maybe it is just a little slower than the rest?

The next morning, the tadpoles had started to grow longer tails, and gills! Can you see the little feathery things sticking out on each side: those are called gills.

Tadpoles don’t put their heads above water to take a breath. Just like fish, they breathe water. When the water flows over their little gills, they are able to get oxygen from the water, just like our lungs get it from the air we breathe. Clever, huh?

And the really amazing thing is that they are starting to wriggle inside their jelly capsules. I’m going to try and get a video for next time.

There are other things living in my pond. Do you know what this is?? Try to guess. Clue: it is very, very tiny, smaller even than the frog’s eggs. The answer will be in the next blog.

 

The start of spring is in fact a very hard time for most wildlife. The winter food sources are almost completely exhausted, and nothing new is yet growing. It snowed again last night, April 9th.

The chickadees have been here all winter, and at this point they will explore any possible food source. This one seems to have found some insects in a knothole in a telegraph pole:

And this one has found something under the lichen on an old apple tree:

These beaver, in a pond with at least two active lodges, were busy some time before the last snowstorm (since there is snow on top of the felled tree), eating the cambium under the bark. They are venturing out now, I have found active scent mounds that they use to mark their territory. Their lodge is visible in the background:

Meanwhile flocks of turkeys are around, the males proudly displaying early in the morning. The three coruncles dangling from their wattles turn bright red with blood when they are excited…

It now gets light around 6.30am, and I am being woken every morning by noisy turkey dating sessions.

Life goes on.

 

[This is an extra blog, aimed at the younger generation, who badly need things to do right now.. Maybe they will find it fun. It overlaps with my usual blogs, so don’t read both! Please send this on to anyone you know who has small children, the more the merrier.]

This is a Wood Frog. He is about 2″ long, and she is slightly bigger than he is. You can tell it is a Wood Frog because it has a black mask on its face.

They live in the the woods of Maine, in the northeastern United States, all year, but when spring comes, they rush to the nearest tiny pond.

These ponds are so small they have no fish, so the frogs (and their eggs) are safe from being eaten. They swim around, looking for a mate:

And they call out as they swim. What do they say? American frogs say “Ribbit”, right?? But not these frogs. These frogs make a loud noise that sounds exactly like ducks or geese:

Once they find the love of their life, the female lays eggs, that look like bubbles on top of the water. My pond has thousands and thousands of them right now.

If you collect a few, and get a better look, here they are:

 

Each egg is a little black dot, surrounded by jelly. There are thousands and thousands of them in my pond right now, so it is OK for a grown-up to collect just a few to show you, so long as I look after them carefully, and put the baby frogs back in the same pond that I found the eggs in. Every day, they will get fresh pond water, and lots of daylight.  Each week, I’ll take some more photos, and let you know how they are doing. If all goes well in about 3 weeks they will hatch as TADPOLES, and then they will gradually turn into FROGS.

I’ll keep you posted, and you can send this blog to all your friends. If you have any questions, you can ask me, and I’ll do my best to answer.

 

 

 

[I am a big fan of a blog called Naturally Curious by Mary Holland.  Today she scooped me.  Yesterday, I had prepared this blog on mating wood frogs beside my driveway, and waited till today to send it. I have decided to go ahead anyway, because not all of you read her excellent blog. https://naturallycuriouswithmaryholland.wordpress.com  ]

The shallow pond by our driveway still had ice on it on Friday. Saturday was the first warm and ice-free day, and on Saturday night this was our lullaby:

You might think it was ducks but no, it was wood frogs, who come to the pond to mate in very early spring. Here is a wood frog, Lithobates sylvaticus, in the forest where they live the rest of the year.

They were still at it during the day, and I managed to get some not very good photos; they  are only two inches long, and they are extremely skittish, so you can’t get close, and after they are disturbed they don’t return for 20-30 minutes. Here is a head-on shot:

And a profile. The eyes are surrounded by a big spherical membrane that looks like an old-fashioned goldfish-bowl diving helmet.

The loud quacking sounds are amplified by a pair of air sacs that they inflate when they call, and I managed to get just one shot that shows them inflated:

In this photo, they do remind me rather of silicone breast implants.

And sometimes all that effort pays off; and yes, the males are smaller than the females.

It appears that not all the liaisons are private one-on-one affairs. At one point a small area of the pond was bubbling like a witch’s cauldron. Here is a not very exciting video to give you a sense of what I saw. What lay beneath the surface one must leave to the imagination.

Much of the time the huge grey shapes cruise along like the submarines in Das Boot, but some behaviors are more interesting.

They do vocalize, and while they are in the calving lagoons they mainly make the so-called ‘knock’ call. Its function is unknown. You can hear this and other calls here:

Gray Whale

They roughhouse. The mother below pushed her way under her baby, and shoved him out of the way. It wasn’t clear whether she thought he was too close to our boat, or whether she wanted to be the one to get stroked instead, or indeed whether it was deliberate, an accident, or a game. The baby was fine.

Their behavior can also be more dramatic. Sometimes after a tail fluke, signaling a deep dive…

… they reappear in a breach, an explosive sudden leap which lifts at least  40% of their body out of the water. Because it happens without warning, getting a photo is sheer luck, but I did manage one:

Somewhat easier to photograph are their ‘spyhops’. This is a wonderful name for a maneuver in which they slowly and steadily lift their head vertically out of the water till their eye is at the waterline. They can stay like this for some time, which makes photos easier. You can see the eye in this one:

and here you can see the grooves that allow their throats to expand hugely to hold vast volumes of food, mud, and water.

It used to be thought that spyhops were so they could have a good look around, but it appears that their eyes do not always clear the water, and in any case their above-water vision is as bleary as our below-water vision. Their function remains a mystery, and our guides preferred to call them “heads-up” instead.

One last close-up:

And off they go:

[I’m going to do one more short post on the history of gray whale whaling and their subsequent revival, for those of you who are interested. If not, skip it and we will return to the spring in Maine after that.]

 

[Another current post from Maine; I’m saving the third gray whale post till next time!]

Spring comes late in Maine. It still snows sometimes, and the hickory buds struggle:

So long as it freezes every night, the ice at the edge of the stream does beautiful things:

In these tough times, small gems are to be cherished, like a single bead of water on a frond of star moss, Tortula ruralis, emerging from the snow:

And when the temperature hovers just below freezing strange things happen, like this hair ice:

The ghostly ephemeral growths are made up of ice filaments that grow from a specific winter-active fungus, Exidiopsis effusa, on dead wood. This was on a dead twig on the ground, and each rosette is about 1/4 inch across.

And the voles or shrews that lived in tunnels under the snow had the roofs of their tunnels melted by the sun, exposing their refuges to the view of passing raptors:

A flock of American robins were undeterred by a late snow shower, and descended on the old apple tree, desperate for the remnants of last year’s crop: