Yesterday morning at 2am I got back from Chile, and I can’t resist an immediate follow-up to yesterday’s coypu blog. Here he is, in his rightful home:
This is near the mouth of the Chepu River, on Chiloé Island in Patagonia in Chile.
I will tell you more about Chiloé in later posts, but for now enjoy “our” coypu, the only one we saw:
It walked along the grassy islet, showing its webbed hindfeet:
and its dexterous front ones:
Then slipped into the water and swam off (the video is slightly slowed down):
Ironically, and sadly, while they are becoming invasive in Europe they are becoming rare in Chile, as a result largely of hunting. Our guide Jonathan was quite excited to see one.
I first saw this animal not in Patagonia, but in the hills of Tuscany, on the edge of a hamlet, next to a tiny stream, or more precisely a ditch. There was a narrow path to the ditch through the long grass and we were discussing what had made it.
It was a nutria, or coypu. Native to South America, it was brought to Europe and the US for fur farming, and escaped (or was released when the fur farms closed). Its scientific name is Myocastor coypus, literally “mouse beaver”. Its many names are confusing. Coypu is preferred in South America, where nutria can also mean beaver or otter. In Italy it is sometimes called castorino, little beaver, and in Germany Sumpfbiber, or swamp-beaver. In much of Europe and the US it is considered an invasive species, damaging water banks and crops like rice as it burrows into them.
It weighs 10-20lbs:
and has webbed hind feet and a naked tail:
and a white muzzle with long whiskers:
If you rank some other aquatic rodents by size, starting with the smallest, you get muskrat, coypu, beaver, and then capybara. All are vegetarian, but their ranges differ. Coypu and capybara don’t like the cold, which limits their range to balmier latitudes. Nonetheless, once they get loose they can expand their territory amazingly fast. This map showing how they conquered France and beyond is from Schertler et al 2020:
How do they do this?? They live to about three years old in the wild. A litter averages four, but can be as large as thirteen, and they can mate again 2 days after giving birth, so a female can have six or seven litters in her lifetime, potentially adding up to a tally of 91 offspring!.
They were bred for the fur trade because of their remarkable coat. From the outside in, they have 3in long guard hairs, then beneath that a coarse dark brown mid-layer fur, and a thermal undercoat of soft dense grey under fur. This underfur is itself called nutria.
Like beavers, their teeth grow all their lives and are orange. Coypus are mainly nocturnal or crepuscular. They build subterranean burrows and also floating platforms.
I am off to Chile soon, and hope to see them there, where they belong.
PS Coypus get about. They have also surfaced in Japan. This 1996 poem by Ito Shinsuke is transliterated from Japanese; the word nutria has become Japanese nutoria..:
“Shirasagi mo Sugamo mo Koi mo kechirashite/ Sasagase gawa wo Nutoria yuku.”
The English translation:
“Pushing away white herons, ducks, and carp/ The nutria goes his way in the River Sasagase.”
PPS My title is the Argentinian nickname for coypu
A ghastly smell wafted across the Tuscan path, as if something had died in the bushes. Casting around for a cause, I realized that just ahead was a patch of tall white mushrooms, mostly lying on their sides after a night of heavy rain.
I had stumbled across a patch of Common Stinkhorns, Phallus impudicus. The source of the first half of the scientific name is obvious; the second half means “shameless”:
It starts as a spherical blob with a gelatinous rim:
When it starts to emerge, the cap is covered in grey mucus:
There is a small hole in the top:
The cap develops a textured surface, and the white substrate breaks through:
This mucus contains the spores, and its powerful smell attracts insects, lots of them:
The sticky mucus gets on their feet, and when they fly off they carry it with them, spreading the spores. Rain, time, and enough flies, remove the mucus, leaving a white sculptural shape, with a texture like tripe:
still strongly scented and attractive to flies:
:
Chacun a son gout.
The stinkhorn family also includes this bizarre fungus, the Red Cage, Clathrus ruber, aka called the latticed stinkhorn, or the basket stinkhorn, native to Southern Europe. It reminds me of a Whiffleball.
It emerges from a white circular base, and the grey mucus is on the inside of the basket, where the flies still track it down:
It only lasts about 24 hours, then collapses, and the mucus washes away, leaving a red sea anemone shape:
and fragments of the ribs, exposing the interior texture that held the mucus:
These exotic fungi are apparently quite common in Europe, but to me they are yet another natural wonder. Maybe one day technology will allow me to add a link to this post that brings you its horrendous smell. Or maybe better not.
PS The Red Cage fungus has been introduced to both the UK and the US probably on imported garden mulch.
Autumn in Tuscany, where we spent a week in late October, is definitely the land of mists and mellow fruitfulness. We had three days of torrential, biblical rain, at one stage flooding the small bridge that linked us to the outside world. The spindle berries dripped:
The hawthorn berries dripped:
The Butcher’s Broom, Ruscus aculeatus, whose 1 cm berries emerge from the centre of what looks like a small leaf but is actually botanically a modified stem called a cladode, gleamed in the shadows:
Medlars ripened:
The oak trees were still green, but a variety of galls were swelling. Three different kinds on one branch, sometimes. This first photo looks not unlike varieties of oak apple I know from the US or the UK, but it is bigger, with an encircling coronet, and made by the Andricus quercustozae wasp:
The aptly named Andricus caputmedusae looks innocuously like a sweet chestnut, but it contains a single wasp larva:
and this shiny purple mass is a small Andricus dentrimitratus; it will grow much bigger:
“Galls are plant growths (similar to tumors) that are induced by various organisms such as bacteria, fungi, and insects. Gall wasps have evolved to “trick” the plant into forming this growth which they then use for food and shelter as they transform from a larva to an adult. The wasp larvae secrete chemicals that mimic growth hormones in a particular plant upon hatching. The chemicals trick the oak into growing a gall on its flowers, acorns, leaves, or stems. The larva is then encapsulated by the gall as it grows, waiting patiently inside until its metamorphosis is complete. “
And all around the wild boars were rooting in the undergrowth, and the mother deer and her (two) fawns risked the hunters to emerge in the early morning mist:
I’ll save the mushrooms for an other time.
PS We are only barely beginning to understand how different (but related) wasps can affect a single tree (often an oak) and then cause quite different galls to be created. It appears that different gall types arise from distinct metabolites. If you would like to know more, read here:
[Oops, this was supposed to go earlier, so the intro is now obsolete!]
With Halloween round the corner, my mind turned to dark and spooky things. So here, to mark the season, is a collection of black fungi to make a coven of witches salivate.
This 1″ tall black fungus is a type of cordyceps, Tolypocladium ophioglossoides. (Thanks to Parker Veitch for the ID). When it is younger it is a yellowish brown, sometimes called golden thread, because below ground are yellow threads that attach to a type of deer truffle, and the cordyceps is parasitic on the truffle.
In close-up, you can see that the speckles are in fact spores being produced on the perithecia, which are minute flask-like vessels embedded in the fungus but protruding through its skin to release their spores.
In pursuit of this photo I lay on my stomach, and my glasses fell out of my pocket, never to be seen again. My most expensive-ever photo.
My favorite name amongst the black fungi is Poor Man’s Licorice, Bulgaria inquinans, not edible despite its name.
The smooth side is the fertile surface, and as it ages the rim curls up and in, creating a cup shape.
Another misleadingly appetizingly named mushroom is the Chocolate Milky, Lactarius lignyotus.
Wikipedia says it is “edible, but of little interest”, so despite its name it won’t show up in a Starbucks drink any time soon. “Milky” mushrooms are so-called because they exude a white latex when broken.
Finally, every witch’s favorite, Dead Man’s Fingers, Xylaria polymorpha.
One feels it could audition for the starring role in Pirates of the Caribbean, waving in the swell, deep on an ocean wreck, alongside Johnny Depp.
Lest you be left thinking that there’s no such thing as a safe and delicious black mushroom, let me assure you that one of the best of all is the Black Trumpet.
But, as always, never ever pick and eat a mushroom unless you are absolutely sure you know what you are doing.
Not only politicians need to be well-groomed for election day:
I was kayaking on our beaver pond a month ago, and startled a Great Blue Heron, with time only for an action shot, his twelve tail feathers spread, and a curlicue of water droplets trailing from his feet:
On the way back, I was watching for him, and caught him majestically rising in flight:
In close-up, you can see every feather. Each wing has 28 or 29 primary and secondary flight feathers, with several layers of coverts on top, and can propel him at up to 30 mph.
These feathers require constant grooming with that intimidating beak:
So do his newly-growing pectoral feathers, the long feathery breast feathers that are only there in the breeding season. They can eventually be up to a foot long. He is fussy. One tiny inaccessible downy white feather is out of place.
But a precision lunge with that unwieldy-looking beak finally gets a grip:
Then back to fishing:
and a final pose:
PS I think this is a juvenile, because his crown lacks the central white of an adult.
This is an ordinary house spider, bottom left, who has cleverly made two silken egg sacs on the outside of my front door window pane. Each contains up to 250 eggs.
Five days later, she had made one more, and the first one had hatched hundreds of tiny spiderlings:
She did not add any further nests, and the others may winter over.
If you have read this far, you are probably not an arachnophobe, so I invite you to continue as I show you a few more of this summer’s spiders.
This remarkable be-dewed web is a Bowl-and-Doily spider web. The name harks back to an era when everyone lived amongst, and named, the smallest inhabitants of their rural worlds. The spider (not visible here) sits underneath the upper “bowl”, ready to pounce. The lower “doily” protects it from unseen predators from below.
Around here there are various species of jumping spiders, tiny little furry things, often quite charming. They can jump up to 30 times their own 1/4″ length. This is a Common White-cheeked Jumping Spider, Pelegrina proterva, resting on a gall. Its other name hints at its jumping prowess “Reckless Jumper”.
And this is a Whitman’s Jumping Spider, Phidippus whitmani, with furry boxing gloves on its pedipalps.
All jumping spiders have eight eyes, and almost 360 degree vision. They use this to stalk their prey, and attack.
I found a very strange Elongate Stilt Spider, Tetragnatha elongata, on the stalk of a Blue Flag Iris growing on the edge of my pond. Their body is only 8mm long, but their long legs mean the whole spider might be 20mm. Indeed as a group they are called Stretch Spiders.
And then on the same day I encountered two separate orb-weaver spiders. The first constructed this elegant iridescent web; you can just see it sitting in the center:
And the second had just caught a tiny fly and was busy gift wrapping it:
If you’re viewing this on a large enough screen you should see the details. At the top, the silk is emerging from her spinneret, on the underside of her furry abdomen. She passes the silk from the tip of one leg to another and winds it round the doomed victim.
I hope you are lucky enough to encounter more admirable spiders. You can see why E.B. White wrote Charlotte’s Web.
PS I stumbled over a marvelous piece of trivia. Apparently Jumping Spiders go through what looks like REM sleep, which raises the possibility that they may dream! Read all the details here:
PPS In 2023, Brian Gall discovered an unanticipated talent in these Elongate Stilt Spiders. “This species spins webs on the edges of ponds and streams to catch prey. So it’s not unusual for the spiders to tumble into the water. When they do, they rely on surface tension to skitter back to shore. But just how the stilt spiders knew which way to go has been unclear — until now. They appear to use light reflected off the water’s surface. It may help them pinpoint the shoreline, which is less reflective.” For more details of how they worked this out, read here:
Floating at the edge of a beaver pond I found these delicate little Fringed Heartworts, Ricciocarpos natans, 5-15mm across, about 1/4″, with a beech leaf top left for scale. Each ‘leaf’ (more properly called a thallus) is an independent plant, and they are not rooted to anything, but bob around happily on the surface like little dodgem cars..
They are a type of liverwort, related to mosses, and like them the vast majority are terrestrial. But this tiny thing is nearly always aquatic, though the mystery deepens below.
I scooped out a cup of water with about eight tiny plants, and took it home for closer inspection. The leaf (thallus) has an underwater fringe of purplish strands, and the leaf surface is covered in minute air sacs, each divided from the next by a single-celled membrane, which help it stay afloat, but also have pores that allow it to take in CO2 for photosynthesis.
Each plant has both male and female organs , and it reproduces by abscission, in other words it keeps branching, and eventually divides into two, each becoming a new plant. The one at bottom right is about to divide.
Underneath it looks for all the world like a Hawaiian hula skirt, or a tiny jellyfish (and in a dish when the water sloshes around they move in the most charming and animated way, so that it is quite hard not to mentally promote them from the plant kingdom to the animal kingdom):
The fringes are dark purple “scales” that act to stabilize it, and they can be up to 1/2″ long. They are very effective. When I casually tipped my cupful of plants into a new dish, every single one emerged from the turbulence the right way up.
Rather astonishingly, if its pond dries out, and it gets stranded on land, it stops growing scales, and roots itself in the earth by growing rhizomes instead.
Back in the pond, they provide a safe habitat for tiny invertebrates, sheltering them from the sun (or the bright lights of my kitchen), and hiding them from predators. In my scoopful of plants I inadvertently captured several of their charges.
Caught in the open, this mayfly larva scuttled back to the closest sheltering plant.
Another one had a minute caddis or stonefly larva underneath, which had decorated itself with a variety of things including what looks to me like a fragment of Fringed Heartwort leaf:
You could be excused for thinking it looks just as if the plant had captured this insect with a view to eating it, but they are not carnivorous, and the little caddis was swimming freely.
My final shot shows a translucent larva (on the left) of perhaps a Naidinae, something I had never seen before. Though it could just be a mosquito!
PS These Fringed Heartworts are found all round the globe, but they are thought to have split off from other lungworts after Pangaea split up, so they must have evolved on just one continent, and then they and their spores were carried across the world, probably on the plumage of birds.
This informative but rather technical article was very helpful in understanding this plant, by Singh, S. and B. Bowman (2023). “The monoicous secondarily aquatic liverwort Ricciocarpos natans as a model within the radiation of derived Marchantiopsida.” In Front. Plant Sci. Sec. Plant Development and EvoDevo. Volume 14 – 2023
The beaver(s) have been very busy building a new lodge for the upcoming winter. My blue kayak is for scale:
The beavers are completely nocturnal, so each morning I take a photo from the shore, and compare it to the previous day for progress.
They build a heap of vegetation, pretty haphazard. As it grows they add mud, then more vegetation, including limbs up to maybe 3″ diameter, but also hemlock twigs and other leafy branches. I created a short stop-motion movie out of a series of shots, but you’ll need sharp eyes to spot the difference from day to day. A green branch gets added, but then wilts and turns brown or gets covered by woody debris:
Their raw materials come from naturally fallen trees, or ones they have cut themselves:
And which finally fell in a windstorm some days later:
They felled the small hemlock below, and then returned and pruned off all the side limbs:
If there aren’t enough trees close to the water they sometimes build canals, which allow them to stay in the water for longer and also float trees down to the pond:
And in this case it looks as though they were used as a source for mud, which they scraped off the banks:
Mud also comes from shallow areas of the pond. In the photo below they scraped a mud bank next to the lodge of all its vegetation to get at the mud:
I tried very hard to catch them in the act of building, but it’s tricky when they are nocturnal, and 30 minutes walk deep in the woods behind my house. Eventually I got up at 5.45am, drove part of the way into the woods in the dark, and positioned myself just as it was getting light enough to see the lodge. I did this three mornings in a row, and finally saw a beaver pushing a big lump of mud up onto the lodge. By the time the light was good enough for a decent photo he had stopped work for the night, so this is the best I can show you. He’s in the bottom right-hand corner, sleek and wet from the pond, with his back to the viewer:
I also tried in the evenings, but no joy.
Here is what a mudded section of lodge looks like close-up.
As the lodge grew, the local wildlife came to visit; a mother and teenage otter:
and Great Blue Heron.
The beavers are wise to prepare for winter. As fall shows its colors round the pond, here is an abandoned beaver lodge, apparently ablaze:
The Gray Catbird, Dumetella carolinensis, gets its name from its “Mew” call:
Grey, with a black cap, the adults are bright chestnut under the tail:
Late this summer, the elderberries were ripening, much to the catbirds’ delight.
This one is a fledgling. It has no black cap yet, and its undertail is buff, not chestnut
It performed acrobatic manoeuvres to reach the berries:
And it used its wing to lift the bunch of berries closer to its beak:
Catbirds are related to mockingbirds, and like them they are accomplished mimics. Its song is long and complex, using snippets from other birds’ songs. It is able to control the separate sides of its syrinx to produce two notes either alternately or simultaneously:
The females sing too, but much less and more quietly.
Cornell’s Birds of the World says it is “believed to mimic at least 44 species of birds, gray tree frog (Hyla versicolor), and a variety of mechanical sounds”, although others say the huge song repertoire (170 syllables were recorded in a 4.5 minute song) is largely the result of improvisation and invention.
The elderberries were also being eaten by a hummingbird!! This behavior is rarely reported. I suspect that a catbird had punctured a berry, and the hummingbird came to the juice, just as it will come to sugar-water on a feeder. And the elderberries of course have bright red stalks!
PS The catbird Mew call is given in various contexts, including when a recent fledgling is approached by a predator (i.e. me).
PPS Unless otherwise stated, all my sound files including these two are my own recordings. I just use Merlin, and my iPhone, so they are not professional quality. I do some editing to shorten the files by cutting out irrelevant stretches.
Eyes on the Wild 