Eyes on the Wild

A few weeks ago I showed you the Northern House Wrens building their nest in an old gourd. After a summer storm, the gourd collapsed at a 45 degree angle, but the wren family was undeterred:

At first I thought there was only one chick:

But there were actually three, and by the time of these photos they could barely all fit into the mouth of the nest:

The parents were coming and going with food supplies. A grasshopper:

Next, a grub, delivered from below this time:

A large beetle for the lucky lefthand one, leaving the other one bereft:

My husband, and the solicitous father of our children, worried about the unfed chick: one can only hope that somehow they take turns.

It seemed to me that the chicks must venture out any day now, and sure enough the next morning one was sitting on a twig overhanging the nest:

Two were still inside, and the indefatigable parents continued to bring food:

They also removed endless numbers of fecal sacs; this short video shows a food delivery, followed by a cleanup:

At one point the pioneering fledgling chick returned to the gourd and tucked itself in under an overhang:

then flew competently off:

I thought if I watched for long enough perhaps I would see one of the last two taking its very first flight, so I settled in. Here is the resulting video. It starts with the one that had emerged the night before. Then all three chicks keep up a non-stop chatter, as they try to work out where the oldest one has gone. The climactic next section has been slowed down: the righthand chick almost falls out of the nest, flutters to get a grip on the lower rim, hangs there for a moment and then flaps up to clamber onto the top of the gourd. It surveys this new world, then takes its first real very short flight (more of a hop) to the next twig up. Success.

The final chick left a little while later. They stay nearby, and the parents will continue to feed them for a while until they are truly independent. Twenty-four hours and a rain squall later, they were calling for food from a tree about 200 yards away. It’s a cold hard world out there:

House wrens sometimes have more than one brood: we live in hope.

[I never finished telling you about Florida, so here is a flashback.]

When I see a huge white wading bird, I think Great Egret, Ardea alba, but in southern Florida, I might well be wrong. True, there are plenty of these egrets around, but there are also decoys, designed to deceive. These impostors are in fact Great Blue Herons, Ardea herodias, but they’re a pure white subspecies Ardea herodias occidentalis, (and more helpfully sometimes called the Great White Heron, see more below.)

Great Egrets in breeding season have black legs,

bright green lores (the skin between beak and eyes),

and ethereally delicate plumes:

which they wield in flamboyant courtship displays:

stretching their necks to the sky:

to the bemusement of their pelican neighbors:

Great White Herons are much rarer. They have pale legs, a heavier yellow beak, and bluish lores:

with less delicate plumes:

Both of them are waders who stalk the shallows in search of prey. Which do you think this is, at sunrise in the Ten Thousand Islands?

It was, to my delight, a Great White Heron. So, don’t jump to conclusions next time you see a big white bird in south Florida, whether it is elegant:

or comical:.

PS As I was fact-checking this post, I discovered that in 2020 the Great White Heron was recognized as a separate species from the Great Blue Heron. It has been renamed Ardea occidentalis, and is considered by the IUCN to be Globally Endangered. There are less than 2500 left, and their shallow-water habitats are increasingly under threat. If you’re curious about how species decisions like this are made, read here: https://www.heronconservation.org/media/JHBC/vol07/07_01_Browning_and_Kushlan.pdf

If you are trying to sell your house, the real estate agent will undoubtedly want the garden looking neat and tidy. But I leave some corners of my garden unkempt and tangled, because that is what nature likes. Here are some of the things that flourish in my thicket, about ten feet square, and composed of ancient lilacs, honeysuckle, a large hydrangea, old wild grapevines, and chokecherries. All of these are either native wild shrubs, or were planted by the early settlers when they built our house in 1810.

In early spring, the bloodroot flowers deep in the shade:

followed by the Red Trillium buds (complete with jumping spider):

The Northern House Wrens arrive, (and will eventually nest, as I blogged recently), and the male spends hours singing very loudly indeed from any available branch.

The chokecherry flowers:

A Northern Cardinal pokes around in the middle then chooses a lookout:

A male Ruby-throated Hummingbird finds the perfect perch to dry himself after pouring rain:

A Magnolia Warbler puts in a brief appearance:

A chipmunk rummages in the dead leaves then pauses on the wall to check the coast is clear:

A Chestnut-sided Warbler find nesting materials in the vines:

and rests amongst the chokecherry flowers:

And a female American Redstart just hangs out:

And all that is just what I both saw and photographed in spring 2025.

…

Jack-in-the-Pulpit, Arisaema triphyllum, is a striking, exotic, almost sci-fi looking wildflower. It has a single funnel-shaped stripy “petal” called a spathe, curled around an upright structure called a spadix.

I found myself wondering how on earth it is pollinated. If you look very closely at this photo, you can see pollen grains on the spadix, on the right hand-side:

Each plant is either male or female. The male flowers produce pollen, and the females have ovaries, and need the male pollen for fertilization. The female spadix apparently has tiny flowers, but I have never been able to see them. Finally, I found a more precise description. The tiny flowers are deep inside the spathe, at the base of the spadix, and to see them you have to cut away the front of the spathe, so I did:

What you are looking at is the inside of a female flower. These are the bright green ovaries, each topped by a tiny white fuzzy stigma waiting to receive the pollen.

But how does it get there?

Here is the best description I can find, from the New York Botanical Garden:

” Jack-in-the-pulpit is pollinated by fungus gnats, which are attracted into the hooded spathes by a slight fungal odor. The gnats visit to lay their eggs on what they are duped to believe is a fungus. … When the mistake is perceived the gnats are unable to crawl out of the spathe due to its slippery interior, nor can they fly straight up to escape in that way. However, if the plant is a male, they may eventually notice a small opening at the base of the spathe through which they can escape. By this time they are dusted with pollen.

The gnats, being of limited brain capacity, may be duped repeatedly until they eventually enter a female plant where the pollen that they are carrying brushes off on the fuzzy stigmas, thereby effecting pollination. This time there is no escape since the spathes of female plants have no opening in the base of their spathes, and the gnats die within the spathe.”

And here is what I think is a visiting gnat, on the stalk at lower left:

Successfully pollinated plants show brilliant berries in the fall:

Jack-in-the-pulpit: Pollination by Deception

PS The suggestive upright “Jack” is in fact a mere sterile appendix, but it does have one function: it produces the aromas that attract the gnats.

PPS There are many different species of Aristaema, Japan has five. It turns out each is mostly visited by a different species of fungus gnat, meaning that pollen is largely transferred amongst flowers of the same species, making hybridization unlikely. Read more here:

https://www.indefenseofplants.com/blog/2021/3/11/how-fungus-gnats-maintain-jack-in-the-pulpits

Floating logs are useful microhabitats for plants and insects, and their avian predators know this. Two today, one shy and subtle, the second brash and flamboyant.

This small, weathered, fallen tree doesn’t look very promising,

but it was clearly home to some sort of insect, because a Spotted Sandpiper flew in and poked around for some time. (Sorry about the photo, but I was in my kayak and it was windy as well as wobbly):

Another log had been in the water for much much longer,

and a rich variety of mosses and small plants had embellished much of it.

But this time the insect was visible, a dragonfly, and the predator was a red-winged blackbird male.

It pulled off the wings, they are visible in the shot below lying on the log:

then picked up the body.

and ate it:

Tummy full, he pranced happily along the log:

launching himself from the far end across the pond:

I suspect the dragonfly nymph had crawled out of the water onto the conveniently low-lying log, and the adult had just emerged. It may have been this species, a Chalk-fronted Corporal, Ladona julia*, since a live one was perching nearby:

It was next to a slender female Aurora Damselfly, Chromagrion conditum, named I think for the golden sun-colored marks on its thorax:

*I wonder who Julia was?

Every fall, I buy ornamental squash from local farms. After a winter outside, they are dried out but still sculptural:

This one was disintegrating fast, and something had burrowed into one end and eaten the seeds inside, creating a useful hollow:

Two years earlier, I had fashioned a decent birdhouse from another gourd, which the wrens had cheerfully taken over to rear their brood, so I wondered if this too could be repurposed. I had heard a wren around, so I hung it in the same messy shrubby brush as before and waited.

The gourd had broken up somewhat, but still, three days later, a male Northern House Wren, Troglodytes aedon, appeared, singing like crazy to advertise to potential mates that he had taken possession of a nest site:

Here is his song:

Having found a nest site, the male starts to build a foundation of 10-400 (!) twigs (visible at bottom left) , and if he is lucky a female arrives:

They then both begin to ferry in small twigs, building from the top cavity onto this foundation. The female takes on most of the work after the foundation is complete, and indeed I only saw the two birds together at the start.

She frequently overestimated the width of the opening.

Some tricky wrestling was involved:

And sometimes the delivery just got dropped:

A few minutes later, a different twig caused new problems:

causing a regroup:

But wrens are persistent. She just picked it up and tried again,

and this time a sideways angle did the trick:

One day later, the main structure must have been complete, and she was bringing in thinner stalks

or grasses:

Pretty impressive work for a bird that weighs no more than 11g, or 0.4oz.

PS Before the female arrives, the male also often adds spider’s nests or other tiny light-colored fluffy things to the foundations, for unknown reasons:

Back in Maine, there is a shallow pond next to my driveway, and when a warm spring day comes along the mayflies emerge. They have been living underwater as nymphs, and now the nymphs rise to the surface and rest on a floating leaf. The sub-imago pushes its way out, leaving the nymphal carapace, the exuvia, behind. This sub-imago lives for less than 24 hours before transforming yet again into the adult mayfly.

Here is one that has just emerged, trailing the dark exuvia behind, complete with its feathery external gills.

A hatch like this can involve great numbers, all at once, and they leave a litter of exuviae as traces of their former lives; the white parts are the edges of the hole through which the mayfly has emerged.

When they first emerge, the wings are crumpled and need time to stiffen.

They are helpless until this process is over, and predators take advantage. A 1/2″ long water strider pounces, from behind at left.:

and settles in for a meal.

Water striders are fierce predators. Another one has caught some nameless tiny pond creature for lunch, and in the water below you can see yet another mayfly exuvia.

And bigger predators are lurking too, ready to eat both mayfly and water strider:

It is nesting season. These huge ungainly birds nest high in the mangroves:

Pelecanus occidentalis are the smallest of the world’s six pelican species, but nonetheless their wingspan reaches 7ft 6in.

The males collect nesting materials. This one was working hard to break off the perfect twig at water level:

Success!

He then proffers the brand (pr twig) to the female in what I promise you is called by ornithologists a “Nest Material Presentation Display”! He carries the twigs to his mate, big ones at first to build the base, then progressively smaller ones.

By the end, small sprigs to create a soft lining are what she wants:

Irresistible echoes of the dove returning to the Ark.*

It can take 7-10 days to build the nest, which only survives for one season. True love.

PS They are monogamous for the season, but no-one really knows if the pair bond is carried over from year to year. They typically have 3 eggs.

*We just went with the grandkids to the Boston Lyric Opera’s production of Benjamin Britten’s children’s opera Noye’s Fludde. Highly recommended for the right child! The dove was a child in a paper hat flapping her arms.

[A week on the Gulf Coast of Florida for Easter spring break with the grandkids gave me a chance to enjoy some stunning birds in spring… I do apologize if you’re tired of birds; I had a complaint recently from someone who thought there were too many birds, but in the spring they are the most exciting things in the Northern Hemisphere. Soon that will change!]

Snowy Egrets, Egretta thula, are quite small, 60cm long with a 100cm wingspan, with black beaks and yellow lores (the skin patches between their beak and their eyes). They hunt in the shallows in the early morning:

If they see something, their strike speed is astonishing; look at the water crater this one creates:

Their heads are not underwater for long:

before the catch appears:

A new hunt:

and success:

proudly displayed:

But when breeding is on their minds, for a brief period those skin patches turn orangey red:

the crest gets more impressive:

The plumes get longer, and as they nest in the mangroves they show off (while the pelican ignores them):

The target audience for this show is tucked unseen into the mangrove below:

I hope she was impressed.