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:
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:
[Today’s photos are taken in farmland, which is off-limits to walkers, so I can only get as close as the roads allow.]
It’s early April in Western Maine; it snowed again this morning, but didn’t settle. Patches of snow are still left in shaded spots, but undaunted the Sandhill Cranes are back in the muddy fields:
This pair were gleaning in last year’s corn field, for the remains of the feed corn crop:
when along came a small flock of Wood Ducks, in single file. The crane kept a careful eye on them:
but soon decided they could be allowed to share in the pickings:
Side by side they grazed, for some time. For me, this shows a new side of Wood Duck behavior. I normally see them on my beaver pond, and they rarely seem to go ashore, though last week this one settled down between two American Black Ducks. (The female Black Duck has an olive bill, and the male has a yellow bill):
Mostly, though, they cruise slowly around between the reeds:
A few days earlier the cranes had shown definite signs that spring was sprung, with the first flickering of their courtship dances, in which they leap a few feet into the air, and spread their wings. First one:
then two:
It’s hard not to share their joie de vivre.
The fields are a low-lying flood plain that is speckled with shallow temporary ponds at this time of year. These are a perfect stop-over for migrating waterfowl, and this year I saw three less common and especially handsome ones. These are Gadwall, which on some of the bird maps aren’t supposed to be in Maine at all, since they breed in the Great Plains and the Canadian prairies. The female is behind, the male in front:
The flash of white hints at a snowy wing-patch that is striking in flight. They didn’t ignore each other the whole time, here caught in a tete-a-tete.
My second handsome migratory visitors are these Blue-winged Teal (in the back), and the much more common Green-winged Teal in the front.)
The male Blue-wing has a striking head.
I also saw my first ever Snow Goose. It had joined a flight of six Canada Geese. They flew in, stayed for ten minutes on a pond very very far away, then took off again. Here they are in flight, the snow goose in the front leading the way.
If you are lucky enough to have seen vast flocks of ten thousand Snow Geese, you will be unimpressed, but I was thrilled. This map shows their migration routes, all well to the west of Maine.
The Canada Geese, however, are everywhere in the fields right now, in their hundreds, with more arriving all the time:
To end this migrant tale, a pair of Buffleheads on our beaver pond. Admire the iridescence on the male’s head:
which looks black unless the light catches it just so:
Sometimes very ordinary things catch my attention. The crows in Brompton Cemetery are not rare or exotic, and since they are scavengers we often find them mildly distasteful. But watch closely. This one found a snail:
He placed it on the raised base of a stone cross:
and got to work:
He held it down with his claws:
and stuck one half of his bill inside to reach the meat:
Here’s a short video of his technique:
It’s not easy getting a snail out of its shell, which survived the crow’s onslaught intact but empty:
Meanwhile, another crow had stolen a chicken bone from some nearby KFC:
He picked fragments of meat off the outside, and stuck the tip of his upper bill inside to reach the marrow:
Another crow came close, so he carried it further off:
holding it down to foil any attempts at theft:
and eventually taking a flying leap with it in his bill, filmed in this short snippet.:
As you can see, a crow’s beak is a multi-purpose tool. Just for comparison, here is a bird with the shortest beak I know of, a Long-tailed Tit, Aegithalos caudatus, in Norfolk (UK) in March. The entire bird is less than 6″ long, and more than half of that is tail, so the beak is maybe 0.1″:
With that tiny beak it eats only minute insects. A snail’s shell would be impregnable.
So there is delight to be had in paying attention to the small humdrum creatures around us.
When I’m back in London, I go to various green spaces. One is Brompton Cemetery in Fulham, and this March the birds were nesting. The Ring-necked Parakeets, not native but long-since settled in the UK, had paired off:
and were looking for a suitable nesting hole:
I watched them for some time, as they investigated thoroughly:
but they were not ferrying in either nesting materials, or food.
They hung out in the nearby branches :
preened:
did their nails:
came and went to the hole
and defended it against interlopers:
But I don’t think they ever moved in; I checked out the same tree for several subsequent days and there were no further signs of life.
Meanwhile, there were crows everywhere. These are Carrion Crows, Corvus corone, a different species from the American Crow, very similar but a little larger and stockier.
They are monogamous and mate for life. They build twiggy nests in the crowns of tall trees, and the nest building for these two was well advanced. The scaffolding is done, and the interior upholstery is being delivered:
and put into place:
The following day, I went to another favorite place, the London Wetlands Centre, in Barnes. The coots were also in building mode, creating a low mound of reeds. This is the Eurasian Coot, Fulica atra, distinct from the American Coot.
This nest is higher than most: maybe they are expecting flooding? It looked finished to me, and one bird seemed to be sitting on some eggs, turning them occasionally, but its mate was not yet satisfied, and went off on a mission:
It returned with additional reeds:
which it carefully handed over:
Mission complete:
But apparently more were needed, because he went foraging for a second load, so I videoed his return. (Being adaptable birds, they’re happily nesting right under the flight path into Heathrow, but I’ve left the sound track in because between planes you can hear one calling for a delivery.)
I have carefully referred to neither bird as he/she, because it turns out they share responsibilities for incubating the eggs. I can confirm this because I watched the handover:
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And the eggs have a new guardian.
*My title is a line from the poem “Crows in Spring” by the English poet John Clare (1793-1864).
[In March I spent a couple of weeks in England visiting family and friends. I’ll do two or three posts about what I saw there.]
The common seal, aka the harbor seal, Phoca vitulina, lives along the temperate and Arctic coastlines of the Northern Hemisphere, in both Europe and North America. There are several colonies on the east coast of England, including a small one near friends of mine in Norfolk, where we stayed in March. And they are not hard to see up close. You just walk along a broad sandy beach for a mile or so, to where a small river opens into the North Sea, and there they are, asleep on the shore:
or doing nothing much of anything in the shallow water.
Like many sea mammals, they are adapted to underwater life. I went down a rabbit-hole of curiosity about how they sense their world, so this post is heavy on information and rather dull grey photos! What follows is mainly based on an excellent summary in Hanke and Reichmuth 2022.
I’ll start with smell, then hearing, vision, and touch. Unlike us, they can close off their nostrils, and also their ears. In this first photo the seal’s nostrils, and also its ears (the little holes behind the eyes) are open:
In the second photo, its ears are still open, but its nostrils are closed:
We have to hold our noses when we jump, into the water to get the same effect. Their sense of smell has been little studied, but there is reason to think they use it above water, but presumably not below, given the closed nostrils when they dive.
To show you the closed ears is harder, but in this shot both eyes and ears are closed; the eye slits are roughly vertical, and the ear slits are just below the eyes, roughly horizontal.
Unlike sealions their ears have no external flap (or pinna), making them more streamlined. Here is a sealion’s ear for comparison, notice the tiny backward facing flap, which can be sealed when diving:
Even though seals close their ears as they dive, their underwater hearing is excellent, better than that of another set of (semi-) aquatic mammals, the sea otters. Presumably this is achieved through their bones and body tissues, straight to the inner ear. Their aerial hearing on the other hand is worse than that of sea otters, and also worse than that of true land carnivores. (Ghoul and Reichmuth 2014)
Their eyes are adapted for seeing clearly both in air and in water. Their cornea has a special flattened front surface, which allows for the same refractive index in air and in water. To boost the light signal in dark conditions, they have a reflective layer behind the retina called the tapetum lucidum that amplifies the light. They must also deal with big light variation, so their pupils can dilate in murky water by a factor of 70 (compared to our human ones, which only change by a factor of four), and shrink in bright light to the size of a pin, and thus invisible in the photo below:
But what my grandchildren would call their “super-power” comes from their whiskers, or vibrissae, up to 100 on their noses and more elsewhere. In addition to exploring the world through touch, these can sense both the dramatic vortex currents caused by a suddenly fleeing fish, and the subtle waves created by a breathing but otherwise motionless flatfish.
When they yawn, their teeth are impressive , giving them a good grip on a fish, and the ability to crunch it up, bones and all.
One last adaptation. Although their front feet are webbed for swimming, unlike sealions they have protruding claws that can be used to hold fish: (Hocking et al 2018).
They sleep on the sand, but they also sleep in the water, vertically, in a stance called “bottling”, which I found quite charming:
They’re soothing to watch, positively soporific on land or in the shallows. They often lounge around in a sort of banana stance:
This one was disturbed by an approaching smaller seal:
Another one was quietly wallowing, splashing around occasionally in a reaction to other nearby seals, which counts for highly energetic behavior by slumbering seal standards:
But they are also inquisitive, waking up enough to give me the eye:
I have no real story to tell here, just two videos that I can’t resist showing you, both taken on our beaver pond in February. The first shows otters playing again; watch carefully and keep counting heads:
I hope you counted up to four! The most I have ever seen together on our pond. They could be a mother and three cubs from last year (litters range from 1-3), but otter ranges overlap, and there is no way to be certain of their relationship. If they are her cubs, they will be leaving any time now..
The second video shows only one otter, behaving very oddly. I took me a while to realize what was going on:
There is a second otter in the water, visible only in the occasional glimpse, and the one on the ice is throwing itself on top of its sibling (a guess) and having a wonderful time.
To finish, while I was away in England a friend, Pamela Marshall, took a lovely photo of three of the otters that she has generously allowed me to share:
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Now, on the last day of March, there is still snow on the ground, but the ice has almost completely melted, and although I saw an otter, it was just a glimpse of a sleek dark brown shape in the dark brown water. To make up, I saw my first pair of Hooded Mergansers. Spring is nigh!
Eyes on the Wild 