maine – Eyes on the Wild

A tale of chipmunks and beetles

[Back to Lovell for this post!]

I tend to think of chipmunks as seed eaters, whether from my bird feeder, or straight off the plant. I’ve also posted in the past about them eating my flower buds (grrr..), and adult beetles. The other day (spring here in Maine, after a long hard winter), I saw one sniffing the lawn at the edge of my flower bed:

Then it began to dig, enthusiastically, until its head was underground:

Success. It came up with a grub, which it seemed to find tasty:

The earth on its whiskers, and the hole at its feet, are evidence of the excavation:

In early spring, they’re desperate for protein after a diet of nothing but seeds and nuts all winter. The beetle grubs are beginning to move, and the chipmunks use smell, hearing, and tactile cues via their sensitive noses, to find these grubs. Just so long as it chooses to remove the kind of grub that gardeners dislike, it’s a win-win situation.

So one poor grub didn’t get the chance to grow into a beetle of some kind, but the same day, getting my vegetable beds ready for planting, I disturbed this emerald Six-spotted Green Tiger Beetle, Cicindela sexguttata:

It has large white mandibles, visible here, and hunts for tinier insects and spiders. You’d think that dazzling coloring would be dysfunctional for a carnivorous predator like this, but apparently not. It is quite common, about 1/2″ long, and is easy to see because it likes sunny patches, but it moves fast and rarely stays still, so it’s hard to photograph.

Coyote spring fever (updated)

[The earlier version of this failed to show the video; I am hoping I’ve fixed the problem).

February is when coyotes mate, and two nights ago they held a party next to my driveway. Neither me nor our beagle saw or even heard a thing, but they didn’t clear up when they left, and so the signs were clear to see.

They came out of the woods, six or eight of them:

Some of them came towards the old stone wall by the driveway:

Others headed towards the vegetable garden at the top of the photo:

where they ran around in excitement:

Then they moved a little closer to the house and seem to have stopped for a while in a group hug:

Nearer the woods there was another gathering spot:

And then they left, some went back the way they came, and some loped off across the driveway and down the hill.

I have no idea what was going on. Usually a group is an adult pair and their young, aged one or two years, for a total of at most six coyotes, but this looked like more to me. Each gathering ‘hub’ had one urine mark, which suggests territorial marking. No scat anywhere, no kills, no signs of a female in oestrus. Mating does take place at this time of year, but it usually involves just the loving couple, not a rave.

Come spring, they will be taking solitary walks through the woods, fording the streams , and looking for prey:

Very occasionally one emerges from the woods at dusk in full view when I have my camera handy. This was in August, after the field had been mowed, perhaps stirring up small prey animals.

PS Coyotes in the northeastern USA are sometimes called coywolves. They’re a hybrid of a coyote and a wolf, and much larger than the coyotes of the western USA.

Photo credit: Justin Lee Hirten from The Canadian Field-Naturalist, from the website of Jonathan Way,

Coywolves: The Coyote-Wolf Hybrids That Thrive in Northeastern North America

The only possible word is sleek

[Back to Lovell, Maine, for now.]

We had had the first proper snowfall of the winter on December 2nd, six inches of lovely fluffy stuff, so on the morning of December 3rd I snowshoed in to our beaver pond. Joy of joys, as I stood on the shoreline two young otters popped out of the ice just a few feet in front of me.

We were all a little startled, but I took a few quick photos:

and after one minute twenty seconds they slid back in:

I stayed put, and ten minutes later they returned, this time checking immediately to see if I was still there:

Since I clearly was, they didn’t hang around, only twenty seconds total this time, but then I saw a third one, on the left, further out on the ice near the beaver lodge.