A Challenge

For all ye readers of scientific mind, I present a challenge.

Anyone who's taken even a rudimentary biology class has at least a passing familiarity with the classification system applied to naming every living thing on this planet. In this system, there are some basic categories: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species.

In order to help students remember these categories, a variety of mnemonics have appeared over the years. I grew up with "King Phyl Came Over For Gathering Strawberries," although I've also heard he preferred "Good Spaghetti." A quick search on-line also turned up:

* Kindly place cover on fresh green spring vegetables.
* Krakatoa positively casts off fumes generating sulphurous vapours.
* Kings play cards on fairly good soft velvet.
* Kings play chess on fine grain sand.
* Ken poured coffee on Fran's good shirt.
* Kangaroos play cellos; orangutans fiddle; gorillas sing.

(The words starting with "v" stand in for "variety," which applies to plants.)

Still, for the purist, there are even more categories, which can lead to more confusion rather than clarity. For those who want to know 'em all, here's the list:

Domain, Kingdom, Subkingdom, Phylum, Subphylum, Class, Subclass, Infraclass, Superorder, Order, Superfamily, Family, Subfamily, Genus, Species, and Subspecies.

These don't, however, apply to plants, which have some different categories (see note above). For now, we shall ignore plants altogether.

So, faced with this expanded taxonomic list, I tried to come up with a new mnemonic to keep it all in mind (and to keep King Phyl in the picture). After wasting many minutes pondering it, here's what I finally came up with:

Dopey King Sigmund Phyl Saw Cows Singing in Sarah's Oven Saturday; Fortunately Sarah's Goats Stayed Silent.

Here's the challenge: come up with a better mnemonic and let me know what it is!

Cattail Critters

Following in the footsteps of naturalists who have gone before (Gerry at Naturespeak and Seabrooke at The Marvelous in Nature), I wanted to see what critters might be lurking inside a cattail head.

So, yesterday, as I drove home from The City (Glens Falls), I pulled over at a wetland to gather me some cattails. There, on the other side of the road, was a state trooper, probably waiting to catch the unwary as they sped by. He kept an eye on me, as I exited my car, walked to the edge of the wetland and severed three cattail heads with my pocket knife. I gave him a jaunty wave as I climbed back into my car. I wonder what was going through his head as he watched this.

Anyway, when I got home, I brought the cattails inside and put them with the pile of stuff to go to work with me the next day.

This morning, I grabbed a paper plate and started to pull apart the first head.

Now, what I was in search of, specifically, were tiny wee caterpillars, the larvae of a tiny wee moth known as the Shy Cosmet (Limnaecia phragmitella). These caterpillars eat the tiny wee seeds of the cattail.

Anyone who is familiar with cattails knows that the brown hotdog-shaped head is a tightly compacted collection of millions and millions of seeds. All things being equal, these seeds are just waiting for something to trigger their release, when they will suddenly puff out, like someone pulled a cord on an inflatable life raft.

For the caterpillars, this isn't a good thing. If the seeds puff out and then blow away on the wind, the larvae will be left to starve. So, to combat this, these clever little critters spin a silken hair net over the cattail head. This fine webbing keeps the seeds in place throughout the winter, as seen here:

This cattail hasn't puffed so much. I didn't pull this one apart, but I wonder if I had if I would've found any caterpillars. Perhaps there weren't any in it.

This is what a cattail hopes to look like by spring - a naked stalk that is free of seeds:

I love to pull off cattail fluff. If you are gently, it will peel off and just lie there, looking an awful lot like a freshly sheered sheep fleece.

So there I was with my paper plate and a partially fluffed out cattail. I grabbed a couple sharp pencils and started to dissect the thing. Each poke puffed out more seeds.

I was rewarded almost immediately with a very tiny larva (very tiny, as in, oh, it may have stretched all of 2mm):

A little more poking around, and a larger, older larva turned up:

All in all, I probably uncovered about a half dozen caterpillars. Unfortunately, the heat from the sun and the furnace had warmed these critters up and they weren't hanging around waiting for the census man. I really wanted to get a photo of one nestled in the cattail fluff, but by the time I found one, put my glasses back on, grabbed the camera and tried to focus, it was gone. These buggers can move fast!

Meanwhile, there were lots of other things crawling out of the fluffwork. They were all the same thing though: the bullrush,or reedmace, bug (Chilacis typhae). Here's an adult:

and a juvenile:

and one of each:

These insects are non-natives. Considered palearctic ("of or relating to the biogeographic region that includes Europe, the northwest coast of Africa, and Asia north of the Himalaya Mountains, especially with respect to distribution of animals"), which means they came from overseas, like the rest of us. Back in their native home, these insects infest bullrushes (aka: reedmace), where the adults overwinter in the seed heads (kind of like these here were doing in the cattails). Bullrush bugs (true bugs, in the order Hemiptera, so we can really call them "bugs") eat the seeds of the bullrush. I presume that they also eat the seeds of the cattails.

Like my little caterpillars, they were fast, zooming around so quickly it was very difficult to get any photos.

Here you can see the chase in action, as the bug tries to avoid the paparazzi by hiding in what seed fluff remained on the stripped cattail head:

Do You Hear What I Hear?

Just a quickie this morning, but I had to report what I heard last night.

It was about 7:15, and I was heading home along the ol' dog walking route. We (the pooch and I) had come to a halt so he could tinkle, when lo! overhead I heard the unmistakable harsh "honk" of a Canada goose! And where there's one, there's bound to be more, but it was 7:15 PM after all, which means the only things I was seeing when looking up were the stars and street lights.

Looking back across my phenology chart, I see that I usually don't encounter my first geese until the end of March. In 2004 I had geese on 3/11, too, though. Still, it seems a bit early.

This morning, Newcomb was full of red-wing blackbirds, cow birds (I just love their bubbly song), starlings, grackles...collectively referred to simply as blackbirds. They are skittish, though, so the best I can offer photographically is their hasty depatures.




And, last but not least, I heard a flicker this morning, too.

Update: Remains at a Deer Kill Site

It's great to have contacts. I finally sent the above photo to Charlotte over at the Adirondack Ecological Center to see if she knew what it was.

A quick recap: I found this brown ball of stuff at the site where a deer had been consumed by (probably) coyotes. My first thoughts were that it was part of the innards, but the fine texture reminded me more of fecal matter, albeit fecal matter from a domestic animal that eats processed food. As it turns out, I was both right and wrong with both guesses. Here's what Charlotte had to say:

"Your deer gut photo looks like the rumen...not the organ but what was in the rumen. Pretty typical for coyotes and what-have-you to not eat it. Pretty vile (or bile). We see that a lot around carcasses."

So, it wasn't an organ, but it was from the innards. It wasn't scat, but eventually it would've been once it was thoroughly processed.

And there you are!

Looking for More Signs of Spring?

Just in case you need a further dose of spring, hop on over to my gardening blog for some views of spring in Vermont - from my time at Merck Forest and Farmland Center. Just click here and enjoy!

More Signs of Spring

As I drove home from work yesterday, I watched two crows chasing and harrassing a raven. Every time they dove at it, it flipped over and presented its feet. Very cool. My camera was packed in my bag on the seat behind me, so no photos.

This morning, my boss came in and announced not only were the starlings back (she saw two at her feeders yesterday), but this morning she had red-winged blackbirds and grackles. I walked by her house about 8 AM today and didn't see or hear any blackbirds of any kind...must be they waited for the sun to warm things up a bit more.

Meanwhile, back in my yard, I discovered the following additional signs of spring late yesterday afternoon:

The giant pussy willows have emerged.

The black pussy willows have emerged.

These guys are stiff and bristly, not soft

and fuzzy like "normal" pussy willows.

The hazelnut catkins await real spring. Two of my four shrubs

have these male flowers this year. Maybe I'll get nuts this time around?


The apple trees have soft green tips, with what look like
new leaves at the very end. I actually noticed these
a month or two ago...should've noted last fall when
the pussy willows popped if the apple trees had put out this new growth
at the same time. Will have to keep my eyes peeled better next fall/winter.




The rodents got beneath the snow and snuggled up around this burning bush, using it for fodder through the winter. This is why I wrap the bases of the trees and shrubs I want to protect. I don't mind too much that this shrub was attacked, for it is considered an invasive and is one of three more plants I need to remove from my gardens.

Spring?

I've been away the last few days. "Away" meaning I took time off from work. It was beautiful weather - I should've been out doing naturalist stuff. Instead, I did household stuff - cleaning, grocery shopping (a day-long event here in Newcomb because it requires a trip to Glens Falls), and reading. And even though the days were bright and sunny, with scads of blue sky and sunshine, the wind was bitter cold!!! Still, things have been melting. The roadsides are all covered with snert (or is it snirt?) - snow and dirt, or dirty snow. The snow away from the roadsides is alternately rotting and freezing. South-facing hillsides are bare. In other words, it looks like April out there, not early March.

This morning when I went out to fill the feeders (birds have been Spartan lately - even the blue jays are not wiping out the peanuts on a daily basis), I was shocked to see the following signs of spring:

1) Tulips, up almost two inches!



2) Daffodils up about an inch, pushing steadily through the leaves!



3) Azalea buds starting to swell and turn green!

4) The rhododendron leaves turning green!

At 8:30 AM, even Toby was lying down and soaking up some rays.

Even my 50 gallon "rain barrel", which collects the water dripping from my leaky gutters, was full of water. WATER. Not ice! After a clear night! The skim of ice on top was so thin it only took a gentle tap to shatter it. It's been full of mostly ice for weeks.


It's just too early for these signs of spring. Either we are going to have spring really really early this year, or we will get dumped on and all these plants will be sorry they put in an appearance so soon in the season.

When I got to work, I noticed that another warm weather creature had been out and about:

This is the remains of the bag of solidified bacon grease I had at the feeders. Remember the raccoon from my last post? I'd give good odds that it (or one of its friends) finally discovered this high-energy snack a couple nights ago and made short work of it.

Our snow stick is down to about 12 inches. More sunny weather is predicted for this week. It sure seems like spring.