For a beautiful photo diary of a monarch caterpillar’s metaphormosis, visit Moments Like These today. Ever so much happier than our misadventure with poor old Homer the Black Swallowtail ‘Pillar last June!
Category Archives: Nature Study
Time for Another Field Day!
Don’t miss the late-summer Field Day at By Sun and Candlelight! It’s a blog carnival of nature study, thoroughly delightful and delightfully thorough. Go play!
It Really WAS a Mystery Bird
Remember a long while back when I posted about a raptor that ate its lunch in our backyard? And we weren’t sure what kind of hawk it was? Well, a helpful reader called in the experts, and it looks like we finally have an ID:
Here is what a raptor biologist friend said when I emailed her. Hope
it helps. Also, thank you for posting this because my oldest two kids
and I had so much fun yesterday trying to figure out what it was. They
got to use their newfound knowledge and I got to learn so much. It was
great!Here is the email response—
"I’d say Sis is right—it’s a Cooper’s and probably a 1-year old,
judging by eye color (which is difficult to tell in that photo). It
could be a Sharp-shinned but it looks too big to be one of those.
Sharpies and Merlins aren’t much bigger than the bird it’s eating. The
kind of slate-grey feathering on the back and head can look bluish. ~K "
Thanks so much, Jo and kids, for helping us solve this mystery!
Project FeederWatch Needs You!
Just saw this in the latest Project FeederWatch newsletter:
Citizen Scientists Needed for Acorn Study
Did you know that Blue Jays help oak trees spread by moving acorns?
You can help researchers investigate variation in the size of bur oak acorns and learn more about the distribution of this tree species. Like many North American tree species, bur oaks have moved northward following the end of the last ice age. The goal of the study is to determine the degree to which acorn size has been influenced by the primary dispersal agent of bur oaks—blue jays, which prefer small acorns, or whether size is primarily determined by environmental factors such as day length and the length of the growing season.
What will citizen scientists provide?
Volunteers will collect a sample of 25-35 mature bur oak acorns: 5 – 7 from each of 5 different bur oak trees located reasonably close to where you live. All you need in order to participate is access to 5 bur oak trees! Trees growing on their own in parks or forests are preferred, but trees in landscaped areas are acceptable as long as they are not watered regularly.
How can I participate?
The project coordinator will provide participants with all necessary materials, including information on how to identify bur oaks and a postage-paid envelope for sending collected acorns. The study is being conducted by Walt Koenig, Research Zoologist, University of California, Berkeley, and Jean Knops, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
Who can participate?
U.S. residents living within the bur oak’s range are invited to participate. Bur oaks primarily grow in the following states: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska (eastern), Kansas (eastern), Oklahoma, Texas (part), Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas (northern), Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan (southern), Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, New York (parts), Maine (parts), and Pennsylvania (parts). If you live in these areas and are interested in participating, please contact Dr. Koenig at koenigwd@berkeley.edu.
I Hate to Have to Tell You This
Herodotus is no more.
At least he didn’t suffer Herod’s gruesome fate. He just simply stopped munching. We don’t know why.
This hasn’t been our year for butterflies.
And there are no signs of life from the caterpillar-husk we thought The Monster was pupating inside, nor any other indication that the ravenous worm-thing exists in any form.
Perplexing.
Field Day
Check out the nature study carnival at By Sun and Candlelight! Lovely job, Dawn!
All Is Quiet on the Butterfly Front
After all the excitement last week, the past few days have been positively anticlimactic. And yet the suspense remains. Herodotus continues to chomp his greens, but…he isn’t growing. He has been the same smallish size for four or five days. Homer got big and fat very quickly, growing noticeably larger day by day until the day he fastened himself to the twig—the last happy day of his life, we melodramatic types are wont to call it.
Herodotus eats for much of the day, but he isn’t plumping up. The words failure to thrive whisper themselves in the back of my mind…
We wait and wait, and we’ll see.
Meanwhile, there is still no sign of The Monster, in any form. I’ve tried to find out how long his pupa stage might last, for surely that’s where he’s gone, right? If he has indeed made a cocoon of Homer’s body, it can’t be much longer now before he emerges as an adult wasp.
More waiting and seeing!
Continuing Our Theme
Theme being: ruthless destruction of innocent creatures. It’s bye-bye, birdie at Here in the Bonny Glen.
Blood and Guts in the Bonny Glen
Seriously, what is going on around here? First it’s the caterpillar horror show. Now it’s dinner theater, Prometheus style.
Father’s Day morning: The girls were gathered around the table in the breakfast nook, enjoying the cinnamon swirl coffee cake they’d made for Daddy, when suddenly a bird swooped down to alight in the grass in our backyard.
“Mommy, you have to see this!” they hollered. They know news of a new bird sighting will always bring me running, and none of them recognized this one. Scott and I peered over their heads at the good-sized bird under the white pine. It was bigger than any of our songbirds, bigger than a mourning dove, gray-brown with white cheeks and a short, curved beak—
“Honey, is that a kestrel?” I asked breathlessly.
It was. (UPDATE: Or maybe not. Sharp-eyed commentors have ID’d it as a peregrine falcon. Which is even better. Because, you know, falcons are just cool. Also, we love the word “peregrine” because of Pippin Took.)
See, Scott and I have a thing about hawks. No drive in the country is complete without a good hawk sighting. If we flash past one sitting in a tree, we’ll turn around and go back for a better look. We actually planned our honeymoon journey around a raptor rehab center in Vermont.
So having one on the grass right outside our kitchen window was pretty much Scott’s ideal Father’s Day gift. We aim to please around here.
Just about the moment we were all exhaling an ooohh of wonder, it dawned on us that this kestrel peregrine falcon was probably hanging out in our backyard for a reason. There’s really only one reason for a bird of prey to be standing on the grass—standing in a fixed posture with one leg stiff and immobile, as if pinning something down.
“Did he catch something?” I whispered, as if I might disturb him through the glass.
“I think he might ha—” said Scott, and it was right about then that the wickedly curved beak dipped down and tore off a stringy piece of flesh.
Feathers went flying. My little girls’ ooohhhhs abruptly became shrieks.
“Oh, the poor little bird!”
We couldn’t tell what it was. Other than lunch, I mean. Possibly a mourning dove: the feathers were gray. We stood there in rapt horror (so to speak) and watched the kestrel falcon devour its prey strip by strip.
And of course I ran for the camera. I stupidly zoomed in all the way, so these pictures are a little fuzzy. But I think you get the idea.
Just another warm and cheery morning in the Bonny Glen.
The Jungle Report
If you’re just tuning into this story, it begins here.
Today’s news: still no news. Herodotus continues to munch unmolested. There has been not the teeniest tiniest sign of The Monster’s presence. Is he pupating inside poor old Homer’s remains? We cannot tell. I’d post a picture but it’s not a pretty sight.
I find myself checking on Herodotus like he’s a newborn baby with respiratory issues. Jane originally found him on the same parsley plant as Homer, on the same day. We speak of the implications in whispers: What if the mother wasp laid an egg in Herodotus too? Horrible to contemplate.
The suspense is agony: Is he a ticking bomb? Will he suffer the same gruesome fate as his fellow? Or will he live to unfurl his wings and sail off into the paradise of blossoms that is our perennial bed?
Meanwhile, we found this: the tale of an ichneumonid wasp whose larva actually alters a spider’s behavior.
The orb spider is stung while on its web and is temporarily paralysed while the wasp lays her egg on it. The spider then recovers and goes about its life with the newly hatched wasp larva feeding on it by sucking its haemolymph (spider “blood”).
For about 7 to 14 days, the spider continues building its usual orb webs for prey capture. However, in the evening of the night when it is to be killed by its wasp parasite, the spider weaves a different web, designed specifically to suit the purposes of the wasp. The wasp larva then moults, kills and consumes the spider and pupates, suspending itself safely from its custom-built cocoon web.
The spider’s dying act is to spin a cocoon for its assassin! Talk about adding insult to injury!
And how does the timing work out? I don’t get that “in the evening of the night when it is to be killed” part. “The execution was scheduled for the stroke of midnight.” Or is it like Charlotte, knowing her time was nigh, urgently extracting her promise from Wilbur as the strength ebbed from her body?