May 28, 2023: Pickerel Frogs

I think we're pretty close to having a full contingent of summer residents now.  This week I saw a veery, a Yellow Warbler, and a Red-eyed Vireo, some of the last arrivals.  The amphibians are also out and about; the tree frogs are singing, and I saw my first pickerel frog.

Pickerel Frog

It blended in so well with its surroundings that I never would have seen it if it didn't leap out of my way as I approached.

It was down near the lake where there are lots of good things to eat, but that's also where our resident garter snake hangs out, so it better be on high alert.  Pickerel frogs are considered poisonous as their skin excretes a toxin that is harmful to humans, cats and dogs, other amphibians and some snakes, but the garter snake has developed immunity to the pickerel frog's toxin [Amphibian Planet].  Dogs often learn about amphibian secretions from toads which have a more mild toxin, but the dog still ends up with a foaming mouth.  Pickerel frog secretions can be fatal to small animals, but to humans and pets it's usually just irritating to the skin and mucous membranes.  

Dragonflies are becoming numerous as they emerge from the depths of the lake as it warms.

Common Brown Baskettail (Epitheca cynosura)

I recently learned that dragonflies are actually considered aquatic insects because they spend most of their lives in the water. They live as nymphs in the lake for a few months or even a few years depending on species.  Then most only live for a few weeks as flying dragonflies to mate and lay their eggs back in the lake.  Their mating process is fascinating - a topic for another day.

Another small animal I saw this week was a Dock Spider.

This little guy was hanging out on our screen.  I think it looks like a pirate.

I've never seen such a little one. Usually I find huge ones on the dock or the boat come mid summer.

On a much larger scale, I've seen deer a few times over the past couple of weeks so I set up the trail camera to see what I could catch. What I caught was a rather skinny young deer, nibbling its way through the trees, and then grooming itself in the opening where I placed the camera. 

It must be relieved to have green grass and new leaves to browse on after what looks like a hard winter for it.  It looks like it might have little antler stubs known at buttons - perhaps it's a young buck.

Here's a video as it browsed and groomed and picked off ticks.

Now on to the flowers - the Lady's-slippers are out.

Pink Lady's Slipper

While I was enjoying this one I noticed a dry, brown stalk coming out from its base.  It's last year's flower which is now a seed pod - an empty seed pod.  Inside it would have been many, maybe hundreds, of tiny seeds.

The now-empty seed pod.

The seeds have presumably been released on the ground so perhaps there will be a whole patch of lady's-slippers here in a few years.

Around the lake, the white blossoms of the serviceberry are gone, replaced with chokeberry growing all along the shoreline.

Black Chokeberry (Aronia melanocarpa)

The chokeberry flower is very similar to other fruit trees such as cherry, plum, and apple.

You've likely heard about the smoke in the upper atmosphere that was blown here from fires in Canada.  Between the smoke and the pollen there have been some pretty impressive sunsets.

It looks like we're going to have nice sunsets all weekend; let's enjoy this beautiful weather as we remember what this long weekend commemorates.  There will be a memorial service at Oakland Cemetery on Monday morning at 8:00 and all are welcome.

A prior Memorial Day Ceremony at Oakland Cemetery.

May 19, 2023: Woodland Wildflowers

I'm publishing early this week in case anyone wants to go out this weekend to look for woodland wildflowers.   Most of the deep-woods flowers are blooming now, and by next weekend they may be going by, depending on the weather.  One exception is the Lady's Slipper which usually doesn't bloom until late May, but you might get lucky and see an early bloomer this weekend.  Last week I noted I found a couple of trilliums blooming, but this week there were many to be found.

Painted Trillium

Several of the tiny white woodland flowers are also blooming, including the starflower and the goldthread.  

Starflower

Goldthread

There are still a few trailing arbutus around, but these, the earliest of the wildflowers, are mostly gone.  All of these deep-wood flowers take advantage of a narrow window of opportunity after the ground warms up, but before all the trees leaf out.  The bare branches of deciduous trees allow sufficient sun to reach the forest floor for these plants to collect enough energy to grow and flower before they are relegated to the dark shade of the forest.  They will continue to photosynthesize throughout the summer with what little light does reach them, but that short window is what really keeps them going.  

If your travels take you by more open sunny areas you're likely to see several other pretty blooms growing down at your feet.  Two violets, the sweet white and the common blue are in bloom now.

I love the perfect spheres of dew on the blades of grass,

Also down at ground level, wild strawberry are flowering, hoping to attract an early pollinator to let them set fruit for the birds later in the summer.

A future strawberry in the making.

Another fruit-bearer is blooming as well, and judging by the quantity of blossoms, it appears another good blueberry season might be in store for us.

Lots of blossoms have been set on the blueberry bushes.

Of course, this depends on sufficient rain coming during June and July, something we haven't seen in two weeks now.  

Bridging the borders between sun and shade is one of my favorite flowers, the fringed polygala, which can spread into large patches.

Fringed Polygala

I think it's the unusual color, somewhere between magenta and violet, that I find intriguing.  You might also see bluets and lily-of-the-valley blooming right now.

Lily-of-the-valley

The last flower I'll mention is a new one for me, and I had to work to determine what it is.  Though I found it on the forest floor, it's not one that blooms down low, but rather up high in the forest canopy.

I expected it was a flower from a tree, but which tree?  I found many of these flowers under hemlocks, but I knew that wasn't its host.  Eventually, by looking up flowers of the various trees that grow in our forests, I determined it's the flower of the American Beech; it perfectly fits the description of the male beech flower in the Audubon guide "Eastern Forests".  [Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, publisher, 1985]  The flowers are very light, and with the strong winds this week, they could have blown a long way.

The tiny flower of the mighty beech tree.

The variation in relative size between plant and flower that different species have developed is remarkable.  A trillium flower is about one third the height of a mature plant, while the flower of the American Beech is less than one one-thousandth of the height of a mature tree.

Moving on to the animals, I saw a couple of new bird arrivals this week, the American Redstart the Baltimore Oriole and the Chestnut-sided Warbler.

Chestnut-sided warbler.

These birds tell me that we're nearing the end of the migration, as these birds, based on my observations, are among the last to arrive.  I heard the oriole on the Wetland Loop Trail at Page Pond, high up in a tree with no chance to see it.  Chestnut-sided warblers flit around in the thickets of young successional forests, but its song is so loud you can easily track it, and if you watch long enough you can usually get a glimpse of him (it's always him that sings).  You're likely to see one along the Page Pond Field Trail at the Barnard Ridge Road trailhead.  Listen for its distinctive "Pleased, pleased, pleased to MEET you" song.

It can be hard to get past the bugs, but if you can, the sights and sounds of the forest are now reaching their spring climax.

Singing loudly to defend his territory.

May 14, 2023: Why do Bears Bite Trees?

I did some boundary monitoring on the Eames and Hamlin properties this week, and the best part of monitoring is exploring remote areas of conserved land, away from the well-travelled parts of the properties.  This often provides unique sights and sounds where the animals are less disturbed by humans, and way back in Eames I found this gash on a tree.  

This is a Bear Bite, where a black bear sunk its teeth into the trunk of the tree.  It's generally accepted that bears do this to mark their territory, perhaps by sight, but more so by smell, as bears have poor eyesight but excellent sense of smell.  Black bears have scent glands in their mouth, so biting the tree will deposit their scent and allow it to be blown with the wind for other bears to detect.  

Less than half a mile from the bear bite, near a beaver pond, I found some of the most impressive beaver cuttings I've ever seen.  There were many trees cut down, and quite a few girdled (the bark chewed all the way around) to make them die.  The girdled trees were all hemlocks, a tree that beavers don't prefer to eat, but which grow tall and wide, shading out all the other trees around their pond.  Beavers know that killing hemlocks by girdling them will allow space and sun for their preferred species to grow.  But I have never seen beaver take on a hemlock of this stature:

I can't estimate the height of these trees; I'll just leave it at "they're big", and they'll let a lot of sun in when they die.  The poor trees - between beavers, bears, and woodpeckers, let alone the insects, they can take a beating.

Another exciting find way out there was a nice pile of moose scat.

I used to see moose even from the trails on Eames, but haven't seen them the past few years, or even any recent signs.  But the Meredith Conservation Commission created some patch cuts in the area to provide some different habitat for wildlife, and an abutter to the Eames property recently created one as well.  Right by that cut is where I found the moose droppings, so maybe they're coming back.  That cut has a gorgeous stand of young pin cherries trees that is regenerating right along the Eames boundary line.

A young successional stand of pin cherry.

You can easily distinguish pin cherry from black cherry when they are blooming.  Pin cherry have relatively flat clusters of blossoms, while black cherries have tubular shaped clusters.

Pin cherries, which are blooming now.

These are black cherry blossoms; they will bloom in another week or two.

If you hike the Arbutus Hill Pond Trail (blazed white) you can see this stand of pin cherries from the high point on the trail where it passes close to the boundary.  

On that trip I also saw the first trilliums of the season, just one small painted trillium and one small purple trillium.  There will be many more soon, so keep you eye out for them on your journeys.

Certainly not unusual, but still fun to see, was the first snake of the season:

This garter snake, a cold-blooded reptile, was warming itself in a nice sunny spot.

Back on the lake, more loons have joined the pair that arrived a few weeks ago.  I don't know if any of them are our second pair, but they were battling each other right along the dividing line that has separated the two pairs for the past few years.  We'll have to wait to see if any of these newcomers stick around.  You can watch one of their skirmishes here.

There were lots of new arrivals from lands south this week.  For the journal record, these are the new birds I saw this week:

Black-throated Blue Warbler, Black-throated Green Warbler, Blue-headed vireo, Blackburnian Warbler, Broad-winged Hawk, Common Yellowthroat, Eastern Kingbird, Gray Catbird, Great-crested Flycatcher, Northern Parula, Ovenbird, and Tree Swallow.

And, just in time for Mother's Day, the hobblebush viburnum are blooming.  

                  Happy Mother's Day!

May 7, 2023: Black and White Warblers Crash the Party

This spring party is feasting on a buffet of insects, providing much entertainment.  The air show started a few weeks ago when the phoebes appeared, but really hit its stride this week with the arrival of masses of yellow-rumped warblers.  Whereas the phoebes - which have taken up residence near our house - dash out from a tree branch to catch a bug and then return to the same tree to watch for the next victim, the yellow-rumped warblers were flying along quickly from tree to tree, the whole flock moving rapidly in the same direction.  As I was watching the yellow-rumped's do their thing, I noticed one bird acting differently - rather than flitting about catching flying insects, this bird was rapidly climbing up and around the trunk of an oak tree like a nuthatch.  With binoculars, I saw it was the Black and White Warbler.  I hear their distinctive "squeaky-wheel" call often, but rarely see them, and have never gotten a picture of one before, but I was able to here.

Black and White Warbler

They move so fast it's hard to get a picture that isn't blurred by their motion.  According the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, black and white warblers often travel with large bands of other migrating warblers.  The B&W's come all the way from Florida or Central America to breed here.  Their diet consists almost entirely of spiders and insects, especially their larva, all of which they pick out of crevices in the bark of trees.  Black and white warblers are ground-nesters, usually building their nest at the base of a tree or a rock for protection and cover.   

Belting out it's high-pitched squeaky-wheel song.

Other additions to the spring bird arrivals this week included the Winter Wren and the Ruby-crowned Kinglet.  Here's one of the many Yellow-rumped warblers.

The robins are once again building their annual nest under our deck.

Mrs. Robin collects nesting materials.

They've been doing this for so many years I guess they just don't mind being disturbed every time we walk by.

The cool and damp weather has meant a long season for the trailing arbutus - they are still blooming.  The service berries have joined them now, as have the fly-honeysuckle.

Fly Honeysuckle (Lonicera canadensis)

You're surely aware that all the rain in the northeast has caused significant flooding and washouts of roads and trails.  A beaver dam on Meredith Neck failed and now the pond is just a shallow mud hole after the rush of water took away part of Meredith Neck Road.  There were reports of the beavers rebuilding the dam that held back the pond after the first breach, but they haven't been seen since it failed a second time with the latest rain.  All the beaver dams around Wicwas seem to have held.  The water level in the lake was as high as twelve inches above normal, but it's now coming back down.  Profile Falls in Bristol is gushing, and the trail to the Pemigewasset River is impassible due to flooding.

Profile Falls on the Smith River.

The first warm sunny evening following all that rain sure got the Spring Peepers excited:

I went for a kayak the day the weather was clearing; I did get a few showers on me, but it was worth it, as our male loon gave me a great show as it performed a thorough preening routine.

Afterwards, he wanted to make darn sure I knew it was him out there:

Making sure I saw his leg band.

Things are getting busy around the lake as spring hits its stride - I barely mentioned all the plants now bursting out with buds and leaves - maybe next week.  I'll close with a video of a Turkey Vulture that was enjoying the airflow being forced upwards by the cliff at Crockett's Ledge.  

While I was there I also saw an osprey fly right overhead.  Ledges provide good vantage points for observing animals as well as great views!