By Way of Explanation

Just consider me the missing blogger. Between the recent trips, a busier spring work schedule, computer trouble, preparing a house for rent in Buffalo and anticipating a move to Texas, I just haven’t had time to comment on the arrival of birds, or flowers or all things spring like here on the Cape. And I miss doing that. But time is what it is, a limited commodity, so I apologize for not getting to this.

My original goal had been to share the sights and sounds of my walk around the bog through a Cape Cod year, and I guess I did achieve that. I often think if anyone wonders what’s happening in May on the Cape, well its fairly similar to last May on the Cape so one can access those entries. What I should start to chronicle is how one resets ones mind from nature in New England to the natural world of the southwest deserts. I have bought all the books, Birds of Texas, Reptiles of the Southwest etc, but haven’t gotten around to really studying them. Mainly because denial is the state I seem to most enjoy. The housing market being what it is, with luck I will get to stay on the Cape a little longer even if my husband does need to start his job by mid-August.

A quick run down on what my walks have featured each day for the last few weeks is watching the leaves unfold under a rather constant cold and gray sky. We have been unseasonably chilly, and “misty, moisty” has been a pretty constant condition here. I keep placing seeds in the ground that are either just rotting away or considered home delivery to the insects that might be eating them. I feel for the nesting birds that have had to keep eggs and chicks warm through chilly damp days and search for insects that would rather hunker low than fly about. Bee’s aren’t exactly buzzing about in hordes due to the cold and yet, and yet, leaves unfurl into their many varied shades of green, moss sends up its spore capsules, and the forest floor is littered with Starflowers and Canada mayflower.

In my neck of the woods it is pretty much still stealth mode for crows and blue jays. No garrulous cawing or jay chatter, just silent trips and sideways glances as they head to their nests. Chickadee’s are flitting in and out of their respective nest holes and only come to the feeders at dusk for a recharge of their own batteries. I always wonder if they switch their diet to insects more once they are gathering them for the nestlings. “One for me, one for my chick”, etc.

The bog also has seen the return of every type of Flycatcher from the early Phoebes to the Great Crested and the pugnacious Kingbirds. If you want to know where anyone’s nest is, just watch the birds come out and go on the attack of any crow or hawk that happens to fly by. The days of the “duck du jour” on the bog have ended and no, that mallard never did return to the nest that was right beside the trail but probably found a more suitable place and although I watched the eggs thinking this is an easy meal for someone, no one seemed to have them on their meal plan, so they remain to this day.

I had the good fortune to see my resident box turtle sauntering down my trail, large as life, and another winter weathered. I was on my way to work so didn’t get to stop and watch how it would negotiate all the fallen trees along the path but detours are probably part of its daily life. I think they might amaze us all with what they can get up and over. So the regulars are back in place, spring or the feeling of spring may end up being a day or two event before summer is upon us, but as my future life will involve tons of unrelenting heat I am not complaining about cool temperatures.

Again, know that I miss these “walks” that we share, but will get to them when I can, and at some point will have to reinvent this as “New England Naturalist goes West” and we can learn together about the resilience of life in a drought stricken state But not just yet. No, not just yet.

P.S. In my usual technologically backward way, I can't seem to get my pictures to save or come up with this new laptop I am using, bear with me, I will eventually when there is more time, get the hang of it! Pat

The Blustery Month of May

I remember a song from “Camelot” that rhapsodized on the “lusty” month of May, but here on the Cape, at least for the last week, it has been the “blustery” month of May. A storm is spinning off the coast and seems content to sit there, so we have been treated to temperatures in the 40’s and 50’s accompanied with sheets of mist, rain and more mist. Walking the bog it looked more like a winter snowstorm than a spring shower and I, wrapped in winter scarves and gloves, could have been contemplating Christmas shopping instead of wondering how to get a frog in such weather.

More challenging than frogs however, was the need to find fiddler crabs for a salt marsh program. My co-worker and friend Andrea is a magnet for all things wild, so following her lead, we went out to the marsh at low tide. The wind was blowing like a gale and I thought “fat chance” of finding any. You wouldn’t catch me at the entrance of my burrow in such weather, not when I could go deeper in the peat and get out of the storm. Incredibly though, searching along the ditch edge on hands and knees, we actually came up with the dozen “volunteers” we needed. Think if it as crab community service. They all get returned to their home ditch as soon as the class is over. But they are part of a lesson on the energy cycle of the marsh, and they are so, so fetching that you hate not be able to show them to the students.

There are some 97 different species of Fiddler crabs but the one we find in our marsh is an East Coast fiddler, Uca Pugnax, a small rectangular crab no more than 1.5-2” long but grand to behold all the same.
The male is said to have “extreme chiliped asymmetry” which, in simpler terms, means he has one claw that is a lot larger than the other and it is this large claw that gives it its name.

Now, the “extreme chiliped” is all for the purpose of attracting the ladies, and for defending its territory. I knew the male waved the claw around to impress the women, but what I didn’t know was that by doing so it makes a sound that is music to the lady fiddler’s ears. If she is impressed with this display she will follow him down into his tunnel, and well, you can guess the rest.
I also read that he can stamp the sediment with his walking legs, all 8 of them and also attract the ladies attention that way. Either way, it is all for show, for the fiddler can neither eat with that claw, nor dig out his extensive tunnel with it. And for even more irony, the larger the claw, well the more ladies maybe, but the harder it is to get through his own tunnel or to forage for food. You can see where Nature puts her priorities!

Plus, I love this, I also read that the female will sometimes attach her tunnel to his, but because of the size of that large claw it is a one-way street. She can enter his tunnel if she wishes but he could not pursue her into hers. The liberated crustacean world!

As far as male fighting, they do wave claws at each other and do a bit of arm wrestling but not a “to the death” sort of duel. A male can lose his claw that way, but he can also chose to snap it off, if say a gull or some other predator is about to lift off with him. Better to lose your one “lucky claw” and live another day, than go down someone’s gullet altogether. Plus, with the next molt, the opposite claw will become the larger one. So when I find a fiddler if it has a left claw rather than right, I assume it has either been vanquished in battle at some point or has had a near death experience with some predator.

The females have two small claws- all the better to feed yourself quickly with.
The Fiddlers diet is detritus, making them detritivores, a fun word to say on any occasion. Detritus being small decaying organisms found in the marsh mud. They eat the mud but are able to filter the good from the bad, in a way, like earthworms do. And like earthworms, whose digging aerates the soil, the tunnels of fiddlers that can be a foot or so deep, help aerate the peat. The tunnels provide them protection from predators and when the tide is high they plug the entrance with mud and wait out the return of low tide, which is their preferred feeding time.

Not to be missed either are their stalked eyes.
They can be held straight up, or lay down flat along their shell for those tight squeezes in the tunnel. Very cute to see them “boing” up or flatten down. All together, this is one amusing crab. Worthy of the wild weather we had to face to get them. Hmm, but not having done the class myself, I am not sure if any of this magic was lost on the kids in the classroom. But when they come out for their field lesson, we will have a chance to convince them once again how grand these crabs are and see how proficient they can be at catching them. But that lesson is a good three weeks away, lets hope by then the winds will have died down and the temperatures risen to a more seasonable degree. Being New England though, that isn’t a given.

Becoming a Spring Tradition

I am quite sure I wrote about this same topic last year, at this same time, which I suppose qualifies it as its own kind of spring tradition- The Quest for Copepods.
Those microscopic crustaceans that are a “must have” for a pond program we do using a Micro projector and invariably take hours to find. This even though they are said to be coating the world in multiple billions. In fresh water, salt water, frozen water, for crying out loud. Just never in our particular pond. Well that’s not true. They are there, clogging the waterways when you don’t need them, but try and produce a half dozen for a class and I can guarantee they will be MIA.

If you were reading this last year, I do believe I filled you in on the life and times of the Cyclops variety of copepod. The one I am after, a hunter itself, looks for things even smaller to ingest. And what I really hope to find is a female with her “saddle bags” of eggs attached right above her abdomen like two grape clusters.

Now there are some 400 kinds of Cyclops species but I will settle for any one of them. The name refers to the one eye they seem to have right in the middle of their “head”, cephlathorax actually. Their jerky movement when swimming is what gives them away. Of course then; actually catching one in my pipette remains a challenge. However, hours later, a wee little group of them was finally found and I will just hold my breath that none of them “do themselves a harm” overnight in their container.

As I probably said last year too, the Daphnia are really the darlings of the show, what with their transparent bodies and a brood patch that 9 times out of 10 is full and looking as though birth were imminent-which it often is.
Life on the bottom of the food chain means you have better be a stellar reproducer, if you intend to stand the test of time-and they are. One source claims every 10 days, a new brood can be brought forth from spring through to the fall while another claimed it could happen in as few as three days. Let’s be conservative and believe 10. With each brood being between 8 –24 individuals, that creates a lot of daphnia to the delight of all those fish fry and damselfly nymphs that eat them. Also to scientific researchers who like to see the effect something has on an organism’s offspring. No need to wait forever with daphnia. I read they do research on the effect of alcohol and caffeine, which sounds too much like a Far Side cartoon to be fact, but if you believe everything you read in Wickipedia, then perhaps they do.

No doubt I told you they reproduce by parthenogenesis, but in the spirit of tradition let’s tell you again! It means they leave the dating picture out of things, their offspring are true clones of mom. And are all female themselves, leading to more cloned females when they reproduce. Again, if you are being gobbled up at a dizzying rate by other pond dwellers there is no time to find that special someone, so nature allows for this method. However, as fall comes on, and the need for eggs that may over winter occurs, the female will amazingly give birth to some males,
(how does that happen?!) and then the mated offspring will have a thicker shell that can last through the winter and as another benefit, it will get a shot at some different chromosomes; always a good thing for variety sake.

Today plenty of daphnia were on hand. Tomorrow I will cross my fingers for a birth in the class. Under the microscope, which is somehow always unforgettable. One minute a brooding mom, next a screen swimming with little mom look-a-likes. By the way, the Cyclops larva looks nothing like the adult but most molt a few times to get that classic Cyclops look. Looks more like a splatted crab than a copepod.


Well perhaps you have heard this all before. But I realize now, it has become a spring tradition so why not include it? The path I walk through the woods is every day more carpeted by Canada Mayflower, also a tradition. The swans are chasing the geese off the pond at work with great flapping and honking and swan like hysteria, another tradition. The Oriole has returned to its trees, right on time, as the early cherries begin to bloom and Catbirds are mimicking and mumbling in my front bush again. May your spring traditions be taking place like clockwork wherever you are. Noted and appreciated, from hunting copepods to hanging out the hummingbird feeder the season is fully upon us. Now let us enjoy!