Hummingbird Weight Watching

No, this is not a weight program for hummingbirds, but a quixotic attempt to see if I can detect what a “fattened up” hummingbird looks like compared to their usual size.  Its fall, you see, and I have often read that they need to add a good 40% to their weight before they attempt migration, at least migration over a body of water, like some of them may do over the Gulf and so, I am looking for a chunkier than normal looking bird.

Quixotic is the right word for this, for I have read that they go from 3.25 grams to 6 grams prior to flying over the Gulf.  Something tells me 2.75 grams doesn’t show up as much as my 10 lb. gain since being in Texas does.  Still, life is made up of little challenges like these.  Poor little things, they weigh them again when they land and they are only at 2.5 grams.  Hopefully some nice Mexican spiders are waiting for them, lush nectar to wash it down with so they can regain what they lost.

Here in TX we are host in the summer to the Black Chinned Hummingbird, whom I haven’t seen in awhile.  Visitors to my feeder are definitely that, visitors.   Red Throated Hummingbirds, first the males, then the females, have been straggling through.  They stay a few days and perhaps are fattening up, indiscernibly, then flying every southward.

So many of the small song birds and others fly by night; its cooler, fewer predators, but the hummingbirds travel solo, and by day, supposedly, just over the treetops.  They do stay and dine awhile where they find nectar available and the only non-stop push is the 500 mile flight over the Gulf.  Not that all of them go that route, at least not in the fall with the threat of hurricanes being encoded somehow in their DNA.  Instinct is what drives them on; the ones born this summer aren’t following the crowd but just following the inner drive to eat a lot and head south. 

And whereas the larger migrating birds may cover a couple of hundred miles a day, hummingbirds do about 23 miles a day.  Clearly, those coming from Canada have to leave early.  I know on the Cape, by now, I would probably be missing them.  For that matter, it has slowed down here in TX too, with most of them making the TX coast by just about this time in Sept but not all. 

And that is the key point.  Keep those feeders out, even after they appear to be gone, for the late straggler, the last one hatched out of the nest etc.  And they are faithful to return to where the food is something they can count on.  The hummingbirds that stay with you all summer are the progeny of generations of hummingbirds that have found your sugar water and flowers to be just right.  Even the migrants are said to have their own favorite remembered stops along the way.  Makes me think I should maybe hang my feeder on a really high pole in fall so it can be seen from the “interstate”. 

And if you happen to see any that have let another notch out of their belt, let me know.  You may have keener eyes than I do for such a thing. 

Why Did the Beetle Cross the Road?

That’s what I would like to know.  On Saturday I walked the dog around the neighborhood much later than I usually do, around noon.  And although a scan of the skies turned up only the usual vultures, a scan of the road was far more productive.  It seemed everywhere, there were ground beetles crossing the blacktop.  These can be fast moving beetles, usually found scuttling from under the mulch or under a rock, but here they were, in several places, some sauntering, some zipping, and some raising up on higher legs to miss hitting a pebble on the road.  We had had rain a day earlier, and it was one of our coolest days yet; first day of fall for that matter.   Why not take a brisk walk on such a lovely day?

But then, a neighbor asked if I wanted to walk with her, so, no sooner had I got home than we went back around.  I wanted to get a closer look at exactly which species of ground beetle this might be, when what did we see?  What looked like a dung beetle festival!  Coming around a bend the road was alive with lots of dung beetles “on a roll”, rolling their dung ahead of them as though they were in a race. Wow!!

Now nothing is more entertaining to watch than a bunch of dung beetles racing across the road, pushing, balancing, sometimes from a forward position, sometimes from a backward position, some going it alone, some in pairs. 

 Well, there probably are some things more entertaining, but if you set your bar low enough, then this can be a riot to watch.  Why so many? Why now?  Again, it had just rained, an unusual event in TX and here in our neighborhood the reigning scat is deer scat, but in normal conditions it gets hard pretty fast, and is elliptical in shape.  These beetles were all pushing a very rounded, larger than originally produced, deer scat ahead of it. I can imagine that if you wanted to shape these scats into nice round balls, than after a rain would be the best time. 

On the remote chance that you aren’t up to speed on your dung beetle facts let me provide you with a few.  They are found on every continent except Antarctica; there are thousands of different species that they divide up into rollers, tunnelers and dwellers, depending on how they access the dung in question.  Only 10% are rollers but they are the ones you are most likely to see, and that was clearly the kind I was seeing.  “Rollers” go to the site and forms their balls that they can push either standing on their head or forward and they are in a hurry to roll it away from the competition.  If two seem to be working cooperatively, you are seeing a male and female getting their “nursery” ready. They will roll it into their underground tunnel and lay the eggs right in it, where the larvae will feed on it as they grow and pupate within it and then emerge as adults. 

 But seeing two can also be the scene of a “snatch and grab” as one beetle bumps off the other and makes off with the stash! 

If you really are looking to fill the vacant hours in a day, check out the amazing video on TED.com “The dance of the dung beetle” and you will find out that they roll those balls in a straight line, using the sun as a guide by day and polarized light from the stars by night!  And all this with a brain the size of a rice grain!

The other thing they studied was why they do this little dance on top of the ball on occasion.  Crossing a hot stretch of sand, a hot road or whatever they are looking to cool their little hot feet, and they also think they are visually orienting themselves.  Wouldn’t I love to get paid to run experiments like these!

So why did the beetle cross the road?  Well, in the case of dung beetle, to get to his home with the goods as quick as he could.  The ground beetles; the jury is still out.

Harvestmen at Harvest time

 Fall on the Cape meant the return of “Project Life” at our Nature center.  A time when we would teach various grade levels about the pond, forest and marsh.  I loved the Forest program in the fall when we would take the kids out into the woods for a 2-hour field trip looking for all the signs of nature we had been teaching them about in the classroom.  And one thing you could always count on was, a preponderance of harvestmen, “daddy long legs”, covering the fallen logs, looking to find a sweet someone before life just got too cold for an arthropod to bear.

Now here in Texas, I was dazzled my first year by the presence of hundreds and hundreds of a Texas species of harvestmen hanging out in huge clusters in every corner of my overhanging porch. 

And then this year, there was maybe a 1/10^th of the amount and lately even they have disappeared.

However, coming back from a dog walk the other day, I caught sight of a gyrating landscape out of the corner of my eye.  We went over to check it out, Tuck and I, and there were hundreds of harvestmen covering the trunk of a juniper, plus the ground around it and filling an old armadillo hole at the base of this tree. Wow!  So this is where they have been hanging out!  Or, at least it is where they were that day.

But why they were all in such an excited state in the middle of the morning I can’t say.  Harvestmen here do a lot of bouncing up and down on their legs, usually as a way to scare away would be predators and confuse them as to which part is the yummy body and which is just a tangle of less tasty, stilt- like legs.  I had seen the mass bouncing from a distance, but maybe they had seen the dog and I and we were to blame.  Or maybe some other danger was afoot.  But it gives me a good excuse to tell you a few cool things about “daddy longlegs” for in this season you are likely to stumble upon them too.

First of all, if I had a dollar for every child who told me how incredibly venomous they were and we would all be dead except their teeth are too short to puncture our skin, I would be able to fly back to the Cape whenever I wanted.  No, they are not venomous at all.  They are not spiders either; where spiders have 2 body parts, they’re two are fused into one.  Spiders have multiple eyes, harvestmen only have two; spiders inject venom into their prey to turn them into something they can suck out through their straw-like mouthparts, harvestmen chew their food. Harvestmen neither have venom nor silk glands, no web making or flying through the air on a strand of silk, walking is their only way of getting around.

If you do watch one walking, watch how they use their second set of “legs” which are longer than the others as a blind man would use a cane, tap-tapping their way, sensing what is out there.  And if you see one “bobbing” as these do then note that it makes it a little harder to see its body.  Admire them for the fact that this particular body shape and style has served them well for over 410 million years.  Why change a good thing?  And, as this is a family friendly blog, I will simply say that, anatomically, the males are more like males than you think of in an arthropod.

And, last couple of cool facts, they can chose to voluntarily loose a leg to a predator and that leg will keep twitching for up to an hour to keep the focus on the gyrating leg while the rest of the daddy long legs makes its escape.  Think of it like having a pace maker in the leg that keeps it pumping even after the rest of the body is gone.  And, males are the ones to care for the young, and the better the caregiver; the more females are attracted to him.  How his reputation for superior childcare gets passed around I don’t know, but go “DADDY” long legs, maybe that’s how the “daddy” part of the name came to be.

So, even though if feels NOTHING like fall here in TX, I have the harvestmen to make me feel at home.  IF I can find them again, for subsequent checks of that tree and hole have turned up nothing.  Cache this under, another natural history mystery!    

Natural History Mysteries

I am always telling children in my nature programs that to be a naturalist is to be a detective.  Clues abound in the natural world for those who have eyes to see them.  Seeing them doesn’t always mean we will understand what we are seeing, but we are curious about what we have seen.  What it indicates.  Ergo, other names like Curious Naturalist, Naturally Curious etc. are descriptive of what life is like for those of us who find our joy in wondering what the scene before us might imply.

This week has tossed up some “unsolved mysteries” in rapid succession.  I had only been back from Oregon a couple of days, when my morning walk with the dog brought me by an extremely recent “crime scene”.  A fawn, probably about 4 months old, had become the main repast for, whom?  My best educated guess would be a coyote. 

This is just a half-mile from my house, and I have said before I lament the absence of coyote signs here.  I saw far more coyote scats, coyote tracks, coyote sightings in my neighborhood on Cape Cod than here in the supposedly “Wild West”.  In this part of Texas we have the highest concentration of White tailed deer of anywhere else in North America, so the loss of a fawn really isn’t something to be too sad about.  Rather I rejoice with the predator who, for once, got a decent meal. 

Now, here was the mystery, not so much a “Who done it?” for I think a coyote is highly likely, but the next morning when I walked the same area I was all set to explore it more thoroughly, but the deer was gone, completely gone!  Now, perhaps adding an exclamation mark there was uncalled for, for often a catch will be eaten where it was felled, and the rest either cached, or at least dragged to a less conspicuous spot. 

Today, with better shoes on, the dog and I set out to look for some sign, maybe drag marks, or something that might show us where it was now.  And it is amazing how there was nothing there to show it had ever existed; no fur fragments, no scats, no blood, no nothing.  I’m not sure what to attribute that to.  

 The ground here is hard and rocky so tracks are a rare thing and, was it so fresh that no fur was dislodged?  Well, these are questions you perhaps wish I would ask myself silently.  But, I followed some of the deer trails through the junipers where I was lucky not to lose an eye to the many sharp lower branches, but I did finally find it.   Clearly it had been the main course over the last couple of days, and that’s good, “Waste not Want not”.  But now, I was looking all around for a scat; surely after such good eating, nature would have taken its course, but no luck.  That would have helped cinch the notion that it was a coyote.  Mountain lions have been seen here, but that is a wilder supposition.  So, cool; a mystery to work on, and to semi-solve.

Then, lo and behold, cutting through my own front yard, I notice what looks like a patch of ground that is vibrating, and wow!  Hundreds of Harvestmen (think Daddy Long legs) were having some sort of a major “Meet and Greet”.  So, let me do a little deducing on that, and a little research and come back with my hypothesis another day.   

 But I invite you join in in this Curious Naturalist life-the “Game is Afoot”, or more precisely, under foot!

A Tale of Two Cities : Tale One - Witnessing Love

I have done this before; I stray from “natural history” and instead make “personal history” the topic.  That’s where this blog is heading.  “Tale of Two Cities” for I have planned two trips for the fall.  One just completed was to see my much-missed cousins in Portland OR and in a matter of weeks, I will go to see my much missed grandchildren in Portland ME.  How lucky is that?!

When I am traveling, I try to pay attention to what I am “witnessing”, loving the chance encounter with some local flora or fauna that may be common to the area but is uncommon to me.  Then that becomes my topic for any blog that might be about that trip.  But when I thought about my 6 days in Oregon, I thought what I witnessed most, was love. 

  Love of siblings for one another, love of parents for children, of grandparents for grandchildren and not that that is unheard of, but having it all in one place, well it was just a wonderful thing to witness. 

These four cousins were a huge part of my childhood, even though they always lived a distance away (my uncle was in the Army) we visited each other enough that is was the next best thing to having surrogate sisters and brothers.  And even though all of us are technically only ½ Italian, when together, there is so much loving, and laughing, 

 hugging and wine drinking and general bonhomie that our Italian side comes shining through.  Leo Buscaglia would be proud. 

Along with this nurture, there was also nature.  What is more beautiful to eyes that have grown accustomed to beige, than a full onslaught of GREEN?  Lush green grass  with horses standing waist deep in their favorite food.

And the ocean, all wild after a storm, huge fronds of kelp tossed ashore, Dungeness crab shells littering the beach and pelicans flying in formation.

Snow capped mountains, the Willamette Valley, rich from glacial deposits with soil ½ mile thick in places, sporting orchards of hazelnuts, fruit and vineyards touting the best Pinot Noir in the world.

A grand trip, a beautiful state, but again, the lasting impression is one of Love.  Another favorite Bible verse of mine is  “..we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses…” and so I was.  I hope you are too.