Hetaerina Heaven
Now here’s a lickable damselfly. (Yeah, you actually want to lick them as they dance along riverbanks.) I know of only two sites for Hetaerina americana (American Rubyspot) in my home state of Vermont. This elegant animal has an odd, scattered distribution across North America and is uncommon over much of the Northeast. So it was a joy to see clouds of them — thousands, really — along the Clinton River in southeastern Michigan yesterday. They perched on streamside vegetation, on rocks, on garbage on me. Males flew circles around one another in competition for perches. Despite their abundance, I saw none courting or copulating. Why? I know little of this species’ phenology in Michigan, but perhaps they were still early in the adult stage, not quite ready for, well, you know. Dragonflies and damselflies do require a bit of time at adults to feed and mature before copulation (in stark contrast to butterflies, which go right at it when they emerge). In any event, below is a male from yesterday and then a female, which I photographed a couple years ago in Missouri.
Saving a Rare Songbird
Each spring, across a small section of North America, dawn comes with an event witnessed nowhere else on Earth. It happens in a zone of mountainous and coastal forest sites scattered across southeastern Canada and the northeastern United States. As the day begins, these forests come alive with the swirling song of the Bicknell’s Thrush. Arriving after a 2,000-kilometer migration from wintering grounds in the Greater Antilles, the thrushes will breed and raise young in these forests, not far removed from population centers with millions of people. A scant four months later, they will depart and migrate south before the onset of winter. With each journey, north or south, Bicknell’s Thrush flies toward an uncertain future.
That’s an excerpt from a summary document I helped to prepare for the International Bicknell’s Thrush Conservation Group. The IBTCG just released A Conservation Action Plan for Bicknell’s Thrush. The plan’s four-page summary (400K PDF) offers a concise account of the threats and conservation actions planned for this amazing songbird. Please read it. Here’s my image of a Bicknell’s Thrush on a nest on Vermont’s Mount Mansfield.
A Swarming Welcome to Michigan
A dead deer and a shredded tire (not mine) were the “Welcome to Michigan” icons when I crossed the Ohio line on Interstate 75 south of Detroit. Ten miles later I pulled off at a rest area and official welcome center. Greeting me was a nice swarm of dragonflies. Here’s the video and images of the three species in the swarm: Anax junius (Common Green Darner), Pantala flavescens (Wandering Glider) and Pantala hymenaea (Spot-winged Glider).
From the Trail Today
The Path of a Century
BLOGGER’S NOTE: The Long Trail, Vermont’s 272-mile hiking path from Massachusetts to Canada, turns 100 this year. The birthday comes with a great book, A Century in the Mountains: Celebrating Vermont’s Long Trail, published by the trail’s caretaker, the Green Mountain Club. Having hiked the Long Trail end-to-end twice, with countless shorter hikes in between, I wrote the chapter on the trail’s natural history. But the Long Trail is Vermont. So my chapter is in many respects a concise introduction to the nature of Vermont. I’m taking a break from the blog in order to make progress on my book. I’ll post here about once a week or so for a while. Until then, here’s my chapter from A Century in the Mountains with a few of my photos (including a bobcat and my hobblebush slideshow). Read on, buy the book … then get outside.
By Bryan Pfeiffer
F
rom the summit of Mount Grant the nature of the Long Trail unfolds at a hiker’s feet. This lofty spot (3,623 feet above sea level) is about halfway between Massachusetts and Canada. Yet it boasts no particular celebrated status on the trail, unless, of course, you believe each step along this route is itself a celebration. In any case, Mount Grant is a fine spot to stop and ponder the diversity of life on the spine of Vermont – whatever flies, flutters, darts, jumps, scampers, walks, crawls, slithers, swims, grows, decays, or even only sits there beside this illustrious path.
Visible far to the south of Mount Grant is some of the Long Trail’s more gentle terrain, a high plateau where a hiker can swim in remote ponds and circumnavigate mysterious bogs. Southern trees and unusual plants, at least by Long Trail standards, like bitternut hickory and Goldie’s fern sprout here and there in few locations. And early hikers, in June, might find early hairstreak, a prize butterfly about the size of your thumbnail, colored in shocking cobalt blue and mint green marked with little orange lightning bolts.
Somewhere off in the distance to the north are the trail’s classic and most recognizable peaks. As hikers here walk atop Vermont, they pass tiny flowering plants more typical of the arctic than New England. And if that isn’t wild enough, one of the Northeast’s rarest breeding birds, the Bicknell’s thrush, with a swirling, fluty song, enjoys a rather exotic and promiscuous sex life nearby. Soon after departing this the elevated excitement, the route to Canada features descents into various dramatic notches and eventually crosses two major rivers, from which, as the Long Trail always seems to do, it rises skyward yet again into the mountains.
But for now, having attained that high perch on Mount Grant, or most any elevated point on this trail, do not forget to admire what is close. Here at your feet, or more likely beneath your boot, look for one of the trail’s certifiable marvels of natural history. It is called Marasmius androsaceus. It is a mushroom standing no taller than an inch or two, with a black hair-like stalk and a tiny peach-colored parasol cap.
Of course, few hikers ever notice Marasmius androsaceus. In the vast assemblage of rock, mineral, plant, animal and otherwise that constitute this path, a mushroom would seem ill-qualified as a poster child for an essay on the nature of the Long Trail. It certainly lacks the lofty status of pink lady’s slipper orchids or peregrine falcons or bald summits with big views. Yet once you discover the role of Marasmius androsaceus, and countless other natural riches large, small and in-between along this route, it should become obvious that most every step on the Long Trail is indeed a step to be celebrated. Spend a lifetime walking this long, green path and you will discover but a fraction of its natural secrets. read more…
Emperor Encounter
While I was out searching for dragonflies on the Huntington River near Jonesville, Vermont, on Sunday, a Hackberry Emperor (Asterocampa clyton) touched down briefly to puddle on a gravel bar. He did a loop de loop around my head, then he was gone. This is a rare butterfly in Vermont. We find it in the vicinity of its host plant, Northern Hackberry (Celtis occidentalis). Hackberry, a tree, makes it way into Vermont in the Champlain Lowlands and the Connecticut River Valley, then “inland” a bit along major rivers, including the Winooski and some of its tributaries. Where the tree goes, the butterfly may follow. This was the first Emperor I’ve found in Vermont. I didn’t have my camera. These two images, from different sites in Missouri, including my pant leg, are a nice reminder that butterflies are not marked the same above (dorsally) and below (ventrally). By the way, Hackberry (North America has six native species) was once a member of the Elm Family (Ulmaceae) but is now considered a Hemp (Cannabaceae).
Counting Butterflies
The rain picked a fine day to return. Today is the 11 Annual North Montpelier Butterfly Count, organized by the North Branch Nature Center.* When the sun peaks through, we’ll be counting every butterfly we see in a 15-mile-diameter circle centered in North Montpelier. It’s like a Christmas bird count, only you get to sleep in and need not wear seven layers of clothing. Here’s a Two-spotted Skipper (Euphyes bimacula). It’s a bog specialist here in Vermont, feeding as a caterpillar mainly on the sedge Carex trichocarpa. Skippers, considered the bane of butterflyers because so many skippers look alike, are now widespread, like little orange flames scattered about the landscape. Most are tiny, no more than three-quarters of an inch in length. Good field marks on this skipper include those faint white veins on the underside of the hind wings and that white margin along the abdomen. Females do have two spots on the upper side of the forewing, which you can’t see in my images here. Occasionally, an adult will alight on your pant leg (above) to lap up salt on a steamy day or drop onto a gravel road for trace minerals and salts. These guys are showing what we call a probing proboscis.
* As it turns out, the count was canceled today because of the rain. I’ll post an update when it’s rescheduled.
Cerceris Season
A white ash seems nearly invincible. It rises in our forests straight and sturdy, with dense wood and a hearty symmetrical crown. Ash trees become tool handles, baseball bats and, back in the day, cross-country skis. An ash is formidable and delightful to see. Yet a tiny invasive insect is now killing ashes by the millions. And our best hope for slowing the carnage may be an amiable wasp called Cerceris fumipennis.
The villain in this woodland drama is a beetle, the emerald ash borer. Shaped like a bullet, and indeed glittering like an emerald, it probably arrived in the United States hitchhiking on wood packing material carried on cargo ships or airplanes originating from its home turf in Asia. By the time the beetle was discovered here, first in Michigan in 2002, it was already too late.
The emerald ash borer has killed tens of millions of ash trees in southeastern Michigan alone. Tens of millions more have been lost elsewhere across the Midwest, New York, Pennsylvania, and now the beetles have appeared just 30 miles north of Vermont in the Province of Quebec. The adult beetle nibbles on ash leaves. But in its immature stage, its larval stage, it feeds on the inner bark and outer sapwood of an ash, impairing the tree’s ability to transport water and nutrients to leaves and roots. It’s the most effective way to kill a tree short of chopping it down. And the beetle, half an inch of terror, is now closing in on Vermont and New Hampshire. All we can do is wait … and watch.
Finding emerald ash borers is almost like searching for, well, little green bullets shot into the woods. It is an expedition of high expense and low returns. But Cerceris fumipennis, our wasp (it has no common name yet), is now being enlisted in the hunt for the beetles. It turns out that Cerceris fumipennis can catch emerald ash borers and haul them back to a waiting researcher.
Here’s how it works. read more…
Discovering Moths
Butterflies get all the glory. They’re the glamour insects, adored like movie stars, French impressionist painters, or great poets. Moths, on the other hand, are the butterflies’ creepy cousins. It was the Death’s Head Sphinx-moth, with the visage of a human skull on its thorax, admired by the killer Hannibal Lecter in the novel and film The Silence of the Lambs. The poet Pablo Neruda wrote no Ode to Moths. And no schoolchildren rally to get a moth declared state insect. Butterflies sparkle in sunlight. Moths are creatures of darkness.
John Himmelman certainly likes butterflies. He likes birds. And he’s big on amphibians. But John really loves moths. He’ll interrupt a nighttime drive to investigate the glow and flutter about a street lamp. He won’t even kill the hornworm caterpillars munching his tomatoes. John loves these insects so much that he’s written his own Ode to Moths: Discovering Moths – Nighttime Jewels in Your Own Backyard. Published in 2002, it’s among the finest guides to insect appreciation I’ve seen, elevating moths to the lofty status of their glittering butterfly kin. read more…
Atlantis Fritillary
Here’s an Atlantis Fritillary (Speyeria atlantis) nectaring on red clover. Our two other large Speyeria frits here in the East are Aphrodite Fritillary (S. aphrodite) and Great Spangled Fritillary (S. cybele). One reliable field mark is the ocean-blue eyes on Atlantis Fritillary; the two others have yellow eyes. This mark won’t work in the West, where the higher diversity of these large fritillary species is enough to make even the most dedicated lepidopterist content with (or relegated to) the wisdom that we cannot always know what’s flying before us.
By the way, DSA members looking for an updated species list can check DSA Update No. 4 again for the new version, which includes additions from Fryeburg and Jackman (although I haven’t listed species from those trips separately).