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The Fall Webworm, the Eastern Tent Caterpillar and the Bagworms

9/16/2019

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The Fall Webworm,
the Eastern Tent Caterpillar  
and the Bagworms

PictureWebworm infestation
When I was driving along our country road on my way to the supermarket I saw these big webs around tree branches with brown leaves inside. Most of the branches were facing south east, ready for the first morning sunshine. Some of the trees had many of those webs and looked very unhealthy. When I came back, I checked the trees around the house and, unfortunately, I also found one. It is on a tree with the best location - just above the pond, facing southeast, and enjoying sunshine most of the day, but I could not see it from the house. As most of the Eastern Tent Caterpillars had passed on by now, I was concerned. Was this a new infestation of the very destructive tent caterpillars that could damage our trees? What was happening so late in the year?
PictureEastern Caterpillar Tent Infestation
After doing some research, I found out that what I was seeing was the Fall Webworm tents. An entirely different animal from the Eastern Tent Caterpillars that we have all come to fear.

Why are the Eastern Tent Caterpillars so despised? Well they start to form their web-enclosed colonies in the Spring in the forks of tree branches- which makes them hard to address. Cutting off the branch below the nest will generally lead to a harmful removal of an energy producing significant branch. So the only solutions were chemical (we don’t want those toxins today), biological (do we want to add biologic agents into the environment as pathogens that we don’t completely understand), or manual destruction. A heavy infestation can defoliate a newly leafing tree and kill it!
PictureWebworm White Moth
One of our neighbors owns over 200 acres of woods, which he maintains for logging and income. His wife Georgia was tasked each year to go through the woods with a long pole and poke apart all the Eastern Tent Caterpillar nests she could find, allowing birds and other predators to kill off the colonies. Perhaps her late Summer efforts were unnecessary.

What we were seeing now, were Fall Webworm colonies - not Eastern Tent Caterpillars. So what are Fall Webworms? Fall Webworms appear as a white moth with a wingspan of about 1 ½ inches from May to August. Those moths deposit up to 1500 eggs on the lower surface of the leaves of the host tree. When the eggs hatch, larvae begin spinning their webs over the leaves on which they feed. The web enlarges to cover more leaves as the larvae continue to feed.
PictureOur own webworm infestation
One of the  important differences here is that Webworms remain within the tent to feed on leaves and come late in the year, when most of the energy the leaves are producing is already spent. So leaf destruction is confined to within the tent. Tent Caterpillars come in the Spring and leave their tents to feed all over the tree - possibly killing it. So Webworms are not very destructive.

Webworms prefer maple, birches, walnuts and willow trees. They damage trees by feeding on the leaves of those trees. Nevertheless, the feeding takes place in the Fall, shortly before trees shed their leaves anyway. It seems to be more of a cosmetic problem than a serious health risk for the tree. 

One should however remove the web, if one can reach it, and destroy it by crushing or put it in an alcohol solution. Chemical measures are not needed, since it is late in the season. If the webworm is spotted in the beginning of its web building, chemicals can be applied. Insects are more susceptible when young.
PictureEastern Catarpillar Tent Egg
The Eastern Tent Caterpillar has a very different life cycle. It overwinters in an egg mass which has been deposited around a small twig. It is ½ inch long, oval-shaped and brown and contains around 300 eggs. When the leaves appear in early spring, the eggs hatch and the larvae begin spinning their tents in the twig crotches. 300 caterpillars will feed on tender young leaves which is very bad for any tree. By the end of May the caterpillars will leave the tree to form cocoons. By late June, adults will emerge and lay eggs on twigs of a host plant and those eggs will not hatch until the following year.

The damage of caterpillars is done when they feed on new leaves after spinning a tent or web in the fork of a tree. Depending on the size of the tent population an infestation of Eastern tent caterpillars is capable of seriously damaging a tree.
PictureBagworm Infestation
There are also the Bagworms. Bagworms are very unique and probably will escape your notice. Their well disguised ‘houses’ are covered with woodland detritus. They may appear like pine cones or other seed pods, but they are an illusion. They can be found on junipers, spruce and pines. Bagworm eggs hatch in May or early June. A worm the size of the lead in a pencil will start eating foliage and will spin a silken bag, camouflaged with tree bits,  around its body. By late summer the bag is several inches long and very difficult to control. A mature bag will repel chemicals and can only be hand picked. This evolution is so elegant because it hides itself with the natural detritus of the environment! So the challenge is on you, as the steward.
All three pests have different life cycles and should be dealt with. A healthy tree however, can handle one webworm nest. If there are more, one has to do something. The other two infestations need your attention, better sooner than later.

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Foxglove

8/29/2019

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Foxglove

We all know the foxglove. Their tall stems, with an array of bell shaped flowers in those vivid colors of pink and purple, or even white, draw your attention to them. In the spring we are surrounded by foxgloves. They can be six feet (two meters) tall, and  are a pleasure to look at. I was told not to touch them because they are poisonous. But I could take photos and saw how interesting those bells were. When you look into the bells you see all the spots and the little hair around the rim of the bell.
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PictureLeonhard Fuchs
So why are they called foxglove? Leonhard Fuchs (the German word for fox) named them in 1542 and put them in the genus of Digitalis (finger-like). In Old English it then became foxes glofe or fox’s glove. Over time people thought that foxes had their dens on hillsides covered with these flowers. And some people called the flowers “witch’s glove,'' referring to their toxicity.

Our foxgloves - the common foxglove,  with the Latin name Digitalis purpurea, is commonly found in open woods, but also where the vegetation has been burnt. If the genus name Digitalis seems to jump out at you, it is probably because that is the name of a popular family of heart medications for people. If it is so toxic, why would we be giving its derivatives to people with heart problems? That’s a very fair question.
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PictureWilliam Withering
The use of plants for medicinal reasons is very old. The Chinese have used plants as medicine since 4000 - 5000 B.C. The earliest  known medical document is 4000 years old. It is a Sumerian clay tablet that recorded plant remedies for various illnesses. Indeed, botanical compounds are still the basis for most of our pharmaceuticals today, six millennia later. As we battle to overcome the new ‘superbugs’ that are resistant to our current antibiotics, we are scouring the world’s rain forests for new compounds that may save us from our over use of modern antibiotics. (Another reason that there is so much panic in the current news stories of rampant fires burning down a soccer field’s amount of old growth rain forest every minute in Brazil, and the current offer of the G7 to supply them with twenty million dollars in fire fighting aid (8/28/19). The remedy may still be lurking in the rain forests.)

Leonard Fuchs discovered the plant in the 16th century, but it was forgotten due to the severe toxicity and the deaths of some patients. But then in 1741 it was rediscovered by William Withering. He went to medical school in Edinburgh, where he became interested in botany, chemistry and mineralogy. After medical school he became a country doctor in Stafford, a small and very poor town in England. One of his patients was an old woman dying of dropsy (now known as edema or water retention). He expected her to die quickly, but she recovered. She had taken a mixture of herbs. Dr. Withering realized that the main herb was the flowering foxglove.
He gave the mixture of herbs to another 163 patients and made detailed notes on the effect of foxglove. The notes contain toxicity, dosing and side effects. Some of the side effects were vomiting, confusion, slow pulse and cold sweats. All of the patients had a slow pulse, which led later investigators to explore using it for heart problems.

Since the discovery, digitalis has been debated whether the toxicity outweighs the benefits. Interestingly, doctors still use digoxin when treating congestive heart failure, in spite of the modern know how of the pharma industry. The compounds are extracted from the leaves of the plant. 

Foxgloves were always used by folklorists. Once the usefulness of digitalis was understood, it was also used for the treatment of epilepsy and other seizure disorders. 

The entire plant is toxic, including the roots and seeds. Mortality cases are rare, but they exist. If one uses the foxglove  for tea or eats them, nausea, vomiting, hallucinations will occur. It is said that Vincent van Gogh’s “Yellow Period” was the result of digitalis therapy, which he went through to control his seizures.
However, the larvae of the foxglove pug, a moth, consume the flowers of the common foxglove for food! And they go on living. This is not an uncommon dynamic in nature. Much like the beautiful and brightly colored Monarch butterfly’s diet of common milkweed nectar - which is also toxic to most animals, confers on them protection from predators. The Monarch’s bright colors warn predators that their bodies are poisonous to eat, if not sickening. Many insects are protected in this way. Generally speaking, the brighter and more vibrant the markings, the less desirable they are as a food.
So this common dynamic - of evolving to consume toxic substances to ward off predators, begs a question! A brief survey of poison control sites, informs us that all parts of the plant are toxic to all animals. Yet hummingbirds thrive on foxglove nectar. Hummingbirds are hunted and eaten by a wide variety of animals, from snakes and lizards, to praying mantises and orb spiders, frogs and even fish. Of course birds will hunt them as well. Is it just the nectar that is not toxic, or has the hummingbird evolved to be immune to the toxicity for just the food source, without it conveying any protection from predators?  Just curious.

Let me end with a poem about foxgloves, written in Dr. Withering’s time (unknown author):

“The Foxgloves leaves with caution given
Another proof of favouring heaven
Will happily display
The rapid pulse it can abate
The hectic flush can moderate
And, blest by Him whose will is fate,
May give a lengthen’d day.”  

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The Lawn - How grass is helping us.

7/28/2019

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The Lawn -
How grass is helping us.

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Who would have thought grass would be so controversial? No, not the kind that some people smoke, but rather the grass in our lawns! We’ve recently been seeing media reports that we should be limiting our use of lawns because they are bad for the environment and somehow contributing to climate change (global warming). Well let’s think about this more carefully.

Europe is experiencing an unusually sunny and extremely hot summer and it is a challenge not only for people but also for nature. The grassy areas are a parched yellow and fires are seen in many parts of Europe. Once in a while there is a fierce thunderstorm with heavy rain, but the water  cannot penetrate into the hard soil and just runs off. The burst of water does not help to bring the green back.
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So why is grass so important in our cultures and how did we get here? Our attempts to engineer sustainable and durable turf grass go back almost a thousand years. An early reference has been found in a Japanese book written in 1159. The Chinese also cultivated turf grasses and medieval European castles made sure their fortifications were surrounded by vast expanses of green swards. It served as a security buffer so that an approaching enemy could be seen early enough, so that the residents could mount a defense. But maintaining these buffers was very labor intensive. They had to be kept in check by either hand-scything or grazing livestock. So until recently, they were the province of only the wealthy. (See our piece https://www.countryforcity.com/mowing-lawns.html)
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The democratization of lawns arrived in 1830, when Edwin Budding invented an affordable mechanical mower. But many credit the famous designer Fredrick Law Olmsted (New York’s Central Park) with pushing lawns to the forefront of the American middle-class dream when he was commissioned in 1868 to design Riverside, a Chicago suburban planned community that featured front lawns for every house, that would give the impression of a continuously flowing park like expanse for the residents.
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Today, for better or worse depending on who you ask, America has some 50,000 square miles of lawn to maintain. Critics point to the expense, the chemicals and the pollution this entails. And many decry the social tyranny of lawn etiquette. Hollywood has long mined the comedic depths of the frustrations of suburban homeowners forced to compete with a neighbor for the most perfect lawn, or the bitter frustration of having to spend a perfectly beautiful summer day laboriously mowing the lawn. Let’s not forget the community shaming that takes place if your lawn is not kept up to the community standards!

In his book "Second Nature" about gardening, Michael Pollan gives a fine philosophical look at his complicated journey, starting with his father’s problems with the neighbors when he failed to maintain their lawn well enough, to his own fascination later with his own lawn, to his eventual detente with the culture of lawns. The social pressure of lawns can be very intense.
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But we would like to mount something of a defense of lawns. The spurious notion that lawns are contributing to global warming seems to be a bit over blown.

Grass is a living organism. It takes in carbon dioxide and converts it into food. As a byproduct of this process,  it produces oxygen which is released into the air. A grass area of 2,500 square feet will give us enough oxygen for four people. An even more impressive statistic is this one: a soccer field can offset the carbon produced by a car driving 3,000 miles. Grass is a simple way to keep our air clean. 

But the grass does even more. It can absorb lots of water before runoff occurs. Grass has a dense root system that prevents erosion and thus will keep sediments out of creeks and rivers.  Studies have shown that grass filters pollutants and reduces them from entering water bodies, because a healthy lawn absorbs rainfall six times more effectively than a wheat field. It also filters our rain before releasing it into the aquifers, providing cleaner drinking water.

And here is a fact we all appreciate on a hot summer day: the temperature on a well maintained lawn will be 30 degrees lower than on asphalt, and 14 degrees cooler than bare soil. Grass is said to reduce stress and make you feel well. It has even been speculated that an appreciation for grass is encoded in our DNA, from the time we evolved in Africa. They call it the ‘Savanna Effect’. A well maintained lawn might increase the value of your house and it invites people to spend more time outside. It is also said that the more technically advanced a civilization is, the more grass areas are maintained and used.

A lush lawn invites sports and  outdoor physical activity. It provides a perimeter security zone around a house, which also helps keep animal nuisances at bay. Those 55,000 square miles of American lawns sequester about 37 billion tons of carbon! So maybe it is more helpful against global warming than we are led to believe.
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We have a big  area with thick healthy grass. We have never used fertilizer or pesticides and we do not pick up the grass clippings. In the morning after mowing most of the clippings are gone. The worms pull them into the soil and keep the soil permeable to air and rainfall. And the lawn rewards us with lots of oxygen.

I have read about the anti-lawn camp. What they really do not want are fertilizers, pesticides etc.  Here I agree. But who would be against a healthy natural lawn?  If your lawn needs fertilizers or pesticides, often times (especially in newly built developments), it is because the soil PH is off or it is lacking essential nutrients. A visit to your local Agricultural  Cooperative Extension can give you the organic remedies to your problems.

I enjoy mowing our lawns! When I am done and look at my work, I can see the results - most other work just blends in. On top of it, I get healthier exercise than in a gym!

​P.S.- The old admonishment  that the 'grass is always greener on the other side' (be careful what you wish for because the other side may not be as good as it appears), is optically true! When you stand above your own lawn looking straight down, you see all the gaps and bare spots. But when you gaze over the fence at your neighbors, it appears more lush and greener because your low angle view sees all the sides of the blades of green grass and none of the bare gaps hidden by your restricted view. Chances are that if you look back from their side, your lawn will look much better than theirs. The same with life.

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Having rain almost everyday -can trees get too much rain?

6/27/2019

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Having rain almost everyday -
Can trees get too much rain?

PictureRotten tree root.
Here in the Northeast of the US, we are having rain almost everyday and not a lot of sunshine. (We are extraordinarily lucky, as this is only the remnants of horrible flooding in the interior of the country, as storms dumped their moisture loads well before arriving in our region. There has been record flooding in the heartland of the US and nothing we are receiving here compares to what they are facing from the weather.) This portends consequences for us as heavier than normal rains saturate our landscape. So what should we be concerned about?

Well, for one thing, what about the trees? If you have tall trees near your house, you may have to worry about one or some of them coming down in high winds. (see post of October 2018 for more info).  Trees need a lot of water and drink the rain up with their roots. But they need oxygen as well, and if a tree’s roots are chronically saturated with water, the lack of oxygen will weaken the root system. The anaerobic (lack of oxygen) nature of saturated soil can also promote the growth of root eating fungi like armillaria and phytophothera. If fungi weaken the roots, the tree is more likely to topple. It is probably a good idea to examine your trees now to assess whether they might pose a threat or not. To identify various tree diseases, you can go to https://extension.psu.edu/tree-diseases-that-create-hazards. If you aren’t sure but see obvious signs of disease, asking an arborist for an evaluation is a good idea.
PictureThe wind can easily blow through the canopy.
The water also  acts as a lubricant, weakening the root bonds in the soil and makes ‘windthrow’ more likely. If the tree is densely leafed, storm winds can’t readily flow through the canopy and it becomes a sail. Think of using a hammer to pull out a nail. The more pressure you exert on the top of the handle, the more leverage there is to pull out the nail. Well it is the same with a full canopy! Add the lubricant of water saturated soil, and falling over becomes more likely. This is another reason to keep a tree properly pruned, to reduce the sail effect.
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And of course, water is heavy. One gallon equals eight pounds. Trees absorb more water than they really need for nourishment. They give it back to us  through transpiration. A regular tree breaths out 250 and more gallons of water daily through its leaves. That’s at least 2,000 pounds, one ton! So if just the weight of a tree’s breath is startling, think of how much force in weight, is in that tree next to the house? It pays to monitor the tree’s health. To help trees along, you should prune them regularly so they are structurally sound and can weather the storms. Also important are the forks in the tree (see post of April 2018). 


Our house is surrounded by a lot of trees, and in the evening you can feel the moisture building. An acre of forest can have over 1,000 acres of leaf surface area. All this moisture being exhaled by trees every day, is critical to our environment. Isotope studies have shown that water evaporated from the oceans by the sun, rarely falls on land as rain past 150 miles from the coast line. So the rains that nourish us beyond that, mostly come from the moist exhalation of trees. Indeed, about 95 percent of the rain inland comes from the exhalations of trees.
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Trees living in wet soil-  like willows, spruce and white pine, are prime candidates to fall in storms. As you by now may guess, because the soil is saturated, the roots of trees in habitually wet ground, tend to be shallower to capture enough oxygen to run their metabolism. 

So, having a lot of rain can be good or bad.
PictureAustralian desert
The tree’s ability to humidify areas inland, away from oceans, guarantees the rain cycle. Without trees, there is no rain cycle and the landscape turns into desert. The Southwest of the U.S. used to be much greener 300 years ago, before settlers started cutting down forests for lumber and agriculture. Nowadays, the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts are slowly expanding north. 

Australia’s European settlers, clear cut so many trees, that the continent’s increasing desertification may be irreversible. No matter where you go on the planet, from the Amazon rain forest to Africa, clear cutting forests for agriculture, etc, leads to desertification of the land down stream from the prevailing winds. Without the moisture exhaled by the trees, the land changes.
PictureImage of Maui by Landsat satellite. The small island to the southwest is the unpopulated island of Kahoolawe.
Even an island- surrounded by water may not be immune. Kahoolawe, the smallest of the eight main Hawaiian islands, is about the size of Manhattan, and sits about seven miles southwest in the rain shadow of the larger island of Maui. Historically it was heavily forested, but after many of the high forests of Maui’s volcanic slopes were cut down, it rapidly turned into a desert island, deprived of the moisture that was exhaled and turned into rain by the slopes of the volcano’s trees.

Kahoolawe is low and relatively flat. So there is not enough lift created for the prevailing northeasterly trade winds to create rain from the surrounding ocean. (This is known as orographic precipitation, and occurs when a moving air mass is forced upwards by rising terrain- Maui’s volcanic slopes. It cools down with rising altitudes, humidity increases and rain can be generated downstream of the winds.) Without Maui’s forests, Kahoolawe- seven miles away over the ocean,  was starved of moisture and is now mostly desert, despite being surrounded on all sides by water! 

There is a lesson in this.

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Kahoolawe island, Hawaii, is now a desert.


So keep the trees,
just make sure they stay healthy.


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Bird Migration

5/28/2019

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By National Geographic

Bird Migration


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A few days ago, when I left the house I heard the sound only a hummingbird can make. They flap their wings at such a high rate, that I recognize it immediately. Scientists found that the wing flapping can be between 16 times per second for the larger hummingbirds, and more than 80 times per second  for the smaller variety. Their top flying speed is between 34 and 49 mph and all that with their two inches in length and a weight of less than 0.07 oz.

When I heard the flapping sound, I turned around immediately and prepared their food. In the article on “hummingbirds” on our landing page, you find that our recipe is one cup of sugar to one cup of water. Before they leave in September we are a bit more generous with the sugar to “fatten” them up. After bringing the mixture to a boil, we let it cool down and then fill the two glass feeders we have. Within the hour, two males took their first drink. We assume that we have again at least two couples.
How is it that these tiny birds, travel twice a year thousands of miles between their winter homes in the south and breeding grounds in the north. It seems nobody has come up with a commonly accepted answer.

You see immediately, how many miles birds travel to be with us during the summer:
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By the Purple Martin Conservation Association
When I was talking to a friend who grew up 100 miles north from us, we both agreed that in the beginning of spring, it always is ten degrees warmer inland than on the coast. At that time of the year the ocean is cooling down the adjacent land as it does in the summertime. I was wondering whether this fact could explain, that one of our friends who lives near the eastern coast  has tried to attract hummingbirds for years, but in vain. In the crucial time when our hummingbirds arrive, it is much warmer inland than on the coast.
How do birds succeed in traveling such a distance. Do they use the sun and the stars? Or do they follow rivers, mountains and other landmarks? It has been believed for some time now that otoliths (small oval calcareous bodies in the inner ear of vertebrates) and found in the lagenal otolith of fish and birds, may well play a role in migratory navigation, using the Earth’s magnetic fields. (Otoliths inside your inner ear- if disturbed, will lead to vertigo and loss of balance.)

Other studies have shown that geographic landmarks seem to aid in nocturnal bird migration as well.  One study partially done in eastern NY State
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347282802364),
found that migrating birds that were affected by wind drift, seemed to use the Hudson River to reorient their flight paths.
PictureBy National Geographic
Recent scientific findings suggest that an unusual protein in the bird’s eye may allow them to see the Earth’s magnetic lines, kind of like their own interstate highway. Studies from researchers at Lund University in Sweden and Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg in Germany, focused on the European robin (migratory) and the zebra finch (resident). They found that due to a cryptochrome protein (Cyr4) in the bird’s eyes, they probably have an enhanced sensitivity to blue light wavelengths and this may act as a kind of visual filter, giving the bird an orientation for the Earth’s magnetic field. In essence, it may give the bird a compass heading. Although this protein is present in most animals and the cryptochrome family is usually involved in regulating circadian rhythms, the studies found that it most likely is involved in the birds navigational behaviors.
PictureBy Borealbirds
Most people, however, think that birds just act on instinct when they start their big trip. Our friend the ruby-throated hummingbird, probably was born here at our property last year, (or at least in the eastern part of the U.S.), and he aimed for our feeder in front of the bay window right away when I heard and then saw him.  He knew where his food source was! He flew more than 3,000 miles from his winter quarters in Mexico! So how he did it is the question.

Thanks to technical advances in weather radars and their dense deployment throughout the U.S., researchers are now unlocking many of the mysteries of how, when and in what numbers, birds are moving around the globe on their epic annual journeys. This has been particularly fruitful for analyzing nocturnal migrations and how large geographic obstacles like the Great Lakes in the north, affect their paths. (One finding was that although flocks would attempt crossings of the widest stretches of water at night, the breaking of dawn would show a rise in altitude of the flock- dubbed the ‘dawn ascent’, and a redirection of their paths to follow the shore lines, implying landmark assisted navigation).
PictureBlackcap warbler
Peter Wohlleben writes in his book “The Secret Wisdom of Nature”, that a study was done by Kalev Sepp and his colleague Aivar Leito. They discovered over the years, that birds switched between three different routes. This rules out learning the route from older birds. Sepp concluded that birds have to get together and somehow ‘discuss’ where they have the best chance of finding good breeding sites and food.

Wohlleben also talks about the German blackcap warbler that has its winter quarters  in Spain. In the 1960s, they found, however, another migration route that led to the United Kingdom. The reason is that the British are great bird lovers and feed the birds in their country so well that they no longer fly south. And the German blackcap warbler migrates to England now, which is considerably shorter than flying to Spain. They even have begun to change in appearance: their beaks are now longer and narrower and their wings have become rounder and shorter.  Now it is easier to pick seeds and fat from feeders, and the wings are no longer suited for long-distance flights.

One might argue that this is an example of evolutionary natural selection at play. Or is it not, because human involvement seems to be the underlying cause? If these morphological changes lead to an identifiable new species over time, do we credit Darwin or human breeding? What do you think?
This notion, that birds are somehow communicating why and how other birds should change to a migratory path that they had not themselves experienced, would scream heresy to many scientists! But there may be more substance to it than we can yet readily believe!

The concept implies a level of sophistication in conveying complex motives and behaviors to other- as yet naive individuals, that most people could not conceive birds of being capable of achieving.

Recent studies of bird behavior have shown that not only can some species of birds remember individual human faces,  but also pass that knowledge of certain individual humans to avoid, to naive (Inexperienced) offspring. This would be considered a ‘culturally transmitted behavior’.
There is also increasing evidence that birds have unique alarm calls which indicate the different threat levels of an approaching cat, as opposed to that of a racoon. As our audio technologies and hunting trail cameras become ubiquitous, we are experiencing a tsunami of new data (sound, photos,  videos, temperature and time stamped with moon phases) which were impossible to see until very recently. This is leading to conclusions that bird communications are far more complex and nuanced than we ever believed until now.

I suspect that as Artificial Intelligence (AI) is applied to these mountains of data, with the corresponding behaviors and audio frequencies directly compared, we will be be astonished at just how sophisticated animal communication really is. We are just- as yet, too ignorant to grasp its depth.

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Spring is here!

4/26/2019

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Spring is here!

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When I see the first snow bells, I know that we have turned the corner and Spring will arrive soon. I am always astonished that those delicate white little bells can withstand the snow and send their flowers through the ice and snow for the sunlight. Very often they will be buried in snow again and again, but they will fight back and eventually they will stand there in a group, welcoming the robin and all the other birds.
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Two weeks ago it seemed as if we had an invasion of birds. They were all sitting in the trees around the house. There seemed to be at least a dozen different species, all chattering at once. I could not see them very well, but I could hear them even in the house. So we went outside and sat down to listen.  It was almost a concert!

It seemed as if all the birds migrating north this Spring had arrived at our house at the same time. There were hundreds of them. If you are a student of nature and how animals communicate, you have learned that all animals use fairly recognizable calls to signal each other about food, prey, danger, predators, mating readiness, caution, alarm, territory, etc. But this was something different. Although I am familiar with many of the distinctly different types of calls, this was a cacophony of all sorts of calls that were just a wall of sound in the trees around us. It was like being in a crowded cocktail party hall with everyone talking excitedly at once. I was having a hard time distinguishing who was present in the din. We had never experienced this deluge of bird calls before. (We are planning a future post about the newest knowledge of just how nuanced and detailed these calls are.)
Some of these birds were no doubt returning nesters or their offspring from previous years, but there were so many others, that many were obviously passing through to last year’s breeding grounds elsewhere. When I remarked that we had never heard so many at one time in one place, my husband wryly joked that ‘well, it has been a long flight north and a lot has happened to them since they left last Fall, so I guess they have a lot to catch up about’. Of course it is fanciful to suggest that this was just a gossipy pit stop on the flight north, but it may not be too far off the mark in some ways.

As our technologies and experimental abilities have improved so much in recent years, scientists are discovering that very specific information is being shared not only within a flock of one species, but also eavesdropped and responded to by other species, and even by animals in different orders.
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We have slowly tried over the last 35 years on this land, to try to improve the natural habitat to encourage a wide variety of animals to visit, breed, live or just feed on their way somewhere else. So perhaps there was a lot of information for them all to signal to each other. ‘Here we can find fresh water, food, habitat and cover.’

We’ve done this by creating water resources, cover, plants, nesting habitats and ‘edge effect’ areas. If you’d like to encourage wildlife to use your property, planting appropriate habitats and food plants is one way of doing it. Using native varieties to your area will ensure hardiness and usefulness for your native animals.

The Audubon Society provides you with a tool to bring more birds to your home with native plants: https://www.audubon.org/native-plants. You can enter your zip code and filter your results by types of plants (grasses, succulents, shrubs, trees, etc.) , the food resource (nectar, fruits, seeds, etc.) or the types of birds you would like to attract. You can even order plants from the website if your garden center doesn’t provide them.
I tried it with my own zip code and was very pleased that the plants/trees they mentioned and what birds they attract is exactly what I have been seeing outside- some of which we established. But it also suggests bushes or trees I might want to add to give other birds a reason to move to my area.

One hardy spring bush we planted covers whole sections in its bright yellow Spring color, the forsythia. I think everybody likes them, because they give us the wonderful yellow in the spring and then change into the summer green.
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When the daffodils appear, I know the mowing season is not too far ahead. Then the grass suddenly appears  and needs attention sooner than later. It also means that I have to pick up all the branches that the winter storms blew down. This means I will get good exercise which makes me feel good.

The sunshine and the warmer temperatures kiss the trees to wake up, and then you see this amazing blush in green, yellow and red on the trees up the hill and around the house. If one of those trees stand near a pine tree, the “blush” is very intense in the contrast.
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Sooner or later all our birds are back, even the tiny hummingbirds, and we are ready for summer. Many years ago I started a bird list, i.e.- I wrote down all the birds I had identified and I am having now well over a hundred different birds on my list. Some of them stayed for the summer, others stayed only a day, a week or so and then headed further north. I saw them again, when they were on their way to their winter quarters in the south. They’ll tend to come back your way, if they found food and cover on their trip north.

My ‘locals’ of course are somewhat more recognizable. The individuals that ‘summer’ on our property, do not ‘display’ and ‘alarm’ like transients do. Robins, Grosbeaks, Sparrows, Chickadees, Finches and others, that were here before and became used to us (and our now much older and less threatening cat), will not react with alarm calls and tail pumping and nervous jumps to higher branches like the transients do. They’ve established their breeding territories on our property, know and recognize us and stay closer as we approach.  If you look out and see a half dozen Robins on the lawn, and only four fly away when you step out, but two stay down and eyeball you, then those two probably raised a brood here last year. They recognize that you are not a threat.
Science has shown that at least some birds have the capacity to recognize human faces. Faces that didn’t molest them in the past, do not cause anxious reactions.  In fact, this knowledge was astonishingly passed onto the next generation! They can recognize the ebb and flow of human behavior and body language. (Not really surprising as they have to do the same with the predators that stalk them everyday! Are they hungry or just passing through? The body language will be very different.)

There is a richness in the returning of life in the Spring. Myriad things open, grow and return. So, if you pay close attention, you may even recognize a returning companion from last year, which is all the richer, because they returned.
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How do whitetail deer survive snowy winters with subzero temperatures?

3/16/2019

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How do whitetail deer survive
snowy winters with subzero temperatures?

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So far this winter has not been especially snowy, but nevertheless since the unusual surprise snow storm of mid-November of last year, we have a solid snow cover on a good foundation of ice. In the last months we have experienced some warm days alternating with record lows and fierce winds giving us a sizable ice foundation under the snow cover.

When I see the deer families passing the house on their way from the hill to the valley, I always wonder how they survive a winter that has been here now for over three months. Those deer families always stop under the bird feeders to lick up some bird feed that has fallen onto the snow before moving on. But these meager morsels can’t possibly help them survive the brutal northeastern winters.
Afterall, most woodland creatures in the winter, live on a razor thin caloric budget, balanced between sharply diminished food resources, energy expenditures and fat reserves. Even small variations in any of these areas can be fatal. Yet the whitetail deer thrive everywhere in the region. Despite this year’s hard layer of ice under the snow from earlier warming and refreezing, now in March, we are not seeing any less deer moving through the landscape.

What is their secret? Well it is a combination of biological and behavioral adaptations that allow them to survive.
Biological Adaptations:

In our post of December 20, 2018, we wrote about deer shedding  their summer coat for a heavier winter coat in the Fall. This coat is  composed of darker hollow guard hairs and a dense underfur giving them excellent protection. The darker guard hairs increase solar heat gain when they are in the sunshine and because they are hollow, excellent insulation.  The fine wolly under pelt is an additional layer of terrific protection.
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But deer prepare for winter in other ways. They are eating more in the fall to add layers of fat. Research has shown, that at the beginning of winter, 25 % of their body weight is fat. Think of all the acorns they will eat in September to reach this weight!

​This fat layer is so important, that later-season born fawns will shift from growing muscle mass and height, to creating more fat.

This additional fat layer though is not enough to survive. So their metabolism and digestive systems change as well. Having adapted to less food during the northern winter months, their digestive system slows down markedly. Studies in North America have shown metabolic declines of as much as 50%. Thermal images of their bodies during very cold temperatures, shows that they can throttle back blood flow to their limbs and outer body layers, to conserve core heat and calories.
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Deer automatically decrease their metabolism at the beginning of the cold season, and it does not matter how much food is available. Lower temperatures slow down body functions- such as digestion, but they do survive, which is more important. In fact, as reported in the Stuttgarter-Zeitung.de, 03 January 2016,  German studies of European Red Deer, showed that their digestive tracts actually shrink. These organs will actually shrink as much as 15%, before enlarging again in the spring. Over a three year study, a confined herd of does which were given abundant food throughout all four seasons, nevertheless they ate half as much food during the winter months. Indeed the cells in their guts changed to start taking up sugars and protein fragments more efficiently. Their winter feces showed significantly lower amounts of protein. Red deer heart rates can be as much as 60% lower in the dead of winter.

Northern whitetails also have adapted by growing larger. Known as Bergmann’s Rule, it shows that in many species distributed over colder and colder latitudes, the northernmost cousins tend to grow larger in body mass. The larger the body mass, the less surface area there is to lose heat, therefore the more efficient the caloric expenditures. (As body mass increases, the increase in surface area decreases in proportion to the body mass). It probably also helps to have taller and heavier bodies to push through winter snows and reach higher branches to browse as well.

You can think in North America of the northern Moose, then the Elk, Mule Deer, Whitetails and southern Whitetails to see this decrease in size. But you see it in bears as well! The Polar Bear is the largest bear on earth, followed by the Kodiak Island and Kamchatka Peninsula  Brown Bears, then the  Grizzly Bears of the American west and the eventually southernmost black bears. They all demonstrate Bergmann's Rule.
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Behavioral Adaptations:

But what do they eat when the ground is covered in a thick layer of ice and snow? I saw them attacking the snow and ice with their hooves, making a hole to get to the soil where the grass is. These patches are called ‘scrapes’ by hunters. A scrape can be made by bears, racoons or turkeys- all doing the same thing. They can all smell the newer green growth below the snow, but the snow will tell the tale of who has been rooting around your house.
PictureThe browse line on our hemlock bush
I also saw them eating twigs and evergreens on our bushes around the house. Yes, your landscaping is easy pickings for hungry deer. As you drive along the highway, you might observe that in the bordering woods, the tree branches appear to have been trimmed off neatly up from the ground to an even edge of about four feet above the ground. It appears as if a committed gardner is keeping everything neatly trimmed. In fact, it is evidence of a healthy local deer herd browsing away the understory growth. If you observe their wandering tracks in the snow, you’ll see them trace the edges of protruding patches of twigs and saplings.
PictureTwo does and their yearling fawns
In this photo (looking north), a mother doe is resting on a berm catching the southern slope sun and the eastern rising solar gain from across the valley. Her fawn is browsing the emerging growth around her bed. As the sun rotates to the west and drops below the trees to the left (west), they will move on to better areas to catch the sun. Energy conservation is paramount to surviving the winter. So although deer are nocturnal, they will bed on southern facing slopes during the day. Wise hunters understand this.
I’ve also noticed that in storms, deer gather around the house and lie down. Perhaps the house gives off some warmth, but they definitely are protected from the wind due to the many trees around our house. I think that the plume of hot gases that leave our woodstove chimney may give a little extra warmth as they buffet about in the wind. Certainly the pine branches provide cover as - like a cloudy night, overhead pine branches, dense thickets or bent cattails form an insulating blanket that reduces heat loss. (Overcast nights are always warmer than nights with clear skies, as a heavy blanket of clouds slows the loss of the day's heat from radiating into space.)
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Three deer bedded underneath the pines in advance of a coming storm
When they get up and leave, you see cashew shaped indentations in the snow, but the soil is not showing, as their well insulated bodies did not melt the snow.  The big end of the cashew is their hind quarters, the other end their shoulders- about the size of a medium- large sized dog. They tuck their legs into their bellies and lay their head and neck next to their abdomen. Yes, they are well insulated and thus protected from the cold.  Moving is expending energy. So they will lay like this as long as makes sense given the weather.
In the spring, deer put on weight again. They have that internal clock: slow down for Winter and spring back in the Spring.

Deer know what to do in winter. Their strategies work, most of the time… without our help!

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Great Backyard Bird Count -  February 15- 18, 2019. This year more important than ever!

2/7/2019

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The Great Backyard Bird Count -
February 15- 18, 2019

This year more important than ever!

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We wrote about this annual event last year - see our post in February 2018. It is a fun and interesting way of getting involved in understanding the natural world. Why are projects like this important? Well, if you are like us, we have been alarmed by changes in the wildlife we enjoy, particularly our birds.

In past years on our property, we have written about bats that wheeled above our pond eating almost their own weight in mosquitos each night. And the barn swallows that would do the same during the day and also skim across the surface of the water with their lower beaks cutting the surface as they fed. Our summer bird feeders hosted probably a half dozen cardinal pairs, as well as bluejays, doves, grosbeaks, finches, all sorts of sparrows, and for us - most importantly - hummingbirds. Yes, we still have some, but in the last few years, we have noticed a slow decline in the numbers.
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The bats have completely disappeared (said to be due to ‘white-nose fungus’). But also others that are unrelated species have gone missing! We don’t use pesticides. In fact, we know that none of the properties in our valley use them. The local habitat hasn’t really changed in the last few decades. Nor have the local agricultural practices or building developments increased. Yet there has been a slow decline in the numbers of species and individuals we see. So we have to ask - ‘what is happening’?

Well, for one thing, within the last decade or so, scientists have become aware of apparently catastrophic losses in insect populations as a whole! In the web of life that surrounds us, perhaps the most important foundational element would be our insects. They are the food for birds and fish and mammals. They pollinate the crops that feed us and most of the animal world.  Plants need them to continue to reproduce. They decompose our waste and recycle the energy that makes life possible on earth. Without these pesky annoyances, we would all starve!
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This extirpation (local loss) of insects from the environment in general, has been referred to as the ‘windshield effect’ by entomologists. We are not very good at noticing a gradual diminishment (loss) or accretion (gain) of things around us. Much like the proverbial frog never jumping out of the pot of water brought slowly to a boil. We just simply don’t notice slow change. So when do we notice?

How many bugs are squished on your car windshield is an experience that all of us have had. Indeed, if you think back many decades - perhaps to your annoyed parents having to scrape off the dried carcasses after a long road trip, it does seem that there are far less of them today than in the past. (This is not due to cars being more aerodynamic today either). Even thinking back to watching the swarms of insects wheeling about street lamps at night, there seem to be far less today than several decades ago.

So if it is true that we are noticing less and less types and numbers of animals around us, is it because there isn’t enough to eat?
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To know how alarmingly and how quickly this is occurring, scientists have been stymied by the lack of quantitative (amounts of...) historical data. Let’s face it, counting bug populations over many years to establish baseline numbers for comparisons, is not the sexiest lure for scarce research funding! Nor is it very attractive to budding scientists, to wait for perhaps decades of complying data, to publish a paper on said findings. (“I spent ten years studying wasps and can tell you that their population is stable!”)

In a career where the watch phrase is ‘publish or perish’, completing studies to attract new funding doesn’t reward long term data gathering- much less on bug populations over years! But these kinds of ‘on-the-ground’ measurements are very important.

Among the rare historical data sets that researchers found in their attempts to quantify how severe the insect collapse might be, were the records kept by a small entomological society in Krefeld, Germany. Their local bug collections and data went all the way back to the 1860’s, and studying them revealed horrible news. Across  habitats and species, there were declines of about 80%! This has led to searching out more old records, and declines of similar levels are being found all around the globe.

As reported in Science magazine on May 10, 2017, when measured by weight, insect losses were catastrophic.

Weighty disappearances

The mass of insects collected by monitoring traps in the Orbroicher Bruch nature reserve in northwest Germany dropped by 78% in 24 years.
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(GRAPHIC) G. GRULLÓN/SCIENCE; (DATA) M. SORG ET AL., MITTEILUNGEN AUS DEM ENTOMOLOGISCHEN VEREIN KREFELD 1, 1–5 (2013) © 2013 ENTOMOLOGISCHER VEREIN KREFELD
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This led to looking at studies in other disciplines, and the apparent trends are very alarming! Fish populations that feed on insects were showing massive declines. As reported in 2017 in Science (where-have-all-insects-gone), ornithologists were seeing the loss of 50% of European farmland birds that were reliant on insects for food, in just the last 30 years. Eight in ten partridges disappeared from the farm lands. It has been widely reported this year that 90% of the beloved monarch butterflies have disappeared in America. Without fundamental, long term data, it is hard to know what is exactly causing these widespread losses.
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Whether it is the use of herbicides, pesticides, mites, fungal infections, loss of habitats, climate change, pollution or a combination of all of the above, is not readily knowable. The data are often not clear in the broader questions outside the goal of individual studies, focused as they are on their particular hypotheses.

Many of us may be aware of the critical role that commercially supplied honeybees play in the pollination of our fruit crops, and the worry that has arisen from the as yet unexplained bee colony collapses. But a study published in Science in March 2013 - honeybees need other pollinators, has warned that ‘wild insects’ also play a critical role in setting fruits in over 41 crop systems around the world. Large reductions in the varieties and numbers of insects in the environment can lead to unknowable losses of our food crops.

Making funding, policy or research decisions based on anecdotal memories is a dangerous thing. Our memories can be exaggerated or muted by time and emotion. This is why quantitative data gathered by projects like the GBBC over time can be so valuable. It is just not the type of information that governments or the private sector tend to collect.

Scientific research has always been constrained by a lack of funding, manpower, lack of local interest or poor communication. Today, smartphones and the internet are drastically changing all that. Now it is possible for a scientist studying a particular problem to reach out to like minded people and engage them in finding solutions anywhere in the world.
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Studies like these may very well be needed to understand how fast and to what scale, the perceived collapse of biodiversity around the world is taking place. It has only been within the last decade, that entomologists all over the world have started to become aware of massive declines across insect species. This is  possibly the most important development since the dinosaur extinction. The loss of this foundational form of life, may cause the extinction of unknowable numbers of species. Insects are food for birds, fish and many mammals. They pollinate our crops, decompose our waste and move energy up the food chain that life relies upon.

What research/data is not funded by government, is funded by private capital looking to make money. So it is the data gathered by the independent amateur scientists- that yield huge data sets over time,  that government or privately sponsored researchers will not yield. The GBBC helps address this.

Since 1998, each year in the second week of February, bird watchers around the world can be part of the Great Backyard Bird Count. This year it will start on Friday, February 15, 2019, and end on February 18, 2019. Participation is free and it only takes 15 minutes of your time. Best of all, you can send in the results from  your smartphone! If you want to participate you have to sign up, so please go to:

How-take-part-great-backyard-bird-count

Since so many birds feed largely on insects, information collected in the GBBC, can be compared to studies in other areas. Getting many data points from citizens all over the world - which funding and manpower would never allow among scientific researchers, it is very important indeed. So do your part to save the planet and spend some time with the family outdoors, and have fun!
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Chicken of the Woods

1/24/2019

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Chicken of the Woods

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Looking out a back window at the beginning of last Fall, I noticed in the woods, a orange-red spot not too far from the house. It was a very bright orange, and we had never seen anything in that direction that wasn’t a natural color!  As it was hunting season, I thought we had dropped a hat there and went to pick it up. (In our area, whether you hunt or not, it is wise to outfit your pets and yourselves with bright International Hunter Orange gear, if you will be roaming the woods.  Although all the locals know hunting protocols and are responsible, you never know when uninvited drivebys may choose to trespass.)


What I found was not a hat. it was a bright orange, huge mushroom growing out of a tree stump! It was a flat, ‘bracket’ shaped mushroom, that was growing from the top edge of a large cherry tree stump that our loggers had cut out three years before! I had never seen something like that in over thirty years and I was puzzled. Of course, I took a picture and wanted to investigate my “find”. As always, other things had priority and it was all pushed to the back burner.
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When I visited the tree trunk two weeks later, the bright orange of the huge mushroom had faded a bit. This time I brought rubber gloves, because I wanted to touch the growth. Why did I bring the rubber gloves? The first thing I learned when I lived in Australia was that you should be very, very careful when you are confronted with spiders with red or orange bodies. They are lethal! You should call an exterminator immediately and you should not attempt to be a hero!

I know that in nature, bright reds and oranges can be fatal flags to predators, but I don’t know the drill when it comes to plants or fungi! So I decided to be cautious. I didn’t want to touch anything with my bare skin, that might be harmful.

When I touched the mushroom it felt firm, but not hard, almost like a piece of meat. I could not break off a piece, so I left everything and wanted to go back a week later. But then we had snow and the mushroom was disappearing under a white blanket. Out of sight, out of mind!
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 A month later I came back to it and I was surprised to see that now the orange had faded 99 % and I was looking at a pure white mushroom.

Now I did my research and found out that I was looking at a “Laetiporus sulphureus”, a mushroom that can be found almost everywhere on earth. Laetiporus means “with bright pores”. It is edible and is usually called “chicken of the woods”, “the chicken mushroom” or “chicken fungus”, because  some people think it tastes like chicken.

The mushroom grows on wounds of trees or tree stumps of oaks, cherries, chestnut, willows and some conifers species. It has a sulphur-yellow to orange body and bright orange tips. It needs warm and moist weather to grow. Well, we had a warm and very moist fall in the Northeast! In fact, it was the 4th wettest year recorded.

So what should I do with my big mushroom? Some of these mushrooms can grow to 100 pounds on a tree stump. Mine was not that big, just around 3 pounds. 

(You think 100 pounds is a big mushroom? Not even close. In the 1980's, scientists in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, discovered a single subterranean fungus (Michigan Armillaria gallica) which feeds on tree roots and rotting wood, which  they believed sprawled under 30 acres of forest and was probably 1500 years old and weighed as much as the biggest whale! In fact, as reported on Jan. 8, 2019 in the New York Times, this one individual is now believed to spread over 180 acres and be a minimum of 2500 years old!)
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Michigan Armillaria gallica
Most importantly, WE ARE NOT MYCOLOGISTS! (mushroom specialists). We don’t know how to determine what is, or is not safe to eat! Some of this family of mushrooms grow on conifers and are toxic, and others are toxic but hard to identify. So do not harvest any you find without consulting with a qualified professional! Mushroom hunting is popular all over the globe, and poorly informed people die every year.

Along the same vein, I was surprised to find recipes on how to cook it, along with a warning not to eat it uncooked! You should not use it anymore when it breaks easily. Another warning says not to gather the ones on conifers as they might not agree with people.

As dire, as all this starts to sound, I was even more surprised to find in specialty stores, that you can buy “chicken of the woods” for almost $18.00 a pound! It is considered a delicacy. One of the selling points was that “chicken of the woods” is an attractive alternative for “vegan consumers”. It also can be frozen for long periods of time and it remains edible.

There may also be health benefits in this mushroom: It purportedly fights staph bacteria and bacillus subtilis.

And there was another surprise: a big mailing house offers “mushroom seeds” so you can grow your own chicken of the woods!

So, did we eat it? No. Our experiences in life made us too cautious for now, but we want to make sure that it is edible. Next year it will probably come back and it may very well be delicious!

After publishing, Rob, one of our loyal readers,  sent me this e-mail:

"We collect them. I slam on the brakes when I see them by the side of the road. Yummy. 
Cut them off the tree. Cut off too hard parts. Saute in butter and enjoy."

As he has been doing this for years, he obviously knows enough to recognize the ones that will be safe to eat.

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Why does the deer’s coat look so much darker in the winter?

12/20/2018

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Why does the deer’s coat
look so much darker in the winter?

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Chances are, that if you live in the countryside almost anywhere in the northeastern United States, you are very familiar with our whitetail deer. Indeed, they are invading our cities, as they have become so widespread. They have even been spotted occasionally in Manhattan!

So, as they are  part of our daily landscape, I always want to know what changes in their appearance may mean.

When I look out the window and see so many does and their fawns around the house, I notice that their coat is definitely darker than in the summertime when  it is kind of reddish. And then quite suddenly, in the fall,  it appears to be dark brown.

The reddish, paler brown summer coat seems to be quite thin and the red hair reflects the sun’s energy. This helps deer to keep cool in the summer without the stress of the heat. When the fall arrives with the cool nights, the winter coat begins to grow, due to hormonal changes. This will happen quickly, usually in one or two weeks. The winter coat will protect the deer from the cold winter temperatures and the fierce winds. The winter coat has two layers. The guard hairs are hollow (trapped air is a very effective insulation) and 2 inches longer than the undercoat. The undercoat is very dense and soft, and keeps the deer warm even in the coldest winters.
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How warm? Some years back, my neighbor came to us near dusk during hunting season. He had shot a buck in a field, which had bolted into the trees. Although he knew that he had hit it fatally, he couldn’t find it and wanted our help. He didn’t want bears or coyotes to find it overnight. About six of us with flashlights, searched the dark frozen ground for a couple hours without any luck. Overnight we had four inches of new snow and temperatures remained below freezing.

The next morning we set out again and found the buck almost immediately, despite it being covered in four inches of snow. A sharp eyed searcher had spied one of the antlers against the fresh snow. The buck had only run 75 feet (~ 23 meters) into the trees before succumbing. We had all walked repeatedly within feet of it the night before, without seeing it.


I was invited to stay for the dressing out of the animal, so I could be rewarded with a choice cut for my help. Despite having lain on the frozen ground and being covered in several inches of snow for about fourteen hours, when the body cavity was opened and the entrails taken out, the insides still steamed in the crisp morning air. The body core was so well insulated as to seem close to normal.

In fact, we have a grove of pines behind our house in which we see deer take shelter during winter storms. They lay down and chew their cud for hours until the snows end. The accumulating snow builds up on their backs and sides as if on a cold surface. When the storm ends, they stand and shake off the loose dry snow before moving on. It doesn’t melt and adhere to the coat. The winter coat is a complete barrier.
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The change of the coat color to a darker brown in the fall, helps them to absorb the warmth (solar gain) of the sun more on a cold day. But the darker color also is a remarkably effective camouflage! How well it blends into the dark brown hues of the winter leaf litter on the forest floor, is evidenced by how many times we walked within feet of the dead buck the night before we found it. The experienced locals among us had seen this happen before many times and shrugged it off. They were not surprised.

Actually, seasoned hunters will tell you that they don’t look for the shape of a deer’s body. That is a losing gambit. They look for movement or a pattern. The swivel of an ear (each ear can swivel independently almost 270 degrees to survey the surroundings), the twitch of a tail (their tail lays down flat against the buttocks, but may twitch and rise slightly, exposing some white fur when the animal is becoming nervous or curious). This signals others to be more alert.

We call them whitetail deer for this remarkable feature. The black upside down pyramid - some say diamond, shaped patch on the top of the tail - rimmed with a thin band of white fur, is a discreet clue to a relaxed deer standing in the brush. If you are looking for it, you’ll see it long before the body shape attached to it!
The shiny, yellowish beige part of a polished antler glinting in the sunlight, is another clue. It may be a small branch that has lost its bark, but the symmetricality and the shine may be from the buck rubbing off the spring growth velvet for the fall competition for does. (see also our post of 1/25/18 “Finding “shed” antlers - with your dog?)

Of course, a ‘flagging’ deer may show its presence by partially flagging as it becomes nervous. It will be a small twitch of white in an otherwise grey-brown background. (When alarmed, deer erect their tail vertically, exposing a pure white ‘flag’ to signal other deer nearby, which they will wave from side to side as they run away).

A couple of weeks ago we had an unexpected early snowstorm. When I got up in the morning, I counted several bucks around the house and many does, all close by. On cold nights, they seem to bed down near the house, which gives some protection and probably some warmth from the exhaust plume from our wood stove. This seems fanciful, but we’ve noticed this pattern during storms for many years. Whether the proximity is security from predators or some meager extra warmth, we don’t know, but we see it.
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For a few weeks in the spring, deer lose their thick fall coat. It will be done in one or two weeks. It is not a pretty sight, when you see a deer losing their winter coat. They appear unkempt, like a molting bird shedding its baby feathers for their adult plumage. During this time they look scruffy, but are actually the healthiest in the herd! A deer in bad health won’t lose its coat until late June. So observing your deer tells you how healthy they are and it is just one more signal in your environment .

And so the cycle repeats. The does bred in the fall, shed their winter coats and birth new speckled fawns. These fawns are born odorless, and are programmed to instinctively remain absolutely motionless, if their mother bolts away at the approach of a predator. The fawn’s white speckled sides are thought to mimic the sun dappled forest floor. Motionless, they have no odor to betray their location to a predator.

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When a predator approaches, the mother will run several meters away and stott. She will prance, snort, cough, and make feints away from her fawn, trying to lead the predator away from her baby. In the end, the fawn’s unique coat will win the day, and another generation will come.

Not everyone is happy about the deer’s success - landscaping, auto insurance, accident fatalities, etc. But by observing them, we can understand them better, and perhaps how we can go forward together?

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    This is about our journey from being Big City people to learning how to embrace a country lifestyle. 

    We bought an old farmhouse (built in the 1850's); we have hay fields and woods, streams, bridges and a long drive way. Our neighbors are far away. We are so far away that we have to go to the post office to get our mail. For us it has been paradise.

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