Searching for Color

H and I went in search of fall (autumnal) colors, finding lots of dull tan and brown, an abundance of yellows but few of the reds that make some areas so beautiful in the fall.

Brilliant fall colors are a feature of northeastern North America. Tourists come from near and far to view the colors, and those tourists are often a driving force in the economies of rural communities.

As the days grow shorter in the fall the chlorophyll in trees’ leaves begins to fade and no more is produced. Yellow and orange pigments (carotenoids) that were there all summer become visible. As the same time, sugars in the leaves form red and purple pigments (anthocyanins) that create brilliant red leaves.

To produce those sugars the trees require sunlight and carbon dioxide, but also use water. Much of the summer and early fall were exceedingly dry in our area and so many leaves were deprived of the water necessary to produce the sugars. No sugars = no red pigments = no red leaves.

And so we went in search of fall colors, especially the reds –

 

 

Unfortunately, many of those who boarded tour busses to see hillsides with brilliant fall colors may have been a bit disappointed. But if they looked a little more closely they’d have seen the colors they sought.

Pileated

We were riding down a woods road, H and I, when suddenly two pileated woodpeckers flew across the road not far above the roof of the car.

One bird landed on a black birch tree about 150 feet from us, the other disappeared from sight –

From the reddish cast to the “mustache” marks on the side of the face to its apparent begging for food, it seems that this was a young male.

He spent some time on the tree as he preened and the other bird flew past –

From there he flew to a small fallen dead tree –

And then off he went, flying out of sight.

Other than a couple of quick glimpses we never had a good look at the other bird.

Nature, red in tooth and claw

"Nature, red in tooth and claw" is a quote from a poem written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in 1850 which aptly describes the competition and predation occurring in the natural world.

Those of you who regularly visit In Forest and Field have seen several examples: A peregrine falcon feeding on a pigeon, a great horned owl with a rabbit, a white-tail doe nibbling on a dead fawn, eastern coyotes feeding on a road-killed deer.

Recently I checked a camera trap on the hill above the house and found that it had videos of an eastern coyote as it attacked a yearling white-tailed deer with a broken right front leg. There’s no obvious wound to the deer, so it appears that the leg had been broken previously; perhaps caught between rocks or logs, struck by a vehicle or …

Predators prefer to attack sick, old, very young or injured prey since that saves energy and lessens the chance of injury if the prey fights back. In this case the deer’s right front leg appears to be useless, just dangling as the deer tries to avoid the coyote.

The coyote repeated circled the deer, trying to exhaust it or looking for an opening –

Toward the end of the video the deer was hidden by the large shrub, so the outcome was a mystery.

The next day I took the memory card from another camera trap in the same general area – it had more videos of the deer and the coyote, but they were again partially hidden by vegetation –

In this video it looks like there were two eastern coyotes attacking the deer but in the end it appears that the coyotes gave up and left – the deer still alive.

There’s abundant research demonstrating that predators are only successful in about 10% of their attacks on prey species. A white-tailed deer, even when severely injured, is a large and formidable animal when fighting for it’s life. This yearling white-tail may well survive as illustrated by a buck with a somewhat similar injury that was repeatedly caught on camera.

Emeralds with Wings

Emeralds are precious stones used in jewelry. But there are other precious emeralds in this world. The emeralds in this post are the moths, dragonflies and damselflies, beetles and flies that glow green as do those emeralds in jewelry. Other than being insects, many of these emeralds have little in common other than their color.

Those are some of the gems of the natural world, there are a lot more. And some other gems of the natural world aren’t green, they may be ruby red, sapphire blue or yellow as the finest gold.