Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Free Eats

The post from two weeks ago, Dinner is Served, featured the videos from a camera trap’s the first week at the carcass of a white-tailed deer that had apparently been killed by a bolt from a crossbow.


When I checked most recently the carcass had been moved and a lot of rain had fallen. The wetland vegetation was flattened where the carcass had been dragged off – Oh Boy thought I, there would be videos of a bear or eastern coyote (other than humans or large dogs the only creatures in the area capable of dragging the carcass away) feeding on or dragging the dead deer. I followed the drag mark and found what was left of the carcass in the water. Not much remained, the large bones, rib cage and most of the head.

Checking the camera I found a multitude of videos of the red fox; actually two red fox, one readily distinguished by a mange-caused bare spot at the base of its tail. And a few really poor videos of an opossum and two raccoons feeding on the far side of the carcass. But there was no video of the carcass being removed. It seems the camera malfunctioned at the most critical time – Murphy's Law at work. Nonetheless there were some interesting videos –


The ravens are probably a mated pair that nest on a nearby high ridge and regularly visit the valley. Ravens are omnivores, eating virtually anything edible. They eat waste grain and earthworms, are predators on small mammals and birds and regularly scavenge other predators’ kills. I’ve watched them flying along highways searching for roadkilled animals and they often follow large predators or hunters to share in the booty.

Bald eagles, although they primarily feed on fish, are active predators of small and medium-sized mammals and medium-sized birds and also readily scavenge from carcasses.

As for the great horned owl, it apparently didn’t feed on the carcass but might have considered an opossum a suitable meal.

While I was very happy to get videos of the ravens, owl and eagle, in some ways the most interesting and indeed the most humorous were several videos of the man and his pets – especially the goat. Have you ever seen anyone walking with a goat as they would a dog?

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Beneath the Leaves

This has been an extremely warm winter – the lowest temperature in January was 9° F – with very little snow, and what snow we got didn’t last long before melting. One day in early February, when there was no snow to be seen at the house and it was 50°F, I repeated an exercise I’d done several years ago (see it here). Out to the woodland behind the house I went and gathered a handful of fallen and decaying leaves. Into a white plastic basin they went and back into the house I went with basin in hand.

There, with plenty of light, I used two precision tweezers and a hand lens to sort through the leaves and seeds and earthworm casts to search out the small creatures that live among, and feast on, the forest’s debris and on other small creatures beneath the leaves.

Since the temperature had been a bit below freezing a few days earlier and the ground was without an insulating covering of snow I was surprised by some of the things I found.

There were four Soil Centipedes, speedy predators of even smaller creatures that live in the forest floor. They were of different sizes and shades of tan –





Two of these small beetles were among the leaves. I couldn’t identify them but assume they feed on decaying leaves or fungus –


Also among the unidentified was this small and very attractive spider –


Speaking of spiders, there were some that I could identify: a small Wolf Spider, a Dwarf Spider (yes, that’s its name) and a Bark Crab Spider –




There were only two springtails to be found, both of the same species – Elongate-bodied Springtail. Springtails somewhat resemble insects and were considered to be insects when I was in college oh so many years ago, but now they are in a separate class. They derive their name from a process under their abdomen that gives them the ability to flip through the air to escape predators –



There was an earthworm among the leaves, almost certainly a European species since native earthworms were eliminated from glaciated areas. The European worms were introduced by settlers who brought potted fruit trees and garden plants to the New World –


The Garden Slug is another introduced species that I found among the leaves. Since they’re entirely soft-bodied it was really surprising that this one survived January’s colder days –


Another surprising survivor was this moth larva (caterpillar), perhaps the larva of an owlet moth –


One of the last critters I found in the handful of leaves was this well camouflaged Rough Stink Bug –


Gathering and sorting through a handful of decaying leaves is an enjoyable activity, allowing us to see things we don't see in the usual course of our lives. It also makes me
curious about how many small animals are crushed with every footstep we take in the forest – curious but not guilty.

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Dinner is Served

Down at the edge of the wetland lay the carcass of a white-tail buck, nearby was a crossbow bolt (arrow), a good clue to the cause of its demise. The deer was probably wounded during the late archery hunting season which ended in January. Wounded deer, especially those hit in the abdomen, frequently head for water. The hunter never found the deer so there it lay.

Poachers frequently use crossbows since they’re silent and quite accurate, so the deer could have been wounded by a poacher working after dark. In that case there was almost certainly no effort made to find the deer.

When I found the carcass it had already been fed upon by scavengers – eastern coyote, bald eagle, vultures or …?


Another great opportunity to get videos of whatever was feeding on the carcass. As usual in an area without trees I mounted the camera on what is called a concrete stake, a half inch diameter steel rod three feet long with a series of holes along its length. These are usually used to hold concrete forms in place, but they’re also excellent for holding a camera trap.

With the camera trap in place there was nothing to do but wait for a week or so and then check the videos it obtained. The first week the camera had well over a hundred videos of vegetation blowing in the wind – but it also had many videos taken over several nights of a red fox feeding on the carcass –


Most predators will feed on the carcass of a dead animal or bird. Less energy is expended in feeding on something that's already dead and there’s much less risk of injury for the predator – an injured predator is at a distinct disadvantage in catching prey.

Over the years In Forest and Field has had a number of posts showing the creatures that have fed on the carcasses of a black bear, white-tailed deer, raccoon and screech owl.

The plan is for the camera trap to remain in place until the deer has been reduced to scattered bones and hair – bones that will be gnawed upon by rodents, hair that will grace nests of birds and rodents.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Last Year at a Fallen Aspen

If you’re a regular visitor to In Forest and Field you’ve seen previous videos of the wildlife activity on and around fallen trees. Today we’re looking at the wildlife that used a large fallen quaking aspen in 2023.

Quaking aspen has the widest range of any North American tree and is named for the way its leaves shake in the slightest breeze due to their flattened petioles (stems). Aspens are fairly short-lived trees with an average life-span of about 75 years although some individual trees can live twice as long. These trees are pioneers on disturbed sites: abandoned fields, strip mines and areas burned by a forest fire. They can be distinguished by their gray bark with a greenish or yellowish cast and almost round leaves. Old aspen have dark furrowed bark.


This fallen aspen grew in a long-ago pasture and was one of the last remaining aspens on the site; it was surrounded by younger maples, ash and birch trees which will take its place in the forest. The tree stood for several years before it decayed enough to fall. In death it’s attracted a host of wildlife species –


The red fox can be easily differentiated from the eastern coyote by its uniformly colored coat and the dark stripes down its front legs. Apparently the black bear was exhausted as it rested before it crossed the fallen aspen. Did you notice the mouse climbing the distant tree and the mouse carrying its prize, a small bone that will provide the mouse with calcium?

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Eagles on Ice

It was an absolutely beautiful morning – clear as a bell, bright blue sky with nary a cloud, cool bordering on cold. It was also a great day to do something H and I have done often over the many years that we’ve been together: take a long ride through pretty country.

It wasn’t long before H spotted an adult bald eagle perched in a white pine; I never saw the bird and could neither stop nor turn around to take a look. Some time later we visited a property where I’d occasionally worked in recent years, a property with large old trees, abundant wildflowers in spring and beautiful stone walls.

The beauty of the day prompted us to visit a large Corps of Engineers lake to see what we could see. The lake was almost completely covered with ice with just a few areas of open water. In the water was a flock of Canada geese and on the ice was a group of ring-billed gulls.

We drove to a spot where we could see more of the lake – out on the ice was a juvenile bald eagle feeding on fish frozen in the ice and being harassed by a band of common crows –




I was busy looking through the camera’s viewfinder and taking photos when H said “Here comes another eagle!”



That was the beginning of a squabble over the fish scraps between the two young eagles –




One prevailed and enjoyed a few pieces of fish –



Until an another bird (a three year old) flew in and took over –


The birds kept looking up and we did likewise to see three more bald eagles coming in –



The after a while the crows left, a bit later the eagles flew further out from shore. One of the eagles that had come late to the party was a four year old bird which the youngsters followed to another frozen fish –



The blue sky reflecting off the ice gave it a blue cast and the heat from the sun caused a heat shimmer that made photography at long distances problematic; the shimmer can be seen in the video.

While the ice easily supported the eagles, it wouldn’t support little ole me and, despite it being a beautiful day and wanting to get closer, I decided a polar plunge was not in the cards so the photos and video were taken from shore and at quite a distance.

Wednesday, February 7, 2024

Contortions

Anyone who has watched chickadees and titmice has seen the gyrations and contortions they sometimes go through to get a bite to eat. One recent day I was walking along the edge of an old field and stopped to watch a tufted titmouse getting seeds from several 5-8 foot tall dead plants. It would go through a few contortions to get a seed from the dried seed pods and then fly off to open the seed’s hull to get at its contents.

 Here are a few photos –









I’ve still not been able to identify the plant they were visiting, so I must hang my head in shame. Although the seed pods vaguely resemble those some other plants, I know not what it is. It may be an exotic plant from elsewhere that’s not common and isn’t in any of the field guides in my library.

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Ravens at Play

Common ravens are our most intelligent birds – they cache food and move it if they’ve been observed in the process, can repeatedly pull on a string and hold it with a foot to retrieve food dangling from a perch, they use simple tools and they play. They’ve been observed carrying sticks as they fly, dropping the stick and catching it; dropping a rock for another raven to catch in the air; and playing similarly with streamers of surveyor’s plastic tape. While flying in a stiff wind they’ll do loop-the-loops and barrel rolls seemingly for the pure joy of it.

We went back to the farmland where we’d previously seen harriers and short-eared owls to try for better photos. That was not to be, because a northwest wind was howling across the ridges.

 

What we saw instead was a band of juvenile common ravens at play –



The ravens were playing in the wind, chasing each other, occasionally landing on a fencepost, and then resuming the chase –


After a while they apparently tired of the games, flew over us and out of sight.

For more about ravens’ intelligence see biologist Bernd Heinrich’s The Mind of the Raven.

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Hawks and Owls

About a half hour from here there are a number of farms on a series of high jumbled ridges. Woodland grows in the valleys between the ridges, but the higher terrain has all been cleared and farmed for 150 years. Although many of those farms had been dairy farms, few are now. Most of the land produces hay, row crops or pastures beef cattle.


Late one afternoon H and I went to see the northern harriers that hunt the fields in winter and hoped to see some wintering short-eared owls that take over the night shift. Although there was but a gentle breeze at the house, up on the open ridges the wind was strong. It wasn’t long before we saw a harrier hunting for meadow voles in a hayfield –


The wind was high and there were raptors aloft soaring on high
a red-tailed hawk accompanied by three harriers –


As the sky cleared a bit they were soon joined by an immature bald eagle accompanied by a much smaller harrier –


They were all too high for good photos and these harriers soaring close to a ridgetop were quite far from us –


There were no owls fighting the wind that day, but we went back on another evening when the sky was gray and the light bad; that evening both the harriers and the short-eared owls took to the air. Short-eared owls in flight resemble gigantic moths; they have long wide wings and are light in weight so they’re fast and buoyant. When they find prey they often turn quickly and make a vertical dive –




The owls frequently sought out perches on the dead stalks of common mullein or on fenceposts –



The birds were far away and the light poor so we headed home. Several days later when the light was better, hoping that the third time would be a charm, we went back late in the day, parked along the township road again and watched for hawks and owls. Great day in the evening when the northern harriers passed over as they headed to roost, first a male and then several females or juveniles –




The fading light brought out the short-eared owls to hunt the same fields that the harriers hunted during the day –






When the sky darkened further we headed home, leaving the owls to hunt through the night.