American Bitterns Courting & Establishing Territories

Because they live in marshes amongst dense vegetation where sight is restricted, American Bitterns communicate with each other largely through their calls. These calls are made at a very low frequency which allows them to be audible at great distances.

The call heard most often, especially early in their breeding season, is low, resonant, and composed of three syllables that sound something like “pump-er-lunk,“ preceded by a series of clicking and gulping sounds. The male bittern accomplishes this by inflating his esophagus while simultaneously contorting himself quite violently. He repeats the call up to ten times, and uses it to establish his territory as well as to advertise for a mate. You can hear the American Bittern’s call by going to http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/american_bittern/sounds. (This post originally appeared on 5/11/15.)

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Zombie Moths

There is a group of fungi in the genus Cordyceps that are capable of manipulating the behavior of insects that they invade. There are well over 100 known related species (Ophiocordyceps spp.) that infect a wide variety of insects, including butterflies, moths and beetles, and at least 35 that perform “mind control” on their hosts. Fortunately, humans appear to be immune from these fungi.

One Cordyceps fungus replaces a moth’s tissues (see photo) and controls the moth’s end-of-life movements in an attempt to increase the likelihood that its spores are dispersed to new hosts. The spikes you see on the pictured moth are a result of the fungus’s invasion of the moth. (Photo by Janni Jacobs; discovery of this Zombie Moth in Vermont by Jake Jacobs)

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Hepatica Leaves

Round-lobed (Hepatica americana) and Sharp-lobed Hepatica (Hepatica acutiloba) are two of our earliest plants to flower, blossoming in early to mid-April, before tree leaves have unfurled, allowing the sun’s rays to reach the forest floor. 

The leaves of these plants are evergreen; new ones are produced in May.  They remain on the plant for a full year, through the next spring’s flowering period. (Many spring wildflowers, or ephemerals, produce leaves, flowers and fruits in a short amount of time and then disappear.) Not only do hepatica leaves photosynthesize on warm winter days (if snow hasn’t buried them), but even worn and tattered they go into high gear in the spring, photosynthesizing before the leaves of other plants have even appeared.  Thus, hepatica is able to produce its flowers earlier than most other spring wildflowers. (Photo: Round-lobed Hepatica, Hepatica americana)

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Ospreys Renovating & Building Nests

It’s hard to imagine doing something as intricate as building a nest without the use of hands, but birds do it year after year.  With Ospreys, the male generally brings the bulk of the material to the nest site and the female arranges it. He may break dead sticks off nearby trees in flight or (more often) snatch sticks from the ground. Material is added to the nest throughout the nestling period.

When returning to a pre-existing nest, both birds engage in rearranging the nesting material that remains from the previous year before adding new material (see photo).

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Common Hazel Flowering

Early in the spring, before its leaf buds begin to open in late April, Common Hazel flowers are displayed. Both male and female flowers can be found on the same shrub. The male catkins dangle in the breeze, shedding their pollen (there are about 240 male flowers in each catkin), while the minute (1/16”-1/8”) maroon female flowers spread their star-like styles open in order to catch the wind-dispersed pollen.

Pollen from the male flowers can pollinate and fertilize the female flowers on the same plant, although male flowers often mature before female flowers. Interestingly, the pollen germinates as soon as it reaches a receptive flower but the fertilization process does not take place for several months. If successfully pollinated and fertilized the female flower will develop into one to four nuts.

If you look closely at the photo inset, you can see the tiny light-colored specks of pollen that have landed on the sticky styles.

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Great Blue Herons Mating

Great Blue Herons return to their breeding grounds in mid- to late March in northern New England.  While they are a solitary bird most of the time, during the breeding season Great Blue Herons are colonial nesters. (While most colonies are considerably smaller than 500 nests, there is a record of 1,000 pairs of herons nesting in one colony in Virginia.)

 Males typically arrive at the heron colony first, choose a nest (rarely the same one as the previous year), and then, when the females start arriving, seek a mate, after which there is an elaborate courtship. Males collect and then present sticks to the females who then incorporate the sticks into their nest.  Ritualized greeting occurs on the nest; bills are pointed skyward, mutual preening takes place, plumes are erected, and bill tips are tapped together.  When the time is right, the male mounts the female, grasping her neck with his bill, and copulation takes place.

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White-tailed Deer Seeking Salt

Congratulations to Janine Norton, the first of many readers to correctly identify the truck “salt lick” being visited by White-tailed Deer! A real-life and humorous confirmation of the quest for salt on the part of White-tailed Deer in the spring comes in the form of tongue marks on the side of Nancy Howe Russell and Jim Russell’s salt-laden truck!

Almost all soils more than 25-50 miles from the seacoast are low in sodium.  In addition, in spring and summer many of the plants White-tailed Deer consume have higher amounts of potassium and water in them which interferes with efficient sodium conversion, leaving deer with an increased need for sodium.  Does are particularly vulnerable, as they need twice as much sodium as bucks this time of year due to reproduction demands. 

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Mystery Photo

Can you guess what made the marks on this truck, and why they were made?  If so, enter your mystery photo answer on the Naturally Curious blog (www.naturallycuriouswithmaryholland.wordpress.com ) by scrolling down to “comments.” The answer will be revealed on Monday, April 1. (Photo submitted by Nancy Howe Russell and Jim Russell)

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Skunk Cabbage’s Heat

A “naturally curious” reader decided to see if she could record the heat that a Skunk Cabbage was producing using an infrared camera on an iphone.  The accompanying photographs show the recorded image of heat inside and outside of the plant.  Many thanks to Emily Ferguson and David Mueller for enhancing yesterday’s blog post.

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Skunk Cabbage Flowering

If you look up, there are numerous trees (poplar, willow, some maples) that have opened their flower buds and are in the midst of being pollinated.  However if you look down, the reproduction of forest floor plants has yet to begin except for the early-blossoming Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus). The flowers appear before the leaves and have a mottled maroon hood-like leaf called a spathe, which surrounds a knob-like structure called a spadix. The spadix is actually a fleshy spike of many petal-less flowers. Female flowers form first, followed by male flowers.

 Because it can create heat through a process called thermogenesis (one of few flowering plants capable of doing so), Skunk Cabbage can be seen melting its way through several inches of snow.  This early maturation benefits the few pollinators such as flies, springtails and beetles that are active now, providing them with both food (pollen) as well as a mini-warming hut for temperatures that are still below freezing some days and nights. (Fueled by energy stored in the plant’s modified underground stem (rhizome), skunk cabbage can maintain temperatures of up to 70° F. within the spathe even as external air temperatures drop below freezing.)

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