Moose Mastication
Moose are ruminants and as such have stomachs which are highly specialized for the microbial fermentation of food that they eat. Without this adaptation, they could not digest their high fiber diet. Mastication of their food, however, is their primary method for the physical breakdown of plant material. By breaking down food into smaller pieces, the surface area increases for microbial digestion.
Moose chew their food twice and the rate at which they chew it varies. Their spring and summer diet which consists of leaves of deciduous browse, aquatic plants, etc. is more digestible than the woody browse they eat during winter due to the relatively small amount of lignin (used in the formation of cell walls) it contains. The more lignin, the more intensely the cud/bolus (food previously eaten) is chewed. The amount of chewing a regurgitated bolus receives can vary from 24 to 107 chews per minute. In the spring, when food is succulent, one study showed that moose chewed food at about 62 chews per bolus, compared with a high of 133 in winter.
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White-tailed Deer & Acorns
The pictured White-tailed Deer is eating acorns by moving its bottom mandible back and forth, crushing the acorns with its back molars and extracting the meat (see inset). Acorns are a crucial food source to deer – up to twenty-five percent of their autumn/early winter diet consists of these nuts.
Although acorns are low in protein content (6 percent), they’re high in carbohydrates (42 percent) and fats (52 percent). They are easily digested, their nutrients readily absorbed. Not all acorns are equally appealing to deer, however. They all contain a certain amount of tannic acid, which affects palatability. The level of tannins is lowest in White Oak acorns, making them the sweetest of all acorns; thus, they are a deer’s first choice.
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Gray Squirrels’ Diet Changing
When you think of a Gray Squirrel’s diet, you think of nuts – acorns, walnuts, hickory nuts, etc., and for half of the year, these nutritious sources of food do serve as their main diet. Fall is spent burying individual nuts which will serve as their winter food supply. By spring, however, the fall stores of nuts and seeds are depleted, and it is one of the toughest times of year for these rodents. Tree buds, flowers, and the softer bark of some trees are their primary source of food. While abundant, buds and flowers are notably poor in calories and costly to digest. Finding and consuming food can occupy most of a Gray Squirrel’s day at this time of year. (Photo: Gray Squirrel eating Sugar Maple buds, spotted by sharp-eyed Lily Piper Brown)
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Grey Squirrel Bonanza
The diet of the Gray Squirrel is extremely varied — from the cambium beneath tree bark, to tree buds, flowers and seeds, mushrooms, fruits, insects, frogs, bird eggs and much more. This year there appears to be a bountiful crop of American Beech nuts and Gray Squirrels will likely have a banner reproductive season next spring and summer as a result of it. Consisting of roughly 50% fat and 20% protein, American Beech nuts are one of the most nutritious seeds to be found. (Acorns are only about 9% protein.)
Historically, beechnuts were a popular food source in both Europe and America. Raw they contain the toxin saponin glycoside, which can cause gastric issues if you eat a large number, but if you’re willing to remove the husks and let the inner nuts dry for several weeks before roasting them, beechnuts can be a tasty delight. Many recipes – from beechnut pie to muffins and stew – can be found on the Internet.
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The Surprisingly Varied Diet of Beavers
It is common knowledge that beavers are herbivorous but the extent of their herbivory is not always appreciated. Examining their skull would tell you that their massive four front incisors (as well as the muscles attached to their jaws) are designed to do some serious chewing. And serious chewing does take place, especially in the fall. Poplars, birches, alders, willows, maples and many other deciduous trees as well as a few conifers are felled in order to reach and consume the inner bark, or cambium layer. (The de-barked logs and branches are subsequently used to repair dams and lodges). Not only do Beavers need to meet their daily nutritional needs but they must cut enough trees to last them through the winter.
However as spring approaches and they can access land, their diet changes from the woody branches they’ve been eating all winter (from their winter food pile under the water) to a diet that consists mainly of herbaceous plants. Ninety percent of their time is spent eating non-woody plants, often skunk cabbage, water lily rhizomes and grasses in the early spring. As summer progresses, they seek out aquatic plants, ferns, sedges and a variety of flowering plants. Usually it’s not until late summer/early fall that their incisors are once again given a good workout.
The pictured Beaver had the good fortune of having a large patch of tasty Jewelweed (Impatiens capensis) growing on and adjacent to its lodge.
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Beavers Released
Most beavers in northern New England have been trapped inside their lodge for several months, with their only food supply being the branches they cut last fall and piled up on the floor of the pond or river near their lodge. Ice has sealed them in, not only to a life of darkness and dampness, but to a diet of cambium.
Needless to say, they are quick to take advantage of melting ice that allows them to exit their lodge and make their way to shore to sample fresh food. One of the first delicacies they dine on, if it’s available, is skunk cabbage. The rhizomes, leaves and flowers of both yellow and white pond lilies are also favorites. No longer restricted to woody plants, beavers head for grasses, sedges, ferns, fungi, berries, mushrooms, duckweed and even algae as the water warms. Their palate must jump for joy with the melting of ice in early March.
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Muskrats Foraging
Usually at this time of year, Muskrats are restricted to foraging beneath the ice and eating their mostly herbivorous diet inside “push-ups” — huts made out of excavated vegetation that have been hollowed out and serve as protective outposts where they can eat and rest. Because of warmer weather this winter, many ponds have retained open areas where Muskrats (and Beavers) can climb out of the water and enjoy sunshine (if they’re lucky) and fresh air while they eat.
Unlike Beavers, which store their winter food in a pile adjacent to their lodges in the fall, Muskrats forage for food on a daily basis throughout the winter. While occasionally they eat small fish, clams, snails and turtles, Muskrats’ preferred diet is the roots, stems, leaves, and fruits of many water plants, such as cattail, water lilies, and rushes. Equipped with a thick, waterproof coat of hair, they are capable of remaining submerged up to 15 minutes collecting food due to a decreased heart rate and oxygen stored in their muscles.
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Time To Take Down Bird Feeders !
Black Bears have just started to emerge from hibernation in northern New England, and their appetite is fierce. Male black bears will typically drop between 15 and 30 percent of their body weight, while reproductive sows can lose up to 40 percent of their weight over the winter. Although omnivores, a black bear’s diet consists of 85 percent plant material, especially in the spring and summer. At this time of year bears favor the tender emerging shoots of sedge and grasses, willow catkins, leaf buds and skunk cabbage. However, these plants are not always available to them when they first become active. Being opportunists, if bears can’t find natural food sources, they go looking for alternatives, such as those provided by humans.
Sunflower seeds are a Black Bear’s dream come true, nutritionally speaking. A bird feeder full of them replaces hours of foraging in the wild. With an outstanding sense of smell (many times greater than a bloodhound’s), Black Bears will find and raid feeders at this time of year when there is a lack of other food sources. Therefore, if you wish to avoid creating a “nuisance” bear, it is advisable to take down your feeders by April 1st. Black Bears have excellent memories, particularly regarding food sources. They will return time after time, and may resort to unwanted (by humans) behavior in order to get more of the food that was at one time available. Once this occurs, their well-being is jeopardized.
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Eastern Gray Squirrel Diet Preferences
The diet of Eastern Gray Squirrels is extremely varied. Depending on the season, buds, fruit (such as the pictured crabapples being consumed), maple and oak flowers, berries, seeds, fungi, the inner bark of maple and elm, insects, and young birds are eaten. However, nuts are by far the main component, which is reflected in their distribution; the range of Gray Squirrels coincides strikingly with that of oak and hickory forests. Especially during the colder part of the year, nuts, acorns and maple seeds, or samaras, that they have stored for winter consumption are the mainstay of their diet. (Research shows that Gray Squirrels recover 85% of the nuts they store.)
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White-tailed Deer Browsing
Microorganisms inside a deer’s four-chambered stomach enable cellulose in the plant material consumed to be digested. In winter, the microorganisms within the deer stomach are different from the microorganisms in spring, summer, and fall. This change allows deer to digest a diet of woody browse during winter months and turn the high-fiber diet into proteins through intricate physiological processes. Among their preferred browse are White Cedar, Yew, American Basswood, Alternate-leaved and Flowering Dogwood, Maples, Staghorn Sumac and Witch Hobble.
Offering food items during this period other than woody browse (such as hay) is detrimental to deer, as it requires different microorganisms in the stomach in order to be digested. Thus, even though a deer’s stomach might be full (of hay, for instance), it may starve due to the inability to digest it. (Photo: White-tailed Deer browsing on Eastern Hemlock)
Squirrels Digging For False Truffles
Such creative and informed answers to yesterday’s Mystery Photo, and many that were right on the mark! To set the stage, several 2” to 4”-deep holes riddled the ground under a stand of Eastern Hemlocks. Something had obviously been digging for something, but who and what? Close inspection of the holes revealed two things. The animal that had dug the holes had run into some thick hemlock roots, and with a clean 45° angle cut, had snipped them in order to have access to the soil beneath them. Secondly, some of the holes had pea- to marble-size, spherical tan objects that resembled puffballs both lying at the bottom and wedged into the sides of the holes.
Only because I had read Paul Rezendes’s Tracking & the Art of Seeing years ago did I recognize these holes and spherical structures within as the work of an animal looking for false truffles (a genus of fungi) to eat. By putting the various clues together – a hemlock stand, 3” to 6”-wide holes, clean incisor-snipped roots, and a few remnant truffles – the mystery at to what was being sought was solved.
As to who had done the digging, white-tailed deer, squirrels and porcupines all fancy false truffles. Both porcupines and squirrels have incisors that would make a clean cut through the roots. If porcupines had been digging here, there would likely be scat and/or quills lying about, which there were not. Thus, most likely it was a squirrel that had smelled, unearthed and eaten the false truffles.
Rezendes found that the truffles he discovered had dried spores inside them, and assumed that this made them undesirable to the animal that unearthed them and therefore they were not eaten. The spores of the truffles I found were not dried out, so I have no idea why they weren’t eaten, but I’m very glad they weren’t, as their presence allowed me to solve this mystery and see this phenomenon which I’ve been looking for for decades.
It may interest some to know that false truffles and Eastern Hemlocks have a symbiotic relationship. The fungi are attached to hemlock roots, so the minerals and water they absorb are available to the hemlocks. The hemlocks provide the fungi with sugars that they (hemlocks) produce through photosynthesis. Squirrels (and porcupines and white-tailed deer) and eastern hemlocks have a similar mutually beneficial relationship in that hemlocks provide the truffle-eaters with food, and the squirrels, porcupines and white-tailed deer disperse the spores of the truffles they’ve eaten. (Caution: Do not eat false truffles – they are considered toxic to humans.)
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Coyotes and White-tailed Deer
Coyotes will eat just about anything they come across – rodents, rabbits and hares, beavers, muskrats, birds, even garbage. Whatever is available and whatever they can catch they will consume. Very often you find white-tailed deer hair in their scat (see photo), and while a majority of the time it comes from deer carcasses that they have come across, there are two times of year when they are known to hunt deer. One is in the spring, when fawns are vulnerable, and the other is during the winter, when one of two conditions are present that favor coyotes: when the snow is deep and deer have to struggle to move faster than coyotes, and when there are crusty conditions, when coyotes are held up on top of the crust, but deer break through, often cutting and exhausting themselves.
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White-tailed Deer Winter Diet
The diet of White-tailed Deer varies with the seasons, but in general deer require a high-quality diet and tend to choose the most nutritious options available. In addition to mast (fruit, acorns, beechnuts) and browse, herbaceous plants and fungi make up the greatest portion of their food. However, their foraging choices are extensive. White-tailed Deer have been known to consume the washed-up carcasses of alewives after they (the alewives) have spawned as well as insects, mice and the nestlings of ground-nesting songbirds.
Microorganisms inside a deer’s four-chambered stomach enable cellulose in the plant material consumed to be digested. In winter, the microorganisms within the deer stomach are different from the microorganisms in spring, summer, and fall. This change allows deer to digest a diet of woody browse during winter months and turn the high-fiber diet into proteins through intricate physiological processes. Offering food items during this period other than woody browse (such as hay) is detrimental to deer, as it requires different microorganisms in the stomach in order to be digested. Thus, even though a deer’s stomach might be full (of hay, for instance), it may starve due to the inability to digest it. (Photo: shelf fungus eaten by White-tailed Deer, showing lower jaw incisor grooves)
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White-tailed Deer Diet In Transition
Even if you didn’t know that a white-tailed deer’s diet changes in the fall, their scat would be a dead giveaway. Its texture and formation are excellent indicators of what a deer has been eating. During the summer, individual pellets are often lumped together due to the moisture content of their summer diet (grasses, clover, alfalfa, apples and other herbaceous food). As winter approaches, deer transition to a diet of twigs, leaves and acorns which results in the formation of individual, dry pellets. At this time of year, it is possible to find both forms of deer scat.
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Black Bears Gorging
Black bears are omnivores as well as opportunists. They will eat almost anything that they can find, but the majority of their diet consists of grasses, roots, berries, nuts and insects (particularly the larvae). As the days cool, and the time for hibernation nears, black bears enter a stage called “hyperphagia,” which literally means “excessive eating.” They forage practically non-stop — up to 20 hours a day, building up fat reserves for hibernation, increasing their body weight up to 100% in some extreme cases. Their daily food intake goes from 8,000 to 15-20,000 calories. Occasionally their eyes are bigger than their stomachs, and all that they’ve eaten comes back up. Pictured is the aftermath of a Black Bear’s orgy in a cornfield.
If you share a bear’s territory, be forewarned that they have excellent memories, especially for food sources. Be sure not to leave food scraps or pet food outside and either delay feeding birds until bears are hibernating (late December would be safe most years) or take your feeders in at night.
NOTE: Orders for 2017 Naturally Curious calendars must be received by October 31.
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Beavers Consuming Herbaceous Plants
One associates Beavers with a fairly strict diet of bark and twigs. While their winter diet consists primarily of woody plants, they consume a variety of herbaceous and aquatic plants (as well as woody) during the spring, summer and fall months. Shrubs and trees make up roughly half the spring and autumn requirements, but as little as 10% of the summer diet when herbaceous plants such as sedges and aquatic plants become available.
Recent observation of a local active Beaver pond revealed that Interrupted Fern (Osmunda claytoniana), Jewelweed/Touch-Me-Not (Impatiens capensis) and grasses are high on the list of preferred foods of one Beaver family during the summer, although woody plants such as poplars (Populus spp.) and Paper Birch (Betula papyrifera) have also been consumed in fairly large quantities. All too soon Beavers in the Northeast will be limited to the bark of branches they’ve stored under the ice. Until this time, they take advantage of the accessibility of more easily digested herbaceous plants. (Thanks to the Shepards and Demonts for photo op.)
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White-tailed Deer’s Diet Changing With The Season
Being ruminants, white-tailed deer have a four-chambered stomach which allows them to digest a wide variety of food, including leaves, twigs, fruits and nuts, grass, corn, alfalfa, and even lichens and fungi. Their stomach hosts a complex set of microbes – organisms such as bacteria, which are too small to be seen with the naked eye – that change as the deer’s diet changes through the seasons.
In general, the green leaves of growing plants are consumed in the spring and summer, while fruits and seeds are eaten as they become available. Hard mast foods, such as hickory nuts and acorns, are an extremely important component of fall and early winter diets when deer need to establish fat reserves. The buds and twigs of woody plants are a mainstay of their diet in winter.
At this time of year it is not unusual to see deer grazing in fields that are just starting to have a touch of green. Grass is a welcome change from their winter woody diet, but it only comprises a very small (less than 8%) of a deer’s overall diet, due to its low crude protein and digestibility. Because their rumen (the stomach chamber where most microbial fermentation takes place) is small relative to their body size, a white-tailed deer’s diet must be high in nutritive value and capable of being rapidly degraded in the rumen. Therefore, white-tailed deer rely primarily on alfalfa, clover, beans and other legumes, additional herbaceous flowering plants, and browse, all of which have more protein and are more easily digested than grasses.
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Beavers Seeking Herbaceous Plants
A recent light snow provided an opportunity to confirm that northern New England beavers have gained access to land and are seeing the sun for the first time in several months. They, along with any beavers living north of the 39th parallel, may well reap some benefit from the change in our climate. Further south, there is no real winter and beavers do not have to cope with a limited amount of stored food for there is usually no ice on ponds. Milder winters and early springs mean more time for Northeastern beavers to access herbaceous food and fresh bark, and less time locked under the ice.
Unbeknownst to many, a large portion of a beaver’s spring, summer, and fall diet consists of herbaceous food – grasses, sedges, ferns, fungi, berries, mushrooms, duckweed and even algae. When beavers first leave their ponds in the spring, one of the first foods they head for is skunk cabbage, as it is one of the earliest flowering plants to emerge (often when snow is still on the ground). Beavers also relish the new foliage of aspen, willow and alders. When they are accessible, the rhizomes, leaves and flowers of both yellow and white pond lilies are favorite foods. Come late fall, when lush greenery has disappeared, beavers up their intake of bark (cambium) and store a pile of branches on the bottom of the pond close to their lodge, where they have underwater access to it all winter.
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Meadow Voles Food for Coyotes
When there is deep snow on the ground, white-tailed deer are often preferred-eating for eastern coyotes, with snowshoe hares not far behind. While small rodents are also consumed during the winter, they make up a larger proportion of a coyote’s diet during spring, summer and fall. With only a few inches of snow on the ground currently, meadow voles are still very vulnerable to predation, as the tufts of grass where they tend to nest are still visible.
Tracks indicate that a coyote stopped to investigate numerous grass tussocks scattered throughout a nearby field recently. Near several of these clumps of grass were slide marks (see foreground in photo) where the coyote had jumped, landed and slid. The groove made by the coyote’s sliding foot always ends with a foot print. At this particular site, the coyote had pounced, slid and then dug and uprooted a nest, possibly procuring a vole, but leaving no trace of success behind. What it did leave behind was scat (3 o’clock in photo), with which the coyote claimed ownership of the site.
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Fishers Eating Fruit & Marking Territory
When one thinks of fishers, meat-eating predators come to mind. While it is true that the fisher is a generalist, opportunistic hunter and scavenger, and feeds on any prey it can catch and kill (snowshoe hares, rabbits, squirrels and other small rodents, birds, bird eggs, smaller weasels, shrews, porcupines, raccoons, amphibians, reptiles, carrion and a very occasional cat or chicken), it also consumes fruit and nuts, especially when prey is scarce.
Given the amount of apples that are available this fall, even if prey isn’t hard to find, it is not too surprising to see fisher scat composed solely of apples at the base of this scent marking post (confirmed by fine fisher hairs at the very tip of the stump as well as scat).
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Eastern Newts Dining on Wood Frog Eggs
Wood Frogs mate and lay their eggs in ponds and occasionally vernal pools before heading back to their terrestrial, wooded habitat. Amphibian eggs are subject to predation by numerous predators, including leeches, fish, aquatic insects and salamanders. Eastern Newts (aquatic as larvae and adults) are carnivorous and consume insect larvae, fingernail clams, leeches and amphibian eggs, among other things. At this time of year, Wood Frog eggs are plentiful and easily accessible, as the individual masses, each consisting of 1,000 to 2,000 eggs, are deposited adjacent to each other on submerged vegetation. Hungry newts can feed for hours without moving more than an inch, and many often do. After discovering an egg mass, a newt plunges its head into the clump of eggs, grabs one and, with great shaking of its head, separates an egg from the mass and quickly swallows it. Seconds later the newt repeats this process, and continues doing so until it is satiated.
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Good Winter For Meadow Voles – Not So Much For Woody Plants
Warming temperatures have revealed the considerable amount of activity that occurred under the protective deep layer of snow this past winter. In addition to a multitude of exposed meadow vole runways, there are ample signs of the voracious appetite of this small rodent. Given that more than 90% of a meadow vole’s diet consists of vegetable matter, that it can eat more than its own body weight in 24 hours, and that it breeds throughout the year, it is no surprise that the bark of many woody plants was consumed this winter, resulting in much girdling, and thus the demise, of many shrubs and saplings.
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White-tailed Deer Scraping Bark
During the winter, white-tailed deer browse on the twigs, buds and bark of trees. Deer have incisors in the front of their bottom jaw, but none in the front of their top jaw, just a hard palate. They grip the bark with their bottom front incisors and scrape their jaw upwards, leaving behind grooves the width of their bottom incisors. Often there are frayed ends of bark at the top end of the groove, due to the deer having to use its hard palate and incisors, rather than two sets of incisors, to separate the bark from the tree. Favorite trees include red and striped maples, oaks, poplar, pines, hemlock, arborvitae and balsam fir.
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Coyotes Feeding on Deer Carcasses
Ninety percent of a coyote’s diet is animal matter, including creatures as varied as meadow voles, mice, muskrats, raccoons, beetles and grasshoppers — basically, anything it can outrun. Coyotes have the reputation as major predators of deer. While research confirms that deer (and rabbits) comprise a good portion of a coyote’s diet in the Northeast, the majority of the deer that coyotes consume is scavenged as carrion (see photo). Because they cannot move as fast as adult deer, fawns are more vulnerable to coyote predation.
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