Black Bears
Recently I lead a small group of nature enthusiasts on a trip to Northern Minnesota to see and learn about black bears and boreal birds.
Migration
After a blistering summer, the weather has finally turned cooler and there is a palatable crispness to the air.
Woolly Bear Caterpillar
It’s funny how some things in nature are very familiar and well known. For example the robin. Stop just about anyone on the street and show them a robin and they can identify it correctly. The same can be said for the small black and orange Woolly Bear Caterpillar. Why this is, I’m not sure. So besides the name, what else do you know about this fuzzy caterpillar? I’ll bet, not much. There are a number of common names for this tiny critters–Banded Woolly Bear and Black-ended Bear are just a few. Called woolly because they are covered with a thick, uniform length fur like hair called setae. I have no clue where the bear part of the name comes from. However they are cute and fuzzy like a bear, perhaps that is how they got their name. They also come in many color forms such as tan or even white. Many think that the woolly hair (setae) cause skin irritation or inflammation if touched. This is not true for the average person. However some people with extremely sensitive skin may have a slight reaction (dermatitis) if they handle the caterpillar. Speaking of handling, the woollies will play dead if picked up or disturbed. They curl up onto a ball and don’t move until the danger passes. This is standard behavior for helpless critters such as the woolly. Woollies are usually seen in late fall when the leaves are golden and the winds turn cold. They are often seen slowly crossing roads, trails and sidewalks. Why they wonder around at this time of year is not clearly understood because woollies can eat just about any kind of plant so they aren’t looking for a food source. So why would they risk coming out into the open and being eaten by a bird or getting run over by a car? Just one more mystery that nature has for us that we won’t be able to answer. It is often said that you can predict the severity of the coming winter based on the width of the orange band on the woolly. The narrower the band forecasts colder winters. In fact, the band width is high variable during each stage of the Woolly Bears life. As the caterpillar grows it sheds its skin. Each stage is called an instar. Some of the black hairs are replaced with orange and the band grows wider with each instar. I think it goes without saying that Woolly Caterpillars are not capable of predicting any kind of weather, short term or long. In addition, the band width and even the color is highly variable with each individual caterpillar. The hatchling caterpillars from the same mother are highly variable indicating the band width is more a function of its genetics than anything else. So what does a fuzzy woolly caterpillar turn into as an adult? The adult is the Isabella Tiger Moth. It is a small yellow to orange moth with tiny dark spots on the wings. It has a fuzzy orange head and small antennae. They are a fairly unremarkable moth that would most likely go unnoticed by the average person. Throughout most of the eastern US the Woolly Bear lives in just about any habitat that include a variety of trees and other herbaceous plants. It occurs from Canada to Florida and west to Texas. In many areas it can be very common and seen by the hundreds and thousands. Two generations occur each summer with the second generation of caterpillars over-wintering as caterpillars. This is fairly unusual because most of our insects over-winter in the egg form. The woolly curls up in a ball under the leaf litter and survives by freezing. They do this by producing a cryoprotectant in its tissue that protects the individual cells in the body from damage during the freezing process. In spring it thaws out and continues to eat a little more before transforming into an adult moth and starts the entire process over again. Until next time… Stan Tekiela is an author / naturalist and wildlife photographer who travels the US to study and photograph wildlife. He can be contacted via his web page at www.naturesmart.com
Clark’s Nutcracker
I’ve been doing this naturalist / photographer thing for several decades now and I am still amazed at the things I see and learn about in nature. For example on a recent trip out west to photograph wolves and grizzly bears in Yellowstone I saw and photographed something fairly unusual–a Clark’s Nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana) catching and eating a vole. You might say, so what? What’s so unusual about a bird eating a vole? Hawks and owls do it all the time. Well for you to get the impact of just how unusual this is, let’s take a few minutes to find out what the heck a Clark’s Nutcracker is. The nutcracker is a large gray bird about twelve inches long, with black wings and long narrow black bill. It is a member of the corvid (crows and jays) family. Well right away this should tell us something. If this bird is related to the crows or jays we can assume that this is a very smart and resourceful bird. And it turns out it is. The Clark’s Nutcracker, which was named after the famous early 1800’s explorer William Clark of the famed Lewis and Clark expedition, is a bird that is well known for being a seed eater. In fact many studies have been done on this species because it stores large amounts of pine seeds for later consumption. Much of the birds entire life is centered around finding, caching and retrieving the pine seeds from its cache. Using a rather large pouch under its tongue, called a sublingual pouch, the nutcrackers collects seeds from White Bark Pine, Pinyon Pine and other evergreens and buries them in underground caches. They can fit up to a 100 pine seeds in their pouch at a time. Each bird can cache 20 to 50 thousand pine seeds per season. This is very important because the cache of seeds is what gets the birds through the rest of the year when the seeds are not available. What is remarkable about this is the birds remember where the stored seeds are even when the cache is buried under snow. Studies show that the birds remember the locations by the relationship to major landmarks such as large rocks and trees and have nearly total recall of all seed locations. In addition they also remember the size of the seeds that they buried at the location. So they can remember if the cache is composed of large or small seeds. Other studies show that these birds are either “left” or “right-footed” when it comes to collecting, handling and storing the seeds. This means they are very similar to humans in our preference in using our right or left hand. They use their dominant foot to hold the cones while pry out the seeds and also use the same foot to help burry the cache of seeds. They inhabit high-elevations where pines are the dominant tree and not many humans go. As a result these birds have little fear of people. They can be a fairly loud bird calling back and forth between family members communicating their wants and needs to each other. Their main source of food is pine seeds. Using their long narrow bill to extract the seeds from the cones. They also forage on the ground finding insects during the warmer months and they are known for eating other birds eggs and babies too. But what is not really well documented is the behavior I saw and photographed. While searching for a Short-tailed Weasel in a small tree lined field I saw some fluttering on the ground. I leveled my camera on the action and saw a Clark’s Nutcracker tossing something in the air over and over. He was clearly trying to kill a vole. Once the vole was dispatched the bird flew up to a tree branch with the vole in its beak. I quickly drove down to get a closer look. For the next five minutes the nutcracker held the vole down with its feet and tore it apart swallowing it bit by bit. I could see the bird didn’t like some of the entrails and other parts and would discard these parts as if it knew exactly what it liked and didn’t like. Obviously this bird had done this before. It wasn’t long before it finished its meal and flew off into the woods. I thought now that is a behavior you don’t see very often in these cool birds. Until next time… Stan Tekiela is an author / naturalist and wildlife photographer who travels the U. S. to study and photograph wildlife. He can be contacted via his web page at www.naturesmart.com
Grizzly Bears
Honestly, there isn’t much that I am afraid of in nature. Some people are afraid of spiders or snakes and other creepy crawly things. I’m not. Never have been. In fact I love all critters large and small, creepy and crawly or cute and fuzzy.
Pumpkins
It’s funny how we hang on to traditions– especially ancient traditions. Take Halloween for example. Started nearly 3,500 years ago by the Celtic people near Britain, it was a special day set aside to mark the end of the harvest and acknowledge the beginning of the long dark and cold season. To celebrate, the leaders, called “Druids” would order all fires in the village to be extinguished. A large sacrificial fire was built in the center the village. People would arrive near sunset carrying large turnips hallowed out with grotesque faces carved into them– kind of like we do with pumpkins (jack-o-lanterns). The evil looking turnips, called neeps, were filled with tallow (animal fat) and mounted on poles or sticks and ignited in flames. The flaming neeps were carried around to frighten away the “evil ones” that come during the season of dankness. Villagers would dance and wave their neep lanterns to frighten way any evil spirits. After the ceremony each family would carry home their flaming neep to rekindle their own hearth fire. Great care was taken to keep this new fire and its protective glow from going out all winter. If you haven’t guessed by now, the use of turnips gave way to the pumpkin after settlers came to North America. The reason is, pumpkins are native to North America and were not know to Europeans. Pumpkins are the oldest cultivated vegetable crop in North America. By the time any European explorers landed in this New World, native peoples had been growing pumpkins for nearly 11,000 years. Native peoples are responsible for a wide variety of foods we still eat today. Some examples of these are the common bean, chili peppers, squash, amaranth, sweet potato, potato, bottle gourds and most importantly corn. Unlike corn, pumpkins have changed very little since it was first grown in primitive gardens. Pumpkins and their seeds were traded all across Central America and the American Southwest. By about three to four thousand years ago, the use of pumpkins had made it to the plains and woodland Indians of central North America. In the late 1700’s, Yale students were calling New Englanders “pumpkin heads” because of their heavy diet of pumpkins. Before Boston was called beantown it was called pumpkinshire. By 1845 the term pumpkin had come to mean stupid and thickheaded. Since than the word has changed to “Bumpkin”. Pumpkins were a major source of food for the early European migrants to America. But in 1893 a New York seed salesman Peter Henderson wrote, ” The pumpkin is yet offered in large quantities for sale in our markets, but it ought to be banished from them as it has been for sometime from our garden.” By the mid-1900’s pumpkins fell out of favor and hasn’t been back except for pies and seeds. This year when you and your family are out picking your pumpkin to carve into a jack-o-lantern, take a minute to consider the history behind this incredible edible vegetable. Until next time… Stan Tekiela is an author and naturalist and wildlife photographer who travels the U.S. to study and photograph wildlife. He can be followed on www.facebook.com and twitter.com. He can be contacted via his web page at www.naturesmart.com
Happy Holidays
Wishing you and your families a Happy Holiday from Stan Tekiela at…