In the Right Place: But Do They Dream?

Yesterday, in light but steady rain, this local quintet of white-tailed deer chose our north field to take their morning nap. Judging from a quick look at the literature, they were performing an important function.

As with all of us mammals, sleep is critical to the health of deer. However, some research indicates that white-tails spend more time bedded than on their feet. Unlike some hooved animals, deer don’t sleep standing. And, when they lie down to rest, you can’t tell from a distance whether they’re sleeping – they apparently often sleep with their eyes open, their ears alert, and their noses inhaling deeply.

When resting, white-tails reportedly nod off completely for a few seconds or minutes, then become searchingly alert for a similar time, and then return to the short sleeping state, and so on. Sleeping in groups tends to assure that at least one of them is completely alert most of the time.

Their resting periods can be fairly long and occur multiple times a day. The locals shown here started laying down a few minutes before 8 a.m. yesterday and got up and browsed their way off at 10:20 a.m. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 27, 2022.)

In the Right Place: Playing the Odds

The “paws” of American pussy willows (Salix discolor) are molting now.  Only the male plants grow these furry catkins, which protect their flowers’ pollen-producing stamens from cold and other elements. As the days warm, the fur disappears, and the flowers’ stamens emerge with their pollen grain heads.

The wind takes the pollen on flights that, if nature’s plan works, will result in some grains reaching the waiting ovules of female pussy willows, enabling them to produce fertile seeds. Each male pussy willow plant will produce millions of pollen grains to try to beat the reproduction odds and drive allergic people crazy. (Image taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 24, 2022.)

In the Right Place: A Good Turn

I haven’t seen any spring mushroom stalks arising out of the soil yet. But, of course, the stalkless mushrooms attached to decaying tree trunks are with us all year. Because of the way they grow, they’re often called “bracket fungi” or “shelf fungi” and their entire bodies are called “conks.”

The various species of these fungi also are known collectively as “polypores” (meaning many pores) because they have innumerable small tubes on the underside of their conks from which their reproductive spores drop. The large conks shown here are red-belted polypores (Fomitopsis pinicola).

One of the curious things about polypores is that they rely on gravity to make their spores drop into the world. This causes a problem when that decaying tree trunk that they are attached to falls – then, the bottom of the conk is no longer facing down to facilitate spore drops. Not to worry: over time, the conk will twist itself so that it’s bottom is again facing downward and gravity will be able to do its job.

Leighton Archive image

(Primary image taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 20, 2022.)

In the Right Place: Bringers of Joy

Daffodils are blooming here now. Their frilled trumpets are at the ready, seemingly waiting for the baton’s signal to blast “Hallelujah!”  Some of the daffodils, including this one, are brightening fallow fields, apparently having been planted years ago in a garden or around a house that has disappeared.

Europeans reportedly brought daffodil bulbs to North America in the 1600s and the resulting plants have been one of the most popular flowers ever since.

Botanists designate “daffodils” as any plant within the genus Narcissus, which would include jonquils, paperwhites, and more than 20 other species, not to mention tens of thousands of hybrids.

However, as far as I can tell, most people consider the early spring flowers with the trumpet-shaped coronas and surrounding collars of petals (perianths), shown here, to be the “real” daffodils. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 23, 2022.)

In the Right Place: Hidden Romance

April is the peak breeding time for Eastern painted turtles (Chrysemys picta picta), the subspecies that resides in Maine. The seduction most likely will be hidden in the shallow water at the edges of a freshwater body, which is what I suspect was going on with these two PTs Thursday. (Look closely.)

The smaller-bodied male usually will approach the female, moving his face in front of hers. When he’s got her attention, he’ll wave his long-clawed front feet in front of the female in a mesmerizing way and sometimes touch her face lightly with them. Then, he’ll swim away. If she doesn’t follow him, he’ll repeat the performance until she does (or doesn’t and he gives up).

If she’s willing and ready, the female will swim after the male and then sink to the bottom, where the male will mount her. His shell bottom (plastron) is slightly concave to accommodate her shell top (carapace). And, his front claw nails are longer than hers so that he can grab her shell. (Image taken in Brooklin, Maine on April 21, 2022.)

In the Right Place: Fly Me to the Ground

One of our first trees to bloom is the red maple (Acer rubrum). Here you see male red maple tree flowers blooming yesterday. The flowers are starting to release their pollen, some of which may fertilize the waiting stigmas of female red maple flowers.

At about the time that the trees are in leaf, those fertilized female flowers will have elongated into fruit in the form of double samaras (winged seeds) that spin through the air before they land and try to germinate into little trees.

Curiously, red maple samaras are reddish and fly in the spring, yet the samaras of sugar maple (Acer saccharum) are green and fly in the fall. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 22, 2022.)

In the Right Place: Weekly Osprey Nest Report

Ozzie and Harriet had a busy week of spring activity in the wild: mostly copulation and nursery preparation. Both ospreys worked daily on improving their penthouse nest atop an 80-foot spruce overlooking Great Cove.

They brought large branches for the rim and outsides of the nest, some looking to be about four feet in length. Smaller branches and moss were packed into the inside, where Harriet will brood. Sometimes they would get in each other’s way, as you see here with Ozzie bringing in some home siding yesterday and Harriet hunching in expectation of a rough landing:

Several of you have asked how I tell them apart, since they’re not much different in size. Frankly, during these early stages, I often can’t, but I’m starting to be able to differentiate differences at a glance, such as Harriet’s white spot behind the eye. I think that this is Ozzie:

I do get helpful visual presentations from time to time – it’s Ozzie on top during copulation; all I have to do is try to keep them straight after that. That’s how I know that this is Harriet about to take off and in flight:

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 21, 2022.)

In the Right Place: Air Conditioning

The white-tailed deer are starting to lose their luxurious gray fur coats. They’re entering the spring molt that will leave them with thin, reddish summer coats. The process apparently is an itchy one, judging by the additional time that the deer are spending on grooming themselves and each other.

The molt primarily is to provide better summer heat control. The deer don’t have enough sweat glands to prevent overheating by evaporative cooling the way we do. Thus, their winter coats’ insulating underfur is molted away in the spring. This leaves only short and thin guard hairs that allow cooling breezes to reach their bodies in a form of air convection. (Image taken in Brooklin, Maine on April 17, 2022.)

In the Right Place: What Would Noah Do?

The images here were taken in yesterday’s windy deluge, which knocked out our power, dropped a reported 1.7 inches of rain on us, and flooded our bog, as you see.

Fortunately, we have a generator that powers the house during outages and a bog full of new growth that loves flooding rain.

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 19, 2022.) Click on image to enlarge it.

In the Right Place: Famous Unknown

I suspect that there are a good number of common and interesting birds that many people don’t see – brown or gray blurs that don’t make enough of a first impression to get our attention. I also suspect that this summer migrant is one. He’s an Eastern phoebe (Sayornes phoebe) that I saw Easter Sunday, my first phoebe of the year. (Sex assumed; only phoebes can tell males from females by sight or sound and both sexes sing.)

He's a small “flycatcher,” a group of birds that have the amazing ability to catch flying insects on the wing. Here he is eating a hard-to-identify breakfast:

Phoebes often sit upright on a twig and bob their tails while identifying themselves with a very raspy “FEEE-BEEE” song. They’re not shy; they often build their nests on or near human residences.

Eastern Phoebes are famous for allegedly being the first bird species to be banded in North America. The bander was an 18-year-old John James Audubon doing an experiment in Pennsylvania in 1804. According to Audubon’s account (which some dispute), he used silver thread to band young phoebe nestlings and documented their return to the same area the following year. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 17, 2022.)

In the Right Place: The Ozzie and Harriet Season Begins

Yesterday, these two familiar-looking ospreys appeared separately and reclaimed their nearby nest, which I’ve been visiting daily lately in anticipation of seeing the first ospreys of the year.

(I’ve been photographing and reporting on this nest for four years and always call the adult occupants Ozzie and Harriet to avoid the he-she-it syndrome.) Ozzie arrived first and immediately began nest repairs.

Of course, I can’t be certain each year that I’m seeing the same two parents. However, ospreys are nest-loyal and these two seem to be very comfortable with the nest and each other – there has been no hesitation about occupying it and no challenges from other pairs. There also usually is little to no courting; copulation attempts usually begin right away in the nest and nearby, as they did yesterday.

Nonetheless, there is a concern about the safety of ospreys such as these that have been nesting along the Maine coast. Bald eagles are on the increase along the coast and they love to harass and rob hardworking ospreys of their fish, eggs, and even chicks.

There seems to be a correlation between the eagle population increases and coastal osprey nest abandonments. According to Maine banding reports and Vickery (Birds of Maine), it appears that significant numbers of osprey are shifting their nesting to inland lakes, where the eagle-to-osprey ratio is better for the ospreys as of now. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 17, 2022.)

In the Right Place: Not in the Pink, But With the Blues

Last night’s rain squalls prevented us from taking a look at the April full moon at its peak luminosity. However, the moon was virtually full on Friday, the night before, and we caught this glimpse of it.

The April full moon most often is called the “Pink Moon,” which reportedly is a translation of the Native American description of the moon that arrives with the emergence of pink wildflowers.

Well, those Native Americans must have been enjoying their emerging pink flowers in latitudes south of here. I may have missed them, but I’ve seen no emerging pink wildflowers here. However, I have seen some blue-purple flowers emerging in the form of this dwarf iris (Iris reticulata):

The April full moon also reportedly was known by more inclusive Native Americans who called the month’s full moon the “Sprouting Grass Moon,” “Hare Moon,” “Fish Moon,” and Growing Moon.” (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 15, 2022.)

In the Right Place: Skunk Cabbage, Humans, and Bears

As of yesterday, as you see, this colony of Eastern skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) that we’ve been monitoring has not shown any leaf shoots, but its purple spathes appear to be doing well.

A nearby smaller plant had opened a spathe yesterday to advertise its internal spadix of flowers and allow their foul smell to drift farther to attract pollinators, which apparently think that rotting meat is a heavenly scent.

Skunk cabbage has a very high content of oxalic acid, which makes it virtually toxic for humans – the smallest taste creates almost unbearable, burning, needle-like pains in humans. The plant is eaten by few wild animals, but is almost essential to one group of mammals that give the plant its alternative name: Bearweed.  

Black and brown bears will eat the roots and other parts of the young plant in the spring as a form of self-medication when the animals arise from hibernation. They usually are severely constipated at that time by up to a foot-long detritus blockage that accumulated in their lower intestines while they were dormant. You probably do not want to be near any bear when the acid of its skunk cabbage breakfast meets the firmness of its hibernation blockage. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 15, 2022.)

In the Right Place: A Bobbed Tale

In the Right Place: A Bobbed Tale

This image of a bobcat appeared yesterday in my monthly column in the Ellsworth American.

To read the column about the resurgence of Maine bobcats, click here: http://www.5backroad.com/montly-column

In the Right Place: Surprises

It was a very gray day yesterday. The water in our field pond was dark and reflected its surrounding crop of cattails, which, themselves, were full of shadows. While scanning the pond’s far bank for turtles, my eyes told my brain that they were seeing something that was not the usual, often-seen pondscape.

After a few seconds, my brain matched two familiar forms in my memory, which I hope you can see here: two male wood ducks sitting still in the water’s edge, apparently waiting for me to leave:

It was surprising to see how well the stripes that break up the ducks’ heads and bodies can camouflage these flamboyant birds.

When I raised the camera and took the first image, the birds rose from their hiding places with spectacular splashes and were gone in seconds:

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 13, 2022.)

In the Right Place: In the Mood

There are many Maine moods. Or, more accurately, the weather and scenery of Maine can evoke personal feelings in many of us. On the day before yesterday, for example, these schools of clouds racing in a clear sky above Blue Hill Bay created bright, expansive, joy-of-life feelings in me:

However, yesterday morning, a sudden rain on a pond proved capable of evoking my gray, introspective thoughts involving complexity and incomprehensibility and doubt – circles within circles; circles destroying circles, appearances and disappearances; agitation and disorder:

Fortunately, the sun broke out yesterday afternoon and changed the day’s mood to a more positive one. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 11 [clouds] and 12 [rain], 2022.)

In the Right Place: Another First

This is the first painted turtle that I’ve seen this year. He was basking and seemingly smiling amid the dead cattails in our lower pond yesterday. (I’m guessing that this is a male because of the relatively long and substantial tail. Among other sexual differences, female PTs have shorter, stubbier tails to facilitate mating.)

Painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) have existed for at least 15 million years, according to fossil records. These common natives to the United States evolved into four geographical subspecies during the last glacial age, which ended almost 12 thousand years ago.

Maine’s subspecies, shown here, is the Eastern painted turtle, Chrysemys picta picta; it’s the only subspecies with shell (“carapace”) segments (“scutes”) that occur in virtually straight rows and columns. The other subspecies are the Western, Midland, and Southern PTs. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 11, 2022.)

In the Right Place: Mastersingers

Sometimes, the most common and plain creatures can possess rare and prideful abilities. That’s true with people and true with birds. And, when it comes to birds, it’s especially true with regard to song sparrows, the most common sparrows in North America. They have been scientifically named in honor of their outstanding ability to sing pleasantly -- Melospiza melodia.

I heard my first two spring song sparrow performances of the year yesterday. The birds were hidden near the edge of our woods, hurling songs at each other worthy of a Wagnerian mastersingers contest. (The images here are from my Archive.) It was a wonderful thing to hear on a gloomy day.

It’s almost always the males that sing in spring to establish nesting territories and attract females. These males have been known to sing up to 20 basic songs on which they perform thousands of variations. Research indicates that the more complex a song, the more attracted are song sparrow females.

Curiously, one study also indicates that a few females will sing like males when stressed by other females intruding into their nesting territory or when the song sparrow population of their area is too high. It’s thought that such events may elevate testosterone levels in the females. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine.)

In the Right Place: Transformations

Perhaps it’s fitting for these troubling times that a plant that was used unsuccessfully to treat the bubonic plague in the Middle Ages is now flowering and providing life-saving nectar to our earliest insects.

The plant, shown above, is Japanese sweet coltsfoot (Petasites japonicus). It apparently was introduced into North America in the 19th Century by Japanese immigrants to Canada’s British Columbia. It has a sweeter scent than other coltsfoot plants, including Maine’s native sweet coltsfoot (Petasites palmatus).

The Japanese version goes through an enormous transformation in which the little two-inch flower clusters shown here disappear and are replaced by sturdy stems of about three feet in length. The leaves at the ends of those stems can grow up to four feet in width and are shaped like a colt’s hoofprint, hence the plant’s name:

The leaves also are the source for one of this plant’s alternative common names: Japanese Butterbur. In days of yore before refrigeration, those leaves were used to wrap butter for storage in cool places. Another common American name for this plant is bog rhubarb. By the way, the plant is very invasive.(Primary image taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 9, 2022.)

In the Right Place: Progress Report

Here, seemingly trying to catch yesterday’s big raindrops, is the eastern skunk cabbage that we’ve been monitoring for many years.

Curiously, the plant (Symplocarpus foetidus) looks both primeval and futuristic now in its bog. But, it will be leafing out in a day or so and its vernal pool likely will be virtually dry and full of ferns by June. (Image taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 8, 2022.)