Hello from Skagway!

We are in the middle of our Alaskan cruise today.  Unfortunately, we are in an Internet Cafe and I can't upload any photos for you to see.  Needless to say, there will be plenty of awesome photos to post when we get back, including a baby Orca!  I just wanted to pop in and give a hello from Skagway, Alaska, the northernmost point on our journey.

Weekly Nature Photo: Bear Head Lake

In case the warm weather lately has made you pine for winter:

This picture was taken on March 1, 2008 in Bear Head Lake State Park, which is up in northern Minnesota near the Boundary Waters.

Friday Links: 7/16/2010

Updates to the endangered species listings in Minnesota are way behind. [Star Tribune]

Lake Superior is very warm for this time of year and could reach record warm temperatures this summer [Star Tribune via MiniSkinny newsletter]

The oil has stopped flowing into the Gulf! [Detroit Free Press]

Weekly Nature Photo: Crab in San Diego

Check out this crab we saw in San Diego.  What interesting coloration!  

Trip Report: San Diego in June

Kellie and I had a chance to visit San Diego in June.

We saw California Ground Squirrels - they were smaller than the ones we saw in Yosemite last year, but definitely the same species.  Don't be fooled by its similarly appearance to the gray squirrels we have in the midwest and east -iit is actually a ground squirrel, not an arboreal squirrel.  The biggest giveaway is that the California Ground Squirrel walks along the ground and does not hop like our arboreal squirrels do.  They are also much less likely to climb trees, although you will see them in the branches from time to time.  

We saw many cool and exotic (to Minnesotans) things down along the seashore.  We visited the famous children's beach in La Jolla that is now full of seals.

While getting our fill of seals, we saw one that looked a little different.  We quickly recognized that it was a sea lion (or, technically, an eared seal), but it seemed to doing something weird with its head.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the sea lion had some fishing line and a hook stuck in its skin and around its head.  We saw this after looking through the binoculars and reported it to the seal protection volunteers that were staffing the beach that day.  The volunteers had already reported the poor sea lion, and Sea World staff had already come out to see if they could help.  Sadly, they determined that there was nothing they could do at that time because the sea lion was in amongst all the seals, and helping the sea lion would disturb all the seals around.  

On a brighter note, we did see a toucan!  

As you might guess, it wasn't a wild toucan, but one that was part of the wild bird show at the San Diego Zoo.  

One of the cooler exhibits that we saw at the zoo was one where they had information about extinct animals that used to live in California, and compared them to the most similar animal alive today.  We got our picture taken next to this statue of a giant ground sloth!  

These beasts roamed the Americas before humans showed up.  Ever since finding out about strange and wonderful large animals that used to live here before the arrival of humans in my Conservation Biology class in grad school, I have been fascinated by the idea of such creatures as giant ground sloths, sabre-tooth lions, dire wolves, wooly mammoths, and teratorns (giant extinct predatory birds).  I was hoping for more information about the dire wolf, and maybe even a statue, but it didn't make the cut.

Back along the seashore, we went out to Cabrillo National Monument to look at the tidepools.  We were there at the wrong time of year for ideal viewing, but we still saw some cool things.

Here was a crack in the rock that was about 8 feet above the water line, but looked like a crab hotel when you peeked in!

And many creatures that don't seem much like what we have in MN!

It was a just a short, fortuitous trip to San Diego, but it is always fun to visit a new place!

Weekly Nature Photo: Frog in the BWCAW

Here is a picture of a frog at the margins of a lake from our most recent trip to the Boundary Waters:

Based on some web searches, I haven't been able to positively ID it.  My best guess right now is the Green Frog (Rana clamitans).  Anyone have any other thoughts on it?

Trip Report: Boundary Waters over the Fourth of July weekend

Kellie and I decided to take advantage of the long weekend to head up to Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW).  The Boundary Waters is always glorious, although in many distinct ways.  This weekend we had hot weather - it was the warmest it has ever been when we've been up there.

We put in at Sawbill Lake, and stayed there for three nights, taking just day trips and not moving camp.  That gave us lots of time to look around at the north end of Sawbill, which is really a cool lake.

The first evening, we decided to check out an inlet into Sawbill in which we'd spent a long time watching a mink hunt on a previous trip.  Unfortunately, we didn't see any mink, but we did get some great looks at the beavers that live there.  When we first spotted them, I thought that one of the adult beavers had a log in its mouth.  However, it turned out that it was carrying a young beaver in its mouth!

It seemed an odd way to carry around the young, but the adult did it repeatedly!  We were just sitting there in the canoe, watching in amazement, but the beavers kept swimming around.  At one point, the adult even seemed to be brining the young close to us, and then left it behind as it swam a little farther away!  I wondered if the parent might be showing its young what a canoe is and showing whether it is something to be afraid of or not.  It is hard to say what is going on in their minds, but it was fascinating behavior.  Rest assured that beaver babies do also ride on their parent's backs.

A little later on that same paddle, we saw a Moose!  Such a large creature, but so good at hiding themselves!  We lucked out and happened upon this Moose when it was in a small bay near our campsite.

As one might expect, we did see some very nice sunsets.

The trip was quite buggy, with both flies and mosquitoes being abundant.  This kept the predators happy, and we saw plenty of toads!

On the trip, we bought a new field guide (Insects of the North Woods, by Jeffrey Hahn).  I'll be sure to give a full review once I've used it a bit more, but one of the things it allowed us to was ID some of the insects we saw.  To be sure, with a field guide that only has 444 species, you'll never be 100% certain of your ID, but it was fun to have the book to give us a hand when seeing insects.  It did always to identify this dragonfly that we rescued from the water as a Dragonhunter (so named because it is a large dragonfly that hunts large prey, including other dragonflies!):

Friday Links: 6/4/2010

The warming climate is causing die-offs of Minnesota's ciscoe, a cold-water fish species. [Star Tribune]

Birdchick keeps the BP oil spill disaster at the front of our minds and encourages birders to post reports of oil-affected birds. [Birdchick]

Dot Earth was out and about and got some pictures of "red efts, the resplendent midlife woods-wandering stage of the Eastern Newt."  [Dot Earth]

Weekly Nature Photo: Blue Jeans Frog

Today starts a new feature on GGG: the weekly nature photo.  Each week I will pick a cool photo and share it with you.  We'll try to keep the visuals sweet and the chatter to a minimum for this feature!

Here is  picture Kellie took in Costa Rica of the poisonous Blue Jeans Frog:

Trip Report: Lake of the Isles and Cedar Lake Redux

Kellie and I went out to canoe ride on Memorial Day.  It was a supremely nice day.

There wasn't much wind and the algae hasn't really started growing yet, so the water is nice and clear and we spent a lot of time looking into the water.

We saw some little fish.

We had a muskrat come quite close to our boat!

One of the really cool things about the trip was seeing all of the Bluegill nests in the shallows.  The Bluegills create a scrape out of the bottom, and each one defends its territory.  

There were a million people out there and it was late in the day, so we didn't see any turtles basking.  That is quite unusual, as we almost always  see turtles basking in the sun.  However, we did catch a turtle sticking its head up out of the water!

Then it swam away!

And hid itself again!

And here is a first for GGG: Video!

This is a video of a bunch of bluegill swimming near a bunch of nests.

Friday Links: 5/28/2010

Hope the Black Bear cub is reunited with her mother! [Star Tribune]

Legal rights for the wildlife victims of the BP oil spill? [Wall Street Journal law blog]

Birdchick blogs about Brown-headed Cowbirds: a post of videos of them and a post about removing cowbird eggs from other birds nests.  [Birdchick]

Trip Report: Lake of the Isles and Cedar Lake

This Sunday Kellie and I finally got our canoe out on the lake.  We rent a rack from the City of Minneapolis on the south side of Lake of the Isles.  On Sunday, we put in there, then cruised around the islands.  Then, we headed through the lagoon over to Cedar Lake.  The weather was quite good for fish viewing in the water and we saw many Bluegills below the water.  At one point, we also saw a nice big Northern or Muskie cruising along too.  We saw many fish that may have been largemouth bass based on the photos I've been able to dig up in a few minutes on the internet.

There were a couple of Common Loons out on the lake too, that came quite close to our boat!  We snapped a few pictures:

There was a also a tern flying about for a little while.  It didn't stick around long enough or come close enough for us to be able to ID it positively, but it was a big one, so I suspect it might have been a Caspian Tern.

In other large flying birds news, we saw and took pictures of a flying V of large birds overhead.  We could only see the silhouettes, but they seemed to be American White Pelicans!  They weren't geese or sandhill cranes, and what we could see of the silhouettes matched what you would expect from a Pelican.

We always see lots of turtles on Lake of the Isles and I'll have to get better at IDing them.  We definitely saw bunches of Painted Turtles.  There were also some turtles that had a knobby ridge down the middle of the shell.  The turtle ID site that I found indicated that the knobby ridge means that they were map turtles or false map turtles, of which we have three species in Minnesota.  I haven't had time to put more work into it to see if I could be more certain of the ID, but we'll definitely be back soon and hopefully see more and get some photos.  

Friday Links: 5/21/2010

Peregrine Watch says "As of today, we still need to raise $3600 by June 1^st to make Peregrine Watch possible this summer."   Donate here.  [Hawk Ridge Bird Observatory]


Researchers spent a month identifying new species in a very remote area of Indonesia, including five new palms and a giant rhododendron flower.  They also located the homeland of Berlepsch's six-wired bird of paradise, which was first described in the late 1800s, but a male had never been observed alive by western scientists.  [BBC News]


Pulpo cazatiburones: A cool video of a octopus taking on a shark, complete with dorky commentary.  [National Geographic via Ecoplaneta]


I wonder if I'll ever do a post about identifying archaea?  Probably not, but I'd love to.  [Olivia Judson]


Dot Earth riffs on synthetic biology.  [Dot Earth]

Jack-in-the-pulpit

Key ID characteristics:
  Jack-in-the-pulpit is most easily recognized by its distinctive flower from which it gets its name.  The "pulpit" is a cylindrical cone that has one flap which curls over the top and provides a protective cover for the "jack" inside.  The flower is only visible for a few weeks in the spring.
  If the flower is absent, you can also look for the berry cluster along with the three leaflet clusters.  The berry cluster starts out covered in a sheath, which wears away and exposes the unripe berries, which are green.  When the berries are ripen, they turn red.  I don't have any pictures of my own of the berries yet, but take a look at the links to get a view.
   There isn't any aboveground part of the stem, so the three leaflet clusters always grow directly from the ground and never branch off of a stem or trunk.  There can be one or two leaflet clusters per plant.
  The flower usually is not directly underneath the leaves, so you can see it from above.

Habitat:
Jack-in-the-pulpit is a common woodland wildflower that grows all across the eastern U.S. and Canada.

It can appear in clumps with multiple plants right near one another.  

Here is a picture of the plant as it is just emerging in the spring:

Here is a photo of a jack-in-the-pulpit in a sea of other spring woodland flowers (mostly trout lily):

All pictures in this post were taken at Nerstand Big Woods State Park in Nerstrand, MN.

Interesting tidbits:

The flowers are pollinated by fungus gnats (Sciaridae & Mycetophilidae) and the larvae of parasitic thrips.  They may emit a faint odor of stagnant water or fungi.

Mammals rarely eat the plant itself because it contains crystals of calcium oxalate, which makes it somewhat poisonous.  

"Jack" is the spathe in the middle of the flower, and contains both the male and female flower parts.  The "pulpit" is the spadix.

Links for further information:

USDA Plant Profile

Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center Native Plant Database

Zen's North Carolina Nature Notebook

all-creatures.org (lots of nice pictures here of the variation in flowers and fruits)

illinoiswildflowers.info

Trip Report: Nerstrand Big Woods State Park

Kellie and I visited Nerstand Big Woods State Park this weekend. It is a great park for naturalists, as it comprises a nice big patch of woods with minimal fragmentation.

The trees are really starting to leaf out, signifying the end of the spring ephemeral wildflower season. It was really cool to be out in the woods and see the forest floor carpeted in the green of Trout Lily and other woodland spring wildflowers. The Trout Lily will soon die back and the forest floor will become much more brown again.

Hidden Falls is a cool little waterfall in the middle of the park. 

We saw an American Robin taking advantage of the shelter of the bathroom building!

Partial list of species identified in the park (5/15 - 5/16/2010):

Birds:

• House Wren
• American Redstart
• American Robin
• Red-Bellied Woodpecker
• Baltimore Oriole
• Rose-breasted Grosbeak
• Brown-headed Cowbird
• Common Grackle
• American Crow
• Blue Jay
• Common Yellowthroat
• Black-capped Chickadee
• American Goldfinch
• Chipping Sparrow
• White-breasted Nuthatch

Plants:

• American Elm
• Sugar Maple
• Mayapple (blooming)
• Wild Geranium (blooming)
• Jack-in-the-pulpit (blooming)
• Trout Lily
• Bedstraw
• Maidenhair Fern
• Virginia Waterleaf (blooming)
• Wild Ginger
• Hepatica
• Marsh Marigold
• Trillium
• Dandelion (blooming ;)

Others:

• Garter Snake
• American Toad
• Eastern Chipmunk

Friday Links: 5/14/2010

Each week I will be posting links to interesting articles around the web relating to birds, nature, natural history, the environment and really anything that seems interesting and related to the topic of this blog.

Here is the inaugural edition:

One of the pleasures of outdoor baseball is actually being outdoors and nature just being able to fly on in.  Kirby the Kestrel has been a big star.  I went to the ballpark this week and didn't get a chance to see Kirby, but I did see large numbers of Chimney Swifts swooping around and catching insects.  [Star Tribune]

The neanderthal genome has just been sequenced, which is quite an accomplishment because they've been extinct for about 28,000 years.  [Olivia Judson]


Minnesota Birdnerd has been catching and banding some nice migrants, including a Blue-gray Gnatcatcher.  [Minnesota Birdnerd]

What I aim to do

I love to be outdoors and to know what I am seeing and hearing out there.  Naturally, I often use field guides to help me with this identification process.  Over the years I have had the chance to work with some great field guides and some that really aren't all that helpful.  I have also had the chance to take classes at the University of Michigan about both trees and birds.  In my Woody Plants class, I had the chance to see how the information presented in "field guides" can differ from how people actually identify species in the field, and even how they are taught in a class by the very writer of that field guide.

Field guides for birds have come a long way from the first one put out by Roger Tory Peterson.  His innovation was to identify and explain field marks for identifying birds, that is, the marks that one can identify when viewing the bird in its natural habitat.  This was a marked contrast from earlier guides which relied on the "birder" to have killed the bird and have it in hand.  Peterson's guide were a great leap forward, and bird guides have continued to build on his innovation, including better illustrations, including more different ages and variations in plumage, and including more information gleaned from the collective experience with this form of birding.

Most other areas do not have the same great field guides that birds do.  Most tree guides still seem stuck in with an overly technical style that makes them difficult to use for the average person and much less fun for the experienced to use.

In addition, most field guides are limited to only certain groups of species.  This makes sense in some ways, because a field guide has to be small in order to be useful.  No one wants to lug a 30 pound tome into the field.  But this separation means that if you have a field guide to birds and you happen to see a mammal, you will have no guide to help you with identification at all.

In 2009, I had the chance to visit Yosemite National Park.  While I was there, I wanted to identify the trees.  I didn't have a field guide that covered western trees, so I went to the nature shop to see if I could find one that would allow me to identify the trees.  I found some tree specific guides that were less than inspiring.  They had black and white line drawings, and descriptions that seemed to focus more on explaining everything about the tree but didn't really help me tell one from another easily.  Then, my partner Kellie noticed a field guide that would amaze us both.  It was the John Muir Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada.

This guide is, quite simply, the best field guide I have ever seen.  It is a guide to just about anything alive you can see in the Sierra Nevada and some things that are not alive.  The illustrations and descriptions are clear, and the field marks are prominently displayed.  The descriptions of the field marks are often done in a non-technical, easy to remember way.  The book was constantly in my pocket as we backpacked through the wilderness of Yosemite, and using the guide we successfully identified almost everything that we came across and were interested enough to ID.  We identified birds, trees, shrubs, herbs, lichens, spiders, snakes, mammals, mushrooms, amphibians and insects.  The one disappointment was that it did not include mosses.  Kellie and I are both experienced and relatively adept at identifying birds and plants, but this guide allowed us to identify things that we had very little experience with distinguishing like mushrooms and lichens.  I was supremely impressed with the book, and wished that there would be more great field guides like this.

One feature of the Laws guide is that it is very geographically focused.  It only covers the Sierra Nevada mountains in California.  This might seem like a severe limitation, in that the guide is far less useful anywhere else you might be.  However, this limitation turned out to be a tremendous strength.  By limiting the geographic scope of the book, it allows it to cover many different types of species, but still be small enough to be easily carried in the field.  Furthermore, actually using the guide is so much easier, because when you are looking for a species in the book, you do not need to flip past pages and pages of species that are ruled out simply by range alone.

My dream is to create such a guide for the north woods of Minnesota and Wisconsin where I live.  While I don't have all the knowledge and skills to create this guide right now, I have the ultimate goal of creating it.

I also intend to take advantage of new and modern technologies to create a better guide.  This blog will be what I do while I am in the long and involved process of creating this guide.  I will blog about the species and the information that will be in the guide.  However, blogs are an interactive media.  I intend to use the power of crowdsourcing to gather the collective wisdom of the outdoors community to help create the best possible guide.  The experience and knowledge of far more people can be aggregated and help to create a fundamentally better guide.  I also hope to be able to take advantage of the massive portable data possibilites of devices like the iPhone and iPod touch to create a guide that includes pictures, audio, video to bring field guides into the next millenium.

I am extremely excited about this project and invite you to follow and participate in this journey!