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.