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]
Friday, May 28, 2010
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
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.
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, May 21, 2010
Friday Links: 5/21/2010
Peregrine Watch says "As of today, we still need to raise $3600 by June 1st 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]
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:
Zen's North Carolina Nature Notebook
all-creatures.org (lots of nice pictures here of the variation in flowers and fruits)
all-creatures.org (lots of nice pictures here of the variation in flowers and fruits)
Monday, May 17, 2010
Trip Report: Nerstrand Big Woods State Park
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, May 14, 2010
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]
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]
Thursday, May 6, 2010
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!
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!
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