northeast-flora-and-fauna

A couple weeks ago I encountered 2 (presumably) different Brown Thrashers ; at least I saw them almost 2 hours apart and a healthy walk away from each other. Because I don't see them very often I wasn't sure who I was seeing, but the leading candidates were the Brown Thrasher or the Wood Thrush . When I looked at the pictures at home and looked them up in my field guides, the long tail, streaky rather than spotty marks on the breast/belly, and lack of lines near the eye convinced me that I had Brown Thrashers. (Brown Thrashers are also quite a bit larger than Wood Thrushes, though without a "reference bird" like an American Robin nearby it's kind of hard to judge size.) Brown Thrashers are one of our general-purpose mimics, and it's believed that they have an even larger repertoire of songs than their Northern Mockingbird relatives. While the Northern Mockingbird will usually mimic a sound 3 times, the Brown Thrasher will mimic it only twice, making it possi...

Though I got some pictures of Wood Frogs earlier in the season and had been hearing the small/elusive Spring Peepers about that time, it was only about 5 weeks ago that I started seeing one of our most visible frogs, the American Bullfrogs . I've talked before about how to differentiate them from their Green Frog cousins (hint: it's all about the dorsolateral ridges), a fairly similar frog that starts appearing about the same time of year. This wasn't my first bullfrog picture of the season but was one of the most handsome. I think they tend to look a little discolored and emaciated very early in the spring. A few weeks later they seem to regain their plumper and greener appearance. May 13, 2022 at Duke Farms Photo 199462915, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC) By way of comparison, here's one of the 1st pictures I got last year. April 13, 2021 at Delaware Raritan Canal Photo 121031804, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

I saw this Red-winged Blackbird who "stopped to smell the flowers" earlier in the month. Or did it? Although birds do have olfactory glands to be able to smell, they're not well developed in most birds including our passerine friend here. Similarly, these birds have extremely few taste buds. For most birds, smell and taste presumably aren't a big part of their lives . There are exceptions. We know our Turkey Vultures have quite good senses of smell which they use to find dead animals. And there are questions. It's believed that birds learn to avoid eating Monarch butterflies after tasting them, which doesn't sound compatible with a weak sense of taste. So what's this bird doing? I'm assuming it's about seeds and insects; birds know that pollinated flowers tend to produce seeds, and that the flowers attract both insects that eat the plants and that pollinate the flowers. Stopping to check out the flower could scare up a meal. May 15, 2022 at Duk...

Do you ever see turtles that appear to be waving at you? Or at least that's what it looks like in a picture, though there wasn't really much movement to the wave? Given that turtles are somewhat fearful of us and they probably haven't studied anthropological greetings, you can assume they're not just being friendly.  Presumably this is done to increase sun exposure . Turtles are out in the open basking in the sun to regulate their body temperature, and having a leg in the shade of their shell doesn't help the process. By sticking limbs out away from their body, they can warm themselves up a little faster. But just in case they were trying to be friendly, it wouldn't hurt to wave back. 😀 March 21, 2022 at Duke Island Park

Earlier this spring some wooded areas were inundated with the tent-like webs of the Eastern Tent Moth  caterpillars These caterpillars are native to North America, and prefer to feed on apple, crabapple, and cherry trees, though they're not extremely picky eaters. When I was a kid, we mistakenly thought these were Spongy Moth caterpillars, an invasive pest you probably knew by a different name . As an invasive species, the Spongy Moth caterpillars are probably more destructive of the 2 since they have fewer natural predators or parasites. Although the Spongy Moth does make silk, it never makes the tent-like webs found on trees. It sounds to me like tent moth caterpillars are less likely than Spongy Moth caterpillars to damage trees, at least partly because they eat leaves in the spring when trees are better able to regrow their leaves, and partly because they do have plenty of natural predators/parasites in our ecosystem so their populations don't generally get as large. When...

I think this is the 1st time I spotted a Common Merganser mom with her ducklings.  I see some evidence of the young referred to as "merganserlings", though it doesn't show up in any dictionary. I kind of like this since it implies juvenile ducks for a species of duck that doesn't have "duck" in their name. For non-birders, the 1st sentence of this post raises questions like "how did a merganser acquire ducklings?" or "is this an example of brood parasitism ?". Ducklings is the official term for merganser young, though I suspect many birdwatchers would forgive you calling them merganserlings. It looks like one of the ducklings is actually riding on the back of the mother. I don't think this is common behavior among ducks (possibly because they wouldn't all fit), but other waterfowl like grebes may do it regularly. With 8 ducklings around her, this is certainly within the range for a Common Merganser brood (6-17 eggs are typically ...

Here's a bird I started seeing about a month ago and is now one of our easiest birds to spot, a Gray Catbird . Before April whenever I'd catch a glimpse of a bird it would usually turn out to be an American Robin , and now when I hear a bird (and manage to locate it) it frequently turns out to be a Gray Catbird. I don't think the issue is that we now have fewer American Robins, nor that we have a lot more Gray Catbirds than American Robins; the American Robin is in the running for the most common species of bird in North American. I think that the change has to do with 2 factors combining together: The Gray Catbird is a bolder, louder bird that will vocalize in one spot, sometimes even when it knows it's been spotted by a human. As the trees leaf out, the quieter American Robin takes advantage of this and hides more effectively. This doesn't mean that you won't find robins around. But if you're in a place with a lot of foliage, it might be easier to find cat...