Nature's Call: Adventures in Natural History

Girls Gone Wild

2011-11-26T18:06:00.003-06:00

In theory, our city-born mother understood the hold nature held on her country-born daughters, but it was the practice that gave her fits. She did not understand dirt’s affinity for girls’ clothes, nor that shoes were optional accessories. Every pot and pan she owned had, at one time or another housed every creepy-crawly critter that was to be found in the Ozark Mountains and, inexplicably, she took a dim view on such housing. She was raised in a southern city and sent to classes by her parents to be trained in the feminine arts of dance, piano and voice. On Sundays the de rigueur of her upbringing required that her shoes and purse match and that they be coordinated with her dress, hat, and gloves. So you see, it could only be a mystery to her how she managed to spawn her unlikely daughters, and to us it was a cosmic joke.

As a child I loved the woods and all that it sheltered-momma was less enthusiastic. Much to momma’s credit, when I was eight, she bought me my first pair of binoculars and bird book. They were my first grown-up possessions. I suspect she was trying to direct my interests in more genteel directions, away from pursuits like poking through the rabbit guts my cat left. Unfortunately for momma I could manage both.

A two-hundred acre bottomland wood lay between home and school. The landowner was absentee, at least that was the rumor on my elementary school grapevine. Deer trails crisscrossed the forest. Huge trees beckoned. There was real dirt in that bottomland not just red Ozark clay! I’m breathless thinking about that lovely dark dirt even now! Offering such amenities, the place was overrun with children claiming the land for their own wild ways and I was among them.

One day, a mother angry that her snotty-nosed, momma’s boy of a brat had been taunted by older boys, called all the mothers and whinged on about, “do you really know where your children are?” That afternoon on our way home we kids found, milling at the wood’s edge, an embarrassed troupe of mothers who, to their dismay, didn’t really know where their children were. Unfortunately for me my discomfited mother was one of them.

Momma began to brood, “What if there was an emergency, and I needed to find you?”

“Any kid can find me.”

Trying not to scare me, but succeeding in frightening herself, she persisted in her line of thought, “What if, and not saying anything is going to happen, but what if you fell and broke your leg?”

“You, knowing exactly where I was at, would not do anything for my broken leg-it’d still be broken.” No answer pleased her and that one in particular ticked her off there was no way she letting me go out into that wood again until she had seen it for herself. Saturday morning momma drove me to the housing addition that skirted the wood, and at road’s end we trekked out over the abandoned construction site. Bulldozers had left gaping ruts, clay pits abounded and between the woods and us lay a hundred-yard morass.

Three quarters of the way across momma stopped before a mud hole and stared at the distant trees, sighing she considered for me for a moment before speaking, “Don’t break your leg, and be home for dinner.” Even though every fiber of her told her not to let me go, my momma did. What a gift! She trusted me; she was confident of my abilities even if she wasn’t confident that the world at large wouldn’t hurt me. Hours were spent chasing, hiding from, and ambushing other children, forts built, trees climbed, frogs chased, mistakes made, and lessons learned all which gave me a confidence about my own physicality and a self-esteem that no over-protective parent could impart.

I tell you this story, because I don’t see children out on their own much in the woods today. Understandably, parents are scared by 24-hour news fear-mongers, but at some point reason needs to take over…the bogeyman always existed and always will, and some bogeymen are real; fortunately, their numbers are small. Bad things happen to good children no matter how watchful their parents. Learn something from my city-mother: Trust good things do happen and sometimes, just sometimes, you just have to drive your daughters to the end of the road and turn them loose in the woods!

Soon now...soon

2010-03-08T08:13:00.002-06:00

This morning life is pairing outside my window. White-throated sparrows fuss and chase in anticipation of northward flights and pairings while a brown thrasher sits upon a sycamore branch bowed before the sun. The red in the sunlight catches the bird’s back drying and drawing out the russet hues of damp morning feathers. Joined by another, the sun glowing in their yellow eyes, they bask for a time, side by side, but the well-oiled togetherness of parenthood is not quite upon them so one fusses then flees pursed by the other. The thrashers are replaced by two mourning doves on the telephone wires and a robin pair in tree. The robins dispel the morning chill warming their dark backs to the dawn. Their heads slightly cocked upwards, as robins do, catches light, and their yellow beaks look illuminated from within. The leftward bulging crescent moon pales in the blue morning sky and wanes while we all wait for the green to seep out of the sun into the ground bringing on the full waxing glory of spring.

Bonta-Nature-Gram #3: Red

2010-02-23T21:43:00.003-06:00

Gorging cedar waxwings bow down the small holly. The berries red as the birds’ sealing wax spots on their wings disappear down their gorges.

Bonta-Nature-Gram #2: Silhouettes Against the Sky

2010-02-22T01:04:00.003-06:00

Herons tall against the sky on nest of old soon to be new again, spring is on the rise, and soon little heron gullets will rise for food.

The Day Tears Fell on Alabama

2010-02-17T01:55:00.003-06:00

On a stunning and blustery day we decided to paddle up the backwater embayment despite it being the coldest day of the year. Deserted by mankind, the lake was silent but for the occasional swish of wind and the tinkling cries of birds. Unimpeded those small sounds gathered and rolled like thunder over the water demanding notice in the otherwise still day. The cold had stripped the air of haze rendering it to a basic clearness through which all the colors to be found in light bolted and teased the eye with a beauty usually hidden from view.

Joe and I sat in the heated car trying to screw up our courage for the better of a half hour before braving the lake. To avoid the inevitable, we first ate lunch, and then watched a brown creeper spiraling up a large pine delicately prying at bark with his curved beak. The graceful bird disappeared and the day outside could no longer be denied, we awkwardly emerged encased in a half inch of manufactured blubber and prepared the kayaks for launch. Despite the neoprene cocoon, my hands and feet stiffened in the cold, but I wanted to prove that the advantage of living in Alabama is the southern climate allows you to join in outdoor pursuits year round, and today was my test. Little did I know the day would illustrate more than that for me.

Once in the water, the forty-degree lake warmed the kayak, and with the cold taking leave of my bones I looked about. A dark shadow swept across the horizon. I paddled after it tossing across the chop on Minky Creek’s embayment all the while watching the fleeting shadow resolve into a young eagle. The pitiable youngster came away from the lake time after time without a fish in its grasping talons. Behind the eagle’s path the land rose up, and the farm field beyond the lake’s edge was golden and capped by a blue sky. Tall, delicately, wind-sculpted pines studded the shore. Yellow marsh grass and cattail tops swayed in the breeze, but below they were held fast by the thin ice rimming the shore.

Leaving the eagle to its uncertain fate we paddled on up Minky creek. Blackbirds and hardy little kinglets congregated on the thin ice retrieving wind-scattered seeds. My kayak silent, passed unnoticed and within inches of the chattering, banqueting birds. Up stream the cattails thickened and spilled far out into the shallows, and where the cattails met open water, their feet were festooned by green and red baubles reeling about on the choppy waves. Like a grotesque string of Christmas ornaments caught in the bulrushes, hundreds of shotgun shells, left to flounder by duck hunters, floated at the margins of the cattail bed. As I looked about me, I noticed more than bobbing shells, there were landscape pots, old coolers and toys, not to mention the flock of flailing plastic bags caught up in the trees. The trash along the lake was so ubiquitous that I hadn’t even noticed it until the “Christmas ornaments” caught my eye. I hadn’t noticed the trash defacing the landscape because it had become normal seemed so abnormal! A memory flashed through my mind of Chief Iron Eyes Cody crying as he looked out over the littered and polluted land. Clearly, the “People start pollution. People can stop it” seventies ad campaign could not have run on television in Alabama otherwise there wouldn’t be so much garbage! How was this so?

Another memory flashed back to earlier when I took my brother-in-law kayaking up Crow Creek. He was horrified by the refuse in the stream, and the only explanation he could think up was that people where hauling trash to the creek and dumping it. I tried to explain the why and how of the trash to him. I told him some of it was blown out of pickup truck beds, and some washed down the mountain, it simply got away from people there was no malicious dumping involved. None of my assurances satisfied him so I didn’t tell him about the old washing machine sitting out on Bellefonte Island in the main Tennessee River channel-that sucker didn’t wash down from anywhere and it took more than a wee bit of effort to get it out there. That bit of information I let slide. More memories flood by to months later to when I was visiting family in Michigan. The small towns that dot the Kalamazoo River had nature trails beside the river, and as I hiked those trails, I was struck by how clean it was. No plastic grocery bags stuck on branches, no plastic pots floating downstream just plain nature au naturel. I realized then how trashy Alabama must have appeared to my brother-in-law that day on Crow Creek.

Why do people in Alabama litter? Alabamans claim a special connection to the land so why don’t they see the trash they leave behind, and does a TV ad really have to tell us to clean up? We need to do what we do best: No one takes care of their own better than Alabamans. We take care of our families, our friends, and anyone in distress. We need to take care of that which is most fundamentally “our own”… the land, only we can keep tears from falling on Alabama.

Bonta Nature-Gram #1: Silences cools

2010-01-09T18:21:00.002-06:00

One freeze resistant sliver vies with the ice for dominance as the snow silently shrouds the mountain. Cold reigns in southern climes, silent and bitter.

Pam Croom © 2010

Bonta-Nature-Gram #3: child's play in the water

2009-08-14T12:29:00.001-05:00

Hanging-out by the geese; splash, miss, wild jab, miss! Inexperienced, the young great white egret doesn’t know the best food is solitary.

Bonta-Nature-Gram #2: Night sounds from the porch

2009-08-07T10:09:00.005-05:00

Bark! Dog? Yip! Frog? No…yip, far away..yip, farther yet. Yelp! A fox! Of course! I spy the quick fox with my little camera eye!

Bonta-Nature-Gram #1 for 2009: From the back porch

2009-01-03T23:15:00.001-06:00

Robins’ rattles echo in the arborvitae as they settle. Geese honk unsure whether to stay or go while the incoming are sure they’ll stay.

Pam Croom © 2009

Bonta-Nature-Gram #46: view from porch

2008-12-27T23:01:00.002-06:00

73 degrees and sunny, but smoke chokes the throat and wafts across the sky. Alabamans do love to light fires-too bad they don’t watch them.

Pam Croom © 2008

Go See the Eagles

2008-12-26T13:43:00.008-06:00

Bald eagle numbers had dwindled in Alabama. In the Tennessee valley there were none. An effort to bring back the population was started in 1985 with the first release of young birds; the program ran through 1991. It started with four young eagles that were released from the Mud Creek Hacking tower on the Mud Creek embayment of Lake Guntersville in 1985. A total of ninety-one eagles were released in Alabama. In 2007 it was estimated that there were around one hundred nesting pairs in the state! The program exceeded anyone's wildest hopes! It started out slow with several years of unsuccessful nesting starts, but in 1991 two nests succeed in producing fledged offspring! It has been going like gangbusters since.

One of the original hacked birds, a female, nests near the Guntersville dam. She does not seem to mind the proximity to people. Her head is yellowish that is how you can identify her. Older bird's white feathers yellow with age.

There are eagles year round on Guntersville Lake. Many of the nesters stay as residents, but right now is the highest the local population will be for the year with the influx of winter migrants. The migrants are mostly from the Great Lakes regions and they will return there starting in February.

For a great opportunity to see and learn about bald eagles come to Guntersville and stop by the park. Keep an eye out for eagles all along the Tennessee River in Alabama. If you cannot get to Guntersville, Pickwick Lake is another excellent spot to see eagles.

To see the Lake Guntersville State Park's Eagle Awareness 20009 Brochure go to:

www.guntersvillestatepark.com/eaglebrochure1.pdf

Bonta-Nature-Gram #45: view from porch

2008-12-25T23:59:00.002-06:00

A yellow flash and a chase ensues. The maple weeps, but no yellow-bellied sapsucker finds succor-just a defensive yellow-rumped warbler.

Pam Croom © 2008

Christmas Day

2008-12-25T21:18:00.013-06:00

I hope Christmas day has found you in good cheer. Hopefully, Santa has treated you well, because I know all of you were good little boys and girls! Santa did right by me! He brought me, via the husband after I wrote out the brand and number of it, an outdoor camera that will shoot in the infrared. Woo haa!

This afternoon, of course, was spent putting it up and testing it. Here the Stealth Cam is up, and I started trying it out...

and making adjustments...

one less sapling for America! Ah, better...

and down loading pictures...

and whoooaaa hurricane!

What I learned so far is that it takes three to four seconds after the motion detector senses motion for the camera to snap a photograph. After that it is about three seconds between shots. The camera is set in burst mode of nine photos then it waits for one minute before it starts looking for motion and photographing once again. For daylight, the motion sensor detects out to about thirty feet. So moving straight into the camera, me or a similarly paced animal (say deer), would cover almost that full thirty feet in four seconds. Therefore, I think aiming the camera straight down an animal trail will probably net me a partial of the animal coming or going and then eight animal-less photos. I would expect head on shots for bait stations to work well where animals are eating or pausing. I have a salt rock out, and there is the left over duck food to nibble so I hope I will attract some one other than myself! Stay tuned, but do not expect anything too soon for it is raining tonight! Drat it!

Bonta-Nature-Gram #44: view from front porch

2008-12-22T23:21:00.002-06:00

From the smallest magnolia, the chipping sparrows drifted down like brown, falling leaves to the grass to search for seeds in the cold air.

Pam Croom © 2008

Bonta-Nature-Gram #43: view from porch

2008-12-20T23:59:00.001-06:00

kingfisher darts, hovers, stalls, dives, and flies away to the snag piscine snack in beak. Whack, whack, against the branch goes the fish, bones broken and glug!

Pam Croom © 2008

Bonta-Nature-Gram #42: back yard

2008-12-19T23:30:00.003-06:00

My customer, patiently, waits at the end of the yard by the dish for his appointed dinner: Breckenridge the beautiful.

Bonta-Nature-Gram #41: view from the dock

2008-12-18T23:54:00.003-06:00

Canada geese in a V formation glide through the sky reflected in the water. The birch bejeweled in drops catches the last light.

Pam Croom © 2008

What are your thoughts?

2008-12-18T00:29:00.002-06:00

Dear Readers,

If you would please, would you express your thoughts about a couple of questions?

What is natural in the world? Where is nature or the natural world found?

Thanks

Bonta-Nature-Gram #40: soundscape from the dock

2008-12-17T23:25:00.005-06:00

The tinkle of rain on water.
English house sparrows chatter.
Far away the wail of a siren carries over the rain.
Dim day and bright sounds.

Pam Croom © 2008

Bonta-Nature-Gram #39: view from the dock

2008-12-17T01:32:00.003-06:00

Honking geese approach shrouded in the rain and fog. Splash! The sluicing sound of landing incorporeal Canada geese is heard.

Pam Croom © 2008

In a Nutshell: Alabama Supplejack

2008-12-17T00:40:00.010-06:00

Alabama supplejack (Berchemia scandens) is easy to spot at this time of year in the bare north Alabama woods. It is a beautiful little twinning vine with lovely shaped, heavily veined leaves. These leaves are the quintessential leave-regular in shape, parallel veins, and pleasing in color. Miller and Miller in their book, Forest Plants of the Southeast and Their Wildlife Uses, quaintly call supplejack "tardily deciduous." True to their account, the supplejack around here stubbornly has hung onto its leaves refusing to believe it is deciduous despite several nights with hard frosts and temperatures in the low 20's.

The supplejack, also know as rattan vine, climbs up supports by scrambling up over trees or twining up tree trunks with its pliant vines. It prefers moist soils, but it is not unusual to find it growing on dry, dolomite glades in the Ozarks tangled across the rocks. The lianas are quite strong measuring up to three inches across, and sometimes they throttle the supporting trunk killing the tree. Many walking sticks with a natural spiral form were made by supplejack vine! The "rattan" vines have been used in making wicker in this county, and although I do not think it is being commercially used, for artisans it is a good basket material.

The flowers bloom in May and June. They are non-descript tiny, star-shaped green flowers grouped in panicles at the end of stems. Some places the vine is thick enough to be the dominant pollen used to produce a dark colored amber honey. In Louisiana it is important contributor to the honey crop. The supplejack's small flowers fruit into a syncarpous drupe with a single stone containing two seeds. It is a lovely shade of dark, concord grape-blue and is pea sized. The fruits, although not high in protein, are high in calcium. Many birds eat the fruits, but often later in winter, quail, turkeys, and ducks among them. Mammals eat the fruits too, for raccoon and grey squirrels they are tasty treats. Deer feed on the tender foliage in spring and early summer; in fact, it is a preferred food.

The supplejack in this photo is the same as in the above winter photos. Can you find it? Look in the right hand top corner.

References about Supplejack:

Kurz, D. 1997. Shrub and Woody Vine of Missouri. Conservation Commission of the State of Missouri

Lieux, M.H. A 1971. Melissopalynological Study of 54 Lousiana (U.S.A.) Honeys. Review of Paleobotany and Palynology. 13: 95-124

Miller, J.H. and K.V. Miller. 2005. Forest Plants of the Southeast and Their Wildlife uses. rev. ed. University of Georgia Press. Athens

Radford, A.E., H.E. Ahles, C. R. Bell. 1968. Manual of the Vascular Flora of the Carolinas. University of North Carolina Press. Chapel Hill

Bonta-Nature-Gram #38: view from porch

2008-12-15T10:56:00.007-06:00

Flat light suffuses each nook and cranny, chasing shadows from their play, and stillness reigns as birds and crickets wait for rain.

WHNT-TV 19, radar http://www.whnt.com

Pam Croom © 2008

Bonta-Nature-Gram #37: From the side yard

2008-12-14T18:34:00.002-06:00

The Scattered brown leaves of the tall forest lie upon another verdant forest only one inch high. Dinosaur sparrows cast off leaves nearby.

The facts, just the facts, Mam!

2008-12-13T20:45:00.011-06:00

Continued from "The Corpse in the Garage"

http://naturescalladventuresinnaturalhistory.blogspot.com/2008/12/corpse-in-garage.html

The Body:
total length 3 3/4 inches, body length 2 1/18 inches, tail length 5/8 inch, forefoot length 3/8 inch (without nails), hind foot length (without nails) 9/16 inch

The shrew I found in the garage was tiny, if you have never seen one, it is apparent from my measurements that they are quite small. Since his tail is only slightly longer than his back foot, he is a short-tailed shrew. In the southeast, there are several short-tailed shrews. There is the least shrew (Cryptotis parva), but they are very small and distinctly bicolor. My guy is not like that. The other short-tailed shrews are in the Blarina species. There are three or four Blarinas depending if you are a taxonomic lumper or splitter: northern short-tailed shrew (Blarina brevicauda), southern short-tailed shrew (Blarina carolinensis), Elliot's short-tailed shrew (Blarina hylophaga), and Everglade short-tailed shrew (Blarina peninsulae) as a species if you are a splitter, or Blarina brevicada peninsulae as a subspecies if you are a lumper. In north Alabama, it is simplified somewhat in that only the northern and southern might be found here. Note I said, "might be." Range maps are all over the place, and the only consistency in the maps is their inconsistency. So, I do not know whether the shrew is a northern or a southern short-tailed shrew.

What are the differences between the northern and southern? Minor, and somewhat esoteric, skull differences are found and to some degree, size. The best detectable difference is chromosomal count, but as far as I can tell, there has been no comprehensive genetic study of short-tailed shrew distributions in Alabama. In "Mammalian Species," published by the American Society of Mammalogists, the southern short-tailed shrew appears to occur below the Tennessee River in this area, and the northern short-tailed shrew appears to be above the Tennessee River. So, by that, it would probably be the northern, but not so fast! "Mammalian Species'" authors report that the total length of northern short-tailed shrews as ranging from 106-126 mm in Pennsylvania to 125-141 in Nebraska. For southern short - tailed shrews, the authors give sizes in several southern states: 72-95 mm in Louisiana, 99-105 mm in South Carolina, 90-105 in Kentucky, 84-102 mm in Florida. So...by these measurements my shrew (95mm) is a southern short-tailed shrew. To confuse it more Schwartz and Schwartz in Wild Mammals of Missouri report these total length ranges: northern 95-127 mm (3 3/4 -5 inches) and southern 72-107 mm (2 3/4- 4 1/4 inches). So you can see there is size over lap between these species. The Schwartzes, appearing to follow Brown's distributions in the south from his book, A Guide to the Mammals of the Southeastern United States, show that southerns are the only inhabitant of north Alabama. Befuddled and not amused I do not know what my poor deceased shrew’s identity.

So, not knowing what shrew it was, I thought I would consult the authorities, and I whipped off an email to the Anniston Museum of Natural History:

“I am trying to find out what short-tailed shrews live in north Alabama. Range maps I've found are contradictory; some report the northern and some report the southern short-tailed shrew, but none report overlap in ranges.”

I promptly received an answer back from Dr. D. Spaulding, Curator of Collections. He sent me an Alabama mammalian land species list and neatly side stepped the question:

“I have attached a list of all the Land Mammals of Alabama. We have 4 species of shrews in Alabama.”

His answer or lack of answer tells me volumes...that there is probably not a definitive answer without genetic studies. So I do not know what kind of short-tailed shrew it is (I’m leaning to southern, but what do I know).

Next, what is its gender? I've been calling it a he, but I really do not know its gender. These shrews do not have an external scrotum as the testes are housed internally in the body, a primitive feature. The birth canal of the female is not a separate external opening. A shrew is a primitive mammal and has a cloaca, the external opening, into which the urinary, intestinal, and reproductive tracts empty. So there is no obvious external gender difference. There are minor size differences reported between males and females, but that is relative and not a definitive marker.

So what do I know? The shrew is small, it is either a northern or southern short-tailed shrew, its gender is unknown, and it died from undetermined causes. I would make a poor policewoman! I am not the only one lacking the facts, science know very little about these shrews. Their semi-fossorial (semi-burrowing) lifestyle along with that they do not reliably enter into traps makes them difficult to study.

Why care about a small mammal such as the shrew that you may never see, well...Jackson in his book Mammals of Wisconsin did the math:

Assuming that each individual consumes an average of about one-third its own weight each day (eight grams), the army of 84 million mole shrews [his name for short-tailed shrews] in Wisconsin consumes more than 500 million tons of pests annually, and equivalent of two big truck loads a day for each county in the state. If we assume that each Blarina averages less than three invertebrates (insects, snails) a day and less than two mice a year then numbers consumed would reach the almost unbelievable, yet not unlikely, number of 90 billion invertebrates and 150 million mice...The mole shrew must be accepted in the class of mammals as a very useful ally to man.

Just think, without shrews in your yard you might be overrun with roly-polys!

Later what is known of the cool natural history of short-tailed shrews...

References used in "The Corpse in the Garage" and "The Facts, Just the Facts, Mam"

Brown, L.N. 1997. A Guide to the Mammals of the Southeastern United States. The University of Tennessee Press. Knoxville. 236pp.

Chapman, S. 1990. The Natural History of Shrews. The Natural History of Mammals Series. Comstock Pub. Assoc. Cornell University Press. Ithaca. NY. 178pp.

Choate, J.R., J.K. Jones, Jr., and C Jones. 1994. Handbook of Mammals of the South-Central States. Louisiana State University Press. Baton Rouge. 300pp.

Fry, B. G., The Poisonous Primate?!, http://www.venomdoc.com/loris/slow_loris.html accessed 12/3/08

George, S.B., J.R. Choate, and H.H.Genoways. 1986. Mammalian Species. 261: 1-9

Jackson, H.H.T. 1961. Mammals of Wisconsin. The University of Wisconsin Press. Madison. 504pp.

McCay, T.S. 2001. Blarina carolinensis. Mammalian Species. 673: 1-7

Pepling, R. S. 2004. Critter Chemistry: The Stunning Saliva Of Shrews, Researchers are trying to unravel the mystery of the shrew's venomous brew. Chemical & Engineering News. http://pubs.acs.org/cen/critter/8242shrews.html. accessed 12/3/2008

Schwartz, C.W. and E.R. Schwartz. 2001. The Wild Mammals of Missouri. University of Missouri Press. Columbia. 2nd re. ed. 368pp.

Bonta-Nature-Gram #36: view down the hill from the front yard

2008-12-13T18:28:00.000-06:00

Piercing the dull gray clouds, a brilliant golden beam illuminates the beaver swamp. In the gloom, a robin and mockingbird shrilly fight.

Pam Croom © 2008