Moth mullein seed capsule (photo by Kate St. John)
This week I noticed for the very first time that there are tiny knobbed hairs on moth mullein stems, sepals and fruit capsules.
Closeup of moth mullein seed capsule (photo by Kate St. John)
Moth mullein (Verbascum blattaria) is a biennial plant native to Eurasia and North Africa that’s now naturalized in North America. It blooms here from June to October.
The earliest flowers have already produced fruit by July. Each fruit is the swollen ovary of one of these flowers.
In this short film, Shawn Hayes describes his relationship with birds and how he became a falconer. His co-star in the film is an immature prairie falcon (Falco mexicanus) that he’s working with to orchestrate the perfect flight.
About the bird’s future he says:
The day that I release my bird back out to the wild I know that bird is going to survive. I know that bird is going to go out and probably get a mate and produce other birds in the wild. And I was part of that.
Shawn Hayes, “How One City Man Found His Calling in the Wild”
“Falconry is not a sport, it’s not an art — it’s a way of life.”
Fruit fly traps, July 2012 (photo by Kate St. John)
It’s that time of year again when fruit flies spontaneously appear in your kitchen. Where did they come from? How do you make them go away?
Fruit flies or “vinegar flies” (Drosophila melanogaster) love moisture and the vinegar smell of fermenting, rotting fruit. They and their eggs cling to fresh fruits and vegetables. They even squeeze through your screens to get to their goal.
One fruit fly becomes one hundred in a matter of days as we learned to our dismay when they invaded our office in 2012.
The western conifer-seed bug (Leptoglossus occidentalis) is a North American sucking beetle that resembles a stink bug, though he’s not in the stink bug family. Ornately marked and 1/2 to 3/4 inch long (16-20 mm), he feeds on the sap of developing pine cones. This causes the seeds in the cones to wither which is only a minor problem in western forests but a big deal at pine seed orchards.
The seed bug used to be confined to temperate forests of the Pacific coast but has naturally expanded his range all the way east to Nova Scotia. In the past 20 years he’s been accidentally imported into Europe, Chile, and Japan so there’s international interest in how this bug finds pine cones at a distance.
Pine cones emit infrared light because they’re warmer than the rest of the tree by almost 60 degrees F. These photos from the study, taken in normal and infrared light, explain: “The temperature bar to the right of the paired images reveals that cones are up to 15°C warmer than foliage under high-cloud conditions.”
To prove that the bug is attracted to infrared, researchers set up infrared emitters shaped like pine cones (photos below). Did the bug approach them? Yes, it did. Could the bug find the cones when his IR sensors were experimentally blocked? No he could not.
As the study explains:
Here, we show that the western conifer seed bug, Leptoglossus occidentalis Heidemann (Hemiptera: Coreidae), a tissue specialist herbivore that forages during the photophase and feeds on the contents of seeds within the cones of many conifers (Blatt & Borden 1999; Strong et al. 2001), uses IR radiation from developing cones as a long-range foraging cue. We present data revealing that (i) cones are warmer and continuously emit more near-, mid- and long-range IR radiation than needles, (ii) seed bugs possess IR receptive organs and orient towards experimental IR cues, and (iii) occlusion of the insects’ IR receptors impairs IR perception.
Apparently the world looks very different to a western conifer-seed bug. For him the pine cones really stand out while the rest of the world is boring.
postscript: NOTE that the western conifer-seed bug (Leptoglossus occidentalis) is not the scourge of our western pine forests. The forests are being killed by a completely different native bug — the mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) — whose larvae make galleries under the bark and kill the tree from inside. Below: Pines killed by the mountain pine beetle, Galleries under the bark, and the mountain pine beetle.
Mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) and its damage (photos from bugwood; see citations and links below)
photo credits: Click on the captions to see the originals. * Infrared images from study at Royal Society 2008.0742, Creative Commons license * Western conifer-seed bug photos from Wikimedia Commons * Mountain pine beetle row of photos: #5540352: Kill at Deadman Road, CO, William M. Ciesla, Forest Health Management International, Bugwood.org, #UGA1254003, Galleries, William M. Ciesla, Forest Health Management International, Bugwood.org, #UGA1306005, mountain pine beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae, Ron Long, Simon Fraser University, Bugwood.org
Like other members of the Corvid family, blue jays (Cyanocitta cristata) are very intelligent and have strong family ties. Some of their intelligence and social awareness is put to use to fool each other, especially where food is involved.
Watch the video above by Lesley The Bird Nerd to see how an adult blue jay played a trick on a young one that was planning to steal his food.
Bristle-thighed curlews are so rare and hard to find that they’ve been called the birders’ Holy Grail. The word “Tahiti” in their scientific name, Numenius tahitiensis, tells us why. These birds are Pacific Islanders. Their remote breeding location in Alaska was not discovered until 1948.
Adult bristle-thighed curlews spend only two months on their breeding grounds at the central Seward Peninsula and Yukon Delta. They arrive in late May and begin nesting almost immediately.
At 3+ weeks old they learn to fly but they aren’t independent yet. At 5 weeks their parents leave them with a few caretaker adults and depart for the staging grounds at the Bering Sea.
There they fatten up for the first leg of their journey home — a non-stop 2,500 mile flight to Laysan, Midway Atoll in the Hawaiian islands. For some curlews the final destination is much further, as shown on the map below. (Red spots are breeding range, white arrow is first stop, blue circles are wintering locations.)
Young curlews follow the adults a few weeks later. They won’t return to Alaska until they’re three to four years old.
This year I happened to visit Hawaii and Alaska on the same schedule as the bristle-thighed curlews. My Life Bird curlew was a fly-by at Kahuku Golf Course, Kauai on February 28, photographed here by Michael McNulty. Then I saw curlews on their breeding grounds near Nome, Alaska in June.
Every year the curlews travel from Hawaii to Alaska. With a worldwide population of only 7,000 birds and sea level rise due to flood their home islands, this amazing bird is vulnerable to extinction.
p.s. Bristle-thighed curlews are closely related to whimbrels, whom they resemble. We saw and heard both species in western Alaska.
Chocolate lily, 18 June 2019 (photo by Kate St. John)
Last month we found chocolate lilies and other delightful wildflowers while on PIB‘s Alaska birding tour. Here are the best of them, mostly found at Turnagain Pass Rest Area on 18 June 2019. Please leave a comment to help me identify the ones I’ve labeled “mystery” flowers and correct any I’ve misidentified. Thanks!
At top, the chocolate lily (Fritillaria camschatcensis) is a gorgeous small flower that resembles a Canada lily (Lilium canadense) except that it’s the color of chocolate. What a treat!
Below, clasping twisted-stalk (Streptopus amplexifolius) has delicate bell-shaped yellow flowers that hang under the leaves. They remind me of Solomon’s seal.
Clasping twisted-stalk, near Anchorage, 13 June 2019 (photo by Kate St. John)
Liverleaf wintergreen in Seward, 18 June 2019 (photo by Kate St. John)
What is the yellow flower shown below? It looks like a cinquefoil to me but the leaves are so big. (The flower is about the size of the first joint of my thumb.)
Mystery: Is this a cinquefoil? (photo by Kate St. John)
Threeleaf foamflower in Seward, 20 June 2019 (photo by Kate St. John)
I couldn’t identify this flower at first, but thanks to Janet Campagna’s comment I think these are yellow marsh marigold (Caltha palustris), seen at Turnagain Pass Rest Area, 18 June 2019.
Yellow marsh marigold at Turnagain Pass Rest Area, 18 June 2019 (photo by Kate St. John)
And finally, dwarf fireweed (Chamaenerion latifolium) was easy to find along the Teller Road northwest of Nome.
Dwarf fireweed by the Teller Road outside Nome, Alaska, 21 June 2019 (photo by Kate St. John)
Please let me know if I’ve misidentified any of these. The solo yellow flower, 7th photo, remains a mystery.
(photos by Kate St. John, all of them taken with my Pixel 3 cellphone)
Indian pipe, Schenley Park, 11 July 2019 (photo by Kate St. John)
I found a ghost flower blooming in Schenley Park last Monday.
Indian pipe (Monotropa uniflora) looks ghostly because it has no chlorophyll. Instead it’s symbiotic or parasitic on fungi that have a symbiotic/parasitic relationship with tree roots. This makes Indian pipe a parasite on a parasite … sort of.
Though it’s a perennial member of the Heath family, Indian pipe only grows when conditions are perfect and these are so impossible to replicate that the plant isn’t cultivated.
Its stems and flowers grow and bloom in a couple of days. The flowers are pollinated, in part, by long-tongued bees and fade within 1-2 weeks. After pollination the developing fruit makes the flower head stand up. Click here to see.
Later this month I’ll return to see the fruiting stems and will look for remnants of the bizarre truck accident that was in progress when I found the flowers.
Hours later, at 3:30pm, a friend and I made our way from Indiana Township (between Fox Chapel and Cheswick) to Churchill. It took over an hour to get there. The traffic was horrendous and the roads that were open were littered with debris. Nadine, Sandy Creek, and Washington Boulevard were all closed.
But I got two photos of the river in flood.
High water on the Allegheny River at Sharpsburg, 11 July 2019 (photo by Kate St. John)
High tide on the Allegheny!
p.s. This rain didn’t even set a record at the airport though there may have been localized records. My friend Julie had 4″ in her rain gauge in her Squirrel Hill backyard. Sue Vrabel commented below that she had 4.5″ in Churchill.
Even when a species is invasive, nurseries sell it and people plant it until it’s banned. Consider the case of Leylandii trees, sold as shrubs in the U.K.
At the garden center, the homeowners say, “I want something that grows quickly and provides some privacy.” They bring home these cute little shrubs.
But Leylandii grow three feet a year. Eventually the shrubs are so tall they have to be trimmed using ladders, like the “ultimate green square” in the photo at top.
