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Autumn Rambles
Green Heron On a walk, it’s safe to assume that surveillance is being conducted by some creature or other. This green heron is one example. It took a few minutes to ensure that we weren’t a threat before continuing the all-important business of hunting pond organisms for its lunch.
I’ve compiled images from three different walks into this gallery. There are enough photos that the slideshow spills over to a second page, reached by the arrow at bottom. It’s not a super colorful fall here — more yellows and browns than reds and oranges. But the unique autumn sunlight and odors of autumn give familiar trails a touch of enchantment just the same.
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Pond Album
I never followed up my heron post with the other pictures from my Sapsucker Woods walk. Here they are — a reminder that we always see new sights. Several of these plants are unfamiliar to me, and I need to follow up on them.
I’d also like to learn more about frogs. Years ago I took a picture of one sitting atop the ice on a frozen marsh in winter. On this walk, I saw this handsome fellow with his bubbly smile. I wonder: why the bubbles?
Anna Botsford Comstock is no help in this, but I do learn from her Handbook of Nature Study that:
- Their ears are the round gray spots next to their eyes. They’re visible on the frog in the picture.
- Frogs hibernate, burrowed into the mud of ponds. What made the one on ice appear in January remains a mystery. Reading the rest of that post makes me think it was an unseasonably warm spell, because the birds also were behaving as if it was spring. The frog may have been doing the same thing.
- They are a favorite food of herons. This I knew already.
- They can cover ground much more quickly than toads due to their muscular, developed hind legs, but water is their home environment.
- Frogs have a chameleon power to change to the color of their surroundings. This reminded me of one that I found on my kitchen counter shortly after my husband and I moved in. At that time the counter was dark green — in keeping with the original ’70s vintage of the kitchen! — and the frog sat motionless on it, identical in color, next to the sink. I was sure it was a prank, a plastic frog placed there by my husband, but in fact it was a real frog. I have no idea how it got there, other than perhaps it came through the drain. It’s the one and only indoor frog I’ve ever seen. I moved it out to the front step and later in the day it was still there but had changed to gray.
So much for my brief investigation of Comstock’s comments on frogs. Now on to the pictures.
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Why I leave the zinnias
These flowers are past their prime, but I leave them for the various passersby that might benefit from them: bees, goldfinches, passing hummingbirds, and butterflies. Today I saw a monarch battling the warm breezes to feast on them, and since it’s one of a precious few I’ve seen this summer, I wanted to take some pictures.
In August and early September, I searched several times for some caterpillars to see through the process of metamorphosis, but I didn’t find a single one. Monarchs aren’t doing well these days.
All the more reason to stop and admire while we can.
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Field Notes: Great Blue Heron
There were lots of sights at Sapsucker Woods this week when my daughter and I went for our first walk there in two years: interesting plants, frogs, fungi, berries, and damselflies performing strange feats. But the great blue heron stalking its prey in the pond stole the show.
Hunting heron, with 5 box turtles watching from a nearby log The Handbook of Nature Study doesn’t include a section on these birds, but Peter Rabbit, the narrator of The Burgess Bird Book, accurately notes that “Plunger [the osprey] hunts for his fish while Longlegs waits for his fish to come to him.” (Links to books are Amazon Associate links.) Peter gives a wonderfully exact description of Longlegs’s appearance, then notes his behavior:
Longlegs waded into the water a few steps, folded his neck back on his shoulders until his long bill seemed to rest on his breast, and then remained as motionless as if there were no life in him. . . By and by [Peter] began to wonder if Longlegs had gone to sleep. His own patience was reaching an end and he was just about to go on in search of Rattles the Kingfisher when like a flash the dagger-like bill of Longlegs shot out and down into the water. When he withdrew it Peter saw that Longlegs had caught a little fish which he at once proceeded to swallow head-first. Peter almost laughed right out as he watched the funny efforts of Longlegs to gulp that fish down his long throat.
We had a front row seat to this drama at Sapsucker Pond. The difference is that the fish was large, and it didn’t inspire laughter.
After a long wait, the heron caught a good-sized fish.
It immediately carried the fish to shallow water, seemingly aware that this would ensure an easier recovery if the fish flopped loose, walking slowly and deliberately so as not to drop its prey.
At the end, it reoriented the fish (now wriggling desperately) somehow, then tipped its head up and swallowed it.
It concluded the process with a few gulps of water, dipping down for a mouthful and then pointing its beak to the sky.
It’s a handsome, gawky, almost prehistoric looking bird, and I can’t begrudge it its need to eat, especially factoring in the great patience and deliberation it demonstrated. But it was hard to watch. It reminded me of my love-hate relationship with nature. I love the beauty, variety, endlessly interesting adaptations of our subjects. But I hate the cold-blooded predation.
Is there a value in seeing this?
What I think of is that it has the value of knowing about something real in animal existence, and human existence. Like the heron, we eat other living creatures. Unlike the heron, we can register the inherent violence, and this carries with it a greater responsibility to ensure a good quality of life for any living creatures we consume, and to minimize the cruelty of slaughter. For some, it means choosing a vegetarian or vegan diet.
In any case, the heron’s behavior meant more than a meal for the bird. It offered some food for thought to its human observers through an essential glimpse the natural world in operation.
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Field Notes: Chickadee
We went for a walk at a new preserve this week. Though there were some pretty views, we were struck by both the chilliness and the quietness of the setting. A fitting reminder for Labor Day: we’re heading into the fall.
We met another birder on our way out and he also commented on how the quietness of birds is a characteristic of fall. Not long ago the world was alive every morning with an intricate symphony of birdsong. Not so now.
However, along with a fleeting yellow-rumped warbler sighting, we did see chickadees. I love these friendly, talkative little birds and find them reassuring. They’re here, as Anna Botsford Comstock points out in the Handbook of Nature Study (#ad) all year. She points out that:
- They have at least 3 songs/calls, from the “Chickadee-dee-dee” to the “Fee-Bee” of spring to the “delightful yodel” they occasionally make;
- They often travel with nuthatches. The nuthatches focus on insects embedded in the bark of trees, while the chickadees harvest insect eggs — estimated at up to 100 a day — in the tips and twigs of the branches.
- They usually have 8 chicks, all snuggled together in a cavity of a tree, fence post, or birdhouse.
I love these little birds and commend them for their hardiness in staying here year-round.
What have you been seeing in your nature explorations this week?
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Field Notes: Fall Wildflowers
The paths in late August are sprinkled with wildflowers. Here are a few:
Aster 
Pea Family 
Crabapple 
Flat-topped white aster (?) 
Wild carrot/Queen Anne’s lace (?) 
Rose vervain (?) 
Goldenrod 
Joe-pye weed 
Chokecherry -
Field Notes: Tiger Swallowtail
Comstock’s memory of a black swallowtail’s hatching affirms that watching a caterpillar’s transformation into a butterfly can be one of the most captivating and memorable experiences a child has.
What struck me first about the tiger swallowtail I watched in the garden was its fearlessness. It was no more concerned to be fluttering around a giant than if I were another flower. My phone was sufficient to capture some pictures.
The second thing I noticed was its broken tail. It’s very unusual to find a perfect butterfly! They seem fragile, yet sometimes they can sustain much more damage than this one had and still last. I wonder how the broken tail happened.
The Handbook of Nature Study didn’t have a section devoted to the tiger swallowtail, but it did have a photo of one in the section on the black swallowtail. Comstock is a wonderfully descriptive writer, and it was fun to read her account of two caterpillars meeting on a caraway stem. Each of them
drew back the head and butted each other like billy goats, whack! whack! Then both turned laboriously around and hurried off in a panic.
But I had to go to this butterfly identification site to learn that
- Female swallowtails lay their green eggs on plants in Magnolia and rose families;
- Males can be seen sometimes “puddling” — drinking from puddles together in damp places, and ingesting sodium ions that help them live longer;
- While the young caterpillars resemble brown and white bird droppings, older ones are a magnificent green with false eyespots that give them a protective resemblance to a snake head; and
- When poked, they project a pair of bright orange glands and secrete a stinky substance that can be wiped on the offending animal
All of that is pretty amazing! Caterpillars and butterflies are some of the best subjects for triggering children’s interest and sense of investment in the natural world because they’re easily seen and approachable. I’ve been an admirer and protector of monarch butterflies since we watched a caterpillar undergo its metamorphosis in kindergarten, but clearly there are other species worth being on the lookout for!
Have you seen or learned about something outdoors this week? Feel free to share it in the comments!
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Field Notes: Cooper’s Hawk
According to Anna Botsford Comstock, “It is the teacher’s duty and privilege to try to revolutionize some popular misconceptions about. . . hawks.” They are, she argues, “most unjustly treated, largely because most farmers consider that a ‘hawk is a hawk,’ and should always be shot to save the poultry, although there is as much difference in the habits of hawks as there is in those of men” (104).
Click to enlarge image She’s writing in defense of the Red-tailed and Red-shouldered hawks. Unfortunately for the Cooper’s hawk, she considers it “to be feared” because it is “very destructive to poultry.”
Admittedly this hawk is intimidating to look at. Its red eyes, lowered brow and habit of hunting other birds athletically through even dense foliage make it a cause for dread among songbird lovers. Mature hawks have blue-gray backs and long, striped tails. From our dining room window, we’ve seen a few birds expertly snatched in the Cooper’s hawk’s strong talons. Its habit is to squeeze its prey to death before consuming it, often mantling over it on the ground or in a tree to fend off other distressed birds. This post from a few years ago shows a Cooper’s hawk mantling — till another predator scares it away.
Cooper’s hawk drying out after rain I don’t keep poultry, so I’ve never seen a Cooper attack a chicken. But I love the songbirds and hate to see it take one.
Comstock points out the distinctive flight of these hawks, noting that they “flap their wings for a time and then glide a distance. They do not soar on motionless outspread pinions by the hour” (105). All About Birds adds some fascinating facts, including the discovery that almost a quarter of the Cooper’s hawk skeletons in one study showed healed-over chest fractures. When we see the speed and agility of their flight, it’s not hard to understand how a collision with a tree might happen.
If a Cooper’s hawk targets birds at your feeders, you can take them down for a few days and it will move on. However, if you have a pair that have long regarded your neighborhood as their territory for nesting and hunting, that solution doesn’t work too well. You can remove the feeder permanently if you don’t want to aid and abet the Cooper. But if this predator is only an occasional visitor, you can consider whether it does more good to the birds to leave the feeder up or take it down.
On the feeder – image from 2015 What have you been seeing in your yard or nature walks this week?
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Nature Study as a Discipline
2022 This is a shot of my two daughters. We were on a nature walk. But since both were in college, I didn’t think of what we were doing as “nature study.” Nature study, I thought, was a homeschool subject.
Yet what else would you call it? Both are clearly students of nature in the photo. Once you have the habit, it pretty much sticks with you.
2010 Looking back, I’m reminded that we’ve been doing this a long time — setting out, looking around, and learning more about what we noticed when we get back home.
2009 Much of the joy of nature study was doing it together, and sharing so many discoveries. I feel less confident about going into the woods alone these days. Still, I’d like to return to a more intentional approach to nature study. The world is going crazy, but that only makes it more worthwhile to look outward at the amazing order and complexity and beauty in the network of life all around us.
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Greenwood Park
