The word of the day is…..

Zugenruhe-German (pronounced…tsooken-ruha).

In the biological world this word is defined as the “restlessness” that animals feel prior to, or during migratory times. Many scientists have explored this biological phenomenon in birds specifically. By experimentally altering(increasing) the length of daylight upon a bird, scientist see a noticeable change in behavior. Birds begin eating much more, fattening up, and exhibit more movement(or restlessness) than normal.

I bring this word to our attention because bird activity is on the rise now in the Adirondacks and will be over the next 3 months.

Migrating birds are arriving as we speak! On a recent drive through St Lawrence County farm country I saw thousands of Canada Geese in flight, Red-winged Blackbirds & Common Grackles cavorting in the treetops , Killdeer calling from fields, and general merriment in the avian world.

Our first arrivals are usually those birds that don’t travel all that far, on a continent-wide scale that is. Many of the birds we see arriving now have traveled from the Mid-Atlantic region of the US. But soon enough others will join in. It should also be noted that many birds are just “passing through” our area while on their longer flights into Canada. Bon Voyage!

There is a feeling of zugunruhe currently being felt in the humid, tropical regions of Central and South America…by the birds of course! Once a good stiff south breeze picks up in the jungles, the birds destined for the Adirondacks take advantage of it and take to the airways, thus beginning their northward journey’s. Stay tuned for more migratory updates as the season progresses.

On another front…we hear that the latestNY winter Bald Eagle count has revealed some pretty cool numbers. And to think that not too long ago this bird was once facing near extinction in the east. Hurray for all the biologists who care!

In the very near future I’ll be posting a wonderful weather map that will show you big-blobsof-migrating-birds flying over the US under star-filled skies.

What birds are YOU seeing? What signs of animal “zugunruhe” are you seeing? As a birdwatcher I think I’m getting that zugunruhe feeling….

Photo credit: Canada Goose-Wikipedia

Learn Your Boreal Birds-Gray Jay

I’d like to start a new feature here on Notes from the field which I’ll call “Learn your boreal birds“. This title refers to the many species of birds that spend a majority of their time in the Boreal Forest region of North America.

What is boreal again? Boreal forests make up a fair percentage of our forested land in the Adirondacks. It’s made up of mostly coniferous trees or cone-bearing species (pine, spruce, fir, tamarack,cedar).

If you were to map out the boreal region on a globe, it would be shown as a continuous ring of green encompassing northern Canada, Alaska, Scandinavia, and Siberia.

But as luck would have it, the Adirondacks, due to several factors including; soil, bedrock, local microclimates, and vegetation, has a version of boreal that we can see/access from many back roads throughout the region.

As we’ll see in future postings, some of our boreal birds are year-round residents and some are summer residents only. These summer only birds will spend the winter months down in the tropical regions of South and Central America and then migrate to the Adirondacks in the spring.

I’ll start this series with the year-round resident Gray Jay. Clicking this link will take you directly to the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s(CLO) “All About Birds” website. If you look at the Jay’s home range map you’ll see a tiny dot where the Adirondacks are. We’re lucky because this is the only area in New York State where this jay can be found. Gray jays are related to all the family(Corvidae) members of the jays, crows, and ravens of North America.

You can read all about the life history of gray jay on CLO site but I’d like to focus on our Adirondack population. I’ll often find gray jays squealing and screeching along the Bloomingdale Bog trail(snowmobile trail in winter). I find the best part of the trail to see the jays is to drive to the northern access point (along County Rt 55) between Gabriels and Bloomingdale. Here you can walk south along the trail, and listen carefully as you do, for the high-pitched squawking the jays make as they approach the trial.

Over the past two summers, I’ve come across several pairs of gray jay with their very dark gray young(photo above right). This leads us to believe that gray jays have had several successful breeding seasons in a row. At one site I counted 4 young!

Gray jays have the wonderul ability to “stash” food in various places in the forest. They will often put food in the crotch of tree limbs, or bury it, or place it in an abandoned nest hole in a tree. All this so it has food(if it remembers where) to tide it over during the winter months.

Gray jays are rather tame and will often approach humans and feed out of hands…if there’s some good food in that hand. Keep some granola in your coat pocket if you’re heading into a bog.

A Visitor Who Came In From The Arctic

This past Friday a gentleman from downstate was visiting the Adirondacks in search of some interesting winter birds. His main target was a Northern Hawk Owl(an owl that spends most of it’s time in the boreal (northern coniferous forest) regions of Canada. One showed up in Champlain, NY sometime in Nov. and has been busy finding mice and voles to keep itself alive these many cold months, as well as keeping birdwatchers happy.

Well, said gentleman was on his search but failed to find the owl. So he turned his viewings to nearby Lake Champlain, specifically Rouse’s Point(Clinton County), and there he found a rare species of gull, called the Ivory Gull, that inhabits the Arctic ice-bound regions around Greenland, Labrador, northern Canada, and Scandinavia.

He had this sighting posted to a birdwatching internet site in Vermont and with that action he started, among the birding world, a low hum that soon reached(and is still reaching) a well-controlled chaos of birder-email traffic from Vermont to New York to New Hampshire and down to NY City and Long Island. I will go out on a limb here and say that most of  the birding world of northeastern US will have heard about this gull in a matter of 2-3 days. Rare bird sightings among birders spreads like fire on grease!

“Hey boss, can I have the day off Monday?” will be heard around offices all over. Get your bino’s and get up to Rouse’s Point!

Well, I took that advice and gathered a friend of mine and we went to visit the gull from the Arctic. At Rouse’s Point we found the gull, as did about 50 other binocular-toting, camera- swinging, fieldguide-opening birders.  Braving cold NW winds the birders walk out on a stone breakwall that juts into L. Champlain. Here they set up their spotting scopes and cameras and capture images of the gull as it might look in its normal home range…sitting on the edge of an ice sheet looking for bits of seal entrails, fish parts, or some other tasty bit of food on ice.

OK, we don’t have the seals but we do have friendly ice fisherman who will sacrifice one of their perch to feed this wayward gull. And as we discussed this act of fisherman hospitality we all agreed it’s like feeding that stray cat or dog and it will surely stay around for another hand-out.

Well we wish this lost, labrador-loving gull all the best and hope it makes it back to the north. But in there lies the problem. This gull may have ended up here as a result of habitat problems back home. The ivory gull is dependent upon many predatory animals for food, along these ice-bound areas, particularly polar bears that kill a seal and eat it on the ice. After the bear has had its fill, the gulls filter in and eat up whats left.

But as you may have heard, much of the ice is thinning(or dissappearing) up in those Arctic areas and polar bears aren’t surviving this drastic change in habitat. So, no polar bears…no ivory gulls! To the gulls advantage, it has wings and can fly away to find food elsewhere. Not so for the polar bear. Maybe that’s how our visitor came to be on the ice of Rouse’s Point, NY.

Photo: by Brian McAllister(This is a photo of another (pure white adult) ivory Gull that was found over in Plymouth, MA in 2009. I tried to photograph the Rouse’s Point ivory gull but the batteries in my camera died before a photo could be taken. Lesson learned! )

Otter slides and beaver sounds

Just some quick highlights here of a recent back country ski into the lesser known trails to Grass Pond and Sheep Meadows via the Hayes Brook Ski Trail.

2 friends and I started out to Sheep Meadows Lean-to, (accessing the trailhead off of Rt 30(north), about 3.8 miles north of the junction of Routes 86 and 30). Finding the usual troops of black-capped chickadees, red-breasted nuthatches, brown creeper, and golden-crowned kinglets buoyed our spirits as we glided over endless deer tracks in the snow. Occasionally we’d spot something different and took time to examine ermine(short-tailed weasel) tracks, snowshoe hare, vole, and mouse tracks. But as our explorations took us to Grass Pond, the wildlife tracks and traces reached a crescendo!

The photo above shows a “playground” of river otter tracks as they slide over the frozen water falls and beaver dams found near Grass Pond. Their sleek bodies flatten out on the snow and they shove off with their large, webbed hind feet allowing for an efficient, and fun, slide along the snow.

This photo(right) shows(in the center of photo) the prints of two hind feet in the middle of the slide.

Nearby was a muddy opening into the side of a beaver dam showing recent otter use. And if that was not enough evidence, my friends then found piles of fresh, and smelly scat(otter poop) close to the hole. Not wanting to overextend our presence we linger just long enough to hear some red crossbills fly overhead.

As we made our way back to the Grass Pond lean-to we skied by the protruding beaver lodge on the pond. Putting ears to the mud and snow on the lodge my friends declare, ” I hear chewing sounds!”.  My own ears pick up a gentle whining sound…maybe from the pups just recently born inside the lodge.

Back onto land and the main trail home, our hearts beat wildly. From the physical exertion?… yes. But mostly from a day filled with great nature scenes and wonders!

Photo credit-Brian McAllister

The Recent Tracks

Henry David Thoreau put it best in his essay titled A Winter Walk where he says,

“The recent tracks of the fox or otter, in the yard, remind us that each hour of the night is crowded with events, and the primeval nature is still working and making tracks in the snow.”

That certainly was the case this morning as I skied the well-designed trails of The Paul Smiths Visitor Interpretive Center. Not 50 yards from the start of the trail I came across this very clear, and continuous set of prints left behind by a pine marten. It was bounding along the Barnum Brook Trail…

The tracks may look like a snowshoe hare hopping but it’s lacking the smaller front feet of a hare. A marten or fisher has a bounding gate(track pattern) where the hind feet come up and land in the same tracks left by the front feet. This is called a “direct-register” track pattern.

Farther along the trail I see white-tailed deer tracks all over the place. A scattering of red squirrel tracks lead from tree trunk to tree trunk. Then this unusual track scene crosses the ski trail…

Here I find a deep trough(3″-4″ depth) with an alternating, or wattling, foot pattern. So, what made this track was something large bodied but small enough to fit under the branch in the upper part of picture. This was made by a porcupine.

We may still be in winters grip but a few warmer days most likely brought out the porcupine to feed and stretch its legs. They’re not true hibernators and so they’ll come out to feed after laying low during a cold spell or severe winter weather.

I found this next set of tracks interesting because the body of this animal was so light that it did not break through the snow. It recently hopped along the top of the snow and shows the characteristic gallop of hind feet landing just ahead of the front feet.

Although I’m not certain, I would guess that these are the tracks of a mouse(deer or white-footed).

The larger image to the left show the drag marks of a tail. This helps narrow down the options because voles, moles, and shrews tend not leave a tail mark, and they will borrow through snow more often than mice.

The Visitor Center is a great spot to go animal tracking and it’s a whole new slate of tracks each morning. So take the time to look at all those tracks that you might quickly ski or snowshoe over and see if you can figure out what animal made it!

All photos by Brian McAllister

Flocking together

I was walking along a snowmobile trail/snow-covered dirt road recently and I came upon a group of birds all nervously chattering, flitting from branch to branch, and staying somewhat close to one another. I walked off the trail into the coniferous woods(red spruce, balsam fir) and stood there for a moment to watch the birds from their point of view(in the woods). Whether I was absolutely invisible or the birds had other things on their minds, they started to gather around me…no not like in “The Birds” movie of Alfred Hitchcock fame, but of a more curious nature.

In this tight little group were black-capped chickadees, boreal chickadees, red-breasted nuthatches, golden-crowned kinglets and a hairy woodpecker. Such a gathering would produce “ooh’s” and “ah’s” from any budding birder. I still ooh and ah over them but as someone who studies birds and works in the field watching them, I understand that they are illustrating what’s called “species flocking”.

In species flocking we find a group of birds that have literally flocked or gathered together for some beneficial reason. It’s made up of several different species and usually stays together as it moves, like a big bird-blob, through the woods.

This is a behavioral function that allows for several things. One is the fact that between them all, there are a bunch of eyes on the look out for food. As I stood quietly in the woods I followed a black-capped chickadee that worked a tree branch very close to my face. The bird crept along the branch, tipping upside down to view the underside of the branch. That’s where most of the overwintering spiders and insects are found.

But then the chickadee flew to the ground near my feet and carefully hopped along at the base of the trunk looking for food. At one point it stared, looking at the trunk…maybe for something moving?

Another benefit to flocking is many eyes looking for predators. Two birds(black-capped chickadee) in this group discovered me standing there and let out a scolding dee-dee-dee. This in turn alarmed the nearby boreal chickadee who let out a scolding call of its own. All the group was warned! The birds didn’t seem too concerned about me as they continued to feed and flow by me.

Here we see the old adage of “There is safety in numbers” put to use. Anyone of these birds can detect a predator and signal to the group what’s up. I find this fascinating and also curious because at any other time of the year you would never find this kind mixing of species. Migration would be the exception but these are not migratory birds. They stay in the Adirondacks all year long. Chickadees have their needs, nuthatches have their needs and the same for kinglets I guess.

But as this very difficult time of the year, birds tend to rely on each other for the finding of food resources, predator detection, and predator protection.

Another example of this behavior of flocking is when birds find a owl or a hawk in a tree and suddenly dozens of birds start scolding the predator and eventually chase it away. Again, safety in numbers.

As I sat there, slowly all the birds paraded through my little area of the woods and within minutes the chatter was gone. The flock moved on and soon the woods was quiet again. It sorta felt like a little wave approached then receded. A very hyper wave that is.

Photo: black-capped chickadee – Danielle Langlois/Wikipedia

Adirondack Biodiversity

Most of us living in the Adirondacks are probably not aware that the UN has proclaimed that 2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity.  Bully for you if you knew this!

But let’s take a minute to grasp what “biodiversity” actually means. Author/Harvard Professor, and “Biodiversity Guru”, E.O. Wilson puts it simply as “…the key to the maintenance of the world as we know it…this is the assembly of life that took a billion years to evolve.” And I will add that it has taken only several generations of anthropocentric(human) effects to destroy it in many areas around this planet.

Biodiversity is the collection of all the living organisms, their interactions with one another, their reliance on one another, and their outcomes of these interactions. So, everything is supposed to be working in harmony. But in many areas this diversity has crashed and burned. Many of you learn about this as you hear of the rapid loss of rainforests;  degradation of the planets coral reefs; the polluting of the oceans, bays, and freshwaters; and the fragmentation of so many of our natural fields, forests, and wetlands.

In each of these natural areas we find millions of living things(birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, insects, plants,..etc), all living harmoniously until some outside, human-made factor enters the system and then we see a domino-effect of great loss and degradation. OK-enough with the negativity.

Now that we have a working definition, let’s look at this “big picture” view and move it into our neck of the woods.

The biodiversity of the Adirondacks is composed of many, many things. Something like 270+ species of birds. I don’t know how many reptiles/amphibians found specifically in the Adk’s but there are around 69 species of herpetofauna (reptiles and Amphibians)in NY state alone. Fish?-no clue. Insects?-alot! Plants-tons! Mammals…about 54. Fungi…? Lichens…? Mosses…? So you see there are many holes in this long list of diverse things that make up the biodiversity of the Park.

Well, how do we fill those “holes”? WE start counting things! WE list things. WE look under rocks; in the water; up in the trees; down in the soil. Please note that the WE is you and I, and a little help from our scientific experts in the field.

Cue the music- da-dada-da! Enter the world of the Adirondack All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory or ATBI for short. You may have heard of this awe-inspiring, species-counting event that will take years to complete. It’s housed at Paul Smiths College under the moniker Center for Adirondack Biodiversity

Headed up by the very talented director David Patrick, the CAB will take on the task of figuring out what living organisms live in the 6 million acre Adirondack Park. A similar program is underway in the Great Smokey Mountain National Park. Many residents of the Adk’s are already involved in this colossal undertaking and there is hope that this number of citizen scientists will grow.

Back to big picture of biodiversity. Why should we care what’s out there? Well, in the tropical regions of earth we may have a yet-unidentified medical cure for humans. There may be unknown plants that will aid humans in technology or industry. There are still yet unknown birds, frogs, mammals, and other organisms being discovered in these critical areas every year. So yeah, this seems important.

E.O. Wilson says, “It(biodiversity) holds the world steady.”

On another note…just want to say that I’m thrilled to be a part of the Adirondack Explorer community and I hope readers will follow our blogs that will take you all over the Adirondacks, and reveal some pretty cool things about our special place!

…..and for those of us wishing for warmer temperatures and the feel of spring, here’s a nice live cam of a Anna’s Hummingbird on a nest in California. Enjoy!

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/Hummingbird-Nest-Cam

Photo credit-Brian McAllister-painted turtle