Kingfishers

I got to add the Belted Kingfisher to the Blue Jay Barrens bird list this week. When the little bit of water you have completely dries up each summer, it’s hard to attract water associated species. This female and her presumed mate were searching for a meal in the recently filled pond.

I was working beside the house when I heard a splash from out front. I walked around the corner and saw a male Kingfisher fly off and this female sitting on the wire with a mouth full of dripping weed stalks. By the time I got my camera out of its holster, she had shed the debris and was back to scanning the water.

A lot of the water flowing into the pond comes off the road, so it’s usually pretty brown after a heavy rain. Since the pond was dry for nearly two months during the summer, I know that there were no fish for the Kingfisher to catch. It doesn’t seem possible that it mistook a weed stalk for a fish.

After a couple of quick pictures, the bird took off in the direction of the male. She didn’t seem bothered by my presence and probably would have stayed longer, but was startled by a pickup roaring down the township road just behind the pine trees. It was fun while it lasted.

Skywatch Friday - Prairie Sky

The prairies are really attractive this time of year with the golden color of the tall grasses glowing beneath the blue sky. The prairie will begin to look a bit ragged as the rain, snow, wind and cold temperatures work on it through the winter.

The oaks are about the only trees still holding on to their leaves. They’ll maintain their leaves for quite a while, but the colors will trend more toward dirty grays and browns.

This view is from a section of trail that I travel very often. Over the next few months I’ll watch the Indian Grass stalks become bent and broken. Deer and turkey give this area some heavy use during the winter and the results of their foraging and bedding activities sometimes look as though a battle had been fought.

This area is going to be mowed during the winter to help control cedars and other woody vegetation. Hopefully I’ll get a pair of Grasshopper Sparrows to nest here next year, instead of making their usual failed attempt in the neighbor’s hay field.

As the trees lose their leaves, I begin to see the neighbor’s house and barn. There goes the illusion of wilderness. Of course, I can’t spend much time outside without hearing one of the three most common sounds of rural America; Gun Shots, 4-Wheelers, and Chainsaws.

Clouds temporarily blocking the sun remind me of the winter weather soon to arrive.

Click the following link if you would like to check out other participants of Skywatch Friday http://skyley.blogspot.com/

Elliott's Beard Grass

Elliott’s Beard Grass, Andropogon gyrans, is one of those plants that remains hidden in the landscape until it finally begins to die back and release its seed load. As it dries, the cluster of wide leaves at the top of the plant open like a fan to release the mature seed.

The fluffy seeds are impossible to miss when they begin to emerge. The escaping seed masses look like white flags atop the grass stem. This grass is in the same genus as the Big Bluestem, but it normally doesn’t exceed two or three feet in height.

The leaves are normally a bright orange at this time of year and make an interesting addition to a dried flower arrangement. The excessive rains this year have already bleached away most of the colors. I’m going to have to get some of this growing up near the house where I can keep an eye on it.

At Blue Jay Barrens I only find this grass growing on the low pH shale based soils. It’s most noticeable on the poor fertility sites. This grass is sometimes referred to as Elliott’s Poverty Grass because of its ability to prosper on sites too poor to support other grasses.

From the Roof

I found myself on the roof the other day and decided get some aerial shots of some items I mention in this blog. I didn’t just wander up there by accident. I was waterproofing the chimneys and took a break to enjoy the view. This is the water garden I talked about back in June. The light colored area around the edge is the shallow shelf for holding potted plants. I still need to find some more rocks suitable for edging. I found that peering through a camera viewfinder while leaning forward from a pitched roof can give you an eerie feeling of vertigo.

This is the leaky pond. It goes dry every summer, but it’s perfect for salamanders and frogs in the spring. I mow it in August or September. Cutting the vegetation causes the salamanders to lay their eggs close to the pond bottom, so they are not so susceptible to fluctuating water levels prior to hatching.

The prairie garden is located beside the driveway so people can ask why I don’t mow those weeds. The plants in the garden all came from Blue Jay Barrens seeds. It’s a nice way to keep track of plant development when you don’t have time to run back into the prairie. This coming spring I’ll be expanding the garden toward the right side of the picture.

Here is the woodpecker tree. The branch on the left was growing almost completely across the house when I had the tree taken down. I left this much so I wouldn’t totally lose the wildlife value. I think the bark has about one more year before it all comes off.
The bare area to the right of the tree is where the turkey and deer eat cracked corn.

This tree normally provides plenty of apples for me and the deer. This year, the squirrels took every apple before any started to ripen. The bare area at the base of the tree is another bird feeding area.

The view behind the house. Variations in bedrock depth and water drainage have influenced the successional pattern developing in this field. The light brown indicates areas dominated by grasses and the dark areas are predominately wildflowers. I told my wife we could enjoy this view together if I installed a staircase into the living room ceiling and punched an observation room up through the roof, but I don’t think she’s quite ready to let me do that.

More Egg Shells

A few weeks ago, I talked about a nest of scattered egg shells that I thought belonged to a snake. Now I’ve found a similar, and much fresher, nest about 200 feet from the first. This nest seems to have been exposed by a running deer and then superficially investigated by some other predator. A snake nest now seems even more likely.

I think this nest successfully hatched before it was exposed. All of the eggs bore these same slits that are similar to what I’ve seen in several snake species.

A lot of the eggs were still buried and were fully hydrated like the egg to this right in this shot. The egg to the left was dried and shrunken like the eggs from the first nest.

You can see the shape of the deer hoof that pushed through into the animal burrow and threw out some eggs shells. The burrow itself resembled an abandoned mole tunnel. I wonder if the snake was eating the mole as it laid its eggs.

The eggs within the animal burrow spanned a distance of about 12 inches. I probed both directions in the tunnel and pulled out all remaining egg shells. The total clutch was at least 28 eggs. I may have to start calling this place Snake Knob.

Carolina Buckthorn

Autumn is an ideal time to locate and monitor certain trees and shrubs. Each species tends to make the transition from summer to winter in a unique fashion that makes them easily identifiable at a certain point. The leaves of the Carolina Buckthorn, Rhamnus caroliniana, maintain their waxy shine and begin to yellow late in the season. This is a southern shrub that has its northern limit in extreme southern Ohio.

A deer trail runs just to the left of this medium sized Buckthorn and a buck deer has found the trunk to be a nice place to rub. Carolina Buckthorns suffer a lot of hardships in this area. Extreme cold temperatures during the winter can kill the top growth on these shrubs. This little clump contains some big specimens compared to the others found at Blue Jay Barrens.

This group is growing beneath a couple of fairly large Black Walnut trees. Many shrubs would not be able to grow in this location because of the juglones produced by the walnut. Maybe the Carolina Buckthorn is a suitable companion plant to the walnut and enjoys less competition from other shrubs in this location.

Carolina Buckthorn leaves always look as though they’ve been waxed and polished. It would make a wonderful landscape plant if it weren’t so susceptible to winter-kill.

One of the key characteristics of this shrub is the naked bud. The tiny beginnings of next year’s leaves are exposed for all to see, instead of being covered by bud scales. The buds are a great help to identifying Carolina Buckthorn in the winter. Years ago I was walking near the creek when I came across a huge patch of buckthorn. I was getting ready to record this exciting find on my map, when I took a closer look at a twig and discovered I was looking at a cluster of little Pawpaws. About that time a Blue Jay started chattering in the tree above me and I’m sure it was laughing at my blunder. Pawpaws have terminal buds very similar to those of Carolina Buckthorn and I had made the classic mistake of making a rapid identification based on one quickly glimpsed character.

Halloween Mask Sources

CAUTION: If there’s any satisfaction to be gotten from this post, it will only happen if you have already viewed the post from yesterday. If you have not yet viewed the October 31, 2009 post, you are urged to stop reading and skip on down the page to Saturday before returning here. Those who choose to ignore this warning may miss the most enlightening experience of their lives. Or, it may make no difference.

Here are the sources of yesterday’s images. Tomorrow I’ll go back to some more conventional Nature.

A – Grim Reaper. A decomposing deer skull. It’s still kind of hard to tell from this angle.

A – Grim Reaper. Skull from the side.

B – Space Alien. Seed pod of the False Aloe. I took this while collecting seeds and pulled all but one pod off the stalk before taking the Halloween shot.

C – Lost Soul. One of the thousands of walnut shells the squirrels have left around my yard. The squirrel did the placement at the corner of this old gate.

D – Casper in Cobwebs. Outside hind wing of the American Lady Butterfly.

E – Gargoyle. End buds of a Shingle Oak.

F – Angry Ent. Tree cavity rotated 180 degrees.

G – Parasite. Another deer skull.

H – Baby Dinosaur. A third deer skull.

I – Angry Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. Bundleflower seed pods rotated 90 degrees.