Florida Nature Adventures

New Blog Transition

2011-01-05T10:01:00.000-05:00

I am changing my main blog from “Florida Nature Adventures” to “On Rappel!” The former is inadequate in several respects. First, it does not match the blog’s URL (www.FloridaDayAdventures), which makes it a little harder for someone to find my blog using a web search. Second, the three words, “Florida,” “nature” and “adventure” are commonly used words, which also render web searches cumbersome and slow. “On Rappel!” should be much easier and quicker to find and be found by more people as it is a lesser used phrase. Thirdly, the new name has more pizzazz!

Unfortunately, I cannot simply change the name and URL of my old blog, but must instead create a new one from scratch. It means that my readers will have to make some link changes in order to continue to read my writ. Hopefully you will all do so, altho I’ll be the first to admit that if you wanted to clean house and throw me out, this is a perfect opportunity. Gulp! For some period of time, I will post a note to the Florida Nature Adventures blog whenever I post to the On Rappel blog to assist in the switch-over.

Already having about 40 years experience at technical writing, I began my original blog with the intention of learning how to write in a popular style. Over the years, it has become evident to me that I do far more outdoor day adventures than the vast majority of people. Mostly, I go canoeing, kayaking, caving, single-track bicycling, day hiking and, more rarely, whitewater kayaking, rock climbing and backpacking. Occasionally I am asked to write about these experiences, and a blog seemed like a good vehicle for that.

There are appx 70 daily views of my old blog, yet it has become apparent that many more might occur with some changes in blog design. An important way for a blog to get more “pageviews” is to have a snappier name that is uncommon or unique, hence “On Rappel!” Another way is a more assiduous use of labels and links, on which I have so far been lax. A third way is for groups of blogs to cross-reference each other, which I have been doing along with other nature bloggers.

As for the new blog’s name, “en rappel,” is French for “on rope.” American cavers and other English-speaking adventurers have hybridized it into the half-English-half-French wording of “on rappel.” Technically, one can be “on rope” and be planning to either descend or ascend, but we use it only to mean that we are about to descend. For me, it also means adventure, an independent attitude, anticipating something daring and exciting while immersed in an unfamiliar yet splendid natural environment. When I think of being on rappel, I think of freedom, adrenalin, self-sufficiency, courage, competence and mental strength, and I am reminded of the final words of William Ernest Henley’s poem, “Invictus,”

“I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.”

Ok, enough of that! Here’s the new blog’s link:

http://onrappel.blogspot.com/

I have had five outdoor adventures since my last posting here, so I gotta go write ‘em and put ‘em into On Rappel. Thanks for your previous support, and I’ll see you on the other side!

Gwion Gwion

2010-12-28T14:13:00.000-05:00

Being a professional naturalist and amateur anthropologist who loves art, I am especially fascinated with Pleistocene paintings in European caves. I believe the artist that painted on the walls of Chauvet Cave in France (http://tinyurl.com/36vmdgs) was a genius of ability comparable to recent artists.

I have to admit, however, that the prints on desert rock walls in Australia and the American Southwest seem to me to be little more than palm prints and stick figures. I realize they actually represent much more than that, that they are significant to their cultures and are worthy of the highest degree of protection, but I do not consider them art for three reasons. First, an artist must master his medium before he can make art, whereas these primitive applications of pecking, charcoal and red ocher hardly compare to the talent that Lascaux and Chauvet Caves illustrate existed in ancient times. Second, art transcends culture, whereas this genre has meanings specific to particular cultures. Third, its creators may or may not have had “art” in mind when they drew the images, thus eliminating it from consideration as art by definition. Australian Aborigines call it “gwion gwion,” and perhaps that (or the single word, “gwion”) is a better name for it.

But now comes a scientific discovery involving Western Australia’s Bradshaw rock art that gives a new dimension to those paintings (http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/pettigrew326/). It turns out that in some cases the paint has been replaced naturally by “a biofilm of living, pigmented micro-organisms whose natural replenishment may account for the longevity and vividness of these paintings.” Some gwion gwion, however, are not infected, so their colors fade. These may be repainted several times over the centuries.

I can imagine going back in time to visit a gwion gwion long, long ago, right after it was painted by a shaman and revealed to his tribe. For a time, the colors were bright and the characters distinct, but after a while they began to fade. The old shaman noticed this and planned to repaint them, but when he took another look, he noticed the colors were changing and becoming more vivid than the original tints. He did not know that microscopic bacteria and fungi colonized and replaced the paints and were responsible for the transformation. It must have appeared to him to be a miracle from heaven, and with the proper presentation, his followers thought so too.

I have an artist friend named Tom Glover W., one of the world’s greatest living wood sculptors, but he has abandoned the wood medium for harder stuff like marble and steel. I don’t know why he has done so, but I can imagine being able to create excellent art and wanting people to be able to appreciate it for a long time. Wood will, after all, crack and rot after a century or two. I have seen Tom’s wood work languishing, dusty and cob-webbed, in an unkempt pawn shop. Oh, the horror…

Envision an artist deliberately using microorganisms in his work, bugs that can withstand the ravages of weather and time while displaying everlastingly bright colors and patterns and perhaps also interesting textures and aromas. This could give artists a new medium to master, and I bet they’d do some awesome, ingenious things with it. One can only hope that microbiologists will expand on this discovery and create a palette of organism-colors for artists to use.

Rainy Day Science Reading

2010-12-27T13:35:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was cold and wet out, and in fact, it actually snowed for a few minutes around 10 am, so I stayed in and caught up on my reading. Too bad the snow was so ephemeral, as I wanted to photograph it. The top of my RV’s “porch” awning iced up in the brisk wind, though.

A layman’s article in the journal Science (Australia to test ‘mosquito vaccine’ against human disease, 10 Dec. 2010, vol. 330, p. 1460-1461) discusses a fascinating approach to dealing with mosquitoes carrying serious diseases of humans. The idea is to infect mosquitoes with the bacterium Wolbachia pipientis, which has the ability to keep mosquitoes from being infected by human-disease organisms. The Australians have succeeded at infecting the vector of dengue, Aedes aegypti, with Wolbachia in cage trials, and now plan a field test in Australia. If successful, they want to try it next in Vietnam and then possibly Thailand. Dengue is a viral disease in humans that causes crippling joint and muscle pains, so the possibility of eliminating it is exciting.

Wolbachia has a very effective way to spread rapidly within a population. All infected female mosquitoes pass on the bacterium to their young, but when uninfected females mate with infected males, there are no viable young. It took only two decades for Wolbachia to infect a fruit fly species, Drosophila simulans, around the world.

The article stated that Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes are resistant to causative agents of some other important diseases, namely elephantiasis and chikungunya, and even inhibits some species of Plasmodium parasites that cause malaria. Unfortunately, the major disease-carrying mosquito species are not infected by Wolbachia, so the Australians want to give Wolbachia a boost up. No genetic engineering is involved and the bacterium already exists widely in the wild, so researchers believe that environmental concern re the release will be minimal.

Some mosquito species carry Wolbachia and do not carry human diseases whereas other mosquito species do not harbor the bacterium but do carry human diseases. This being the case, it begs the question of why Wolbachia does not already infect disease-carrying mosquitoes. Is it possible that the disease organisms of those mosquito species have already evolved ways to defeat Wolbachia?

There’s another interesting article in the 12 November 2010 (vol. 330, p. 932) issue of Science entitled “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” Yep, that’s really the title of a serious research paper in one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals, and it caught my eye and I bet you know why.

There were three basic findings. First, people’s minds wander frequently almost regardless of what they are doing. Second, people are less happy when their minds are wandering than when they are not. Third, what people are thinking is a better predictor of happiness than what they are doing. The authors stated, “… a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” You could bring up the Devil and idle hands if you want to, but to me it rather sounds like Mother Nature giving us yet another insistent incentive to do better. Not a bad thing to realize a few days before the New Year.

San Felasco's Mideast

2010-12-26T12:29:00.000-05:00

Twice recently, I hiked into a part of San Felasco Hammock Preserve State Park that I have never before visited, traversing 6.2 and 9.9 miles. That area is along the eastern boundary about half-way between Millhopper Road and the park’s NE corner, just about as far from either trailhead as you can get. The first occasion was a reunion with a friend and former co-worker from the 1970s and early 1980s, and the second was solo. Aside from enjoying good company and good woods, the missions on both expeditions were to continuing documenting the locations of sinkholes and trails. This aerial photo depicts the GPS tracks of the two hikes and the general polygon of interest (white polygon):

A couple of days before the visits, I finally took the time to read the 2005 land management plan for the park (http://tinyurl.com/23opnbv). I was encouraged by the overall direction being resource-based recreation and conservation as opposed to timber management or a single-species/habitat orientation. In other words, the plan is to restore the native plant and wildlife communities that occurred on site in pre-Columbian times and allow citizens to make passive recreational use of it. Notably, the authors recognize the hammock as the largest and best example of this habitat type remaining in Florida.

The plan also contains a map of the park’s major plant communities and a base map of its roads and trails. The latter is much better than any other map I have seen of San Felasco, either on-line or as a hard copy trailhead give-away. Unfortunately, the two maps are not at the same scale, and the vegetation map has no trails on it to use for orientation. In fact, all other maps of the park are also frustrating in that regard. USGS Topo Quads that are as wrong as they can be. The county publishes much better topos, in 2-ft contour intervals, but those covering San Felasco are at two different scales, one for areas within the Fernandez Grant and another for areas outside that old Spanish land grant; Google Earth provides aerials at odd scales that do not match any other map; and my Garmin GPS uses the incorrect USGS at still different scales and oddball contour intervals, plus it contains roads that have never existed. We’ll just have to wait until my map comes out before we have available a map with accurate topography, trails and plant communities, all at a single scale.

The mixed forest in that region may be the best of the park for several reasons. It is dominated by climax forest species like Southern magnolia, live oak, Florida maple, pignut hickory and mockernut hickory, although pioneer species like sweetgum, laurel oak and spruce pine are common. Another reason is that it seems to me that the trees here might average a little larger than in other parts of the park. Dan and I encountered a large bluff oak (Quercus austrina), for instance, larger than any I have ever seen (and I keep an eye out for champion trees). Here’s a shot of Dan with the bluff oak on the left:

Incidentally, the park plan mis-identifies this species as the bastard oak (Quercus sinuata var. sinuata), unless the taxonomy of the taxon changed while I wasn’t looking; not being a botanist, that could well be the case. Here I am peering into a hollow laurel oak trunk to see what I can see – no critters this time, though:

The large black willow I mentioned in a post a few weeks ago is within this region. The uplands here have more exposed limestone than elsewhere in the park and two species of rare ferns. Finally, this region has no park trails and is distant from trailheads, so human visitation here is almost certainly at a minimum. One of the stated goals of the park plan is to provide a wilderness experience, and this particular area certainly does that.

The sinkholes are very different, too. In general, they are larger, deeper and support more vegetation and wildlife than sinkholes elsewhere on the park:

The relatively large marshy pond located in the lower left quadrant of the aerial is called Dahoon Pond, named after the dahoon hollies (Ilex cassine) ringing its perimeter. It is primarily a maidencane (Panicum hemitomon) marsh, however, being almost 100% dominated by that grass. Below is a shot of the maidencane, illustrating it as a monoculture, and also showing one of the small clearings within the dense grass. I have no idea what caused this denudation, although I rule out feral pigs because the ground was not torn up and pigs are not grazers. They are no deeper than the surrounding marsh bottom, so water levels have nothing to do with it. The maidencane stubble almost appears to be carefully clipped, but by what? Capybaras?

I’m enjoying the extra dollop of wildlife that occurs in San Felasco at this time of the year. Ordinarily lucky to see a single flicker once every couple of years, for instance, on the second trip I saw two of them. Dan and I noticed some kind of animal making waves in Blues Creek that disappeared before we could identify it, but on the second trip, I saw several small flocks of wood ducks in the stream. Other notable observations were a flock of yellow warblers with a token black-and-white warbler, a flock of cedar waxwings, a chuck-will’s-widow and possibly a whippoorwill.

I almost misjudged my exit timing on the second trip, and had to boogie to get out of the woods before darkness fell. I had a small headlamp with me, but when alone in the wilderness it is a good idea to have backups.

Snowing in McIntosh

2010-12-26T10:03:00.001-05:00

At this very moment (10:01am), it is snowing in McIntosh, FL!!!

The thermometer says the temperature is38dF, and the snow is melting as soon as it reaches the ground, or truck or whatever, but there's definitely snow in the air.

Happy holidays! Brrr!

The Bat - WNS Arms Race

2010-12-24T13:07:00.000-05:00

By now, most of you have surely heard of the catastrophic malady in bats known as White-Nose Syndrome. It has been called the worst disease to occur in North American mammals in recorded history. Its cause is not entirely understood, but a fungus named Geomyces destructans is believed to be the causative or an aggravating agent. The affliction does not kill its victims quickly; it is more of a wasting disease causing infected bats to awaken several times during hibernation to drink water and forage in vain for insects.

G. destructans infests hibernating bats mainly in the colder areas of the continent, although its range is still expanding and we have no way of knowing how widespread it will ultimately become. It is believed to have originated in Europe and then recently introduced to NA via dirty booted cavers or an infected bat stowaway on a transoceanic ship.

The fungus is likely feeding on bat skin, hair and body fluids. The long, deep folds of bat wings held closely to the body additionally trap moisture, creating a perfect incubation chamber for fungi. A knowledgeable caver recently posted on a forum that the pathogen appears to sap moisture from hibernating bats, as evidenced by low weights of infected bats and observations of them drinking thirstily from almost-frozen water sources in mid-winter near hibernaculums.

Our insectivorous bats are quite small and capable of storing only limited amounts of body fat to tide them over the winter. Each mid-winter awakening thus consumes precious energy. It becomes even more critical if the bat is stressed by being injured, ill or dehydrated, or if it didn’t get enough food in the months prior to hibernation.

Wibbelt, et al. (http://www.cdc.gov/eid/content/16/8/1237.htm) have just published a paper documenting the presence of G. destructans in five species of bats in Europe, noting that the affliction does not seem to be causing any deaths over there. They postulate it is present throughout Europe and that the fungus and European bats have co-evolved together. Importantly, they point out that European bats are generally larger than North American bats.

Imagine a species in the wild having to cope with numerous threats, including parasites, predators, competition, a surfeit of food in summer and a shortage in winter, adverse weather (heat, cold, rain, wind and storms), injuries and diseases. Many animals – yea, some entire species – live near or at the edge of their existence. Bats are numerous and thus can be thought of as highly successful, and indeed, they are as a group, but many of them individually are at the perimeter of their envelope. For them, any new stress added to the existing welter of stresses could be the last straw.

The small bodies of northern bats are at a great disadvantage in the cold, so fewer species live there year-round. Those that do tend to exist in smaller numbers and take advantage of several strategies. One such is to hibernate, but that makes it easier for infectious organisms to find them. Another way is to evolve a larger size, as bears, canids and felids have done, but a larger size has serious drawbacks for a bat. It becomes a more noticeable and desirable target to predators; it requires more food, water, roosting space and foraging habitat; its maneuverability on the wing is reduced, adversely affecting its ability to hunt insects; and it is forced to hunt larger, rarer prey. This is a tack taken by European bats, but WNS-susceptible northern North American bats do not currently exhibit it. Evidently, for them, smaller is better.

Perhaps larger sizes in affected bat species will be selected for more forcefully in the future? Perhaps the ranges of affected species will become reduced in size to where they will live only in warmer climes where insects are available nearly year-round and hibernation is unnecessary? Another strategy to avoid WNS and similar diseases is to hibernate in smaller aggregations, or even singly. Indeed, mass hibernators are currently believed to be especially prone to harboring WNS. Still another prophylactic is to migrate south where hibernation is moot or greatly shortened. But, like larger size, each of these also has its drawbacks. Ironically, the federally-endangered gray bat (Myotis grisescens) already migrates south from its northern summer range, but still hibernates and does so in large colonies and is particularly susceptible to WNS.

It is now time for America’s bats to “co-evolve” with Geomyces destructans. I am left wondering how these bats will respond to the epizootic, whether they will have sufficient time to evolve survival mechanisms or if they will become extirpated from the colder portions of their ranges or become extinct altogether. It would be a grand evolutionary experiment were it not for the horror of millions of cruel deaths and the reduction of Earth’s rich biodiversity.

Zero-Sum Cave Entrances

2010-12-13T18:51:00.002-05:00

I certainly can’t complain about being bored last weekend, having gone to a fire management workshop Saturday morning, a 9.5-mile bike-n-hike on Saturday afternoon and on Sunday a short, 2-mile hike around Irvine Slough followed by quick visits to Charles and Christian Springs in Suwannee County (FL).

The workshop was held at friend James’ place. He is a member of a local group taking advantage of a state program that works to reduce fire hazards in low density residential areas by instituting regular programs of controlled burns. His group is called the Watermelon Pond Community Cooperative. James lives on a sandhill ridge that was originally vegetated by a fire-dominated xeric ecosystem. Adjacent to his property is a unit of the Goethe State Forest, which supports the same habitat and also needs prescribed burns. State land managers realize they can protect and manage state forest lands better if adjacent landowners are on board with fire management. It seems to be a good program where one hand washes the other. This photo of James talking about the program as it pertains to his land should give you a glimpse of what the immature but species-rich woodland is like:

Bruce, Brack and I then met up with Jere to check out two caves that are small and very unstable, and at times downright dangerous. As you may know, many of my friends and I are ardent cavers, but we stay out of these particular caves due to the ever-present danger of rock-fall in them. Both occur in locations that are highly active geologically. The entrance to the first cave is usually choked by detritus, as pointed out here:

In the past, the second cave’s entrance has been in the face of a very steep sinkhole a few feet above ground surface, but that old entrance is now almost totally obscured by a small landslide. In some kind of zero sum karst game, however, a new entrance has opened up at the base of the side slope. The old entrance passage was a horizontal, hands-and-knees crawlway about 30ft long that continued onward past a boulder that blocked cavers from going further. The new entrance is a spiraling, vertical route through boulders. Think of it as a fissure or solution pipe filled with boulders that you must squirm between as you wiggle downward while exploring onward. The boulders seem to be pretty solidly set in place, but that is only for the geological moment.

Getting into the second cave requires passing through a fairly tight, Y-shaped vertical slot. How tight is it? Well, I had to take everything out of my pockets and then remove my belt in order to pass it, that’s how tight it was, and I’m thin. I should also point out (in case the helmet police look at my photos) that it was too tight to wear a caving helmet. I was able to down-climb 12 – 14ft to an apparent end in recent sediments, and noticed that air was blowing through boulder slots a few feet above that dead end. Jere noticed that air was also flowing out of the old entrance remnant. Here’s a shot Bruce took of me emerging from the new entrance looking tired:

On Sunday, Bruce, Chuck and I went to Suwannee County to Chuck’s property on Irvine Slough. This area has a couple of karst windows that are entrances to the entirely-underwater Telford Spring Cave, and are named Luraville I and Luraville II (after a nearby town). As the Suwannee River rises during wet seasons, tailwaters back up into Irvine Slough and drain into the Floridan Aquifer via Luraville I and II (and a lot of other karst holes). When the wet weather ends and the river level drops, these so-called “siphons” reverse flow and become springs that discharge back to the river. As water levels continue to fall, surface flow in the slough ceases, the slough dries up and Luraville I and II look almost stagnant. This type of karst entrance with spring-siphon-stagnant characteristics is called an estevelle, and these are abundant along the Suwannee River in north Florida. Charles and Christian Springs are also estevelles.

I have cave dived into both entrances in the past and can report that their passages contain more wildlife than the vast majority of Florida caves. The high abundance and species-richness is due to the periodic pulsing of floodwaters because floods bring nutrients, fish and wildlife into the caves. Trapped there when water levels fall and the surface water connection to the river is broken, fish and invertebrates then eat each other until the water rises again. If it doesn’t rise quickly enough, well, as they say in The Highlander, in the end there can be only one. I’m betting the last standing fish in the current episode will be this predacious bowfin (or mudfish, Amia calva):

In addition to being a competitive predator, the bowfin can burrow into the mud when surface waters dry up and wait out the drought. It is one of the few freshwater fishes alive today that lived during the reign of the dinosaurs. Its air bladder is lined with blood vessels, so it serves as a lung that the mudfish can use to gulp air (oxygen) when surface waters are nearly devoid of the stuff. It is thick-headed, having a double-skull and a covering of large, hard scales. The male makes a nest on a mud bottom, and after convincing a female to lay her eggs there, he fertilizes them and then protects the eggs and fry aggressively for several weeks. It is a strong fighter when hooked and will try to bite anglers when pulled into the boat using sharp teeth that draw blood. To add insult to injury, they don’t taste good, their meat supposedly tasting soft and mealy. In short, they are uberpredators, have hard heads and sharp teeth, are feisty, protect their young, “breathe” both water and air, can survive the pond drying up and taste bad too! It is no wonder that the species has survived maybe 100 million years.

That’s a pretty amazing record when you think about it. After the bowfin evolved, thousands more species of fishes evolved of which many have become extinct, yet this ancient taxon is still a top piscean predator where it occurs. It’s right up there with gar, sturgeon and the coelacanth.

Irvine Slough also has small, shallow caves that are dry most of the time. Chuck showed us several holes in the ground, two of which are the terminal entrances to a 30+ ft long cave passage. Here’s the entrance to a small, nearby cavern, with Bruce hunkered down in the entrance for scale:

Other holes out there are the entrances to small caverns, but most of them appear to be “ratholes,” so to speak. They may or may not shelter rats, but armadillos, snakes, mice, opossums and skunks have been known to take dry season advantage of these refuges. A few years ago, Bruce and I saw an indigo snake (Drymarchon corais couperi) in Peacock Slough, a similar karst swale located less than a mile away. The indigo is a federally-threatened species that depends on such ratholes for shelter. I’d like to do more cave surveys out there in the not-too-distant future.

San Felasco Trail Mapping

2010-12-04T21:25:00.000-05:00

I just can’t stay away from San Felasco Hammock State Park. I did a solo 15.2-mile ride this afternoon with the goal of filling in blanks on my master map of its trails and roads. Before today, I had been lackadaisical about adding waypoints to show where trails/roads start and end, or where I jumped off trail to take shortcuts or explore wilderness, so the master map is kinda snaggley, with hanging trails and horse/bike statuses unknown. I guess I just figured that if I recorded my bike-and-hike GPS tracks, I could sort ‘em out later. Wrong!

The worst depictions are trails that are furthest from the trailhead, naturally, so that’s where I went. Folks, I gotta tell you, 15 miles of my boney butt bouncing around on that skinny, hard bicycle seat has me worn out and sore. I don’t even have the energy to fix dinner, so here I am instead posting to my blog and drinking a beer. But that’s ok! Someday soon, I will have a map of the park that is better than any version I can get online from the state. Maybe it will all be worth it? Wanna buy one from me?

As usual, the trip produced some neat stuff, but less than normal due to my constantly getting on and off the bike to collect waypoints and bury my nose in maps. Here’s the best botanical find today, a crane-fly orchid (Tipularia discolor) leaf:

It is the time of year when the crane-fly orchid produces a single leaf, but is immediately after it flowers and sets seed. Having only a leaf makes it harder to spot the beast among abundant greenbriar sprouts and newly-fallen leaves. This specimen did not have a flower stalk, so if you take just a quick glance at the leaf you might think I have mistaken a greenbriar (Smilax sp.) for an orchid. It certainly does look like the leaves of several local species of greenbriar, but look at this second pic:

It clearly shows the smooth, purple surface of the leaf’s underside, whereas Smilax pumila, the only greenbriar around here with a purple leaf bottom, has a profusion of hairs under its leaves. So it’s a crane-fly orchid, and I am tickled pink to find it in San Felasco. I have been looking for it all my life, yet only saw it recently for the first time (in the mountains of NC), so am glad to know that it occurs in San Felasco. The NC experience taught me the cues to look for, and I suspected it might occur in San Felasco due to potentially appropriate soils and forest habitats, so I was watching for it today. Treasures appear to those who are prepared for them. If you want to see some really good pics of crane-fly orchids in bloom, check out the Nov. 29, 2010 post on The Florida Native Orchid Blog (one of my Favorite Blogs, listed in the right-hand column of my blog) at http://flnativeorchids.blogspot.com/.

Moving right along… In the Trees-with-Character category, I spotted this Southern magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) on the hillside:

It is a single plant, the trunk in the center being 2+ ft dbh and the two flanking trunks 1+ ft dbh. The central trunk is partially hollow, and I searched for evidence of mammal nests at its entrance, but found none. Its three main trunks have caused the tree’s healthy crown to spread out wider than the norm for this species, so evidently the large wound has not put a crimp on its ability to survive and flourish. We should all be as tough. Peace.

Folk Wisdom

2010-11-28T10:52:00.001-05:00

Jim Conrad writes a terrific weekly naturalist’s newsletter that I receive via email (his website is in my list of Favorite Links). Currently living on a hacienda beside Chechen Itza in Mexico, he has acquired many Mayan friends by living beside and hanging out among them. Jim grows some of his own vegetables and discusses gardening with them, and being a gardener myself, it is interesting to read some of the conversations they have.

In today’s newsletter, Jim relates two discussions he had with Mayan farmers that might shock a modern organic grower; at least, I think it shocked Jim. He suggested to one fellow that laying down a mulch of leaf litter might aid in retarding soil moisture loss. The M-dude quickly responded by turning over a clump of leaves to reveal a large spider, and said "Look, that's the kind of thing that plant-trash on the ground attracts. That 'bicho' eats plants. Why attract things that'll eat up your garden?" Another Mayan sodbuster admitted that he knew of no instance when Mayans would use organic matter to cover the soil, saying "When dry weather comes, mulch sponges up moisture from the soil, and of course that hurts the plants." Thus, Jim felt moved to bemoan their ignorance of soil moisture control and feeding habits of spiders, not to mention the fact that the spider they looked at ATE ‘bichos’ rather than WAS one.

Forgive me for saying so, but I saw it coming. Some time back, Jim had a story about woodpeckers in the garden, specifically a species closely related to our own red-bellied woodpecker. It seems that the Mayan farmers hate that bird because they believe it damages tomatoes by eating the fruit. I must admit that I grinned when I read that, because I had a similar experience with a woodpecker and a tomato, but mine had a much different and far better ending: http://tinyurl.com/2d328xx

Like Jim’s Mayan farmers, my neighbor misinterpreted the actions of a red-bellied woodpecker that was damaging an occasional garden tomato. By conducting a little investigation, I discovered that the woodpecker would drill a dime-sized hole in a single tomato and leave, and when it returned a couple of hours later, there would be a few insects in the wound, sipping juice. The woodpecker would eat the invertebrates and leave, and continue to revisit that tomato every few hours in the day until the tomato soured. It would then repeat the process on a subsequent tomato, but rarely used more than one tomato “trap” at a time. My neighbor was educated and was not raised by traditionalist subsistence farmers, so he (we) learned from the experience that woodpeckers set traps for garden pests. We also concluded that, just possibly, fewer tomatoes were ruined when there was a woodpecker in the garden because of the efficiency with which the traps lured vegetable-eating insects.

Jim inadvertently reminds me over and over again that so-called “folk wisdom” often stinks. My grandfather, for example, grew up in the 1890s+ and truly believed that polluted water cleaned itself after flowing seven miles. I bet you have examples of this, too. Maybe we could collate ‘em all into a poster for the bath…, er, I mean the refrigerator.

Marshall Swamp - A Chapter in the Book of Nature

2010-11-27T10:53:00.005-05:00

Last Sunday morning (Nov. 21) was spent on my second Meetup.com day-hike on part of the Cross-Florida Greenway, accompanying 14 other North Central Florida Explorers led by Linda Duckworth on the 2.5-mile Marshall Swamp trail east of Ocala. We walked the trail from the CR 314 trailhead to the 64^th Avenue Trailhead, plus a little loop on the far end, totaling 6.1 miles. This was my second time here, the first being on a bike ride last May. After the day-hike, we went to Tracy’s Restaurant on the north side of Ocala for fish sandwiches and soda (Tracy’s deserves its own blog post).

A few of the little treasures we experienced were a mild sweetgum “seed rain,” a small colony (clone?) of toothpetal bog orchid (Habenaria odontopetala):

and a shy Florida mud turtle (Kinosternon subrubrum steindachneri):

The rest of the group walked faster than another fellow and me because the two of us stopped to take photos along the way. Eventually, I quit continually trying to catch up and just lapsed into a solo routine at the end of the line for most of the trip back. I had noticed some uncommon flora and wanted to photo-document it, flora that eked out a living on the buttressed bases of cabbage palms (Sabal palmetto). It occurred to me that this is a neglected microhabitat – why, I bet not one scientific journal has been dedicated to it – so I resolved to give it some attention. Yes, I am easily amused and you may laugh, but I made several anecdotal observations about cabbage palm root balls that may be new to science, so there!

In a swamp like this where it is wet or moist for much of the year, some but not all cabbage palms sprout a mass of roots at the base of the trunk, coating as much as two feet of the stem. These exposed roots are seriously shaded by several layers of leaves in the mature floodplain forest. The roots are dense and hard and grow parallel to each other with little if any space between them. It is a moist but otherwise inhospitable surface, yet is transformed by weather slowly eroding the outer roots. The raggedy surface thus created easily collects peat and inorganic sediments, making a decent substrate for small plants whose roots then tie the whole mass together in a natural Bonsai microcosm.

Cabbage palm root mass flora is dominated by mosses (actually bryophytes) that form a luxuriously thick carpet, interspersed with such things as panic grass, common blue violet, whisk fern and strap fern, even the odd green-fly orchid, all crisscrossed by vines such as partridgeberry and poison ivy. As the plants burgeon on the root ball over time, the peat soil grows thicker and richer, and so presumably does the number of plant species (now there’s a student science project!). And whenever a patch of the carpet moss is broken off, the newly exposed peat is a perfect little seedbed for shade-tolerant plants.

The first thing I noticed was that cabbage palm root masses sustained more plant life than pretty much any comparably-sized piece of ground, hunk of deadwood or buttress of any other tree species. Here is an old hardwood with "knees" to the ground that has a good growth of mosses and ferns at its base, but even this is not as lush as the growths on the cabbages:

Too, as you look through these pics, notice that the ground surface is more often than not almost devoid of small plants. Indeed, it can seem to be a veritable desert for little herbs. The second thing I noticed was that some plants when growing low to the ground occurred only on cabbage palm root balls; these species include whisk fern (Psilotum nudum):

strap fern (Vittaria lineata):

and goldfoot fern (Phlebodium aureum) (the root ball on this cabbage palm is well above the ground):

Third, although mosses are less picky, also growing on other types of wood both living and dead, nowhere were bryophytic mosses carpeting their substrates as profusely as on cabbage palm bases.

Fourth, I noticed that it looked like this swamp’s cabbage palm root masses were rarely if ever totally inundated, unlike the forest floor, and if so it would mean the root masses were elevating small plants above the flood line.

A keystone species is one that other organisms require the presence of in order to carry out their life cycle. Although at first blush it might seem that cabbage palm bases perform this function, in fact all the species mentioned do well in other habitats. The goldfoot fern and green-fly orchid (Epidendrum conopseum), for example, prefer to grow in the canopies of cabbage palms and live oaks, respectively, mosses occur on many substrates in the swamp and violets occur on the ground in the swamp and elsewhere. The cabbage palm base microhabitat stands out by perhaps providing the best habitat in the swamp for certain species, thus being a platform for “parent” plants to re-seed the ground after flood waters have drowned low-growing vegetation.

I like to say that I read “the book of nature” when I’m in the field, each soil type, weather formation and plant species being a paragraph or a page of the tome. It absolutely delights me that I will never get to the end of the book. Even in my sixties, I still encounter new script worthy of marvel on every outing. I truly pity those whose careers were spent doing things they never again want to do upon retirement and am immensely saddened upon hearing that someone is bored with their retirement.

Lubee Bat Conservancy & Blue's Creek Swallets

2010-11-14T12:06:00.002-05:00

Saturday afternoon (11/13), Bruce and I headed over to the Lubee Bat Conservancy north of Gainesville for their annual festival, along the way exploring the numerous, mostly dirt, back roads in the vicinity of Monteocha. This is the one day of the year that Lubee’s facilities are open to the general public and I had been meaning to see the place for some time now. The tours were self-guided and led through large, outdoor cages containing the bats. The Conservancy is dedicated to the conservation of fruit bats. It seems odd to me to locate a fruit bat center in Florida because our native bats are all insectivorous, but I guess fruit bats cannot become established here if there is an accidental release. Unfortunately, the dense fencing between the bats and my camera denied photography, but their website contains plenty of pics: (http://www.batconservancy.org/).

I did buy a bat at the festival. How could I not? After all, this is a bat place and I collect toy bats for decorations in my home. Mostly they are plastic Halloween horror decorations, but several are cute plush toys, some of which are hand puppets. Saturday’s find was a cotton print stuffed bat. Ordinarily I like a demure bat, almost invisible, like a genuine chiropteran cruising overhead after dusk. Perhaps that’s just what I’m used to, because toy bats are typically manufactured in black and brown, and it is hard to find them more colorful. The only prior exception is the white, pink and green banana leaf bat ensemble hanging in my living room, but now this fiery little devil gets added:

The Occasional Bat (http://www.theoccasionalbat.com/) produces two sizes of these bats with a variety of print patterns. The more I look at this thing, the more I want to get another, and another. In fact, I think I will get one for the raffle at the annual Florida Cave Cavort.

After that, we went to the bicycling trailhead at San Felasco Hammock State Park, pedaling over to the NE slope of Sanchez Prairie and walking from there. Bruce had never been to the Blue’s Creek swallets from the north, so I retraced a previous trip for his benefit. Not having any other goals and the daylight fading, we covered ground quickly. In fact, we returned to the trailhead in a round trip of only 2:16 hrs (covering a total of 8.1 miles), implying that an early start could place explorers in the heart of the east side of Sanchez Prairie in a little over an hour of biking and hiking. That would provide up to 5 or 6 hours of discovery time where it is most involved to reach and where I have spent the least amount of time. I’ll be back there soon.

Land Bridge Trail Hiking and Biking

2010-11-06T19:26:00.017-04:00

Ordinarily, I run off into the woods solo or with a few buds, but today I did something different – I went with an organized group called the North Central Florida Explorers that operates under the MeetUp.com banner, and I was the only caver there (I can just hear the gasps). We met at the Land Bridge Trailhead of the Cross-Florida Greenway and hiked to the bridge over I-75 and westward before heading back to the parking area, a total of 4.3 miles (butterscotch line).

It was not one of my usual hard-(old)-man treks, much less one of my occasional death marches. It was instead more leisurely and social, and I’m not worn out, scratched or bruised at the end of the day. I didn't know you could do that! I had the opportunity to walk and chat with several interesting people. It is good to get out in the woods with new acquaintances and trade knowledge banks, plus I met some naturalists that I plan to invite on my next bike-n-hike. New blooood, bwa-ha-ha-haaaaa!

Ecologically, the Land Bridge Trail is nothing to write a home blog about. The trail from trailhead almost to the land bridge is second growth, very low diversity broadleaf evergreen forest totally dominated by live oak and laurel oak. In fact, I saw only one other tree species in there, and that was a single individual sugarberry. Oh, there probably was sweetgum or water oak in there, somewhere, but I didn’t see them. Nonetheless, the canopy is mature and shady, and the live oak limbs are draped with resurrection fern, so it is quite pleasant. Since most of the participants today were not botanically inclined, I may have been the only one there noticing the floral poverty. Prem Subrahmanyam, one of my blog readers and an orchid aficionado, suggested in a previous post comment that I should be on the lookout for Triphora orchids, as this is the time of year when they begin to flower, which I did but saw none. Maybe next time?

Approaching the land bridge, the topography rises and the plant community becomes a sandhill habitat. It has been thoroughly modified by timbering, the absence of fire and earthmoving associated with the abandoned Cross-Florida Barge Canal. (Pause for a moment to remember that we have Marjorie Carr to thank for being the first person in America to defeat a major US Army Corps of Engineers water works project, this damnable canal, and say hallelujah!) The profound disturbances have transformed the habitat from a dominance of longleaf pine and turkey oak to one of a mixture of scrub oaks and ruderal pines, including myrtle oak, scrub live oak, Chapman’s oak, sand pine, loblolly pine and (rarely) longleaf pine. Before being stopped, the canal was partially dug with short segments excavated down several tens of feet but not deeply enough to reach the water table. The trail we walked took us alongside and atop some of the spoil banks, which had been piled up so long ago that the second-growth sandhill scrub vegetation has colonized and blurred the line between them and the original sandhill soils.

Despite this native Florida ecologist’s haughty attitude toward the floral fiasco, the trail here is carpeted in quietening pine needles and is quite peaceful and scenic.

Garberia (Garberia fruiticosa) was blooming all along the sandhill trail, its light purple blossoms slightly fragrant and attracting a few pollinators. It probably would have lured in many more pollinators and my pics of it might have been less blurred from shivering if the day had been warmer. Goldenrod (Solidago sp.) was everywhere but its flowers were fading into brown and thus unworthy of pictorial attention. Likewise, dense blazing star (Liatris spicata) was past its prime but still attractive. Deer moss (Cladina evansii), a lichen composed of a fungus and an alga, formed large beds in places, indicative of the long-term absence of fire which kills it.

A single fence lizard (Sceloporus undulatus) was spotted by an alert hiker and pointed out to me, hanging out in the sun on a pine log in the chill wind. Possibly, because it was so close to the ground and flattened against the log, it was within a “boundary layer” of still air that protected it from the cold. It allowed me to approach to within 4 inches, so it must have been desperate for warmth. Ordinarily, just you try and approach this “swift;” it will dart away before you can get within a yard of it. Compare it to the photo of a scrub lizardat the end of this post – they are closely related, and possibly the latter evolved from the former during a higher Plio-Pleistocene sea level when the Florida peninsula was reduced to a series of islands. The scrub lizard is found only in xeric scrub plant communities in Florida whereas the fence lizard is found in many open xeric and mesic woodland habitats throughout most of eastern North America.

I should also point out the rockwork on the land bridge. Ever since I saw the intricate, imaginative, mortar-less stone walls of central Mexico in the late 1970s, I have closely inspected literally every rock wall that I have walked by to compare them with their Hispanic hermanos. Frankly, I find American rock walls wanting, most being slathered with mortar and some being nothing more than random, long stacks of rocks (Bruce J. Morgan’s sublime stoneworks being the sole exceptions). But I have to admit that the one on the land bridge is a good one. True, it uses mortar, but there is rather little of it and the stonemason took care to closely match edges.

The hike lasted from 10am until noon. After lunch, the trip organizer, Linda, and I got on our bikes and pedaled back to the land bridge and beyond (green line on the Google Earth image above). We had intended to ride the Christmas Trail, but it was closed for unknown reasons so we took the limestone road down the center of the Greenway property and then back, covering another 6 miles. I hope to do more outings with this friendly group.

Tomorrow I’m off to the low hammocks along the west side of the St. Johns River floodplain in the Ocala national Forest. I have seen some really cool serpentine cabbage palms, snail middens and older growth forests there in the past, and have stayed away too long. Who knows what treasures for Buford Nature lay in store for the morrow?

Land Bridge Trail + Santos Bike Trails

2010-11-05T16:16:00.001-04:00

The brisk weather this morning sent me back to the Santos area bike trails; specifically, I parked at the Land Bridge Trailhead and biked east and west from there, covering about 15 miles in 2 hours:

It was a relatively easy route over flat terrain with few rocks, roots and fallen logs to deal with, so I was able to lean into the pedals and burn quads pretty much the whole way. Park managers have created separate trails for bikers, hikers and horse riders, which is great. Notably, there were more horse riders out this morning than the three of us bikers and one solo hiker. Tomorrow, I’ll be back to hike with a bunch of Meetup.com people, and afterward bike with a few of them. I’ll include some pics of the trail environment when I post tomorrow’s adventures.

Blue's Creek Valley Karst

2010-10-23T22:23:00.012-04:00

Brack and I did a 13-mile (7 biking, 6 hiking) bike-n-hike today at my favorite Florida state park, San Felasco Hammock. I have many missions to accomplish at San Felasco, but today’s was a new one I had not thought up before. There are two caves out there called Pine Arch Cave and Little Pine Arch Cave, and the Florida Cave Survey states that Pine Arch has a couple of tens of feet of small passage leading to a blowing hole beside a major chert boulder. I had heard of Pine Arch before, but had not heard of the blowing hole, so armed with lat/long from the FCS database, we set off to find it and evaluate the boulder.

Brack and I had walked very close to the coordinates last December without knowing of its existence. We were not all that sure we would have missed it anyway because we look for such karst features whenever we are out in the woods, but we were willing to give it a go. We left my truck at the park’s north entrance and biked about 3.5 miles along single-track trails, stashed the bikes in a clump of native giant cane (Arundinaria gigantea) and walked from there. We found that we had indeed walked right where the caves are supposed to be last December, but this time we saw no caves or even sinkholes where the caves could be hiding below. Oh, there were three sinks in the vicinity, but they were quite well plugged. Possibly, the original lat/longs for the caves were collected via a different datum and then not converted to the datum the FCS uses?

Ok fine, it was time for a backup mission, and I had one at the ready. I have several times been to the swallets that consume all the normal flow from Blue’s Creek, but always reached them from the south following the creek. I have wanted to come in from the north because there is a karst feature I have been trying to re-find for the last several years, so taking the north route today became Plan B. I non-imaginatively call the feature Limestone Pavement Marsh after its tall sedge vegetation and exposed white limestone ground surface. The rock “pavement” may actually be huge, flat boulders appx 15ft x 25ft x 2ft in size, lying not quite flat on the ground, but in any case, they may cover yet another swallet or two. I stumbled upon this marsh a couple of times over the decades, but always without a GPS, which is why I have been unable to re-find them. I can tell you that aerial photos and USGS Topo Quads are truly worthless in this place. Uplands and wetlands are both dominated by hardwoods that appear identical on aerial photos, and the USGS Topos are wretchedly wrong. Perhaps today would be the day we re-found the lost karst?

We set off following the toe of slope at the edge of Sanchez Prairie, rounding a peninsula separating the prairie from Blue’s Creek Valley and headed south. We did not have to travel far before the valley changed from low hammock forest to (dry) cypress swamp, and after progressing only a few hundred feet more along the west edge of the cypress, we hit pay dirt – huge limestone boulders.

Was this it? Was this part of a wetland that would segue into the sedge marsh and pavement limestone of my memory? I felt certain it would be, so I took my time admiring each 10 – 20ft boulder, photographing many of them, but they finally ended at a plugged sinkhole.

Beyond this was a small sedge and smartweed marsh that did NOT have pavement rock. But no, I was not disappointed. Promisingly, there was more cypress ahead that could yet contain the mission marsh, and I was still flush from finding this spectacular karst feature that was totally unsuspected! To top it off, we also found the shed skin of a diamondback rattlesnake, whole but for the rattles.

Happy enough with these things, I rationalized that maybe it was a good thing we had not found the Limestone Pavement Marsh after all, because now I still have that worthy goal to seek. Sometimes, looking for the pot of gold is better than finding it. On a previous trip, Bruce certainly seemed to think so:

Continuing southward we arrived at the location where Blue’s Creek leaves its main valley and flows into two little karst valleys on the west. These side valleys are where the creek’s water drains into the Floridan Aquifer via several small swallets. Each of these short valleys has very steep dirt side slopes with occasional, sheer limestone walls split by fissures into which the creek disappears.

Ordinarily, the first valley’s swallets take all the water, but as the creek rises in storm events or during wet seasons, it overflows the first and then heads into the second side valley, sumping into both of them.

These two small valleys are very picturesque. All exposed rock is covered with mosses and liverworts, spotted here and there with several species of ferns. Florida’s only species of genuine tree fern, Ctenitis sloanei, maintains a couple of ambassadors at the head of the second valley. These are the northernmost individuals of this species I know of in Florida. Half-way up the second valley, 3 – 4ft boulders are imbedded in the substrate and piled atop each other and the lushness of ferns, mosses, liverworts and wildflowers that carpet them is fantastic.

Even trees try to climb the rock!

Fallen logs are abundant along this boulder section, fodder for ferns, fungi and company. Draped over the entire boulder-and-log maze are grapevines and other vines, plus various shrubs. You cannot walk through this habitat upstream of the above photo – it is too treacherous. If you put your weight on the moss carpet, it will slip off the rock like a loose rug and you’ll faw down go boom. Many of the smaller boulders teeter-totter under your weight, plus you must move gymnastically, gingerly over and under the lianas and logs. So don’t! Instead, just stand at the start of it all and marvel. It may be the most beautiful karst valley I have seen in Florida, and I’d like it to stay that way. I have been here before, but Brack had not, and he wisely refrained from blundering in.

Just north of this second valley, another seasonal stream comes into Blue’s Creek Valley from the east and heads south toward the second valley. This stream drains a hardwood swamp. At its western end is a 2ft-diameter willow. Thinking it was an enormous Coastal Plain willow (Salix caroliniana) I was sure I was looking at an unrecognized national champion tree (the largest individual of its species in the US).

I used to nominate national champs and state champs, at one time having about a dozen of them in my portfolio, and continue to keep an eye out for unusually big trees. Brack and I estimated height/ diameter/ crown spread dimensions to use in checking the books back home, knowing that if it indeed is that worthy we would have to come back with a tape measure to obtain real numbers.

It could also be a black willow (Salix nigra), which can grow to a diameter of 5ft or more, but I have never seen this species on the Florida Peninsula. There is always a first time, so I collected a twig with leaves for later identification. CP willow has whitish undersides to the leaves whereas black willow’s are green like the leaf dorsum, and this tree has green leaf undersides (= black). However, tiny glands at the tips of leaf margin teeth are red on black willow and yellow on CP willow, but this tree’s leaves have orange glands and the book says the two can intergrade. If this were mid-summer and the leaves were turgid and strong, I would be satisfied to call it a possible intergrade, but we are late in the season when leaves are dying, so the red could easily be fading to orange (or even yellow?) by now. I shall have to wait until spring to find out for sure. I plan to notify park management about it next week anyway, because regardless of whether it is a black willow or an unrecognized champion Coastal Plain willow, it is a notable tree that warrants protection.

Peddling back to the parking area, we saw the Traveling Gnome that someone moves around the park:

Florida's Amendment 4 Debate

2010-10-19T22:15:00.001-04:00

Monday night I attended a Florida Native Plant Society meeting in Gainesville FL, my first in over a year. I feel guilty about not attending more of their meetings because I am a founding member and because they are my kind of people. In fact, I ran into Peggy Y there, my longest running friend except for family; we have been friends and in frequent company since the early 1970s.

The meetings are usually about FNPS business and socializing, but tonight’s meeting was different. The group sponsored a debate regarding Amendment 4 that will be on Florida ballots statewide in November. Amendment 4, if passed by the people, would require all Comprehensive Plan changes be approved by voters in the districts where the changes are proposed. For you who are out of state or are Floridians out of touch, the Comp Planning process is in addition to local zoning and is more comprehensive than zoning, and is designed to prevent such bad things as leapfrog development, overcrowded schools and adverse impacts to environmental resources. The list of proponents of Amendment 4 is a Who’s Who of environmental and consumer advocacy groups. The list of cons is a regurgitation of land development interests.

The debate was set up like those run by the League of Women for US Presidential debates, and was MC’d, I think, by an LoW representative. The two pro debaters were an activist named Francis ____ and Alachua County Commissioner Mike Byerly; the cons were Robert Brinkman and the head of the Alachua County Planning Department, Steven ____ (I apologize for not knowing everybody’s last names). All were thoroughly versed on the subject and did great jobs responding to both canned and audience-generated questions.

Yes, I asked a question: “If it is assumed that elected officials fairly represent the will of the few people who take the time to vote, it could also be fairly assumed that Amendment 4 is redundant. What am I missing?” Somehow, Rob was not given an opportunity to respond, but Steve and Francis made good responses. Mike Byerly’s answer, however, was most pointed, replying that most elected officials are from the land development community because most other citizens do not have the time or money to run for public office and often do not even have the time to attend public meetings. Thus, he said, Amendment 4 will give citizens their only opportunity to vote against bad comp plan (land use) changes. In fairness, I have observed that there are many elected officials who are not part of the land development industry, especially in rural counties, but in urbanized counties, the land development industry does indeed hold sway.

In the end, however, the cons made an equally excellent but disheartening point. The comp planning laws are about to sunset – dissolve – unless the Florida Legislature renews them. However, the comp planning laws were passed by a far different legislature than the land development industry-controlled legislature that currently mismanages Florida’s affairs. Therefore, it is highly likely that next year’s legislature will allow comp planning to evaporate, plus the debate cons claimed that passage of Amendment 4 would make that likelihood even more of a certainty. Florida will still have zoning laws, so we won’t go the way of Texas, but those of us who love Florida’s nature bounty and a high quality of life in rural areas are afraid, very afraid.

Why I Climb Trees

2010-10-18T13:35:00.005-04:00

Back in the mid-1970s, I invented a way to climb large trees using lassos made of one-inch tubular webbing and cave rope ascending gear. The idea is to reach up as high as you can and lasso the tree trunk, cinch the webbing down tightly, then use a set of three mechanical ascenders to “inchworm” your way up the webbing to the knot of the lasso. Then reach as high as you can to wrap a second lasso around the trunk and do it all over again, then do it yet again with a third lasso. Next, remove the first lasso and use it for a fourth, still higher wrap, and continuing on use the second lasso for a fifth wrap, etcetera, until you reach the canopy and can freely “monkey” around in the treetop branches. Thus, only three lassos are needed. Upon reaching as high as you dare to go, tie a fourth piece of webbing around the trunk, clip a carabiner onto it and thread a low-stretch rope through the ‘biner. The rope’s bitter end is already tied to the base of a second tree, and the hanging end of the rope is what you use to rappel back to terra firma.

Lately, I have discovered that several other cavers have also independently invented this method of ascending trees. The “wheel” keeps being re-invented.

I won’t describe here the caver’s ascending gear and ascension techniques because that is the subject of whole books that you can immerse yourself in for a looong time. Suffice it to say that, for safety’s sake, we American cavers always have at least three mechanical ascenders on the rope at all times, even though a single ascender is quite strong enough to support a person. A great weakness of the caver’s ascending system, however, is that although we have three ascenders on the rope, we have only the one rope; thus, we have a redundancy of three with ascenders but no redundancy at all with the rope. Needless to say, we take VERY good care of our ropes – don’t even think of asking to borrow our pit ropes!

So, why do we climb trees? An oft-cited reason is to construct a “rope stand,” that is, a standing rope that cavers can use to practice their Single Rope Technique, or SRT. Getting in and out of some caves involves rappelling into and then climbing out of rather deep pits up to several hundred feet deep. Rock climbers may climb solid rock like granite, but limestone is often called “rotten rock” for good reason, so cavers go up and down ropes, not rocks. SRT is not intuitive. It requires knowledge, patience and skill that only come from practice, practice and more practice. In addition, hanging in a harness constricts blood flow and pinch nerves, which can cause serious injury and even death if not performed correctly. Thus, conditioning is required in addition to practice.

Over the years, I have constructed several dozen rope stands in trees in my back yards and those of my friends. Frankly, climbing trees via lassos is slow and can be exhausting, so a more efficient method is to use a bow and arrow to drape a monofilament line over the base of a high branch, then use the monofilament to pull an eighth-inch line over the branch, finally using the latter to pull the rope into place. Disadvantages of this technique are that the lines and rope can saw through the bark, damaging the tree and getting tree sap on the rope. Pines make the best rope stands because they have a single trunk from which numerous horizontal limbs splay outward, making the canopy of a pine essentially a three-dimensional ladder; hardwoods are vastly inferior in that respect. But pine pitch is horrid on the rope. It can do serious damage to the rope and, because it gets on you and your gear, you get all hot and icky. Ugh! Everything is a trade-off. Sometimes we use the bow and arrow and sometimes the lassos.

My house lot in NC has several tall white pines (Pinus strobus) suitable for rope stands. Since much of my time recently preparing the lot for house construction was spent in waiting on contractors to show up, I decided to invest some time setting up a rope stand. I chose a hundred-foot tall pine about 75 ft downhill from the house pad and set to work using the webbing lassos. After a half-day of exertion and pinched arteries and nerves, I had climbed only about 30 ft up the tree. Part of the reason I was unable to ascend higher was because I was sawing dead limbs away from the trunk as I went, but using the webbing involved a lot of knot tying and re-tying, plus cinching myself closer to the tree so I could reach higher to wrap the next lasso, plus having to use not three but four points of attachment. The following pics do not really give the uninitiated a full grasp of the system but should imply how sloppy and complicated it is:

“There had to be a better way,” I thought, as I tucked myself into bed for the night. Visions of webbing and SRT danced in my head as cramped muscles failed into flaccidity. Then suddenly it came to me! “Why not use rope instead of webbing?” Rope is stiffer and easier to throw around the 3 ft diameter trunk, rope holds the ascenders in place more sturdily than slick, flat webbing, knots are easier to tie and untie in rope and rope tangles less than webbing. Excited about this epiphany, it took another couple of hours before I finally was able to fall asleep. I kept going over and over in my mind how my techniques would change.

The next morning, I cut three 16 ft long pieces of rope and turned them into lassos, and using them found them to be indeed a far more elegant solution. The fourth point of attachment was needed only momentarily, fewer knots were needed and never needed to be re-tied, ascenders never slipped or got snagged, rope lassos never tangled or got in my way and I was able to do away with cowtails and carabiner cinches. Although this photo (again) does not give you a full picture of the technique, it does show how much simpler the new method is:

While I climbed only another 30 ft the second day, again largely due to sawing off dead limbs plus having to work out the details of the new rope lasso method, it took an hour less time and I was not nearly as tired as at the end of the first day. I stopped at the base of the canopy where limb whorls are about 2 – 3 ft apart, almost to the point where I can free climb without having to use the lassos or have to cut more than a few additional dead limbs. I should be able to reach the top of the tree in only a few hours the next time I go out and play.

There are other reasons I like to climb trees. American scientists working in Costa Rica back in the 1970s were featured in an issue of Smithsonian Magazine roping their way around the Monteverde cloud forest canopy. Their research turned up interesting features of natural history new to science that fascinated me, and this in fact was the catalyst that precipitated me into exploring the canopies of Florida’s forest giants. I studied their photographs intently, trying in vain to figure out how their kit was composed, so invented my own from scratch. They learned, for example, that epiphytes on treetop limbs form a web of stems and roots that trap leaves, sticks, vines and the feces of insects, mammals and birds. Epiphyte roots penetrate tree bark, breaking it off and incorporating it into the rich organic matrix. The trees themselves then send their own roots into this mass to sip its moisture and sup on its nutrients – the trees had roots at both ends! Inspired, I climbed trees in Florida and discovered similar epiphytic mats with roots from host trees of red maple, Southern magnolia and swamp tupelo.

Other large trees I have climbed include live oak, winged elm and bald cypress. I have sat on brontosaurian limbs of live oaks a hundred feet above the ground, swaying in the breeze while eating sandwiches and sipping red wine, laughing at wide-eyed blue jays astonished to find me amongst them. I have ascended to the top of a bald cypress 80 ft high and 4 ft in diameter at that height, broken off by a hurricane long before, and looked down through its hollow trunk onto an abandoned bear den. I have found trails atop canopy limbs through epiphytic resurrection fern “lawns” that were created by gray squirrels, opossums, raccoons and cotton mice. I have come face-to-face with a yellow rat snake staring out of a trunk den, fat with four lumps in its gut. I have been startled by a family of raccoons, a mom and her four young-uns, emerging at dusk from a cavity high in a live oak, first to pee and then to scuttle down the trunk to forage for the night. I climb trees for many reasons.

NC House Lot, Phase I

2010-10-09T12:32:00.018-04:00

I have mentioned a few times lately that I am improving my house lot in NC in preparation for building a summer home there. I have written but little about it here because it really isn’t about Florida adventures or Florida nature, but it has taken so much of my time lately and a few curious minds say they want to know, so I will indulge. Besides, if I don’t write about something, you will forget about my blog and that just won’t do. But I will be merciful and keep the story to just one or maybe two postings, which you can choose to read or not.

The project began out of a marriage of love for the mountain property and desperation over a lack of income, thinking that it was about time I finally developed the site and should do so while still flush with recent income. I knew it would be a race between running out of money while building the house in NC versus saving money by not paying rent at my RV space on the edge of Orange Lake in FL. I just hope that I can figure out how to save enough money on the building and lot improvements to keep construction going forward while finding some paying work as I go.

I focused first on improving the lot. Having a driveway and house/RV pad constructed was expensive, but I got bids from 6 contractors and was astonished to have them vary by almost a factor of two! The cheapest bidder was the one recommended by Uncle Dave, a former realtor who had contracted on behalf of other snowbirds and thus had a lot of experience dealing with local contractors. Having a lot of faith in Dave, I bought the cheapest bid and it proved to be the right thing to do, so I saved almost $10,000 right off the bat. So far, so good.

The main reason I focused on the lot rather than house construction was because I calculated that building a house would greatly exceed my savings. As I proceeded with lot improvements, however, Uncle Ralph revealed he was building a portable sawmill that would handle a 16 ft long by 42-inch diameter log, and that all I had to provide were the logs, gasoline, saw blades and half the labor. There were 8 white pines and several oaks of saw-timber size within the house pad and driveway that were sufficient to build a decently sized house. Then, when an arborist friend of Ralph’s found out about the sawmill, he offered Ralph literally a hundred tons of free oak, pine and poplar logs! We plan to use the pine for framing, oak for flooring and poplar for indoor and outdoor paneling, all for just the cost of sawing. Oh, man! So far, so good.

But several contractors told us that we might not be able to use my own saw timber due to county ordinances that address wood strength and wood-boring insect concerns. We noticed, however, that a lot of the advice was conflicting, so I went straight to the horse’s mouth – the county building and inspection department. At first, the nice young man quoted ordinance wording that was fairly restrictive, but there were conflicts there, too, so he put me on hold and conferred with the county engineer. When he got back to me, he said, “Look, we think a person should be able to use his own timber, so we’re going to work with you on it.” (Say hallelujah!) He said the most important thing is that the house lumber moisture content must be less than 19% and that we would have to beef up on the load-bearing timbers. He also said that they would advise us on the latter when I submit house plans. You know that would never happen in a large-population county. So far, so good.

The distance of the house pad from the closest power pole was too far for Duke Energy to lay underground lines for free. They preferred to erect overhead lines, but I was unwilling for them to clear-cut a 30ft wide swath through my beautiful mixed oak-pine forest, especially after clearing the driveway and house pad, so I sprung $2000 for underground service. As a friend taught me some years back, I consider this to be merely a “temporary inconvenience.” The electric contractor put up the power pole and circuit boxes relatively inexpensively, as did the plumber when running a sewer pipe from the pad to the septic tank. So far, so good.

Friday, the well driller installed a 6-inch well. It needed casing only to a depth of 33 ft, whereas the usual for this area is 60 – 80 ft at a cost of $5/ft. They found first water at 40 ft although the usual here is 60 – 120 ft and can be much deeper. They continued to drill down because a well that shallow can easily go dry during drought, taking it to a total depth of 125 ft. Most of the folks I have talked to said their wells were drilled to depths of 160 – 220 ft, so at a cost of $9/ft I think I got off pretty good. Also, most of the wells around here produce only 4 – 8 gallons per minute, whereas my first water produced 10 gal/min and the total inputs are estimated to be 20 gal/min. We joked afterward that perhaps I should start a utility company. So far, so good.

There have been a few disappointments, mostly being the interminable delays in getting bids, return calls and construction delays from contractors. Then there was the instance when the sewer line plumber cut the underground phone line despite me showing him exactly where it was located, because he was too lazy to halt digging with the track-hoe and “find” the wires using his two strong young men and their shovels. Aaarrggh! But the latter didn’t cost me any money and the delays only cost me my time, which is cheap now as I am unemployed. So, ok … fine.

The driveway has also been a problem. The soil here is clayey sand that becomes mushy when rained upon, so much so that heavy equipment cannot access the site unless it is very dry or paved with asphalt or gravel. Since the site gets 60+ inches of rain yearly and most of the work has been during a rainy period, “dry” didn’t work. Asphalt is very expensive and is crushed by heavy equipment anyway, so I opted for gravel. Actually, we don’t use what they call “gravel” because it is uniform in size and therefore acts like ball bearings, plus it would get smushed into the ground when driven or walked upon immediately after rain. Instead, we use what is referred to as “road bond,” which is every size (of gneiss, I think) between rock flour and gravel. These mixed-sized grains interlock when being driven over and rained upon, and if thick enough the material becomes almost as hard a surface as concrete. Anyway, after having a 2 – 3 inch-thick layer of road bond placed on the driveway by a contractor, Ralph and I have been repairing the driveway after each contractor comes and goes. For example, this week we filled his truck bed at the local quarry twice each on Tuesday and Wednesday and once on Thursday, and then hand-shoveled the material onto the driveway. Since each truckload weighed 3000 lbs, ahem, we each shoveled 7,500 lbs of sand and rock this week. My lumbar region is a bit sore today (Saturday), but … I’m gonna say it … So far, so good.

Monday, the well driller should return and lay underground water and electric lines from the pad to the well and get the whole shebang inspected by the county. Likewise, the county should also make the final inspection of the sewer line on Monday, thus completing lot improvement and preparation for house building, a milestone worthy of note! I will return to NC when Ralph finishes constructing the sawmill for the next phase – making boards out of logs and stacking and covering them so they can air-dry over the remainder of autumn and then winter. Come spring, unless I am broke or employed, I will start building the house. Below is a sample of photos taken during the last few months; hopefully, they will give you an idea of what has been done and how beautiful the forest is and the home will be.

Now, where is that new mountain bike of mine? Where are the biking trails? Is it cool enough to get back to caving yet? I think I saw some fall wildflowers back there somewhere begging to be photographed…

In the beginning there was an old logging road and leaves...

And I said, "Let there be heavy equipment and dirt:"

Installing a culvert in a tiny creek flowing over sediments that are saturated "all the way down:"

It seems a shame to log a 32-inch pine, but it will make a fine living room. Here is the pile of logs that it made (the large log on the upper right is 16 feet long and the one on the lower left is 12 ft long):

This view is from the downhill side of the same pile of logs looking up toward the house pad and front yard on the upper left and the "greenfield" septic drainfield on the upper right:

Another view of the lot's forest from just uphill of the house pad:

New look of the driveway entrance after application of the road bond:

The Empty Bucket List

2010-10-01T19:16:00.002-04:00

There are three things I thought I would never do in my life: physically bury a relative, wrongfully come under suspicion over a serious crime or kill a human being. I have been able to avoid war and bar fights, but the other two have indeed happened to me.

Preparing the corpse of a relative and burying it has become so “hands-off” these days. However the loved one may have died, we are rarely present at the moment of death. The person may have been killed in a vehicle crash, died on the job or passed away in a hospital. When informed of it the officer or doctor asks you where the body is to be sent, and you (if it is even you) tell them which funeral home. Someone else delivers the body and the undertaker prepares the corpse. It may or may not be cremated and is then put into a cremation urn or casket and buried by funeral staff. All you have to do is show up for the services and pay the bills. I have been through this many times and never thought much about it. It was not done that way by pioneers or beyond the frontier by early explorers. Kinfolk or fellow adventurers dug the holes themselves, laid the bodies down and shoveled the dirt back in.

My mom died of nicotine cancer. They took out the grapefruit-sized growth and pronounced her cured, but they also unknowingly excised an artery that fed a foot-long section of her intestine. That portion of the gut died, went septic and killed her. I was not there for the relapse nor was I present when she died, arriving several hours after she expired. The hospital called the undertaker, who took the body to the crematorium, reduced it to ashes and placed them in an urn that we had chosen. Again, it was all clipped and manicured. The undertaker said he would take care of everything, but a series of problems ensued so I drove back to North Carolina, picked up the urn and carried it to the cemetery myself.

It was not grave diggers but me that dug a hole beside the remains of her sister, father and stepmother. My (ex) wife was with me at the time, and we chatted nonchalantly about mom, the weather and lack of rocks as I dug deeply into the sandy soil. I set the urn in the bottom of the pit, and as I began shoveling dirt back into the hole, the heaviness hit me. Suddenly I was no longer confident and nimble, but clumsy, numb and heavy of heart and limb, but I set my jaw and finished the job like a man. I can tell you, burying a parent with your own hands and shovel is closure! I now know how the early explorers felt when they filled that hole under the tree. Perhaps it is only fitting, after all these years of adventures in the wild lands of Florida and beyond that I too had to finally hoe that row.

Not too long ago, a neighbor committed suicide, leaving a wife in a state of shock. I took her some vegetables from my garden a few days afterward, she invited me in for a cup of hot tea and after only a few weeks, we started dating. I justified my lack of hesitancy by repeating to myself her words that their marriage was in name only. Very shortly afterward, however, she dumped me, but then two days after that she disappeared, and I mean she just vanished off the face of the earth. Her landlady called the sheriff and a missing person’s report was filled out. It came to light that I had dated her only three weeks after the suicide and that she had dumped me, so suddenly (there’s that word again) I was a suspect. Egad!

The first detective was a nice man, casually dressed, short, fat and bald, and we talked about the falling water level in the lake and other random issues before he started the interview. The second detective, however, was tall and muscular, stern of countenance, all no-nonsense and literally covered with colors, appliances, leather and steel. He watched me out of the corners of his eyes as he asked every question at least twice. Good cop, bad cop. It turned out that she had simply decided in her paranoid haze to go into hiding out West, but the cops found her anyway. For a while, I was a prime suspect in a disappearance most foul, but now I can go about my business without looking over my shoulder. Whew!

So I guess I’ll stop thinking about things that I might ever do or not. I guess I’ll just do whatever tasks are before me.

Butterfly Rattlesnakes!

2010-09-27T19:26:00.006-04:00

Bruce and I have been exploring the bike trails and karst terrain of a property on the west side of Gainesville over the past two weekends, covering 7.7 miles on the 19th and another 4.9 miles yesterday Sunday. Most of that mileage was single-track biking, but yesterday’s route also included a mile or so of pushing our bikes through briary brush. We found five active sinkholes and a pretty cavern, but unfortunately no caves.

Bruce named this cavern Sombrero in honor of his straw hat:

Leading along a bike trail yesterday, Bruce spotted an eastern diamondback rattlesnake (Crotalus adamanteus) crossing the path and slammed on the brakes before hitting it, slowly slid off his bike and reached for his camera. After pulling it from the pouch, he took several steps forward to snap some photos of it while I stepped forward onto the spot where he had just been standing. Something on the ground about a foot away from my left leg caught my eye:

Gulp! This species has been called the most dangerous snake on earth due to its having very long fangs, large poison sacs, toxic venom, overall large size and great abundance in frequent proximity to humans. Yes, we are thankful that the eastern diamondback rattlesnake is not quick to bite! Here’s a shot of the first rattler:

The one at our feet was a lady and the coiled serpent was a gentleman, both of them being about 4 – 4.5 ft in length. Neither of them ever lunged or made any attempt to bite us. The female never made a sound, although the male shook his rattles continuously during our presence (note the blurred tail tip).

I really don’t know why the species is called the “diamondback.” You can clearly see that their back pattern more closely approximates a bat or butterfly shape, not at all diamond-shaped. I’d suggest the alternate name of bat rattlers, although they might be more marketable to the warm and fuzzy crowd by calling ‘em butterfly rattlers.

They weren’t the only snakes we saw yesterday. Sadly, after parking my truck in his yard after the biking, we found this colorful little red-bellied snake (Storeria occipitomaculata obscura) dying in the tire tread print. This species (subspecies) is pretty common, but hides and forages under rocks, logs and leaf litter and thus is seldom seen. Some of their behavioral quirks are fascinating:

“The red-bellied snake exhibits a curious behavior known as "lip-curling." While both ingesting prey and being threatened, they flick their tongue and curl their lips upward to show their small maxillary teeth. This is thought to have some benefit for prey seizure, but it may be just as important as a deterrent to predators. When handled roughly they will sometimes exhibit the lip-curling, then rub their head sideways on the captor scratching their teeth against the flesh. The teeth are too small for this to be harmful to humans and is barely even noticeable. As with many other snakes when captured, they often release musk and smear the captor with cloacal matter (Amaral 1999). Occasionally they may even play dead by going completely limp until they think the coast is clear (Watermolen 1991). A much more dramatic display of death-feigning has been recorded. The particular snake wiggled its tail, twitched the back of its body, rolled over exposing the red belly, held its mouth open, protruded its tongue, contorted its body, and then went completely stiff instead of the usual limp display (Jordan 1970). It is not known if this is actually a death-feigning display or a stress induced seizure (Harding 1997).” From http://tinyurl.com/33r9bhr

Mary Susan Nicks, 1929 - 2010

2010-09-18T20:24:00.002-04:00

On my way back from NC today, I attended a funeral in Fernandina Beach, FL for Mary Susan Nicks. She was first my babysitter and later, when my mom married the father (Joseph Pocher) of her children, she became my stepmother. She was a good and kind person, had a positive influence on me and I mourn her passing. She raised four fine children to adulthood, and they are a testament to her character. May she rest in peace.
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/timesunion/obituary.aspx?n=mary-susan-nicks&pid=145429320

This is a photo of her three surviving children, Joseph, Ann and John:

Mountain Lot Creek Work

2010-09-12T20:36:00.006-04:00

This post is not about Florida nature, but that’s ok, right? I am in NC working on my house lot in the beautiful, cool-weather mountains of western North Carolina. My goal on this trip is to install a septic line from the septic tank to the inlet for the RV and electric lines from the road to the RV pad. The county requires the septic line to be emplaced by a licensed plumber. The only plumber I have talked to so far wants $1500 to lay a 70ft long line and I think that’s too much. I plan to get a couple more bids, but if that’s what it costs then I just may take the allegedly “easy” open-book exam and become a licensed plumber myself! That’ll go well with my hazwoper training, inactive real estate license and gopher tortoise agent certification. Think that’ll get me a cuppa coffee?

My goal today, Sunday the 12th, was simple, to stick a couple dozen wildflower transplants in the ground on the lot, and I did that but first had to deal with an erosion problem. It rained cats and dogs yesterday, and my driveway funneled surface water into some right places and some wrong places. The dirt at both ends of the culvert where the driveway crosses a first order stream got eroded away somewhat, not enough to panic but sufficient to require mitigation. I therefore felt it wise to spend about 5 hours this morning and early afternoon hauling rocks and green logs and shoveling water-saturated dirt around. All those things were heavy. My back hurts and my left arm is cramping even now, almost 6 hrs later, but here is the result:

If you know anything about stream dynamics or erosion, you know that bulkheads seldom last for long, plus, ecologically, bulkheads are BAD because of the limited amount of wildlife habitat associated with them. But if you know anything about the biology of temperate montane rain forests, you know that mosses, ferns, wildflowers and roots will soon enough tie it all together in beautiful harmony, and there will be plenty of wildlife there.

I have spent numerous weeks lately working on the lot, clearing trees and shrubs, rolling up root mats, wandering around and turning logs and rocks and so forth, but in all that time I have seen only one small salamander and one ground skink. I have been wondering, “Where are the herps?” Well, working in the creek today I found out: they are all in the creek and under the root mat that was hanging out over the creek. I caught a spiffy ringneck snake today with a back as sheeny black as you could ask for, and with a bright yellow neck ring, but was myself caught up in shoveling, filthy and sweaty, and didn’t want to pollute my camera so let it go without photographing it. Afterwards I kinda regretted that, so when I caught a big salamander I collected it in a ziplock bag and brought it back to my home away from home (Uncle Dave’s place), photographed it, and tried to key it out. I think it is a Northern Dusky Salamander, Desmognathus fuscus. It is robust beast, maybe 5 inches snout to vent, and about 0.75-inch wide. I can’t tell if the tail is re-grown after being bitten off by a predator or if that translucent tail is just what they look like (that is not a water line on the tail; there is no standing water in the container other than a few drops). Later, I returned to where it was caught and released it.

I saw a couple more, smaller salamanders in the creek but didn’t try to catch them or photograph them.

Notice in the photo of my handiwork above that I have placed rocks in the stream bottom. What you can’t see is that I first placed a layer of irregular-shaped rocks on the surface of the gravelly sand bottom and then placed a second layer of flat rocks on top of the first. Hopefully, salamanders will be able to roam around between the two rock layers protected from most predators, making this excellent salamander habitat. My philosophy here is that if I am going to create a biologically bad bulkhead, then I have a responsibility to make what’s left into good habitat. I think that’s fair.

I hope to find a roadside ditch where I can collect some wetland plants to place around the bulkhead and side slopes, to give a head start to revegetating the scene. This will be harder than some of my Florida friends realize, however, because up here in the mountains there are no real road shoulders to pull over and park on. There’s just the asphalt, about 18 inches of grassy dirt and then a ditch. I’ll search around and find something though, it’ll just take some patience.

I’ll repair the other side of the culvert when my back and left arm recuperate. Groooan!

San Felasco State Park - Labor Day Weekend 2010

2010-09-05T20:41:00.009-04:00

I took a rather easy trip today to my favorite Florida state park, San Felasco, biking about 4.9 miles and hiking 2.6 miles. I would have hiked further but high waters in Sanchez Prairie kept me from my mission. I am in search of an elusive karst feature, a tall-grass pond that a stream flows into and then disappears into the ground below some large flat boulders that may actually be limestone bedrock pavement. I stumbled onto the feature twice, years ago. Both times I didn’t spend enough time deciphering its geology nor did I take photos of it. I have searched for it in Bruce’s company several times, once with Brack and a couple of times by myself including today, all to no avail. Annoyed!

This is a good mystery, however, and is guaranteed to keep seducing me back until I find it, even if it takes me umpteen trips to do so. It’s a good place to be, perhaps not as lucrative and dangerous a raid as an African tomb, but hey, I’m only a weekend warrior. Right? And there are other kinds of treasures along the way…

I rode my spanking new mountain bike eastward from the parking area to the power line R/W and then south along it to the gate beyond which bicycles and horses are forbidden, and stashed the bike in the oak-hickory-pine woods. This forest will ultimately staff up with many more hardwood species like Southern magnolia, basswood and winged elm, but alas, I must be resigned to American ash and redbay probably not ever making it due to the emerald ash borer and whatever fungus it is that’s killing off our Persea bays (redbay, swamp bay and scrub bay). Oh well, at least sweetgum is not especially common, and the trees here are nice and mature. Glass half full.

After stashing the bike, I walked over to the open water’s edge under the power lines where they crossed Sanchez Prairie to see for what wildlife might be visible. A rather loud barred owl was shouting “Wa wa wa Wacahoota!” Clearly, it was a plaintive cry to bring back that nearly forgotten whistle-stop along a defunct railroad that ran south of Micanopy, clearly to me, anyway. But there was another sound, a soft splashing in the shallow water only 100 ft away in the swamp. I thought it might be feral pigs rooting around the edge of the water, but it sounded too soft for swine, plus there was no grunting. I slipped quietly towards the commotion, crouching low as I went until passing beyond the forest edge off the R/W, and then I saw it! It was a river otter, cruising at an angle away from me, alternately under water and then breaching the surface for air and observation. I don’t think it saw me, but maybe. I was too far away to get a good picture of it, but this will at least give you an idea of its foraging habitat:

I waited until it was out of sight and headed back to the east to continue my mission. As soon as I entered the forest on the other side of the R/W five wood ducks flushed from the water, whistle-whining as they went in complaint of my presence. Last winter this area harbored perhaps a hundred woodies, and I suspect that many again will return this year. Only a few hundred yards further on, a handful of white ibis foraged unconcernedly in the prairie’s mud without taking flight at my intrusion. A great blue heron squawked a little further away. This photo will give you an idea of the park-like atmosphere landward of the swamp:

There is a lot of water in the prairie this year, much more than last year when I could walk across the R/W without getting my feet wet. There are too many large alligators in this prairie for me to chance a foot crossing at this time, though. Although the water is currently a little high, take a gander at the high water lines on these trees 4+ ft above the low hammock’s ground surface:

The north edge of the prairie has hundreds of 4 ft long white PVC pipes outlining what I think is a previous water’s edge a few inches higher than today’s. The pipes are appx 10 – 30 ft apart, and they sure do take away from the otherwise natural feel of the site. After the holiday weekend, I must remember to call DEP and ask why they are there. They are not at a jurisdictional wetland edge for sure, as I used to delineate wetlands and these are all well waterward of the legal lines:

I only saw two deer. Wow. Usually many more are in evidence. A blue jay called in the distance, giving me the opportunity to practice my blue jay calls. I bet you didn’t know that I can almost imitate a blue jay, did you? Heh, but after 40 years of trying, I still can’t get it right. Blue jay calls are hard, so hard that I can’t remember how to do them unless prompted by a real jay, so don’t ask me to try it at your next party.

How about this spiral mushroom:

What may be Florida’s commonest milkweed, Asclepias perennis, always found on floodplains:

A woodpecker’s grocery store:

The river otter was a cool sight, especially coming at the beginning of the hike (harbingers!), but the last denizen of the forest I was lucky enough to spot was a water moccasin that was every bit as cool. Perhaps 2 ft long, it was coiled at the base of a tree among a set of fallen, small dead pines strewn about like pickup sticks. The serpent had the clouded eyes of one soon to shed its skin. It remained completely still throughout my photography gymnastics, never even testing the air with its tongue. Now that’s a calm snake! Or a sleeping snake? Even after I left and continued onward, when I passed back by 15 or 20 minutes later it was still there, still unmoving, still tight-lipped, an example for us all:

Tracks Identity Revealed

2010-09-04T08:38:00.003-04:00

I have replaced the white water lily photo in the header with a pic I took of a favorite lizard species, the Florida scrub lizard (Sceloporus woodi). It is endemic to Peninsular Florida and found only in xeric, high pine scrub habitats. Its populations are highly disjunct due to strong habitat exclusivity, as high pine scrub also occurs in highly scattered, isolated locations. Possibly, this serpent evolved during Plio-Pleistocene times when sea levels were higher and the peninsula was reduced to a few islands. I never once saw it in the citrus groves on the Lake Wales Ridge when I used coverboard traps to assess herps along the pipeline route last summer, although nearly every other (if not all other) lizard species occurring on the Ridge was present.

Ok, I have an id on last weekend’s mammal tracks. I corresponded with a professional animal tracker, Kim A. Cabrera (http://www.bear-tracker.com/), who assured me that they are from the common raccoon, Procyon lotor. I was fooled by the way thin toe prints can become widened in soft sand. Here’s a synopsis of how different they are compared to ‘coon tracks in mud or clay:

1. The prints are up to 3 inches long and 3 inches wide. Although raccoon tracks can be that long, they are typically appx 1.5 inches in width; however, I suppose the wet sand sediment might not have provided firm enough support to the weight of the animal, resulting in the toes splaying apart.

2. The toe pads are as wide as they are long whereas raccoon tracks are longer than wide. This could be the result of the sand being "splashed" outward as the animal bounded along two paws together at a time (prints were always nearly equally side-by-side in the sand). After revisiting the pic, I can see where there is an "axis" to the toe prints, indicating the toes are not rounded but are more elongate.

3. There are no claw marks above any of the tracks, whereas raccoon tracks generally display light claw marks when walking slowly. I do note, however, that Cabrera’s website shows some raccoon tracks clearly without claw marks. In the photo on my blog, I can barely see possible claw marks on the left print but no claw marks on the right.

Ok, ok, I’ll admit I’m sometimes too left-brained!

47 Runs and Atsena Otie Key

2010-08-30T19:23:00.011-04:00

Sunday was a two-adventure day, first to the braided Wekiva River Swamp south and east of CR 326 just north of US 19/98 and second to Atsena Otie Key off Cedar Key.

The purpose of the first trip was to document the wetland status of a 20-acre parcel called "47 Runs" that the Suwannee River Water Management District had misclassified as uplands and listed for sale as surplus lands. Many broad-brush maps such as my Garmin GPS maps and the USGS Quadrangle had mislabeled the parcel as uplands also, and District staff had never visited the site, so it is understandable that they might have initially gotten it wrong, but if they had taken a brief look at the property in person I believe they would not have made that mistake.

My circle of local naturalists knew from a recent visit that the parcel was a mix of mesic hammock, low hammock and bottomland hardwoods, and that the latter habitat was directly connected by surface waters to the Wekiva River swamp’s northernmost braid, so Brack and I spent a couple of hours on site collecting plant species lists and photos showing the wetland nature of the parcel. I then spent a half-day earlier this morning writing an ecological assessment of the parcel and associating the photographs with lat/long waypoints. Hopefully, Brack will be able to use our findings to convince District staff to reverse their previous stance and remove the parcel from the list of surplus properties.

In case you need any convincing, here are three photos of the low hammock and bottomland hardwood habitats:

The trip to Atsena Otie Key in the Cedar Keys National Wildlife Refuge was made in Brack’s sea kayaks. He had rounded up a couple of paying customers through the Santa Fe College adult education program, billing it as an adventure in the prehistory and history of that island, and his grasp and explanations of same are enlightening even to an old time Floridian like me. The wind was rather stiff out of the east, but our low aspect on the water in the kayaks reduced its effects to a minimal degree, so the paddling over from Cedar Key and back was easy exercise. I joked that if we had been in canoes, we might have been blown out to a Pleistocene shoreline; it would have been a strenuous stretch of stroking.

An excellent brief history of the island is provided at http://www.fws.gov/cedarkeys/atsenaotie.html. In a nutshell, it was used by prehistoric Native Americans dating back appx 5000 years, was the site of a mill that produced cedar wood blanks for making pencils, a resort for Florida and Georgia planters and an important shipping port and is now a wildlife refuge managed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. John Muir visited the place when he walked from Indiana to Cedar key, and even got a job in the Faber pencil mill for a short time and almost died of malaria there.

There is a dock and short trail on the western side of the island, the trail leading to three interpretive boards and the dock used by locals for fishing. Not far to the north from the dock is a small pet cemetery, where this marker to someone’s beloved dog can be found:

The cross on the marker indicates that the dog was a Christian. Imagine that! LOL

Brack is not only a paddling guide, but also an archaeologist by education and showed us a whelk shell that had been used by Native Americans as a tool. Notice two things: (1) the hole in the side of the shell where a stick had been driven through and tied on for a handle and (2) the very eroded, smoothly rounded pointy end of the shell indicating that it had been used (for digging, etc) long and hard enough to have been worn back 1 – 2 inches:

Here’s a close-up of the pointy end, showing its cultural erosion a little better:

The east side of the island has an old cemetery that has been vandalized, as so many other old cemeteries in Florida (and the world) have been, but their information and ambiance remain for our gratification:

Just before leaving the island, while crossing a soft sand bar we encountered various tracks including these strange ones. The individual prints occurred in side-by-side pairs and were left by two individuals traveling side-by-side, one set of tracks being almost 3 inches long and the other 2.5 inches long. Notice that there are five toe marks above the “heel” pad, no claw marks whatsoever and that some of the tracks had toe-drag marks in the leading direction. We have no idea what animal left them. Brack and I both have track mark books, and the only mammals around here that leave five toe prints on the ground are the opossum and river otter; however, the tracks are too regular to be those of an opossum and do not have any of the features of an otter. In the field, we thought at first they might be from a felid, but cats leave only four toe marks on the ground; likewise, only four toes are imprinted by canids (plus canids leave claw marks). Does anyone out there in the blogosphere have a clue as to what might have left these prints? Could it have been cucachabras? Inquiring minds want to know!

A night in the life of a redneck

2010-08-22T19:33:00.001-04:00

Stop me if I’ve told you this story. But first, I gotta tell you that I was reminded of it by a wonderful blog I just discovered written by Lynda, called Mainly Mongoose. Absolutely, you must check out her posts (http://mainlymongoose.blogspot.com/), especially the last two or three about lions and elephants, which precipitated this posting.

I was 15 years old and living in a trailer on the Westside of Jacksonville, Florida on the very outskirts of town near Cecil Field, a Navy base. By outskirts, I mean that beyond our little trailer and clapboard neighborhood there was nothing but pine flatwoods, cypress and gum swamps and blackwater creeks. It was a fine place for young male hellions such as my friend Danny and I, ‘cuz there were plenty of snakes and bream to catch and bobcats to watch zinging across dirt roads at night in front of headlights. I don’t believe that I have ever before or since lived in a more wildlife-abundant place.

One of the neighborhood fathers had constructed a treehouse in the flatwoods not too far from where we all ordinarily slept, and it was palatial as far as most treehouses go. No, it wasn’t a Disneyesque Swiss Family Robinson McMansion, but it beat the pulp out of any other treehouse I ever got to play in. The man had found four stout pines growing in almost a perfect square, and had built a 6-sided wooden box about 8 ft off the ground among them. It had 4 walls, a door and 3 windows in addition to the requisite floor and roof. The walls were lapboard and the plank roof was covered with roll roofing (rock-covered asphalt felt). The door could be latched from inside as could the storm-shuttered windows. He was a good father.

The event happened on the first night we camped out in it, natch! Some of the kids didn’t have sleeping bags and it was cold, so they brought carpets to roll up in. I am not joking about the carpets – this was not an affluent neighborhood. We had a little campfire downstairs and cooked up some marshmallows and hot dogs before turning in. Boy, were we cool! No parents were present to lord it over us and we were sooooo confident in our independence. Of course, all the neighborhood dogs were present too. Hey, they were not about to miss a campout with kids and weenies!

As the evening wore on, we got sleepy and decided it was time to lay our heads down, so up the ladder we went and settled in for a good night’s sleep. The dogs were made to stay below to “guard” us, a job they took seriously, I’m sure. We battened down the hatches by closing and latching the door and shutters, said our prayers, chattered for a few more minutes, and then as the little ones drifted off, we elders shut up and lay awake listening to night sounds. There were katydids, tree crickets, nighthawks and chuck-will’s-widows sounding off for the evening, and all was really quite peaceful and well with the world.

Suddenly, the dogs started barking. At first, they only barked curiously, alertly, but after a short time began barking in a more worried timbre. This soon segued into a fearful, whiny barking that subsequently evolved into out-and-out yelping, and the next thing we knew the dogs were haulin’ ass outta there, crying in complete fear as they ran and stumbled, probably not even looking back. We heard them disappear into the distance as each one found its own way home, every dog for itself.

Gulp! It was a pitch black night with no moon, and it was even darker inside the treehouse. Every kid in there had platter-eye syndrome. No one was asleep. The little kids were muttering and whimpering quietly, and quite frankly, the hair on the back of my neck stood on end for the first time in my life. One of the little kids then mustered, “Buford, look outside and see what it is!” “Right,” I thought, “you would pick me.” But I was the oldest and nearly a man, so I knew that was right. OMG megagulp! I quietly slipped out of my sleeping bag, fumbled around and found my flashlight, slunk over to one of the shuttered windows and slowly opened one side of it, put the flashlight on top of my head so that the tapetum lucidum in the intruder’s eyes would reflect back at me, and panned the ground around.

And then I saw it, or rather saw them, a pair of eyes looking back at me from perhaps 20 ft away. They were about a half-inch in diameter, appx 3 inches apart and perhaps a foot off the ground. Then they disappeared and I slammed the shutter shut! And latched it. The beast neither tried to climb the stairs (as far as we knew) nor did it ever make a sound and we saw nothing of it any further that night or otherwise. To this day, I do not know for sure exactly what I saw, but firmly believe it could only have been a Florida panther.

The treehouse was dismantled the very next day, and we were never again allowed to camp overnight in those flatwoods.

The Botanical Gardens at Asheville

2010-08-21T08:19:00.004-04:00

I just discovered this wonderful place on the local campus of the University of North Carolina. Why is it such a great place? Let me count the ways…

The parking lot is in two sections, one being small and tree-shaded and the other being a sunny overflow area. There were only a few vehicles other than mine, so I was able to park in the shade – a nice touch.

Going into their gift shop before seeing the gardens proper, I met a nice lady volunteer who immediately pointed me to their book section. I wanted a book on NC wildflowers because I had earlier found a blooming roadside vine that my Southeastern wildflower book didn’t have, and figured that, as long as I was going to be spending a lot more time in NC, I needed a local flora book. They had several, so I bought Justice, Bell and Lindsey’s Wildflowers of North Carolina. Much to my chagrin, it did not have the plant I wanted identified, but out of the back rooms came Jake, a local naturalist who was able to finger the plant and also gave me a personal tour of some of the resources at the headquarters.

It turned out that the plant is Clematis terniflora, an invasive exotic from Asia. Jake related some growth and kill-attempt experiments he had done on the plant, and folks, it’s bad. You almost can’t kill it and it grows faster than kudzu! Cry your eyes out over this beauty:

Anyway, off I went with my new book under my arm to tour the place, and it was with sublime joy that I discovered that this botanical garden is totally dedicated to native plants. There were coneflowers, sunflowers, Solomon’s and false Solomon’s seals, at least 3 kinds of violets, blue curls, cardinal flower, and numerous species of shrubs and trees. Most of the flowers were in my new book, so I was able to read about them and compare the pictures to the real things!

Blessedly, there were more identification labels on the plants than I have seen at any botanical garden in any of my travels. Each label had the common and scientific names plus family names. Many of the more common plants were identified by several labels scattered throughout the garden so that, if I forgot a name, and I did, I was able to see it again and sometimes again and again.

And it wasn’t as if they had only a few specimens of each plant. Oh no! They often had hundreds of each species and the beds are packed with them, although some of them were indeed rare. In most botanical gardens, rare plants are kept unlabeled and in inconspicuous places where you wouldn’t ordinarily look for them to protect them from thieves. Well, I am sure they did some of that, too, but a few rare species were prominently displayed and labeled, and furthermore, when a roving gardener saw me paying special attention to one plant that shall remain unnamed, he (ahem) obviously recognized that I was a special person and sidled up to me to tell me about some more rare plants that he knew I might otherwise miss. What a nice man.

In deference to protection of the rare flora, I shall relate only one of those, Franklinia alatamaha, a plant that I have been looking for all my life, and now that I am 62 I have finally gotten to feast my eyes on it, say Hallelujah!!! I know of a few other botanical gardens where it supposedly occurs, but it was always hidden when I visited. Franklinia was discovered by John and William Bartram in 1765. William retrieved seeds in 1777, germinated and brought them to flower and named the genus after Benjamin Franklin. William remarked that he never saw it growing anywhere but the original 2- to 3-acre site where he and John had found it. Its last verifiable sighting in the wild was in 1803, and all the specimens in the world are descendants of the seeds collected by William Bartram. It is said to be commercially available, but I have asked about it in maybe a hundred plant nurseries throughout the Southeast but have received only blank stares in return. So please, kind folks, if any of you know where I can score some nursery stock, run don’t walk to your emailer and inform me! Oh, incidentally, not only did I get to see the beast, it was in flower and I got a decent photo of it:

I can die now.

Fathers and Daughters

2010-08-17T19:20:00.001-04:00

I’m in a frisky mood tonight and I just ran across a blog post about a father-daughter day, so I was reminded of a fathers-and-daughters story of my own. FAIR WARNING!!! This one is not for the easily offended (but it is about nature).

Picture us on a company field trip. We performed biology field work in a miserably cold winter wind all day long. We were windburnt, poison ivied, dehydrated, hungry and just plain whupped from the cold and the rough terrain. All day long we had used hand clippers on our hands and knees to tunnel through greenbriar and poison ivy thickets rather than hack our way with machetes. We were really very tired and stupid by evening, so you can hopefully understand our slowness to comprehend things. You should also know that the city was a coastal tourist town, and the biggest convention there that day was one for new-car dealership owners. Thus, there were a lot of lonely, middle-aged, rather affluent men in town without their wives. Got the picture?

Stupefied, we returned to the hotel that evening, showered and stumbled downstairs to the hotel restaurant below for dinner. We ordered our food and were having before-dinner drinks on our client’s dime, and I’m not talking about iced tea. Of course, that made us even stupider, but what’s your point? Cindy glanced over at the table next to us and noticed that there was a pair of beautiful young women sitting with a pair of fat, middle-aged men, and she said, “Oh look, there’s a couple of fathers and daughters having dinner together!” The rest of us discretely looked over at the foursome and allowed as how, yes, they did make a nice pair of fathers and daughters, and then returned to our own conversation and libations.

But something nagged at me a bit about the scene, so I looked again and saw one of the women lightly slap the hand of one of the men that had gone where it shouldn’t have gone in a restaurant, and it was then that I noticed that the dining room was filled, literally filled with “fathers and daughters.” I kid you not, that room had a hundred alluring, fetchingly dressed young women sitting with a hundred fat, middle-aged new car dealers, and with the glee that only a 25yo tipsy bachelor can muster, I pointed this out to my group. The look on Cindy’s face as she realized what was really going on was absolutely priceless – a kind of a shock that turned to horror that eventually relaxed into exuberant humor!

Myrtle Beach, Virginia sure has a lot of starlets.

Chassahowitzka Swamp in August

2010-08-14T19:00:00.020-04:00

I couldn't raise the troops for a trek into the Chazz Swamp, so I went there solo on Saturday. It's about a 1:45 hour drive thanks to all the schlocky podunks from Inglis on south to just north of Thresher Road where one turns west to enter the Chazz WMA. The limerock road you turn into is actually named Indigo Road, but there is no sign for that at US 19. I paid my three bucks and drove on in. The goal was to get an idea of the terrain north and east of where I have been before, to check out the so-called Sink 311A that was named by some cave diver and to look for more karst features yet unknown to me. Here is what my 5.1-mile dayhike looks like on Google Earth:

Some of my buddies have the idea to camp out in the swamp while on a 2-day wander around the place. I tried to convince them of their folly but they just called me a wuss. Harumph! These photos, which are typical in every way of the Chazz Swamp, should convince anyone that camping there in tents and sleeping bags is an odd idea.

But there are some neat things to see there, like cabbage palms cloaked with shoestring fern (Vittaria lineata).

And a view of the clear waters of Blind Creek with snags and three young alligators sunning themselves.

And Pool 8 (dunno its Christian name), with its limestone ledge above a sheer drop into cool, deep water.

And this pair of unidentified blue mushrooms that have emerged from below thick leaf litter to look like alien blue eggs in a cupped nest.

People talk all the time about cypress knees and debate what their function is, but I am just as pleased at the knees of other tree species like swamp tupelo (Nyssa sylvatica var. biflora) and sweetgum (Magnolia virginiana).

Did you notice the deer bones scattered to the right of the knees? I did not notice them until stooping down to snap the shot.

There was plastic flagging everywhere I went out there, red, orange, blue and candy-striped, plus three plastic balloons. So much for wilderness! OTOH, there was very little sign of feral pigs, perhaps because there is so little food for them this time of year. Other interesting biota seen included a striped mud turtle (Kinosternon bauri), beau coups corkwood plants (Leitneria floridana) and a terrestrial Habenaria orchid, possibly H. odorata, which we have seen blooming out there before.

Lastly, the prescribed burns that the State is conducting in the pine flatwoods and sandhill habitats are doing great things! Oaks and slash pines are being killed back, allowing for an abundance of ground plants for gopher tortoises to feed on. The burns will eventually result in a greater abundance of the large-seeded longleaf pine. Many of the herbs are in bloom and support diverse pollinators, and the longleafs will provide sustenance for the threatened fox squirrel. Gopher tortoise burrows were abundant, and goldenrod provided great swaths of cheerful color. I didn't even mind that I was soaked in perspiration and swamp water by the time I returned to the truck.

Swimmin' with 'gators and spiders, oh my!

2010-08-01T11:22:00.007-04:00

Ok, lately I HAVE been having fun. One recent afternoon included swimming in a swamp braid of the Wekiva Spring Run where it crosses CR 326 in Levy County. A quick look at the situation where some of my buds were cooling off will give you an idea of the place:

Of course, you have to be totally unafraid of alligators and cottonmouths to swim here. Bruce, Bill, Jon and I did so, but Lisa deferred. Um, you also should be unafraid of giant spiders:

That tree it is on is appx 4.5 inches thick. Trying to id the beast, I found a site that has several fishing spider photos and the similarities are great. Thus, I think it is a Dolomedes in the family Pisauridae, otherwise known as fishing spiders, probably neither D. albolineatus, the white banded fishing spider nor D. triton. I found a video of a D. okefinokensi adult female, but the abdominal dorsal pattern is wrong and their femme does not have a white perimeter band:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1p8bx374nM.

Pesce on SpiderIdentification.org suggested it might be D. tenebrosus. Their pic, of a male, is very similar but does not have the white perimeter around the central black spot on the cephalothorax that ours has. That could be explained by gender difference or by individual variation? Unfortch, a bugguide.com range map does not depict it as being in Florida, but that map is obviously gappy. Various web sites claim it is North America’s largest spider. Davesgarden.com (http://davesgarden.com/guides/bf/showimage/2447/) has a bunch of D. tenebrosus pics, but all show brownish specimens without the white perimeter band. Our specimen is grayish.

The NC website has a pic of Dolomedes scriptus, and it is almost a dead ringer for our octopedded monster, except that theirs is a little browner and has a less obvious white perimeter band around the dorsal black spot:
http://www.carolinanature.com/spiders/spider2624.jpg. OTOH, the Wikipedia entry for that species depicts and describes a white stripe down the sides of the animal, in full conflict with the Carolina site. Egad! Will the real D. scriptus please stand up!

Interestingly, fishing spiders crouch on top of the water with the two hindmost legs anchored to a floating leaf or whatnot, and then plunge downward into the water while still holding onto the leaf to grab their prey, usually a fish or invertebrate, but I bet they will also take small frogs as their African relative, Ancylometes rufus, is shown to do in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv7YSEIOxwo&feature=fvw. Male fishing spiders are known to tie up the females with silk prior to mating. Hey, bondage is what I’d do if my ladies were bigger and hungrier than me!

Wildlife Marking Trees

2010-07-12T19:47:00.000-04:00

As you can clearly deduce from the lack of recent postings to this blog, I just haven’t been having much fun lately. Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to synopsize an article recently published in the summer 2010 issue of the Wildlife Professional, which is the non-technical quarterly read of The Wildlife Society. The article is entitled “How animals send ‘tree mail.’” If the Camera Codger and Henry, two camera trappers that I greatly admire still read my blog, they and other camera trappers should pay special attention.

Cam McTavish and Michael Gibeau have written a marvelous piece about trees that are used by wildlife as marking posts to inform other animals about their presence. Their research was based on >16,000 camera-nights, plus winter-time tracks in the snow. As a result, these fellows have uncovered a hitherto unknown galaxy of behavior and camera trapping opportunities. As you all know, many species of mammals mark certain trees as a way to alert conspecifics (same species) and other species of their presence. It can be done to mark territorial boundaries, scare away competitors and advertise their physical prowess and sexual state, among other things. Here's a black bear-marked cabbage palm tree I photographed somewhere (I forget) that has some pretty deep claw marks:

Surprising to me, however, is the relatively large number of ways that mammals use to mark trees. This includes biting and scratching by bears; scratching the ground around the trees by canids and felids; rubbing the bark by the mountain goat, bears and wolverine; defecation adjacent to and up to 20+ meters away by canids and felids; and spraying or rubbing of anal matter by the wolverine and felids.

Their list of marking species reads like a who’s who of mammalian predators, including grizzly bear, black bear, gray wolf, coyote, red fox, Canada lynx, cougar, wolverine, dog and martin. They also found a fair number of herbivorous species using marker trees: mule deer, white-tail deer, moose, elk, bighorn sheep, mountain goat, red squirrel, wood rat and porcupine. Other research has shown that many other species from bumblebees to hyenas worldwide use scent marking on trees. Feral pigs commonly rub trees around these parts.

We have all seen trees and shrubs marked by claws, antlers and hair, and I have always thought such tree mail was aimed at their own species, but this is emphatically not so! Using camera traps, they documented that marks by grizzly bears caught the attention of mountain goats, for instance, some of whom then also marked the tree, and mule deer will go well out of their way to investigate scent markings. Some marked trees were used by up to seven species.

Any species or size of tree can be marked. Age, girth and bark roughness of the trees make no difference. They are typically found beside animal and human trails and along fire lanes, power line ROWs and, get this, seismic lines! Although aspect (facing direction) makes no difference, they are usually on the downhill side of the trail. Most commonly, communication trees are at trail junctures where many species would tend to cross paths.

In most cases, predators actively used (marked) the trees whereas prey species used them only passively (sniffing). Obviously, predators want to advertise themselves to and fend off other meat-eaters while prey animals just want to learn which killers have recently passed by and might be nearby threats.

Other interesting characteristics of active users are:
-) Scent marks are often made by individuals that are dominant over and tolerant of conspecifics.
-) Scent marking can synchronize menstruation in females of a species.
-) Scent marking affects socio-sexual behavior and conspecific fertility, thus possibly reducing aggressive encounters.
-) Because small species of felids scent mark primarily when they are sexually active, fertility may be suppressed when their populations are high.
-) The variety of methods used for marking (paws, claws, scent, hair, etc.) may pass on other messages besides the obvious ones like “I am here” and “I am looking for love.”

McTavish and Gibeau also point out that some marker trees have been used for generations, up to 150 years for bear in one instance, and conclude that the loss of these special trees might have adverse effects that have been overlooked. For example, such trees might be terrific locations to conduct long term wildlife research, or their loss might cause additional inter- and intraspecific confrontations among local wildlife. All I know is that when my favorite stores go out of business, I am as lost as a lizard on a piece of driftwood sailing out to sea. So we might want to sleuth them out and try to save them from the land manager’s chain saw, although I don’t think I’d want to chain myself to a predator attractor!

Remind me to tell you some day about Richard and the black bear rub tree on Mormon Branch in Florida’s Ocala National Forest. It’s a hoot.

Onions are a Jones

2010-05-28T19:21:00.000-04:00

I love to putter around in the garden just about as much anything. It is so good for the soul, this creation of food from "first principles." Weeds don't have a chance under the gaze of this gardener, although I transplant some of them to more appropriate places. Today I noticed that my grocery store ginger root had sprouted more roots plus shoots. Some folks would just throw it out, but a gardener will consider this a second bite at the apple. So into the garden it went, taking me only about 2 minutes to walk out and back and plant the little sucker. Maintaining a garden after it is set up is easy, taking only an hour or two a week to do the job including harvesting. Mother Garden nurtures me even when I'm on away missions, by provisioning me before the trip and chugging along in my absence. Here are my May harvests, ex radishes and snap beans that got eaten before photoed. Not a lot carbs, I'll admit, but maybe someday people will say, "Buford really knows his onions!"

Neandertal Debt

2010-05-22T11:13:00.000-04:00

In the sidebar entitled, Cloned Neandertals Still in the Realm of Sci-Fi? (Science, vol. 328:682-683), Elizabeth Pennisi quotes several scholars as questioning why we would want to bring Neandertals back to life in the first place. I agree with them that it is wrong to do so to satisfy scientific curiosity, but suggest another reason: If Modern Man had a hand in the extinction of Neandertal, perhaps we owe it to them to bring them back? We were more brutal when they died out, and they were brutal, too, but today we are more paternal toward endangered species. Doubtless, if they were extant but imperiled, we would take steps to ensure their survival just as we are doing with other jeopardized species today.

There are, of course, other ethical questions to consider. The sidebar asked, for example, if it is ethical for a human surrogate mother to carry the fetus of another species, but we don’t even have to ask the religious world’s opinion on that one. Another ethical question that was not asked in the sidebar is whether we really want to force some Neo-Neandertals to grow up and live in a Sapiens world knowing of their species’ tragic fate. It could be heart-wrenching all around.

A long three weeks

2010-05-20T10:30:00.000-04:00

I have not written to this blog in almost a month because of the intensity of my current field work, having been out of town and working 12 – 16 hrs a day since late April. It’s a grinding schedule, but the money and experiences are good. I have been primarily relocating gopher tortoises from the pipeline right-of-way (R/W), occasionally interspersing that work with searching for endangered species on small parcels. After getting only one day off over the past three weeks, I may be getting off today through Memorial Day, say “Hallelujah!”

The word, “relocating,” that I used above is a bit misleading, as it refers only to disposition. To be more complete about it, what we do is dig up gopher tortoises (Gopherus polyphemus) using shovel and backhoe and then move them out of harm’s way, either by releasing them elsewhere on site or taking them to an off-site preservation area. Before release, we collect a fair amount of information on the animals (e.g., weight, length) and use a scute-notching system to semi-permanently number them. Commensal species are sometimes encountered in the burrows and are allowed to escape, although capture and release on site is appropriate in some situations.

Along the way, I am working within my first union featherbedding experience. Only three people are needed to excavate the turtles: an “agent” that is a state-certified tortoise mover -that’s me; the “hole-jumper” - BrianM has been my assistant and a safety backup so far; and the backhoe operator – Joel, a “competent person.” The first day, there were not just the three of us, but actually ten people: we three essential fellows (sniff), two inspectors, four laborers and a foreman. From the second day onward, that number was pared down to eight! And all of us are men. I am reminded of a satiric imitation sea shanty that was played occasionally on the radio twenty or so years back that was sung by deep-voiced men in their best “row, row, row your boat” marching canter that started out something like this:

“Men, men, men, men,
Men, men, men, men,
It’s great to be with men,
I love to be with men,
Etcetera”

Well, let me tell you, the sandhills are a different kind of sea and the clanking of the backhoe is not exactly a chantie, and I can think of a lot of women I’d rather spend my working days with than some of those men.

Ok, let’s have some pictures…

Here’s a young indigo snake (Drymarchon corais couperi) that we dug out of a shallow armadillo burrow in a farm crop field where it was directly in the path of construction:

We took it some distance away from the construction area and released it into a ditch-side briar thicket. Of all the places I would expect to see this federally-threatened species, an intensively plowed and sprayed ag field is not it. But there’s more to this place than meets the eye. At first, one sees the recently-mowed field’s late summer weeds chopped and strewn about, and a series of ditches rectangularizing the former wet prairie. The ditches are overgrown with thick ruderal vegetation, including brush, briars and vines, while cattle and feral pigs wallow in wet puddles at the edge of the field.

But, looking closely at the ditch water, you don’t see the pea-green soup that ordinarily flows through Florida’s vegetable fields. Instead, this water is clear to the bottom and has thick growths of submerged plants. Where is this spring water coming from?

Being physiographic about it, we are standing on a once-submerged terrace that is flatter’n a pancake. Only a few hundred feet away is the eastern toe of slope of the Lake Wales Ridge, an extremely sandy “Plio-Pleistocene island” with a very steep gradient – my friend Tom Morris compares it to a loaf of bread in cross-section. Rainwater percolates easily through the soil down to the water table and then moves laterally to the toe of slope where it arises as a series of seepage springs. These, then, are the sources of the field’s ditch water base flow and where livestock bathe. Can you imagine how beautiful these springs and associated streams and wetlands must have appeared before being squandered on dirt farming? Truly, these are “pearls before swine.”

I propose that the public acquire a strip of land, perhaps only 200 – 300 yds wide, running along the toe of this slope where seeps are abundant that would exclude agricultural activities for the purposes of restoring native seepage spring habitats, providing for surface water quality protection and perhaps even adding to our portfolio of recreational wild lands. Protection of this strip of habitat would continue to provide water for ag operations, yet would remove only a tiny acreage from ag production. It would cost but little due to the small acreage involved and the fact that ag land is relatively cheap, especially these days. I propose to employ eminent domain if it becomes necessary to retrieve these tarnished jewels.

Ok, off the soapbox again, and now for some tortoise pics. Here’s a close-up one of one little fellow that was shedding some neck skin:

Here’s four juvenile tortoises excavated from a single burrow:

These four were caught and marked a few days before, but they found a hole in the silt fence and returned to their territories, taking shelter in the burrow nearest the hole. But fear not, gentle reader, as they were re-released outside of the R/W, and are known to be able to dig a new burrow in only 2 - 3 days. Gopher tortoises dig down generally at a 30 – 45 degree angle until they reach the water table, then level the burrow off and construct a nest chamber. Here is a shot of BrianM pulling an adult tortoise up out of the water that filled the nest chamber when rains elevated the local groundwater level:

Second Spring

2010-04-25T19:00:00.000-04:00

Even a naturalist living in the paradise called Florida has to haunt other retreats on occasion. Some years ago, I got the idea to “follow spring north,” but never did. This year, spring wildflowers around north Florida have been simply exuberant. I ascribe it to wet weather last year and so far this year, although my friends Danny and Annette may be right about the absence of a late frost also being beneficial. So, when I took a few days off to wander around North Carolina and NE Alabama, I was pleased to see those regions are enjoying a colorful spring time, lagging slightly behind Florida and giving me two bites at the springtime apple.

Dupont State Forest in NC is located close to Pisgah Forest where some of my maternal relatives live, so I explored a few trails there after visiting uncles Dave and Ralph and their families. One of the trails had a most unusual “bridge” across a creek:

I next camped at Walls of Jericho State Park (http://www.alapark.com/press/release.cfm?ID=322) in NE Alabama. I was tired after the 6-hr drive; nevertheless, I still wanted to see some woods so I headed down the path despite the trailhead warning that the round trip hike could take 6 hrs. I made it almost to the Walls about a half-hour before dark, so rather than have shadows to look at I ascended the trail back to camp. The next day I went down the trail again, this time all the way to the ends of both Walls trails and then some. But there’s a problem with leaving the trail in the mountains that is hard for a flatwoods Florida boy to relate to: The woods off trail are cliffs and slick slopes that you can’t really walk. Oh well, there’s plenty to see from the trails. Here is a rock formation that looks like a hybrid between a tank and a dinosaur:

A sinkhole that might be the entrance to a cave, a sand-plugged sump for Turkey Creek (the stream that carved the Walls) and the kind of cemetery where I’d like my ashes spread:

A native of eastern North American forests, blue phlox (Phlox divaricata), was the most abundant bloomer along the half-dozen trails I walked.

In Dupont State Forest, a row of its pale lilac flowered plants grew in the disturbed soil flanking each side of one trail. Conversely, along north Florida roadsides grows an introduction from Texas called the garden phlox (Phlox drummondii), which exhibits abundant blooms of red, pink, magenta, purple, off-orange and white on open, sunny highway shoulders. In the same genus, one species is a bright, multi-colored dominant of sunny lawns whereas another is a pale purple denizen of shade.

Cancer-root (Conopholis americana) also sprouted occasionally alongside the trail. This is a parasite of the roots of primarily oaks and beech throughout eastern North America. Being more common along the trail than away from it, I wonder if our trail tramping injures tree roots and thus encourages infestation by this pest?

A semi-parasitic plant that was flowering that day is lousewort (Pedicularis canadensis), but it grew only in a grassy clearing near my campsite. It is said to parasitize over 80 plant species in 35 genera, stunting its neighboring grasses. It is called lousewort because farmers once believed sheep and cattle could get lice from grazing on the plant. Its coloration is an unusual maroon and yellow.

Some other common wildflowers along the trails include the eastern false rue anemone (Enemium biternatum), star chickweed (Stellaria pubera), mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum), foamflower (Tiarella cordifolia), white baneberry (Actaea pachypoda), dwarf crested iris (Iris cristata), common blue violet (Viola sororia), long-spurred violet (V. rostrata), Canadian white violet (V. canadensis), sweet white violet (V. blanda), red trillium (Trillium sessile), large-flowered trillium (T. grandiflorum), fire pink, (Silene virginica), red columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) and trailing arbutus (Epigea repens).

Rock redux

2010-04-18T13:00:00.000-04:00

I really should have included the photo below with my post on September 10, 2009 in re to rocking a pack, but I didn’t receive the pic until today. It’s another by my old friend and caving buddy, Brian Houha.

TAG Caving

2010-04-17T09:46:00.000-04:00

Brian Houha shot this outstanding photo in Stephen's Gap Cave during the 2009 Pupfest (that's Mudpuppy on the ledge). This may be Southeast cavers' favorite cave entrance to photograph. I hope he enters it into competition at this year's NSS Photo Salon. At the very least, it should make cover of the NSS News.

Happy yellow...

2010-04-16T23:18:00.000-04:00

I have been looking at project sites for threatened and endangered species over the past two weeks, spending long days and short nights away from home, but there are rewards…

This is a spring-siphon encountered in a secret location (sorry, cave divers, but the client insists!). The darker pool in the back is the spring side and the larger, lighter-colored pool in front is the siphon; the water actually was a transparent greenish-blue. It is a karst window, an opening in the roof of an underground and underwater conduit of the Floridan Aquifer that is headed for the Suwannee River nearby. Scouting around I found a nearby karst slough elongated at one end and amoeba-shaped at the other. The blobby end even had an island! I imagined monkeys.

You and I would rejoice if we suddenly found ourselves owning this place, but the current owner is content to attend to other matters. If it were mine, I would control the duckweed floating over the water’s surface and turn the feature into a botanical garden. The water under the duckweed was clear blue, so it may be a spring-siphon also as the river water was a tannin-stained shade of brownish-black. Whatever, with the water’s surface opened up it would be a beautiful place to swim or take scuba lessons.

This past week we field-assessed whether the caracara nests we documented earlier this year are still in use. In winter, we had numerous sightings of adults but few juveniles. It is difficult to tell adult males from adult females unless they are beside each other. Side-by-side, the male’s black and white patterns are almost obviously darker with less blurring, but this distinction can be trumped by changing the angle of the sun glinting off the bird’s feathers. Their differing behavior, however, gives them away. When eggs or young are on the nest, or the young are still hanging out in the family’s core area, the female mostly remains close by while the male does more wandering away from the nest. Some things never change.

The plumage of the juvenile is hard to rattle up even though descriptions of adult plumages are readily accessible. This photo shows a juvenile’s plumage in brown and brown-tinged-white with gray nares and gray beak. Adults have orange nares, orange base of beak and gray tip of beak; immatures pass through a stage when the nares are dull pink yet the beak is completely gray. A characteristic that works even in bad sunlight is the presence of a dark spot in the center of the white band on top of the tail in adults, whereas juveniles do not have that spot.

I caught another yellow rat snake (Elaphe obsolete quadrivittata), and like most of them it cooperated with my attempt to photograph it in a menacing position. This one was considerate enough to strike my camera only once. But seriously folks, despite the S-shaped body threatening to strike, does that face really look evil or angry or predaceous? Nah! Actually, I thought its belly and top of head were a particularly bright yellow, a happy color.

Tomorrow I’m going to practice using a TV camera system designed to spy on the inhabitants of gopher tortoise burrows. We must do this before excavating a burrow, a new requirement for us that is guaranteed to produce some interesting research results. This pipeline job gets more and more interesting.

The veg garden yielded another half-pound head of Romaine lettuce today, about three-and-a-half pounds of potatoes (mostly red), and another pound of broccoli. That broccoli is incredible – I flat-topped their branches less than a week ago and today harvested their fourth (or is it fifth?) flush of tips! I’m going to let them continue to grow and produce and see how late into the summer they will continue to feed me. Yum! I picked a small red onion and some cilantro to have for dinner tonight along with the new potatoes and fresh broccoli. Last night’s dinner was macaroni and cheese using garden broccoli and onions, each morning my omelettes are laden with onions and broccoli flowers (such a happy yellow!), and lunch sandwiches have multiple layers of Romaine lettuce. The garden doesn’t produce everything I eat, but it does produce more than I can eat of much of what it does produce, so come on down and I’ll lay some organic veggies on ya!

Rosy Maple Moth

2010-04-04T17:40:00.000-04:00

This rosy maple moth was holding on to the broccoli today for dear life. I wanted to pick that vegetable, but none of my bluff and bluster fazed the little critter – it didn’t budge. I gently moved it to my finger and huffed and puffed to get it to fly away, but only its wings moved with my breath:

It eventually was coaxed into leaving my finger for a sugarberry leaf. It is Dryocampa rubicunda, a member of the Wild Silk Moth family, the Saturniidae, and was named by Fabricius in 1793. The species is said to irrupt (have a population explosion) occasionally and defoliate trees, so evidently it was important enough to be noticed early in the English colonization of the New World. Its caterpillars feed on maples, oaks, beech and butternut, while adults do not feed. The one pictured probably overwintered in a shallow underground chamber.

I don’t see too many insects in my vegetable garden, so I jumped at the opportunity to photograph this one. I suspect part of the reason for so few insects is this green treefrog, Hyla cinerea, on the Brussels’ sprouts:

The vegetable garden haul today was 28 oz broccoli (no stems, all food, and that may be the last of the broccoli for the year), two cabbages and a handful of buttercrunch leaf lettuce. Yum! Again, I say, if you are a Floridian wanting a veg garden, plant using the IFAS schedule: http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/vh021. If you’re not a Floridian, I bet your state’s land grant university has something comparable. I harvest something almost every day – lately being English peas, scallions, broccoli, cabbage and lettuce. The tomatoes and bell peppers are mostly just sitting there, waiting for more warmth. I think they dislike 50°F at night, but the 80°F+ by day is awakening them, slowly – Big Boys, Better Girls and a Tommy Toe. The red (new) potatoes are growing like gangbusters, radishes are out of the ground and are basing for a flush, garlic and both red and yellow onions continue to grow steadily larger, newly planted scallions are leaping up even though it is late for them, remaining cabbages will need to be harvested over the coming very few weeks, peas will soon wilt and be replaced by blue lake pole beans that are already hesitantly coming up out of the ground (need more warmth), and herbs just keep on producing spice whenever the palate calls for it, rosemary, oregano, dill and cilantro.

Hughes Island

2010-03-24T12:43:00.000-04:00

Hughes Island is in the Ocala National Forest. Unlike your garden variety of island, this one is not a spot of land within a water body nor is it even like a hammock, which is an “island” of evergreen trees in a “sea” of something else. Hughes Island is 800+ acres of sandhill vegetation within a sea of sand pine and oak scrub. What makes it an island is that its plant community is noticeably different from the surrounding plant community.

There are several of these sandhill islands in The Ocala, but for some reason unknown to me, Hughes seems to stand out when Florida naturalists talk about them. It isn’t the largest or smallest and I don’t know that its flora and fauna are any different from the others. It is well-defined on aerials, being the circular, light-hued feature in the center of the photo sporting a bull’s-eye comprised of oak hammock and bayhead habitats:

It has been a few decades since I visited that bull’s-eye. It contains the national champion loblolly-bay tree (Gordonia lasianthus), a species of the tea family with showy, 4- to 5-inch wide white-and-yellow flowers: http://tinyurl.com/yjrao9y. Ordinarily a denizen of seepage slopes, the loblolly-bay is gaining increasing popularity in home landscaping due to its glossy evergreen leaves, compact narrow crown and attractive inflorescence. The plant flowers over a several-month period in summer and then its leaves turn bright red a few at a time during late summer and fall, adding to its attractiveness. The champion tree is a magnificent specimen almost 6ft in diameter at chest height if memory serves correctly. Back then, I found two younger, slightly smaller loblolly-bays side-by-side at the seepage edge of a floodplain located a little closer to home, and I suspect those two forest giants may still be recognized as the second and third largest individuals of the species.

Linda and I drove to Hughes Island yesterday to look for Lewton’s milkwort (Polygala lewtonii). She had a printout of some known GPS locations that we used to locate a few plants to study to establish a “mental search image.” We then spread out and soon began finding more of them, and I’m happy to report that they appear to have a healthy expanding population here. Linda picked this week to look for it because she knew it would be in bloom this month. I was able to get a few decent photographs of this small species, which seldom reaches a height of more than 6 inches.

Did I tell you that I like Luckenbach music?

2010-03-17T22:04:00.000-04:00

I had just returned home from a 5-day Florida Panhandle work field trip at 7:05pm tonight. I unpacked and started paperwork on field notes and time sheets, but there was a St. Patrick’s Day party going on at the pavilion so it was hard to concentrate. Amplifiers for the country/ western band were set up about a hundred yards from my place, thankfully dialed only to “6” rather than “10.” I tried faithfully to finish my work, really, I did, but then that diabolical band started playing Luckenbach, Texas. One of the band members tried to sound like Waylon Jennings and another like Willie Nelson, and that was the end of me. I love that song. I burst out singing, walked away from the computer and stepped outside, sat down at a picnic table and drank beer and munched on almond clusters. Imagine a band just showing up and playing in your back yard all evening long! Wow! It’s good to be home.

Two big horns and one small man

2010-03-13T22:55:00.000-05:00

I am in west Florida surveying for gopher tortoises for the next several days. I drove to a tract and discovered it is a pasture containing a small herd of longhorn cattle. I have heard that longhorns are fairly docile as far as modern aurochs go, but their horns are 4 ft or more from sharp tip to razor tip, so I was not happy about having to survey the field on foot. When cattle, and especially bulls are around I really, really want my truck as a handy escape module. Some phone calling produced the key to the gate, and after working amongst them for a while, I discovered that the longhorns were really quite docile. So far, anyway.

After working until almost dark, I had noticed a couple of cows braying somewhat insistently, but paid them no mind. When driving up the hill to the gate, I realized the two were bulls, not cows, and one of them was in MY pasture at the fence about 50ft from MY gate. The other bull was on the other side of the road in another pasture. The two bulls were challenging each other, and not just by mooing loudly but also by snorting, pawing the ground, pushing against their respective fences and looking quite wild-eyed. Fifty feet away is not a lot of feet away from a mad bull.

I thought better than to drive straight up to the gate because I figured my bull might take it as a direct challenge and either charge the truck or just come over and skeer me into staying in the truck all night. So I drove wide around the pasture and snuck up to the gate from the far side and stopped. So far, so good. I then slowly, quietly opened the truck door and just as I stepped out to open the gate my bull turned 135 degrees and stared straight at me with fire in his eyes. Gulp. I got back in the truck and waited. Fortunately, the bull did a bit of mental weighing... Buford... the other bull... Buford... the other bull... Aaaah, screw Buford... Then he turned back toward the other bull and continued his testosterone testiness.

Taking another chance, I slowly got out on the OTHER side of the truck and snuck over to open the gate just wide enough to get the truck through it. Meanwhile, two longhorn femmes with horns THIS WIDE stood a bare dozen feet from me, gently chewing their cuds as though to ask, "What's the matter? The bulls won't bother us girls." Stinking cows. Anyway, I made my escape and I hope they break their legs in a gopher hole.

The BESG Bird Blog

2010-03-10T09:50:00.000-05:00

For once on this blog, I post not about me or mine but about my all-time favorite blog, a birding blog maintained by the Bird Ecology Study Group of the Nature Society in Singapore. Its guiding light in writ was provided by Nobel Laureate Richard P. Feynman, a physicist and a naturalist who must have truly loved birds:

“You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing - that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”

The blog is called simply the BESGroup Website, and is found at
http://besgroup.talfrynature.com/

Every day it contains posts contributed by various members of the group. The photographs are outstanding, nonpareil action shots of avians engaged in the business of life rather than shots like mine of wildlife standing still for a slow shutter. Accompanying texts are short and to the point, explaining what the birds are doing, sometimes adding to the corpus of knowledge about the species’. When I started my own blog, it was with the intention of telling the natural history stories of what I saw and occasionally succeeded in photographing. You might then imagine my delight when I found the BESG blog, as they are head-and-shoulders above my own. I urge you all to visit them every day that you can. Their blog is a masterpiece!

2010 Florida Cave Cavort

2010-03-08T18:27:00.000-05:00

The annual Florida Cave Cavort was held this year near Webster FL, hosted by the Tampa Bay Area Grotto of the National Speleological Society. It ran from Friday through Sunday, March 5 – 7, and around a hundred people registered (the usual number). I attended on Saturday and Sunday, and was able to explore Jackpot and Blowing Hole Caves, both of which I had never been to before. Both are controlled by substantial gates made of angle iron steel, and are designed to keep vandals out yet encourage bats and other animals to enter and leave at will.

Vandals are a serious threat to cave resources, spraying enamel paint on walls and calcite formations alike, and the gates and locks keep 99% of them out. There are always a few vandals with special equipment that apparently delight in thwarting conservationists, so if you ever see someone trying to damage a cave gate, please make them aware that you intend to thwart them, and then promptly inform local authorities after obtaining license plate numbers, etc. Vandals also often kill the bats within, destroying common species and imperiled species alike.

Jackpot Cave has a tight entrance that leads to more tight passage, often forcing the caver to remove his helmet to pass restrictions. The portions of the cave that I saw on Saturday can be likened to a pit filled with boulders and cobbles, which the caver must slither amongst to get to the main part of the cave. My small group never did get to the latter, however, as there was a larger, slower group ahead of us that occupied the way onward. We therefore exited the cave without seeing it all. This cave was too gnarly to take my camera into.

Afterward we drove over to Holy Oak Cave, which is not gated and is considered a “sacrificial” cave, and is open to all. Surprisingly, there was less spray paint than in many gated caves I have visited, although names and initials carved into the rock are abundant. There were also three 4-inch diameter corings into the rock, possibly obtained by someone looking for rock samples to analyze? Holy Oak is a single, almost vertical passage perhaps 30 – 40 ft deep that does not require a rope or cable ladder to explore, really all you need is a flashlight. Rainwater has washed black, organic mud down into the cave over part of the rock wall, creating dozens of tiny dams on the rock that are encrusted with a white material, possibly calcite. The overall effect is that of lower lips sporting white, frosted lipstick. This photo gives you an idea of what they look like, and I’ll admit they are nowhere as spectacular as the white or colored calcite formations you surely have seen in National Geographic. The white object in the center of the photo is a mushroom or other type of fungal growth that evidently has hyphae growing within the mud. On the short hike to this cave, we spotted a rather large barred owl (Strix varia) in a longleaf pine, which watched us intently as we stared at it.

We spent a chilly night in the cow pasture cum campground. My tent was covered with frost when I arose in the morning, and Mike and Kitty’s truck camper was covered with breath-frost inside above their heads. Ordinarily at Cavorts, I hear the clanging of pots and pans about a half-hour after first light, but Sunday morning was silent until maybe after an additional half-hour or more. Brrr! I scrambled around, bouncing between fixing/eating breakfast and organizing a trip to Blowing Hole, and we finally drove off at 1030am. Our group included cavers from Jacksonville, Gainesville, Dunellon, Brooksville and somewhere south of Tampa Bay (I forget where Tom lives), a truly interFlorida group.

Blowing Cave is a maternity cave for little brown bats, Myotis austroriparius, although at this time of year there are but few bats present including LBBs and the tricolored bat, Perimyotis subflaveus. The entrance must be negotiated by rope or cable ladder, has a nasty, tight entrance section where you wish your long bones were a little shorter, but once past that spot it bells out and you have plenty of room to climb within. A few feet below the entrance, a nest formed of palm “socks” was nestled in a wall niche. I think it was that of an Eastern phoebe (Sayornis phoebe), but am not really sure.

From the entrance room, a short hands-and-knees passage takes you into the main passages, which are a spacious 8ft high by 8ft wide. There are a fair number of side passages, some similarly-sized and other smaller and less knee-friendly, but nothing really grim. Like Jackpot, there is no mud to slog through and no water to wade through – nice! Plus, there are numerous small calcite formations, nothing of magazine quality but admirable nonetheless.

I’ll end this post with a few pics of the formations and my friends, but not before pointing out that it was a real pleasure to go caving with this group of highly competent, nimble cavers and certainly not before thanking Robert, Tom and Lance for leading this trip.

I am a Torreya Guardian

2010-02-26T17:35:00.000-05:00

I first heard about the world’s most endangered coniferous tree, the Florida torreya (Torreya taxifolia) while taking a tree identification course in college in the late 1960s. This species had been reduced in the wild to a few Apalachicola River tributary ravine habitats, which Torreya State Park had been created to include. It was hoped that the species could make a last stand there and, hopefully under state protection, become re-established as a viable population. I have visited that park a few times but have seen no evidence that the Florida torreya is rebounding therein. The last time I walked some of the wilder ravines in the park, all the specimens encountered were small and severely grazed by deer or used by bucks to scrape the velvet off their antlers. None of these plants were receiving any protection whatsoever from deer or other wildlife, and I got the distinct impression that they were doomed by browsers and official inattention.

But this was not always the case. Early botanists described the tree as a prominent mid- and under-story species growing along a 65-km stretch of the Apalachicola River and up its tributaries, achieving up to a meter in circumference and 20 meters in height. A still-unexplained “catastrophe” in the 1950s, however, laid waste to the plants, so now there are only stump and root sprouts within its historic range. It is reminiscent of the chestnut blight, and a similar fungal pathogen is thought to be the culprit although little research into the cause has been done.

Over the years, I have discussed this situation with some of my naturalist friends. All who have seen the torreyas on the state park agree that it is a sad situation and are resigned to losing the species in the long run. I often asked why could we not artificially propagate it and plant it more abundantly within and outside of the state park. Most responses were glass-half-empty statements that need not be repeated, but some of my comrades had the curious, quasi-religious belief that if it didn’t already grow elsewhere then it shouldn’t be planted elsewhere! One fellow actually stated, “If it was meant to be there, it would already be there.” I was astounded at this attitude, but this mentality evidently holds sway over the state park system in regards to the Florida torreya. For shame!

It has been proposed that the Florida torreya might have become “trapped” in a Florida peak-glacial pocket and is unable to naturally re-expand northward into cooler climes, which it possibly prefers as a consequence of the absence of a co-evolved seed disperser. I am not inclined to believe in the seed-disperser hypothesis, though, as squirrels assiduously seek out torreya seeds and eat and presumably cache them, and because the species was propagating itself quite nicely before the 1950s. Fortunately, it has been artificially propagated successfully at the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina and at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. I have seen the Biltmore trees; they are truly beautiful, dark glossy evergreens and I have wanted one ever since.

About a year ago, I read of the Torreya Guardians (http://www.torreyaguardians.org/). This group of dedicated individuals has determined that the species will probably go extinct under current public management policies. Deeming this unacceptable, they have assembled unofficially (no membership roll, no dues and no officers) in the private sector to try to bring the species back from the brink of extinction. They have done quite a lot of research on its propagation requirements, both from cuttings and seeds obtained from Biltmore and Atlanta, and hope to re-establish it within its theoretical cooler-climate range outside of Florida.

As I own a 2-acre lot in the mountains a few miles from Biltmore and (ahem) have a green thumb and a jones for biodiversity, I contacted them asking if they could spare me a few seeds. After many months, they responded with an offer of 10 seeds! But they want me to propagate them in Florida rather than North Carolina because they want to learn whether the species can live in Florida in places other than Torreya State Park. Wow! I am just so excited that I can hardly stand it! I received the seeds today and promptly set them out according to their recommendations. I am now a Torreya Guardian.

Waccasassa Winter

2010-02-26T13:07:00.000-05:00

I went kayaking with Jim and Brack yesterday on the Waccasassa River in Levy County, FL. Brack and I became acquainted with Jim by virtue of him being a reader of my blog. As mentioned in the sidebar, one goal of this blog is to meet fellow naturalists from around the country (world), and it was a real pleasure to spend some time in a fine Florida floodplain with another naturalist from a different part of the country - New York, in his case. So, to the rest of y’all: Come on down!

We put in at the boat ramp at the end of CR326 and paddled upstream. It was right cold, too, maybe in the 40s with a perky little breeze, but we were dressed for it with long johns and neoprene socks. Brack’s kayaks are stable and drain splash water quickly, so the only parts of me that got wet were my ankles, and they were only moistened. We left the boat ramp about 10:30am and returned at about 3:30pm, an easy 5-hour loaf.

Passing by the mouth of the Wekiva River, we noted its dark, tannin-stained waters. Ordinarily, this spring-fed tributary’s waters are clear to the bottom and its thick submerged vegetation is clearly visible. Winter rains have swollen the basin’s wetlands and streams, however, carrying heavy loads of leaves and other detritus that contribute dark-colored compounds and particles into the waters. At one point, I tried to shove off a “sandbar” covered with leaves by pushing against it with the paddle, but it just sunk in about 18 inches, proving that the bar was really just a manatee-sized leaf pack. Despite the high waters in the tribs, the river’s level was down due to it being at low tide and close to the sea. Although the current was swift in its shallower reaches, our kayaks slipped easily over the river’s flexed muscles.

Tidal riverbanks and salt marshes are muddy. You almost cannot get in and out of your kayak or canoe without getting muddy feet. Nonetheless, the banks in tidal waters seem to avoid eroding away despite numerous fiddler crab holes and swift currents. Now how can this be? This photo gives you some idea of how algae can provide armor against erosion. The depicted algal mat (the laurel oak leaves in the photo are 2-3 inches long) is filamentous and grows on top of the mud. It is apparent why it can retard erosion, but most mud banks are not so well-protected. Instead, the upper eighth-inch or so of the mud is perfused with thinner, less-visible filaments of algae that enmesh it all together. Jim likened it to a web of fungal hyphae, and upon reflection, I wonder if fungi are also associated with this wetland substrate?

For me, one of the nicest things about Florida is that you can find flowers during any month of the year. Only a few species of wildflowers were blooming yesterday, being common blue violet (Viola sororia), butterweed (Packera glabella) and golden club (Orontium aquaticum), and only one kind of shrub, Walter’s viburnum (V. obovatum). Red buckeye, wax myrtle and swamp privet (the native Forestiera acuminata, not an invasive exotic Ligustrum) exhibited flower buds, but they were not quite yet open for business. Wind-pollinated, leafless trees on the other hand, were starting to bloom pretty good, including sweetgum, winged elm, red maple, bald cypress and coastal plain willow, and possibly others too tall to clearly tell. Fortunately, the oaks and pines were not yet trying to ignite hay fever inflammations.

Where the river passes under CR326, two of the pilings holding the bridge up were badly eroded by physical damage and corrosion. Here is a photo of the worst one, with its reinforcing wires fully exposed! One wonders how many pilings are actually necessary to support this bridge, but I suppose FDOT has made the county build in sufficient redundancy.

Not surprisingly for those who know me, we just had to stop by the solution valley located up one of the Waccasassa’s tributaries that I have mentioned here before. As you may know, a solution valley starts out as a limestone cave whose stream floor has become an above-ground creek because the roof of the cave has eroded away. In this case, remnant side passages still exist, so the big picture is that of a system of little caves pointing toward a small brook. Below are several pics of the system. In one shot of a cavern entrance, you can see the reflection of water lit from behind. In another shot, Brack demonstrates how small these cave entrances are. Most of these holes are too tiny for designation as caves by the Florida Cave Survey, and in several instances are more properly considered natural bridges. All are quite wet and muddy, and there are a lot of natural bridges, too. Also pictured below is cretan brake fern, Pteris cretica. It has the odd distribution of being known in the US only from Florida, Maryland, Louisiana and California.

Winter in Warrens Cave

2010-02-20T13:42:00.000-05:00

It has been a while since I have been in a Florida cave. No particular reason, just haven’t. Dave L invited me to join a few adventurers at Warrens Cave on Friday evening, so I was thankfully able to get a speleofix and end my speleodrought. The six of us actually comprised two teams: Alex, Mike and Chris wanted to zip back to the Sand Room and Dave, another Mike and I to go a little more slowly to the Sand Room. Bill Oldacre, the property manager and fellow that is responsible for Warrens Cave being under caver management, met us at the gate on the dirt entrance road with the two keys to the road and cave gates. It is always good to visit with Bill, but this time it was especially gratifying as he presented me with a couple of gifts in recognition of my small contributions to the NSS Nature Preserves (Warrens is one of thirteen) as former Chairman of the Nature Preserves Committee.

The zip team, a young crew ranging 18 to maybe 24 yo, scooted off ahead, unlocked the cave gate and disappeared. Dave, Mike and I, the more mature (in years only, I hasten to add) team, progressed a little more slowly. Alex is working with Sarah C and Corey B to try to set up a far camp beyond Agony Alley in the very back of the cave in order to extend the known reaches of this, the longest known air-filled cave in Florida. They are all slender, athletic, hard-core(y) cavers, and if anyone can do it, it is they. For those unfamiliar with the situation: Agony Alley is 600 ft of body tube that most of us cannot turn around in, so tight that you must tie your pack to your foot and push your helmet ahead of you, take at least a gallon of drinking water and hope to Oztotl that you don’t get “corked in” by an expiring caver between you and the entrance. I have been back there only once, at a time that I was out of shape, dehydrated, improperly bulked up carbohydratedly and not yet having taken up stamina pills (foxglove). I will never return to those far reaches, but I can proudly say, duh, that I have surveyed passage back there (with Keith S and Bob N). The trip back there is through the Sand Room, noted for its sandpaper-like sediments that can rub your elbows raw, and takes 4 – 6 hours one-way depending on your abilities and physical condition. Alex, Sarah and Corey plan to spend several days on their expedition, and it could go down in Florida caving annals as one of the most grueling ever.

Along the way, we eyed a bunch of small traps that a graduate student has emplaced to capture a tiny species of cave beetle. This beetle is appx 2-3 mm long, less than 1 mm wide and is typically found in the cave on feces deposited by cotton mice (Peromyscus gossypinus). The mice are found almost anywhere cavers frequently go in the cave, eating crumbs left by snackers and probably other types of food washed into the cave during rain events. Cotton mice will also gnaw on ropes and rope backup straps if salty sweat is left on them by riggers, so we must be careful when rigging and using the ropes.

I counted 31 bats in the Historic Section, more than I have ever seen in Warrens at a single time, say hallelujah! They were mostly the Southeastern myotis (Myotis austroriparius) and a few tri-colored bats (Perimyotis subflaveus) (formerly called the pipistrelle, Pipistrellus subflaveus). They occurred on walls, typically immediately below minor horizontal rock ridges or small overhangs, in ones and twos, although I spotted one foursome and one sixsome. In warmer months the cave gate serves as a perch for yellow rat snakes (Elaphe obsoleta quadrivittata), from which they snag and eat bats flying to and from the cave. I would like to see the existing cave gate replaced with one that is more bat-friendly. Although in winters past I have seen rat snakes up to a couple hundred feet inside the cave staying warm, we saw none this time. That’s a good thing for the bats, but last night it was a good thing for the snakes, too, as I had already decided that, henceforth, I am going to capture and relocate all rat snakes I find in this cave. This is not ordinarily considered a cool thing to do, but bats are under many serious threats, especially at Warrens, whereas the yellow rat snake may be Florida’s most common large snake. I don’t know if there is such a thing as a homing snake, but I bet they will be hard pressed to re-find Warrens after being relocated to the trees beside Orange Lake.

I found myself commenting twice during the trip that the most important rule about caving is to know your own limitations, not in lecture but because it was already ingrained in my companions and they knew when to exercise the rule. Kudos!

Ketch dogs and bay dogs

2010-02-12T20:16:00.000-05:00

There are ranches and there are ranches. Some are lived on and operated by affluent owners and others are occupied and run by low-paid, uneducated hired managers. The worst are hired louts that act like barbarians, cruel to the bone. One such fellow I met gave me an education about rednecks hunting feral pigs, and it is everything a sensitive human being could dread.

They have “bay dogs” and “ketch dogs.” He says ketch dogs (you and I would say, “catch dogs”) are a “dime a dozen,” and talks about them like they are throwaway appliances. A ketch dog will hit the trail to sniff out a pig, follow the scent trail to the pig and then clamp down on the victim with its powerful pit bull jaws. This is quite painful for the pig, duh, which commences to squealing mightily. Believe me, it is an awful, heart-wrenching sound. The pig tries to throw the dog off, but a toothy dog-vise cannot be slipped. The pig tries anyway, slamming the dog around brush, briars, rocks and trees, and occasionally the pig’s “tushes,” or tusks and hooves meet dog meat too. The damage to the ketch dog can be so severe that it has to be killed. Why take the appliance to the vet and spend a few hundred dollars healing it when it costs only twenty-five bucks to get another? They just shoot ‘em and leave ‘em in the woods for vultures and ‘possums.

The bay dog is another matter. Dogs so want to attack the pig in the heat of the hunt when another dog is attacking the porker, but that is not allowed to bay dogs. You see, the job of the bay dog is to follow the ketch dog, perhaps even help sniff out the trail, and then bay (howl) loudly and constantly until the hunter reaches the trio and shoots or spears the pig (and maybe the ketch dog). If the bay dog attacks the pig, the bay dog could get hurt and not be able to tell the hunter where the trio is located, so breeders train bay dogs not to attack. As I said, it is hard to train a dog to sit back and let the ketch dog have all the fun, so bay dogs go for up to a thousand dollars each, and if you sell a redneck a bay dog that attacks pigs, you can expect to have to give the barbarian his money back and take a lot of heat, too. At this point I should point out that my informant has prison tattoos on his knuckles and says that he had to quit drinking because his “personality changes when [he] drink[s].”

These dogs are kept in small pens way out back away from the house, not so far away that they cannot be heard barking and howling all day long and some of the night too, just far enough away that you can’t smell the stench of dog feces from the back porch. The dogs are not allowed physical contact with each other despite their being highly social animals. They cannot touch or groom each other, as they want to do, cannot establish a pecking order as they need to do and cannot play together as their intelligent brains insist they should do. They cannot get out and run and run and run as a long distance running animal is built to do, so when they are let out to hunt they tire easily, get hurt easily and get lost and sometimes killed by predators and starvation. Of course, being done in winter, lost hunting dogs also have to face the cold and sometimes the rain, too. Their pens are extremely small, generally less than 6ft x 6ft, so they cannot even pace about to maintain muscle tone. They defecate and urinate on the floor that they sleep on, and the feces are simply hosed out every week or so, resulting in a very stinky environment. Nor do their owners offer them any affection or attention (surprise!).

These rednecks care not a whit for any but their bay dogs, and them only because of the expense. When I look into the eyes of these penned dogs, I see misery, plus hopelessness in the older dogs and pleading in the younger. Why is this cruelty allowed? I simply cannot understand why the authorities do not put a stop to this egregious inhumaneness. Surely, this is illegal under any animal cruelty law or ordinance? Why is this butcherous behavior tolerated by the ASPCA, PETA and animal control organizations?

But let’s get back to the pigs. Anyone who reads this blog knows how much I despise feral pigs due to their significant, adverse impacts to native vegetation and wildlife. I would like to see feral pigs eliminated from the US by the use of traps and euthanasia or by well-placed gunshots, but not by cruel means. My informant has other ideas. After trapping young boars, he breaks off their upper canines with pliers so their lower canines will grow longer and be more impressive as a wall mount, and so the dogs and hunters are less likely to get injured. Then he cuts off their testicles so they will grow larger and taste less rangy. He will sell the large boars to hunting concessions for a hundred dollars, where they will be hunted as described above. Smaller pigs will be sold to hunting concessions for “meat hunting” at a rate of twenty-five dollars, and these too will be hunted but not wall mounted. Many older sows will be released so’s they can reproduce. He will relocate some sows and small “uncut” boars to places that “don’t have enough hawgs.” By the way, this latter is one of the main reasons that the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission ceased offering bounties for feral pigs. They learned to their dismay that rednecks were deliberately releasing pigs on state lands so there would be more to hunt there and nearby!

As I said in a previous post, Okeechobee is culturally grim.

The Caracara and the Wild Man

2010-02-09T19:26:00.000-05:00

One pair of caracaras almost drove me nuts trying to find their 2010 nest. Their 2009 nest was a single palm in open pasture away from a marsh. The tree having no lianas and only a few inflorescences to anchor it, winter winds had shredded the nest and the birds did not repair it. I don’t blame them for moving, but wonder why they chose that particular tree in the first place? Maybe they are a relatively young pair and it was their first nest, or maybe I just don’t know enough about caracaras.

The 2009 nest wasn’t very close to a favored perch – a half-dead pine – but the pine was adjacent to a small marsh and was probably a good perch to hunt from in 2009 because then it was wetter and produced more prey. The marsh is dry this year; in fact, all the marshes anywhere close to their 2009 nest are dry so far this year. Nonetheless, this pine is still used occasionally by the pair and is where I first saw them, and thus subconsciously I concluded that it was a good place from which to follow them. Wrong! They all but stopped perching there after I started looking for their nest.

On Day Two, they began flying from somewhere in the east, passing over the pine perch and landing in a pine snag to the west. I walked over there and spied a disheveled stick nest in the snag, definitely not a caracara’s, but it didn’t look active. Possibly the caracaras had a nest in one of the nearby palms? But the caracaras didn’t spend much time there. They just went over briefly and then went to some place in the east, again and again. It turned out that a pair of ospreys were actively building that nest and the caracaras didn’t like it one bit. But one osprey can run off a pair of caracaras, so perhaps the osprey were one of the reasons the caracaras moved their nest?

I walked over to the east side of the territory where I thought they were coming from and found what seemed to be a fine spot for a nest. It had several snags offering commanding views, a larger (albeit dry) marsh and a palm with the right amount of lianas and inflorescences (a liana is a woody vine). But there was no nest there. At this point, I had also sat hidden and quiet for several hours in each of several places watching for caracaras to see where they came and went, hoping that they would reveal the location of their core territory. A core area is where the nest, one or more high perches and a nearby dependable source of food are co-located and competitor core areas are distant. Once you find the core area, you hang out and you will inevitably find the nest. I walked all over their territory over a second half-day looking for activity that would lead me to their core area, all to no avail.

Near the end of that day, when the caracaras were gone I snuck over to a palm hammock that gave a view of the old nest, a potential nest tree and a flyway they had used repeatedly to launch harassment attacks on the ospreys. I waited and waited but saw nothing, so decided to move. At about official sundown, I snuck carefully and quietly around the edge of the hammock to a second observation post, spadefooted my way backwards into a dense clump of tall grass where I believed I was well-hidden, and looked up into the bemused eyes of the male caracara sitting on a fencepost about 100 ft in front of me, and got that old flush-cheeked feeling again. You know how it is when you’re busted but you bravely bluff your way through just in case your opponent doesn’t care? Well, that’s what I did. “Ok, you spotted me,” I thought, “so what are you going to do about it? You still have to go to bed tonight, and I’m not leaving until after your bedtime.” He answered by leaping off the fencepost flying straight toward me, and then banked to his left and rocketed away along the tree line. Care to guess whether he lost me?

The next day, I noticed them headed a little south of “the” east that I had investigated earlier. Following up, they proved to be using power poles and an oak for core area perches a lot closer than the east area. “Ahah,” I thought, “all I have to do now is look at all the cabbage palms in there and I’ll for sure locate the nest.” But all the cabbages in their core area are tall (at least for South Florida), easily 70 – 80 ft, which makes it very hard to discern nests in trees containing arboreal thickets. I looked and looked, yet could not find the nest. I sat down in the shade of a bush and waited for them to show it to me even though they knew I was watching. That evening they pulled the standard tricks of male-decoying-me-so-female-can-sneak-into-nest (which worked) and right-at-dark-male-zips-into-nest-from-fifth-dimension (which also worked).

The next day I waited until both birds left the core area. I was just about to run over to a pre-selected, hidden observation post, but just then, the female came back. Fortunately, she immediately dropped down out of sight right over there, so I thought that if I ran as fast as I could that perhaps I could get under cover behind the barn before she flew up to where she could see me. I did and she didn’t – good so far. She had landed on a utility pole behind the landowner’s house, and from there she flew over to the nest tree. I didn’t know it was the nest tree at the time because I had already looked for a nest in that tree without finding one, plus she was sitting way out on an inflorescence outside of the crown’s foliage instead of hiding inside the crown. She sat there for awhile, flew down to the ground where I couldn’t see her, flew up into a second palm and sat on one of its inflorescences, and then a few minutes later flew off to the east. I knew either of those two palms might well be the tree.

This was good and this was bad. It was good because the area was open and everything was easy to see, plus there were good hiding places from which to observe the birds. It was bad because I would have to lurk around the edge of the pasture immediately adjacent to the landowner’s back yard and hide in clumps of vegetation. If their kid happened by and spotted me, it would probably would have been ok because kids are cool, but if poppa was an angry man and happened by…? Oh, the horror… Because I had been trying to not bother them and had not even met them, I really didn’t want to greet them accidentally at that hour, but I had been working on this nest too long, I was in the right place at the right time and no one seemed interested in visiting the pasture, so I blessed my camo and proceeded. Call me a wild man.

I knew the female caracara would go to the nest well before official sundown, perhaps by an hour or more. I had maybe 1.5 hrs before sunset, so I ran over to the hammock that was close to the two potential nest trees that she had shown me. I found a hiding spot at the edge of the body of the hammock and waited. I didn’t like that spot so moved to another that was on the tip of a point of the hammock, more exposed to humans but still well hidden from caracaras. The two birds returned to core perches before long and gave no indication that they were aware of my presence. The pair left again and I used that opportunity to move quickly to yet another post, closer to the perches and the presumed nest trees, but even more exposed to wandering landowners. When the birds returned I discovered that a critical part of my view was blocked by vegetation, so when they left again I moved to yet a fourth, even more exposed yet still well-hidden spot. I felt like an accomplished sniper when they returned unsuspecting. About 10 minutes before official sundown the male flew off and when I looked back the female had vanished. I did not see her again that day. Old trick.

Shortly, the male flew back to the utility pole and at 19 minutes after official sundown, he flew to the nest tree. To confirm that it was the nest tree I walked over and used my presence to cause him to fly away from the tree, because if he returned I could be almost certain that it was indeed the nest tree. The poor fellow couldn’t see me until I was almost directly underneath him due to the darkness, and when he realized I was there the expression on his face was absolutely priceless. He was open-mouthed and his demeanor fairly shouted, “Where in Hades did YOU come from!” When I left the tree, he was so anxious to return to it that almost as soon as I turned my back he flew in. This time it was he who was busted, I gleefully note.

There is so much at stake that we have to be extra careful that we finger the correct tree, so I returned the following morning to visually confirm that there was indeed a nest in the tree and that they weren’t just spending the night in a plain old palm. The nest was so new and threadbare that I could see her plainly through the bottom of it, not at all like my earlier post on the usual thickness and opaqueness of their nests.

Finding this nest was a lengthy challenge – it’s a good thing that I wasn’t being paid on a lump sum basis!