Natural History Calendar

The Natural History Calendar is written monthly by Kristen Lindquist, our Development Director

May 2008: Meditations on Terns

With an activity we feel strongly about, we often pick favorites: favorite Red Sox player, favorite actor, favorite restaurant, or, with bird-watchers, favorite bird. One of my favorite birds is the tern. I made this choice at a young age, and not only because the tern is a beautiful bird--a flyer of such grace it's often called a sea swallow--but also because this time every year terns return to the Maine coast after an incredible 12,000-mile migration flight spanning the longitude of the globe.

I've gone on several outings to see the successful Atlantic puffin colony on Eastern Egg Rock. Since their restoration, puffins have become Maine icons--they're colorful, look sort of like penguins, and whirr past like little wind-up toys. But what I secretly enjoy most about those trips is the bird circus of hundreds of terns swirling, diving, and filling the air above the island with their breath-taking aerial acrobatics and the cacophony of their screeching.

While many have become aware of efforts to bring back puffins, few realize that other colonial seabirds, including terns, have also needed help. Tern populations have suffered since European colonists first moved to islands, bringing livestock that trampled breeding colonies and eating their eggs. Then it became all the rage to wear bird feathers--sometimes whole birds--on hats, and tern feathers were in high demand. Although that practice was stopped in 1918 with passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, tern populations continued to be threatened by increasing numbers of gulls, thanks to open landfills which provided easy living for these predators of tern eggs and chicks.

In 2003 I was fortunate enough join three U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) staff--Brian Benedict, Ron Joseph, and Linda Welch--on Metinic Island to help them count terns. USFWS has owned 149 acres of Metinic, about a dozen miles southeast of Rockland, since 1995. They initiated a tern restoration project there in 1998. Metinic is one of the many island gems that make up the Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge, and private boats are not allowed to land there during nesting season. On our hour-long trip out, I feel as excited as if I were going to be shown the crown jewels.

We land in a small cove bounded by a cobble beach on the northeastern tip of the island. The bare tip of land beyond the cove is swarming with terns screaming and dive-bombing with such persistence that we have to tape flags to our hats. A house for the two young women spending the summer on the island as tern researchers sits above the cove. I expect this. What I don't expect are all the sheep. About 100 black-faced ewes with gamboling lambs, belonging to the family that owns the other half of the island, roam freely.

This is mid-June, and the two researchers, Megan and Kristin, have been there for about a month and a half. I'm amazed they aren't completely stir crazy, focused on terns all day every day from behind two blinds. This is Megan's third summer doing this. She tells me another researcher stationed on Petit Manan island has promised to write his girlfriend every day. "What can he have to say to her each day? 'Today I banded another tern...' "

Inside the house is a dry-erase board listing "firsts"--First Egg, First Hatchling, First Fledgling. The first egg arrived in mid-May, the first chicks are hatching now. Linda tells me the chicks won't fledge for about 22 days. By summer's end, these youngsters will take flight southward on the world's longest migration.

The board also contains notes on sheep damage, such as the discovery of a trampled nest. The first few years of the restoration project, USFWS studied the impact of sheep on the site. Sheep have lived out there year round for a long time. It was decided they could stay because the sheep-cropped grass seems to be preferred tern nesting habitat. Herring and great black-gulled gulls are managed by breaking their eggs or what Brian calls "pyrotechnics," although that doesn't means outright shooting as on some other islands in the Refuge where the terns desperately need that extra advantage to get a colony established. (The great black-backed is the world's largest gull and a fierce marauder.)

Birds were initially attracted to Metinic by using decoys and tape-recordings of tern colony noises. In 1999 the first terns nested there. Numbers progressed annually until 2005, when extreme weather devastated the colony. Numbers began to recover in 2006 and 2007. Last year, USFWS reports that there were 321 pairs of common and 338 pairs of Arctic terns on Metinic, but no nesting roseates terns, which are on the federal endangered list.

To count the tern chicks, we do a transect survey, looking for eggs and chicks and calling out numbers to Linda as we go. Some chicks we find are wet, just hatched. Some eggs are in the process of hatching. The nests are bare scrapes on the ground, many marked with red or blue flags indicating species. The eggs are works of art, splotched with brown on shades of brownish-grey. I hold a chick, the cutest ball of downy fluff, and feel no weight in my hand. It is unfathomable to me what this chick will become in just a few months.

On the beach, Arctic tern chicks blend in so well that Kristin has to point one out to me before I see it. I almost step on it--it's huddled right on bare granite--before I can pick out the speckled ball of fluff. Thinking about these tiny fragile chicks just lying among the rocks on the beach, I ask Megan about boaters who try to land on the island. She tells me a family of about 15, ten of them kids, tried to land there recently for a picnic, and she had to ask them to leave. She said the husband was nice about it, but the wife indignantly complained, "We've been coming here longer than these birds have!" Guess she didn't know her Maine island history.

Thanks to the hard work of USFWS biologists, Refuge staff, and summer researchers like Megan and Kristin (at least one case of our federal tax dollars being put to some good use), National Audubon Society, and support groups such as Friends of Maine Seabird Islands, terns will continue to be a part of Maine's island history and natural heritage. And its protected beaches will continue to serve as the stony cradles of thousands of tern chicks to come.

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April 2008: Meditations on Skunks

"I think I smell a skunk," my husband said the other evening, and then opened the door, allowing the unmistakable perfume of Eau de Pepe le Pew to waft inside. Fortunately for our domestic bliss, I don't mind skunk smell so much in light doses or from a distance. The smell kind of reminds me of over-brewed coffee. (Up close is another matter, of course, unless you're our friend Jodi who has no sense of smell.)

That first hint of skunk scent in the evening air is as sure a sign of spring's true arrival around here as blooming forsythia and the return of singing robins. All those skunks that were waiting out winter under our porches and sheds rouse to the warmer air and, later in spring, the necessity to feed their kittens. On their nocturnal wanderings through the neighborhood, they inevitably encounter its various canine and feline residents.

Though we smell them regularly, we've only seen a skunk pass through our yard a few times. Keying in on those white stripes as the animal humps across your lawn at dusk evokes that same combination of recognition and alarm as realizing that the German Shepard out in your field is really a coyote. We don't let our cat outside, so don't have to worry about accidentally letting in a skunk-sprayed pet. But I think every dog we had when I was growing up was sprayed at least once. And my maternal grandmother had a long-haired white cat that was pink for weeks after being given the good ol' tomato soup treatment for skunk spray.

If you can put your fear of getting doused with pungent musk aside, and your annoyance with the way it digs up a yard, you can perhaps appreciate the fact that a skunk will eat anything--including pests like mice and slugs. And also, like the similarly shunned porcupine, when seen up close, a skunk has a very sweet face.

skunks

Photo credit: PGC/Jacob W. Dingel

My paternal grandparents owned several pet skunks long before I was born. My grandparents were pet pioneers, in their way, though "animal wackos" might be a more apt phrase. They had a pet crow named Zeke and a myna bird, both of which they taught to speak a few words. They owned two ferrets decades before it was fashionable. They kept sheep and chickens, some of which were allowed into the house, as well as a goose, who lived in the house at night. And they raised five skunks over a period of several years, as evidenced by many family photos. A skunk kitten is especially photogenic.

Four of the five skunks were de-scented, and therefore safe to let loose in the house. (An important caveat: keeping a wild animal such as a skunk as a pet is now illegal in Maine and several other states). My grandmother likened them to cats and said they were very affectionate. Those four had boring names like Skunky, Stinky, and Stripey. But the one skunk who wasn't de-scented had the memorable, glam moniker of a porn star: Sachet Kitten. Although Sachet Kitten was still in full possession of her scent glands, the story goes that she only raised her tail in warning once--when someone startled her by coming into a room too quickly. But she never sprayed. Unless you rush right up on them, skunks generally give you plenty of other warnings before they spray--stamping their feet, rearing up on their front legs, or growling and hissing.

With its talent of spraying a blinding, nauseating liquid almost ten feet, you would think the skunk would have no enemies. In fact, they are a delicacy to great horned owls. According to one of my favorite old bird books, Edward Howe Forbush's "Birds of Massachusetts" (vol. 2, 1927), "Horned Owls kill and eat many skunks, and seem to care little for the disagreeable consequences of attacking these pungent animals." He adds drily, "Many of the owls I have handled give olfactory evidence of the habit." Forbush also mentions that in addition to skunk remains being found often near owl nests, that the "white on the back of a skunk is [the owl's] favorite mark," and goes on to cite instances of people in white hats being attacked by great horned owls at dusk. I have several times heard the great horned owl referred to as "skunk owl," though most of the old reference books call it "cat owl." I don't know if that latter nickname refers to its physical similarity to cats or its penchant for eating them.

A friend living right in the heart of downtown Camden recently reported a skunk-owl encounter in his front yard. Upon hearing a thud against the house one evening, he stepped out onto his porch to see what had made the noise. In the yard, he saw a skunk scuttling across the yard. And not six feet away perched a great horned owl, which had perhaps run into his house in pursuit of its favorite prey. My friend had complained of the efforts he had undertaken to dissuade the skunk from living under his shed. Perhaps the owl will be the ultimate, all-natural solution to his skunk "problem."

As obnoxious and exasperating as skunk spray can be, I think the creature gets a bad rap. It's easy to dislike them for their defense mechanism. But we should admire their adaptability in the face of broad wildlife habitat loss: they aren't endangered, they've adapted to living around people very well, and the females even den together, inspiring girl power. They're keeping mice and insect populations down, they remind us that spring has arrived, and, hey, just look at that cute face! And not only that, but they're a food source for what is, in my opinion, one of our most dramatic and beautiful birds--the great horned owl. So what's not to like?

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March 2008: Meditations on Wolves and Ravens

I am one of those Mainers who firmly believes that the harshness of the New England winter is exaggerated, even though I'm also cold all the time. Winter here offers its own set of outdoor pleasures that makes it worth sticking around for.

However, this winter has been a particularly snowy one, and I have to confess that the long month of March lurks like a storm cloud on the year's horizon for me right now. Officially, spring starts here in Maine at 1:48 a.m. on March 20, but those of us who live here know that we have equal odds of enjoying a snowstorm or balmy warmth on the long-awaited vernal equinox.

Perhaps that's why I've been thinking dark thoughts lately. Specifically, about that big black bird, the raven. It all started when friends recently took my husband and I to the Loki Clan Wolf Refuge on the New Hampshire-Maine border. So as to approach on foot, we parked down the road from the refuge, which rescues wolf hybrids from illegal breeders and "pet" owners ill-equipped to handle this wild species. As we neared the refuge compound, we heard a sound I instantly recognized but had never heard live: the howling of wolves. This primeval sound rose up from the forest around us, and we could see shadowy figures of large animals moving among the trees. It sounds like a cliche, but when a wolf howls that close, in the flesh, a chill really does run up your spine.

And then, as if in answering chorus, the metallic quorks of ravens began to ring out over our heads. We looked up and saw maybe three or four birds circling the one-acre wolf pens. But there were more, many more. We just didn't realize it until we embarked on a guided tour of the refuge and reached a vantage point that offered a scenic vista of the White Mountains. From that point, we could look toward a neighboring hill and see so many ravens in flight that we could barely count them. I estimated about 30 birds, but it was hard to tell--they were swirling and diving among one another, flying in formations of two and four, performing somersaults, snapping at drifting beech leaves, and emitting a crazy cacophony of croaks, quorks, and clinks. A couple of eagles showed up, but squadrons of ravens quickly escorted them from the premises. Ravens were rising up and settling amid the spruce trees in the wolf pen. They soared and circled overhead, black forms against white snow and blank sky.

Often when I am hiking in the Camden Hills, I will hear a strange sound overhead, an animal call that I have never heard in my life. After a moment's confusion, I eventually realize that it's a raven, that old trickster bird trying on a new voice. And I don't think I'm being self-centered when I say that the bird is probably announcing my presence in the woods with that weird call. That's what they do.

At the wolf refuge, the birds were loudest and most numerous when we first arrived, gradually disappearing over the hill or into the trees. The wolves, on the other hand, most of which were accustomed to people, often came right up to us. The refuge has more than 80 wolves on dozens of forested acres straddling two states. These wolves will live out the rest of their lives in the most natural state possible (except that they are sterilized)--free to roam the woods within their large pens, form social packs, and howl their hearts out. These half-wild creatures are the reason for all the ravens.

Ravens and wolves share a long alliance. Ravens long ago recognized that wolves were a source of fresh meat, and often follow hunting packs of wolves. At the wolf refuge, the wolves are fed, if I remember correctly, about 20 pounds of fresh, raw meat a week. Bernd Heinrich's wonderful book "Ravens in Winter" details how ravens, normally solitary or paired birds during the breeding season, will often summon great flocks of fellow ravens to a food source of food in the winter. These ravens were clearly exhibiting that behavior, which made me wonder if some of the wolves had recently been fed.

Several Native American tribes, including the Koyukon of Alaska (as described in Richard Nelson's "Make Prayers to the Raven"), respect the raven as a good omen when hunting. The birds sometimes lead hunters to prey or, more often, arrive on the scene soon after hearing gunshots. The ravens clearly use their superior avian intelligence to take best advantage of any situation. Nelson labels the raven "the greatest character in the boreal forest," and describes how wolves at their prey (and even his own sled dogs) ignore them, enabling the birds to nab quantities of food unmolested.

Ravens used to hover over ancient battlefields of men, as well, seeing a similar advantage to that of hanging out with wolves. Perhaps that's another reason they've been in my thoughts lately--that ever-present fact that we are a country at war, despite the fact that we can't see the battlefield and its carnage first-hand.

Locally, numbers of ravens and eagles can be seen at their opportunistic best right now in Warren, soaring above the St. George River valley and in the vicinity of a poultry farm along Route One. Both species take advantage of ice fishermen on nearby ponds as well as the discarded by-products of poultry processing. By early March, they are also joined by one of our first returning birds of spring: the turkey vulture--gloomy as a harbinger of spring but a beautiful bird in flight. On a bright winter day, even on a bright winter day when the calendar says it's supposed to be spring, my dark thoughts are often dispelled by the sight of dozens of eagles, ravens, and vultures circling over the snow-covered fields. I just have to put out of my head the fact that it's death that has brought them there.

(For more information on the Loki Clan Wolf Refuge, please visit: http://www.lokiclan.com/).

February 2008: Meditations on Woodpeckers

A sound of winter: on a hemlock-covered bluff on the Knowlton-Swanson-Stephenson Preserve in Belfast, a tapping noise, growing louder. Not rigid tree trunks creaking under the weight of cold; not the clacking of frozen branches in the slight breeze; not the shifting of bits of ice in the fast stream below--a repetitive knocking, followed by the soft sound of bark chips falling onto crusty snow. I follow my ears to a dead tree, almost bare of bark, fretted with woodpecker holes. And there he is above me, red crest bright--a pileated woodpecker, hammering away. Later in my walk, I hear his loud "ka-ka-ka-ka" call resounding unbuffered through the leafless woods. These are his woods, and he wants all within earshot to know it.

Here in Maine we have the opportunity to see nine woodpecker species at best, and of those, only five are common: northern flicker, yellow-bellied sapsucker, and downy, hairy, and pileated woodpeckers. The ivory-billed woodpecker, now well-known to the general public for having gone extinct and then possibly having been rediscovered in the cypress swamps of the south, never lived anywhere near New England. Instead we have the pileated, a smaller but still impressive and handsome substitute that used to be known as the "cock of the woods" or the "log-cock."

The pileated woodpecker looks a bit like Woody Woodpecker, the old cartoon character with the contagious laugh (which my mother, by the way, if she's in the right mood, can imitate perfectly). The word "pileated" refers, in fact, to its crested head, Woody's most notable physical feature. The pileated doesn't sound quite like Woody or my mother; its distinctive, rather primeval, call always make me think of background bird noises in movie jungle scenes.

There's an oft-repeated story about the ivory-billed woodpecker, in which the famous 18th-century ornithologist Alexander Wilson injured one (in an attempt to "collect" it for science) and brought it to his room at an inn. While he was briefly away from the room, the bird almost made its escape by pecking through the plaster-and-lathe wall. Unfortunately, it was caught before it had quite pecked through, refused to eat in captivity, and thus soon died. The pathos of that story, how the bird almost escaped, makes one overlook the fact that the woodpecker pecked through a house wall in less than an hour! That's one strong bill, and one strong will to escape.

The pileated woodpecker also boasts a history of serious pecking strength. In C.E. Bendire's "Life Histories of North American Birds" (1895), as quoted in Ralph Palmer's "Maine Birds," an observer describes: "I have seen one pick a large hole through two inches of frozen green hemlock to get at the hollow interior, and it seemed impossible that a steel tool of the same size could have done such work without being broken." In the woods, its large, square-edged holes are distinctive and easily visible along many local trails. This time of year, the bird spends nights in roosting holes, but in spring it will move with a mate into a nesting hole, often using the same one for several years. My parents see what I bet is the same pair every year, nesting in an oak tree near their house on the Megunticook River.

Holes

Pileated Woodpecker excavations, Ducktrap River Preserve

I distinctly remember when I first saw one, aged 12, on a trip to climb Mt. Katahdin. The night before our hike, we camped along the West Branch of the Penobscot River. The next morning, I was awakened in my tent by a loud knocking nearby. I crept out into the chilly, dewy June morning feeling like I'd been summoned forth from my sleep by woodpecker drums. It took me about 15 minutes of sneaking around under trees, without binoculars, to find my first pileated woodpecker. The thrill of being in the dramatic presence of that "cool," sought-after bird, combined with the excitement of our impending hike up Mt. Katahdin, has firmly fixed that morning in my memory.

Many ornithologists now believe that the alleged ivory-billed woodpecker caught on videotape was really a pileated, a very common species in that habitat, as well. From a land conservation perspective, however, what species it was doesn't really matter. The sighting enabled The Nature Conservancy and other partners to quickly conserve thousands of acres of Mississippi delta bottomland, a rich habitat supporting many kinds of wildlife. Those conservation efforts are not wasted just because they may not actually be protecting the rare woodpecker, because the charismatic pileated woodpecker--indeed, dozens of waterfowl and songbird species, as well as other animals--will benefit from the protection of their sensitive and rare cypress swamp habitat.

Here in the Camden area it has been my sense that pileated woodpeckers are becoming more common. I often see one flying near the Land Trust office or my house nearby, its rowing wing beats and big white wing patches against its black body distinctive, along with that crazy call. I wonder if I'm seeing the same pair of birds that nest near my parents' house just upriver, because the bird ranges up to five miles from its nesting hole. It relies on relatively mature forests, so the protection of large blocks of forested habitat, like with Camden Hills State Park (which is almost in my backyard) and Coastal Mountains Land Trust's system of preserves throughout the western Penobscot Bay region, will ensure that this trend continues and we'll continue to hear the pileated woodpecker's call ringing out in our backyards and woods.

Pileated

Pileated Woodpecker excavating a rotten stump near the Land Trust office last summer.

Edward Howe Forbush's "Birds of Massachusetts," which was "Issued by the Authority of the Legislature" in 1927--a pre-ecology time when a species' value to humans was more important than its intrinsic value as a part of the web of life--states, with some subtle affection: "ECONOMIC STATUS: The Northern Pileatead Woodpecker takes its food chiefly from the forest and does no injury to the farmer or the horticulturist. It sometimes bores holes into trees, apparently sound, but such trees are infested by borers or ants, and the work of the woodpecker in such a case often saves the tree from complete destruction. Its abandoned domiciles serve as nesting places for the Wood Duck, Bufflehead, Hooded Merganser, and possibly for the Golden-eye also. Therefore it plays a part in the conservation of these game-birds. The bird is useful and picturesque and an asset to any forested region. It should be protected everywhere by law and public sentiment."

I'm very fond of this image of the pileated woodpecker as unconscious conservationist; and if indeed it was a pileated woodpecker and not an ivory-bill seen in that Arkansas swamp a few years ago, then the species continues to play the role of conservationist at an even higher level than ever!

January 2008: Meditations on Chickadees

The chickadee is not an exotic bird in these parts. Many days, especially this time of year, it's the only species I see--along with its cousin the tufted titmouse. The two tit species visit my feeder regularly, often seeming to scold me from very close at hand when I take it down to refill, as if urging me to hurry up. Before dusk they seem particularly active, stuffing themselves to get through the long, cold night ahead. Before a storm, too, they are unusually attentive to the feeder, as if they can sense that food might soon not be so easy to find.

Maine's primary chickadee species, the black-capped, is also our official state bird and on our license plates--a more acceptable image, in my opinion, than the red lobster that used to grace those first illustrated plates. As an emblem of Maine, the chickadee is a democratic choice. Sure, Maine might be the lobster capital of the world, a place whose destiny was shaped by its fishing industry. But the chickadee is everywhere in this state, in pretty much everybody's backyard, in almost any habitat, year-round. And it's such a lively, almost tame bird--who doesn't love a chickadee

Chickadee

Albino Chickadee; Photo Credit: Don Reimer

In a recent conversation with a friend who's an avid and well-traveled birder, I was surprised to learn that his favorite bird is the chickadee, because they're such an everyday sort of bird. I figured he'd go for something exotic or at least colorful, like indigo bunting or roseate spoonbill. But he says they're his favorite because they're the boldest and bravest--they're the first back to the feeder when he's refilled it, and they are quick to alert other birds to potential predators. Also, he loves that they're always around, that in winter they're often the only bird to be heard when he's out alone on the ski trails.

In reference to the chickadee's bravery, another birder friend, Brian Willson, shared with me a poignant scene he witnessed a couple of years ago when a red-tailed hawk swooped into his yard and carried off a chickadee. In his words: "The scene... left me with an emotional press in my gut just below the breastbone. I can still hear the little bird's enduring cries. With its last breaths, it filled the wintry air with frantic titters: sounding the alarm, sounding the alarm. Hawk, hawk, alarm, alarm..."

Ordinary as they may seem at first, chickadees clearly have a lot more going on than we would expect. Studies have shown that in winter, their brains expand to increase memory. This helps them remember where they've cached extra food, to help them get through hard times. For a bird with a pea brain, this seems extraordinary. It also emphasizes the miracle of evolution that helped this tiny creature adapt to living in an often harsh, cold climate year-round. That extra seed or two may not seem like much, but to a chickadee in the winter it could mean the difference between life and death. During the day the chickadee must be constantly active and feeding in order to maintain its body heat. Its main source of food is conifer seeds, which are high in fat and oil--and which luckily Maine's pines and spruces offer in good supply. The lively chickadee we see darting about the winter woods is not cheerful and perky so much as unable to stop moving for risk of freezing to death.

Overnight, a chickadee can lose up to 15% of its body weight--akin to a 150-pound human losing 20+ pounds. On winter nights, the sleeping chickadee's rate of metabolism decreases so the bird goes into torpor and doesn't freeze to death. Chickadees also survive the long, cold nights of this time of year by huddling together.

In addition to these physiological quirks, chickadees also apparently possess a distinct and relatively decipherable vocabulary of more than fifteen songs and calls. Most of us are familiar with the typical "chick-a-dee-dee-dee" call that gave the bird its name. This call has several meanings depending on the situation, serving as a greeting, an alert about something good (food) or bad (predator), or, when used by a flock, to scare off a predator. No one who has come across a loud flock of chickadees mobbing a hawk can have any doubt about what's going on--they can be very aggressive when they need to be.

One successful way to attract chickadees is to imitate the call of a screech owl. The chickadees appear as if out of nowhere in response to this perceived threat. Birders regularly do this not with the intention of annoying the chickadees, but because many other bird species hang out with chickadee flocks as a way to find food sources more effectively and take advantage of the added protection of an alert flock. So, as happened to me recently on the Ducktrap River Preserve, calling in a group of chickadees may also bring in some of their avian friends, in that case both red- and white-breasted nuthatches and some golden-crowned kinglets.

Many may also recognize the male's loudly whistled, two-note courtship song of "hey sweetie" or "fee-bee" that he sometimes starts singing while snow is still on the ground--apparently his thoughts are never too far from love, no matter how cold the air. A quieter version of this call serves as communication between chickadee pairs, to keep track of one another. A shortened "quirrup" call serves to announce one bird's dominance over another with regards to food or territory; a high-pitched chattery call is a warning; and various other calls help pair bonding, maintain flock cohesiveness as birds move through the forest, or assert flock hierarchy. So it's clearly not all as simple as "chick-a-dee-dee-dee" for these vocal little songbirds that cheer us up all winter. Next time you're out on the trail and the ever-curious chickadees begin to flit around you through the bare trees, watch and listen carefully--you might learn something, and at the very least, they'll bring a smile to your face.