Don’t forget the talk coming up this Monday (3/19/12) about native plants by Doug Tallamy. It’s free and will be good!

7 pm in the Student Activities Center.

Here’s a short video featuring Tallamy that will give you a brief overview of the subject:

The Value of Native Plants

If you are interested in native plants or the animals that depend on them, you might be very much interested in three upcoming talks about how we can better manage our yards and gardens to provide for both.

The first, featuring Doug Tallamy, author of Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife With Native Plants, is sponsored by and hosted at Stockton and will be held Monday, March 19, at 7 pm. The subsequent two talks on March 26 and April 2 will be held at the Unitarian Universalist’s Center across Pomona Road from Stockton. All three talks are free.

Come join us! See other details on poster at the link below:

Doug Tallamy Presentation & Sustaining Landscape Series

The scene above is a site thirty miles from campus on the Great Egg Harbor River near the border of Camden and Gloucester Counties. The trees are tupelo, Nyssa sylvatica, and the green, basketball-sized clumps clinging to them are clusters of American mistletoe, Phoradendron leucarpum.

Once upon a time mistletoe was common enough in southern NJ to be collected by the “Pineys” and other residents to be sold in Philadelphia and elsewhere.

New Jersey is the northernmost extreme of its range, however, and it was probably never as numerous here as in the southeastern US where it is considered a pest in some areas. It’s a hemi-parasite (“half a parasite”) — photosynthesizing its own energy through its green leaves, but also able to penetrate the bark of various hardwoods to steal nutrients.

In NJ over-collecting and tree-harvesting have endangered it for at least the last century. In 1911 Witmer Stone noted in his Plants of Southern New Jersey, “Comparatively little has been left on record regarding this interesting plant, now all but exterminated from the state.” Mistletoe has hung on here since Stone’s time, mostly in scattered locales south of the Mullica River. Today the state’s official designation for the species is S2 (“Imperiled in NJ,” one step up from the rarest status, S1, “Critically imperiled.”)

Here’s a closer view from the scene above:

Returning from the Gloucester/Camden site above a couple of weekends ago, and crossing back into Atlantic County, my wife and I decided to try our luck looking for the plant closer to home. We pulled over at a couple of river crossings, and with a wonderful dose of beginner’s luck, we succeeded, spotting one beachball-sized clump in a red maple tree on the river about twenty miles from campus.

That little adventure has left me wondering whether we could find Phoradendron on campus. We have plenty of tupelo here, the preferred host in NJ, and some parts of the campus seem sufficiently undisturbed to spark at least some hope that a dedicated, sharp-eyed observer might find a clump or two.

December-March is the time of year to search for the plant — after one year’s leaves have fallen and before the next year’s leaves burst from their buds. Once tupelo, red maple, and other trees leaf-out, mistletoe’s green clusters are virtually impossible to spot.

So, if you are walking the campus woods in the next few weeks, especially in lowland areas where tupelo and red maple grow, keep an eye out. Finding this rarity on our campus would be a wonderful and significant discovery!

And please let me know the good news!

jc

PS: here’s a recent article that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer and elsewhere:

Stalking the coy mistletoe

The Spong, November 10, 2011.

The walk to the Spong two weeks ago with my freshman seminar students and a subsequent exchange of emails with Pinelands explorer Gabe Coia prompted me to gather some notes in response to a pair of related questions: how is the Spong different from Stockton’s other water bodies? and how long has it been here?

The Spong is very much under-appreciated, in my opinion, and deserves more attention and celebration.

First of all, unlike Lake Fred, Upper Lake, Cedick Run Bog, Little Lake, Lake Pam, and the Parkway Ponds — all of which are man-made — our Spong seems to be a natural feature of the campus landscape.

Thanks to Coia, who has been researching the history of the Mullica River and its tributaries, and who passed along a link to a wonderful website, you can get a sense of this for yourself.

NETR Historic Aerials

National Environmental Titles Research has created an amazing collection of maps by compiling and organized hundreds (thousands?) of aerial photographs from many areas of the country, including South Jersey.

Type in Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in the search box and you find eight different sets of maps for our area: 1931, 1951, 1957, 1963, 1970, 1995, 2002, and 2006. (The first five show the area before the College existed.)

With a couple of clicks you can see quickly that the Spong pre-dates Lake Pam and the Parkway Ponds and appears to be an entirely natural wetland.

The NETR link below will take you directly to the 1931 map. Push the slider to the right for a wider view and eventually you will be able to orient yourself when Lake Fred appears to the NNW of the Spong. (Lake Fred is clearly man-made and, according to Coia, dates to at least 1833, which is a topic to be explored in a future post.)

The Spong & nearby in 1931

The cleared land in these 1931 aerial images are the farms in the area, several of them pig farms, according to various sources. Look close at the line running near the Spong and you can see that what we now the call the “cross-country” trail (a.k.a. Rice Road) dates to at least the 1930s.

Twenty years later, that trail looks a little wider but otherwise the Spong seems unchanged in this 1951 map:

The Spong & nearby in 1951

Push the slider for a wider view and you will see a mix of forest and farmland on what is now the east side of campus with no water bodies closer to the Spong than Lake Fred.

The landscape changed significantly over the subsequent six years, however, as the 1957 map indicates. Most significantly, the Garden State Parkway had reached the area. Also appearing in the photos for first time are Lake Pam, the Parkway Ponds, and the rectangular ponds near the intersection of Pomona Road and the Parkway (those I call the Police Station Ponds). The sudden emergence of these several water bodies is not a coincidence. All could be called the Parkway Ponds because all were accidental artifacts of that construction. Workers found the sand for the concrete of the Parkway pavement by digging for it directly alongside the new road. The burrow pits left behind soon filled with rain, and depending on rainfall and droughts, they have held varying levels of water ever since.

The Spong & nearby in 1957

So, these maps prove the Spong dates back a minimum of eighty years.

You can’t measure the age of the Spong in decades, however. You need millennia.

The Spong’s circular shape and its ecology suggest it is more than 15,000 years old — and was created at a time when the northern end of the Atlantic Coastal Plain was probably as cold as the coast of Greenland is today. For most of that time, the Wisconsin Ice Age, which lasted from ~100,000 years ago to ~12,000 years ago, what we now call northern New Jersey was under a glacier and central NJ under an ice sheet. With ocean levels low (because so much ocean water was frozen) the coast extended east to the continental shelf, nearly 100 miles farther out than it extends today. That open plain and all of South Jersey was treeless, arctic tundra and in some areas probably a near-lifeless polar desert, blasted by howling winds.

Mark Demitroff of the Permafrost Group at the University of Delaware has written frequently about the origins of the Pine Barrens’ many spongs.(1)

Demtrioff and others have explained that the spongs were created as the Wisconsin Ice Age drew to an end, by “katabatic wind deflation under cold, nonglacial conditions.”

Katabatic winds involve cold air blowing at high intensities down into slightly warmer areas, nowadays a phenomenon most obvious in the Arctic and Antarctic (2).

According to French & Demtrioff, the spongs were carved by these high winds blowing off the ice sheet down onto the coastal plain for many thousands of years. The spongs are blow-outs. (3)

Eventually, ~15,000-12,000 years ago, the climate warmed, the winds eased, and the ice surfaces slowly melted. The glaciers retreated to Canada. The circular holes left behind — wind scars, in a sense — were filled (as I understand it, at least) by water rising from the high water table.

Except in extreme droughts, they have probably remained seasonally or intermittently wet ever since.

As the land became more livable, the spongs became critical features for plants and animals. “These pockets of water served as oasis-like watering places for wildlife and ambulant peoples over a period of 12,000 years,” Demitroff and his colleagues have written, “and [eventually became] loci of early European settlement.”

Mark Demitroff’s home page

If you look carefully at the NETR maps above, you will note another key difference between the ecology of the Spong and that of Lake Pam and the other Parkway Ponds. The burrow pits are all self-enclosed, holding rainwater that flows nowhere. At the Spong, by contrast, water pushes up during wet periods, when the water table is high, and trickles in a little stream that runs northward to enter Morse’s Mill Stream, just east of Lake Fred. The flow is particularly evident in the NETR 1963 aerial photos, but here’s a ground-level view of that stream during a wet period in May, 2005:

Here’s a photo of the Spong itself that same day:

The Spong, May 22, 2005.

The Spong’s water is more acidic than the water of Lake Pam and the Parkway Ponds. As I understand it, at least, this is because it has percolated down and up again through the the Spong’s soil and also gained tannins from the dissolved leaves and other materials from the trees, shrubs, sphagnum mosses, and other plants that live in it or around its edges. That acidity (low pH) means the Spong hosts different plants and animals than other wetland areas on campus:

Trientalis borealis, a.k.a. starflower, is hard to find on campus, except in the wet, acidic soils alongside the Spong’s run-off, where this one was photo’d in May, 2005.

Pine Barrens tree frog photo’d at the Spong, June 5, 2003 (and released immediately).

Demitroff and his colleagues and many NJPB conservationists worry about the future of Pineland spongs. “They are not isolated basins, but complex regional watertable features,” they have noted. And the spongs are losing their connections to one another. “These intermittent pools are slowly fading away due to a regional lowering of ground water and landscape disturbance.”

Let us hope that Stockton can protect this wonderful spot!

jc

Update: Mark Demitroff kindly read an earlier version of this post and offered a number of corrections and clarifications. Any remaining errors are mine.

1. Demitroff and others spell the word spung; John McPhee, Howard Boyd, and others spell it spong; all seem to agree, however, that it rhymes with sung.

2. Here’s a scientist’s blog on the New York Times website describing the phenomenon in Antarctica: John Goodge on katabatic winds.

3. French & Demitroff, 2001. Cold-Climate Origin of the Enclosed Depressions and Wetlands
(‘Spungs’) of the Pine Barrens, Southern New Jersey, USA.

The last few survivors of the trek to the Spong, November 10, 2011. (Click to enlarge.)

Stockton’s Natural World seminarians hoofed it through the College’s east-side forest on a Thursday afternoon. Starting at Pokeberry Lane, they hiked east and then south, marching ever onward into terra incognita.

Along the way, they identified thirty species of woody plants (including at least three species new for the semester); fought off the wolf spiders, leaf-footed bugs, and harpy eagles that attacked them from all sides; and never complained…. well, at least not too much!

Not everyone made it the whole way. Apparently, a few had been kidnapped by the Jersey Devil on Wednesday night because they never showed for the start; a number of others had to peel away right at the end of the hike because of thirst, starvation, and sheer exhaustion (and alleged 2:30 classes they claimed they had to make). But the dozen intrepid explorers photo’d above made it all the way to the Spong.

Whether all of those twelve made it back to civilization again to live to talk about the adventure is not yet known at this time.

Wrap-around photo of the Spong by Anthony Lepore (a.k.a. Usain Bolt) taken with his phone. (Click to enlarge.)

One corner of the Spong: Atlantic white cedar, red maple, highbush blueberry, and other wetland species.

The Parkway Ponds, near the Spong, were created in the early 1950s when sand was removed for concrete for the Parkway — the same operation that created Lake Pam. They hold water less reliably than Pam, however.

Sweetgum, Liquidambar styraciflua, is common in lowland/wet areas on the south east side of campus, from Pokeberry Lane south and east to the Parkway Ponds. It is much harder to find on the west side — a sign of differences in the acidity of campus soils, perhaps?

Sweetgum leaves.

A woody plant close the Spong not yet ID’d by any class members. Who will figure it out first?

Chesnut oak leaves stand out in orangey-yellow (Halloween colors?) at this time of year. Photo taken 11-6-11.

All nine species of oaks (Quercus, sp.) that grow regularly in the New Jersey Pine Barrens can be found on campus, and we have another oak as well. The ten species make a nice little challenge for an outdoor explorer. How many can you find before November is done?

This month is a good one for the chase because changing leaf colors often accentuate species’ differences — and can lead your eye to a tree that has been hidden in the more uniform green of summer and early fall.

Scarlet oak, for example, practically names itself for you at this time of year:

Photo taken 11-18-10

Four of our ten oaks are so abundant that they are almost unmissable: scarlet oak (Q. coccinea), black oak (Q. velutina), scrub oak (Q. ilicifolia), and white oak (Quercus alba).

Three other species are scattered here and there in our woods, but if you wander for a few hours (with a field guide in hand), you should be able to find them: post oak (Q. stellata), southern red oak (Q. falcata), and chestnut oak (Q. prinus).

Southern red oak leaves “give you the finger.” Photo taken 10-24-10.

Chesnut oak leaves show the wavy-edges, and the species’ acorns are huge. Photo 11-6-11.

So, that makes seven common to fairly common species that most hikers can find after two or three walks around campus.

Then comes the tough part.

The remaining three species require a higher level of oak-consciousness, and you can spend many days searching for them.

Leaf color in November can be a key to one of them: Quercus phellos, willow oak. It seems to hold its green just a week or two longer than other November oaks; even its fallen leaves sometimes stay green. The willow-like leaf shape is another key.

Willow oak on Pokeberry Lane, 11-6-11.

One individual grows on the Dark Path (look on the right while walking away from the main campus buildings). Another grows on Pokeberry Lane (across from Parking Lots 1 and 2) on the left-hand side of the trail as you walk away from the parking lots — before you reach the fence. The tallest willow oak I know on campus is on the wooded “inside” of the cross-country trail alongside the Parkway Ponds.

Willow oak is so fire-sensitive and so seldom found in Pine Barrens habitats that Howard Boyd does not include the species in his Field Guide to the New Jersey Pine Barrens. The species is at the very northern tip of its range in southern NJ and is found much more commonly on the Inner Coastal Plain west of us and in other areas outside the NJPB with richer soils and fewer fires.

Its opposite among the oaks is blackjack oak, Quercus marilandica, the most fire-adapted of all NJ oaks and a species found most numerously in the stunted forest of the Dwarf Pine Plains near the center of the NJPB. Blackjack has a thick bark that enables it to live through many fires and the ability to resprout again and again from its rootstock when the most severe fires kill it off above ground.

I don’t know why the species is so rare (or apparently rare) on campus. We have sandy soil and fire-prone habitats that seem right for it. I know of fewer than half a dozen trees on campus, however. Two grow along College Drive — on the path that leads from Louisville Avenue to Kennedy Farm. And two grow on the cross-country trail, close to its junction with the power line on the eastern edge of campus, close to the Parkway.

Does anyone know where else we have blackjack oak on campus?

Blackjack’s leaves are usually club-shaped. Photo’d along cross-country trail, 11-6-11.

Blackjack’s odd, rough-and-broken (“checkerboardy”) bark helps separate it from scrub oak, a look-alike.

The tenth oak is not a tree, but a small shrub: dwarf chestnut oak, Q. prinoides. It’s an uncommon oak in the NJPB (Boyd says “locally frequent”), but like blackjack oak, it seems harder to find on campus than you might expect. It grows along Pomona Road in several spots just across the street from College property. The only place on campus that I know where it occurs in numbers is at the end of Delaware Avenue, just on the Stockton side of the fence on Pomona Road.

Chestnut oak is often listed as its look-alike, but only the leaf-shape is similar. Q. prinus grows tall and straight and has those enormous, elliptically-shaped acorns. Q. prinoides is always short, usually shows multiple trunks, and has small, more-rounded acorns.

The lobes on dwarf chestnut oak leaves are usually more pointed than those on chestnut oak. Photo taken 11-6-05.

Here are some ID challenges for my current students (and anyone else who would like to try their skills):

Two look-alike species, separated (usually) by “sinus” shape and at this time of year by color. (Photo 11-18-10.)

All these different-shaped leaves fell from the same (very common) oak species. Which? Photo from 11-6-05

A fairly common species on campus with a cross-leaf shape, suggesting its scientific name, Quercus ______________? (Photo 11-6-05)

Five oak species, all from campus (photo 11-18-10): can you name each?

Photo by Kevin Curtin, 10/30/11, Cresskill (Bergen Co); Nikon DSLR D5100; Lens: Nikkor VR 55-300

This is not a shot from campus or nearby, but I am posting it anyway, because…

Stockton alum Kevin Curtin sent it in, and …

it documents the very weird October storm that struck much of the state last week (note the still-green maple leaves contrasting with the snow on the limbs of the tree), and best of all,….

it captures a red-tailed hawk moments after it snared a mourning dove.

Kevin and his wife Lisa (both Stockton PT grads in the class of ’98) were looking out their window at the snow in Cresskill and noticing how the birds were especially easy to spot against the white, when Bam! — apparently the red-tail noticed the same thing.

Yes, birds eat birds. At least three of our local raptors — Cooper’s hawk, sharp-shinned hawk, and peregrine falcon — feed on birds primarily, sometimes exclusively.

Red-tails do not specialize on birds, not by a long shot. They are generalist hunters, “jacks of all trades” — one reason they are so widespread and numerous across most of North America — and feed on a wide mix of prey, including mice, chipmunks, squirrels, rabbits, snakes, frogs, lizards, fresh carrion, and both large and small birds. They don’t have the speed of Cooper’s hawks or peregrine falcons, but when mourning doves grow unwary, red-tails can take advantage of the moment.

The individual in Kevin’s photo is an adult (the tail is red, and the eye color more orange than yellow) and it has the mourning dove grasped in the talons on its left leg.

Yes, a very cool shot!

Fiery skipper in Port Republic garden, 10-22-11

My wife called me at my office late on Friday afternoon “Fiery skipper in the garden right now!” I threw my stuff into my backpack, bumped my bicycle down the stairs, and hopped on — all within three or four minutes. The sky grayed darker and darker as I pedaled, however. By the time I reached home, twenty minutes later, gassed and panting, the little [expletive-deleted] bug had disappeared.

The sun rose in the morning, I am happy to report, and by 11 a.m. Saturday our butterfly was back at the same flowers where Jesse had found him the day before. He is only the fourth or fifth fiery skipper we have seen in the garden in our twenty-two years in Port Republic — and the first since October 2007.

You can still see butterflies on the wing on-campus and elsewhere locally for another few weeks, including several species not seen at any other time of year.

Fiery skippers, for example, reach the state generally only in September and October as northbound strays from their range in the southeastern U.S. They do not breed in NJ, apparently — at least not successfully. Their autumn migrations are explained in most textbooks as “source and sink” movements, a phenomenon seen in a number of butterflies, moths, and some other insects. All involve individuals flying from their established home ranges (the source) into areas where they are almost certainly doomed (the sink). They land in habitats where the host plants, climate, or some other variable do not match their needs, and they either perish or (possibly) retreat back to their homelands.

The adaptive advantages of “source and sink” movements are not fully understood.

Other species — monarch, buckeye, question mark, painted lady, and several others — are headed south at this time of year on a regular migration that is easier to observe and to understand. These species escape the worst of New Jersey weather and overwinter in areas from Virginia and the Carolinas to as far away as Mexico. They or their offspring will return to us next spring and summer. All breed here each year.

Painted lady, photo’d in our garden in September a few years ago. They migrate south each fall, in varying numbers

Keep an eye open as you walk Stockton’s pathways. Monarchs and buckeyes are the most noticeable, but alert observers can find other species as well.

And if you are already hooked on butterflies, you should check in at the South Jersey Butterfly Log for a Google spreadsheet with the latest reports from NJ’s southern eight counties:

here

… or you can go to the South Jersey Butterfly Blog:

here

Photo taken October 16, 2011

Stockton’s most reliable orchid species is blooming right now — in the wetland area where it comes up most years, at least in small numbers.

It is Spiranthes cernua, nodding ladies’ tresses, one of the prettiest of all fall wildflowers. You can see the spiraling effect on the stem here, and a little bit of the nod (cernua is Latin for nodding).

Thanks perhaps to the many wet weeks we have had, autumn 2011 seems a good season for the species. I counted over 100 separate plants this morning in an area about 20 yards long.

Anyone interested in visiting is welcome to email me for directions. If you want to see them up close, however, wear shoes and pants that can get wet. It’s a mucky place, especially now.

S. cernua is one of the very last native plants to bloom each year in southern NJ. Generally, you won’t find the flowers poking up from their wetland haunts until tupelo and sassafras have changed into their autumn colors.

For more on this species go to the USDA Plants Profile.

Same place as photo above, some of the more than hundred plants in bloom today

The osprey rescued Tuesday, 10/11/11, from Lake Fred (see Les Block’s report in the post below) was looking better by Wednesday, thanks to the good care he’s receiving in the Animal Labs.

John Rokita, who worked for twenty years in the Avian Rehabilitation Center in Seaville, has explained that ospreys are notoriously difficult to keep in captivity because they refuse to eat any fish they haven’t caught themselves. “That’s why you never see an osprey in a zoo.” They must be force-fed.

John had no choice with our recent captured bird, however. It is a young, starving juvenile on its first migration (by size apparently a male), and emaciated from lack of food. So John and his student assistant Katie Crider have been feeding Freddy — by chopping up silversides (food for the lab’s diamondback terrapins) and feeding the hawk by hand.

Our lab lacks the facilities for long-term care for birds, so John has been on the phone trying to find placement for him in an avian rehab center elsewhere in the state.

This hawk’s problems are typical for young ospreys on their first flight south. The birds are only four-five months old and have been flying for only eight to ten weeks. They are still learning how to live as independent ospreys, including how to find fish on their own and and snatch them out of the water. (As in most species of migratory birds, adult ospreys depart for the wintering grounds long before their juvenile offspring.)

Thousands of ospreys fail the Darwinian fitness test each fall and die because they cannot solve the double challenge: “Feed yourself by yourself and, while you’re at it, find your way south to a place that you have never seen!”

Freddy was almost certainly doomed… and may still have a tough time surviving. John estimates that it will be weeks before he recovers the muscle mass and other physical conditioning he needs to take off for the wintering grounds.

Katie Crider with Freddy, October 12, 2011

John Rokita and Katie R. feeding Freddy

Hawks (and other birds) are calmed by darkness, so John R returned Freddy to his box soon after the feeding and closed it, so he could rest and recover his energy before the next feeding, scheduled for three hours later.

Naptime

For photos of this feeding by Susan Allen (from our Public Relations office) and her account on Facebook, go to:

Susan Allen photos and story on Facebook

Here’s a photo from this time one year ago by Susan of another young osprey on Lake Fred. The orange eyes and crisp white edges of the feathers tell you it’s a juvenile. The fish in left talons tell you it’s a healthier bird than Freddy and feeding itself with apparent success.

Click to enlarge photograph by Susan Allen

Photo by Lester Block, October 11, 2011

Lester Block and several other Stocktonians have saved an osprey from almost certain death by starvation.

Lester’s email explains:

Tuesday evening, 10/11/11, a couple of students who were fishing Lake Fred came upon an osprey in distress. They alerted faculty at the college and eventually word got to the lab that this bird, our school mascot no less, needed help.

The bird did not attempt to fly away. With Ryan Alianell’s assistance, I was able to capture the bird (with heavily gloved hands) and place it in a box. We returned to the NAMS lab and called in our local bird expert John Rokita (from our Animal Labs). John was kind enough to come [back to work from home] and evaluate the bird…. He told us it was a young bird, just hatched this year….probably a male. The bird was weak and thin. Perhaps from migration, or some other issues he could not see. He and Ryan force- fed the bird and held it overnight. It is to be moved to an avian rehabilitation center (hopefully today, Wednesday).

Wednesday morning update:

John Rokita has successfully fed the bird again this morning (Wednesday, October 12) with the help of his student assistant Katie Crider — and he continues to try to find a more permanent place for it in one of the bird rehab facilities in the state.

I’ll post more photos shortly. Stay tuned!

Thanks to Lester for the rescue, the report, & the photos — and to John and Katie for their good work.

jc

The pattern of gray, brown, and black from head to tail indicate this is a baby black racer.

On our walk to Lake Pam this week (10/6/11) several students in my Stockton’s Natural World seminar spotted a small snake in an open patch of sand and scrub, and after a brief chase, we managed to capture it.

It doesn’t look like a black racer, but that’s what it seems to be — with those big eyes and the pattern of gray, brown, and black from head to tail. Juveniles in this species look very different from the nearly all-black adults.

In his Field Guide to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, Howard Boyd notes that the scientific name, Coluber constrictor, is “a misnomer because this is not a constricting snake. Feeds on insects, lizards, frogs, small snakes, rodents, and birds and their eggs.”

Our little guy had a swelling in his belly that suggested he had recently fed.

We found him in one of the several patches of high-fire scrub over white sand and pebbles along the trail to the lake — the kind of habitat Boyd describes for the species: “open dry country… bordered with brush.”

Anthony Lepore and Sarah Manaut with our capture.

We released our captive a couple of minutes after these photos, of course. You should also return to the wild any reptile (or amphibian) you come upon. In fact, it is illegal to have them (and many species are threatened by poaching).

See the match (and good info) at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, a research unit of the University of Georgia

And here’s a page about the species’ status in New Jersey from
the NJDEP Online Field Guide for Reptiles and Amphibians

Here’s a photo of an adult black racer, one that has overwintered under some concrete blocks in my wife’s garden for the last three years at least. It emerges in late May, hangs around for a few days, sheds its skin, then wanders off each year. Since 2008, it has returned each year to the same concrete blocks and has grown larger and larger each year. We measured the skin in May, 2010, and it was exactly 60 inches (5 feet long).

Adult black racer, our Port Republic garden, May 29, 2011.

The shed skin of our black racer, May 30, 2010, sixty inches long.

Finally, here’s a photo of Stockton’s Natural World seminarians, on the Lake Pam shoreline, halfway through the long trek:

Our intrepid hikers, October 7, 2011

On our Stockton’s Natural World class walk last Thursday (September 29), Sarah Ridgway and a couple of her teammates spotted the organism above near the south-side beginning of the Dark Path. It looks like a mushroom, as a couple of observers pointed out — but it’s actually an herbaceous plant and flowering right now.

This species, Indian pipe, Monotropa uniflora, and a close relative, M. hypopithys, a.k.a. pinesap, both look like fungi at first glance and their classification as “saprophytes” underscores that impression. Sapros is Greek for rotten or decaying, so saprophyte means “plant of the rot” or “plant of the dead.”

In truth, monotropes have no use for dead tissue. Instead, they are parasites – stealing nutrients from the linkage between living trees and the mycorrhizal fungi the trees depend upon. So, they steal from fungi. Apparently, monotropes are able to fool the fungi into feeding them some of water and nutrients ordinarily exchanged between the fungi and trees.

Since they steal all their energy, monotropes do not need to photosynthesize and have no chlorophyll. Also, their parasitic methods means they need spend less time above the ground than an ordinary herb. They poke up from beneath the ground only to flower and to fruit.

Indian pipe is fairly common on campus, especially in late summer into fall, and you can find it right now by looking under trees in open, shaded areas. Generally, several clusters of plants emerge close to one another. They might remind you of toadstools also because they push up so quickly from the ground that they often have pine needles or pieces of bark clinging to them.

They still need to be pollinated, like any other flowering plant. Here (in my bad photo below, from 9-29-11) ants seem interested in investigating the flower. Are they typical or potential pollinators of Indian pipe?

The plants turn black after fertilization and look even more like mushrooms (and even spookier) then.

The upright blossoms at the top of these stalks indicate the flowers have been fertilized. The plants will soon turn black and then fall and decompose. The plants below are farther along in the sequence.

Pinesap, the other local monotrope, seems much harder to find in southern NJ than Indian pipe. I’ve never found it by myself in the state, although sharper-eyed botanist friends have pointed it out to me on two or three occasions. As far as I can tell (which might not count for much), it does not occur on campus.

M. uniflora and M. hypopithys can be distinguished by the single flower of the former (uniflora = one flower) contrasting with the multiple flowers on each stalk of the latter. Also, their colors are usually different: M. uniflora is generally white and only occasionally pinkish; M. hypopithys is buffy to pink.

Witmer Stone considered neither species a “Characteristic Pine Barrens” plant. He reported Monotropa uniflora “rare in the Pine Barrens” and M. hypopithys as only “occasional on the eastern edge of the Pine Barrens.”

One interesting article I stumbled upon, “Extreme specificity in epiparasitic Monotropoidea” by M. I. Bidartondo and T. D. Bruns ….

from Molecular Ecology, 2001

… reports that the different species of monotropes specialize on different fungi. M. uniflora parasitizes from fungi in the genus Russula while M. hypopithys parasitizes only from Tricholoma fungi. Perhaps these dependencies help explain the scarcity of those monotropes in the Pine Barrens? Are those fungi also hard to find in classic New Jersey Pine Barrens habitats?

Both photos by Lester Block, 9/27/11

NAMS Program Assistant Lester Block reports on an interesting bird find this week:

“It is a Virginia Rail. It was found on campus today [Sept 27]…probably tired and a little weak and disoriented from migration. Fortunately, one of our coworkers (Jessie from Grounds crew) found it and brought it to the lab. John Rokita, our animal lab tech, took care of it, fed it some mealworms and later it was released at the Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge….where it can feed on natural foods and continue on its way south, when it is ready.”

This is a new species for the informal “Birds Of Stockton” checklist I’ve been keeping for the last few years. As far as I know, we have had no specimen records or sight reports of this species on campus. This is our first.

Thanks very much to Lester for the report and the photos.

For a quick overview of the species go to:

Cornell Lab of Ornithology “All About Birds”

My Stockton’s Natural World seminar students discovered a number of creatures on the Lighted Path on our walk there on Thursday, Sept 15th, while surveying the woody plants. I thought I’d post a selection of photos and links here just to show how even the most everyday creatures have their mysteries and intriguing behaviors.

We saw several individuals of the butterfly above: it’s the pearl crescent, Phyciodes tharos, one of the most common small butterflies of the NJPB and elsewhere in southern NJ. Its caterpillars feed on asters and one mystery about this animal is how the caterpillars can be so secretive and seldom seen, when the adults are so numerous. David Wagner, Professor of Entolmology at the University of Connecticut, author of Caterpillars of Eastern North America, and perhaps our country’s leading expert on the immature stages of moths and butterflies, has never managed to find a caterpillar of Phyciodes tharos, although he has photographed many thousands of caterpillars. (For a possible photo of the rarely documented caterpillar go here.)

The insect below is best-known for its sexual habits.

Everyone seems to know the same story about the praying mantis: females are sexual cannibals — killing and eating their male partners while mating with them. Biologists have long argued how such a habit can be adaptive — and even how common it is. Here’s an article by Carl Zimmer of the New York Times summarizing some of the complexities:

This Can’t Be Love

I came upon the scene below while trying to get an close-up shot of black willow leaves:

The ant is apparently milking the aphids for honey dew, as ants are known to do. The aphids benefit by gaining protection from predators who might otherwise eat them. But the relationship is not a simple one, and biologists are not sure which partner benefits more. For more on this relationship, go to Science Daily article here.

My students are focusing on woody plants this semester — each student has one species to study — and one sub-topic they will investigate are the enemies each plant species must fend off. We found several examples of enemy action on our walk, caterpillars at work. (Almost all caterpillars are plant consumers, eating leaves for many hours each day [or night] throughout that life stage.)

We saw a cluster of the caterpillars above feeding together in a white oak, Quercus alba. They are most likely red-humped oakworms, Symmerista canicosta. Wagner has pointed out, however, that this species and another, S. albifrons, are nearly impossible to tell apart. Both feed gregariously — that is, in a group, just as we saw them doing. One clue is the host plant: S. canicosta feeds on oaks, which is what we saw the guy above and its companions doing, so that’s a good bet that is its identity.

Two other caterpillars of the Lighted Path on Thursday:

The creature above, an Io moth caterpillar, Automeris io, is the largest caterpillar we found. It and its apparent siblings have been foraging on a buttonbush the Path for the last couple of weeks. I photo’d this individual a few days before our walk (described in an earlier post on this blog), but we saw it or another still there on 9/15. These caterpillars feed on a wider variety of plants than most others, including, according to Wagner in his Caterpillars of Eastern North America : “aspen, birch, blackberry, cherry, clover, elm, hackberry, hibiscus, oak, sassafras, willow,….” and many other plants. (Students in my class: does the Io moth caterpillar feed on your study species plant?)

I am not sure if any of our teams on Thursday spotted this caterpillar, as it was pointed out to me later by other students on the Lighted Path. I am adding its photo here because it’s a common caterpillar on campus, especially around Lake Fred, and feeds on several of our woody plant study species, including fetterbush and staggerbush. It’s Datana major, sometimes called the azaela caterpillar.

I will end this series with two photos that I have not been able to ID: two spider species. The mystery involved with these two is “What are they?” Spiders are very hard to identify (at least for me). The Bug Guide site (top click under Blog Roll above on right) is a place to begin if anyone wants to try.

Ok, what’s the moral of this long post?

Keep your eyes open and there’s lots to find in the natural world. Even a paved path in a disturbed habitat walked by hundreds of people each day holds mysteries you can try to solve.

jc

… what are they doing?

Professor Ron Hutchison of the Biology Program passed along these intriguing photos (above and below) that he took with his cell phone on the Dark Path this past May.

How many individuals do you see here? Five heads and five tails? Two larger individuals toward the top of the photo and three smaller ones rubbing against the largest individual in the center?

Female watersnakes average larger than males, so we might guess the two larger individuals are females and the three thinner, somewhat darker and redder individuals are males, but that’s pretty much only a guess (at least for me).

Ron and I wondered if this could be a courtship scene: Watersnakes mate in spring and the timing is right. Could this be three males attempting to mate with one or both females?

Stockton graduate and reptile expert, Anthony Chodan, took one photo at the photo & confirmed that is exactly what was going on.

So far, I haven’t been able to track down much on-line information about watersnake courtship and copulation, but I did find one interesting and relevant passage in Thomas Tyning’s 1990 Guide to Amphibians & Reptiles in the Stokes Nature Guide Series (pages 317-8).

“These behaviors [courtship and mating] have rarely been observed in natural situations and even less frequently by someone with a notebook. Here is an area where an aspiring herptologist can help advance knowledge of one of the most common and widespread snakes in the United States….

“It is not known if a female mates with more than one male in any given season, though males probably mate multiple times.”

I’d be very much interested in hearing from any readers of this log who could chip in with some words of wisdom on this scene.

Thanks to Ron H for the photos and to Anthony C for the behavioral analysis!

jc

Both photos by Ron Hutchison, 5/15/11

Another post on water snakes on campus here

In pursuit of some plant photos yesterday on the Lighted Path, I came upon this guy — and three of his (or her) presumed siblings. Each was ~4 inches long and happily munching on buttonbush leaves. They are Io moth caterpillars, Automeris io, and are protected from birds by their poisonous spines.

Unlike the majority of lepidoptera (moths and butterflies) Io moths seem not to specialize on one species or one group of plants. In his excellent book, Caterpillars of North America, David Wagner lists their various host plants as “aspen, birch, blackberry, cherry, clover, elm, hackberry, hibiscus, oak, poplar, sassafras, willow, wisteria, even grasses, including corn, and many other plants” [!] He doesn’t list buttonbush, but the Lighted Path individuals were feeding actively and many of the leaves had only their petioles remaining. (These are the red stubs in the photos above.) I am guessing a single female laid her eggs on this plant weeks ago and her children have been feeding on it ever since. Many of the leaves of the host plant are gone.

I am not sure how well these creatures are protected from parasitic wasps (which prey on caterpillars frequently), so I took one home to raise in more protected conditions — under a net in our caterpillar-raising tank on the back porch. We have buttonbush that I can feed it. When it pupates (judging by size, that should be soon), I will post a photo. If it emerges successfully as an adult, I’ll post a photo of that event as well.

I did a quick check of the dozen other buttonbush shrubs along the Lighted Path and found no others hosting these caterpillars, though I could very well have missed them.

Keep an eye open as you walk on our campus paths. Even as trampled and manicured a walkway as the Lighted Path can still hold little wonders.

jc

For more on the species (and photos of adults), go to: Butterflies & Moths of North America » Continue Reading

Luna moth photo’d by Riana Cordoba, 8/3/11

May 2011 graduate Riana Cordoba (who is working on campus this summer) sent me two photos she took of silk moths earlier this month: a luna moth, Actias luna, above, and an imperial moth, Eacles imperiales, below:

Imperial moth photo’d by Riana Cordoba, 8/3/11

By coincidence I had recently encountered another member of the group — a polyphemus moth, Antheraea polyphemus — in its caterpillar stage feeding in a scrub oak tree on the path to Lake Pam.

And next I happened upon an adult polyphemus on the Lighted Path and snapped this photo before moving him to a safer spot out of the way:

I took home the caterpillar because caterpillars are often attacked by birds and wasps. I thought it would have a better chance of surviving protected in a plastic jar under a net on our porch. We fed it scrub oaks leaves for about a week, and it pupated on August 13th. I knew this only because my wife and I had been watching it munch away all week and suddenly that morning it had disappeared from our jar. Where had it gone? Had it crawled out through the netting? I had to remove all the leaves and reach into the bottom before finding it in its wonderfully cryptic pupal state below.

You’d have to be a very sharp-eyed bird to spot this hidden creature on the forest floor among the dying oak leaves.

The leaves seem glued to the white pupal shell, and I decided to leave them there in case they help insulate the pupa through the winter.

Jamie Cromartie reports that it might emerge this fall or over-winter in this state. If it emerges successfully, I will post an update here.

For good info and pretty photos of some of the wild silk moths we can see on campus (and elsewhere in eastern North America), go to:

Saturniid Moths by Ric Bessin,
University of Kentucky College of Agriculture

My wife Jesse spotted an unusual flower on Lake Fred yesterday (Aug 2): Utricularia purpurea, purple bladderwort, and this morning I went back for some photos.

It’s a carnivorous aquatic plant that gets its nitrogen by capturing tiny invertebrates in underwater traps that float in strands beneath the surface.

We have seen it flowering on Lake Fred only once before — in August of 2005, when the lake was drawn down to fix the spillway and the Lighted Path. A botanist from the state told us then that the plant is actually more numerous here than it seems. The underwater stolons (the trap-bearing strands) float all around the lake, but they go unrecognized because the flowers bloom so erratically — and most years not at all.

They are blooming this week, however, and close to shore.

To see them, walk to Carol Slocum’s bench at the little bridge on the narrow path between Lake Fred and Little Lake. About a dozen flowers are visible ten or twenty feet from the bench, on both sides of the bridge. Carol would certainly have been pleased to have them there.

These are not large, eye-catching flowers, but small and subtly-colored ones, a pale purple/pink, prettier than apparent in these two photos. A pair of binoculars might help you see them.

They are well worth a visit.

For a few more words about Utricularia, you can click here:

Lake Pam’s Strangest Plant

Writing About Nature class for Spring 2011. Click to enlarge.

On the last Friday of spring semester, Stockton’s Writing About Nature class competed in the annual WAN Spring Scavenger Hunt.

You can see some of their finds above, and the list of target items here:

WAN Scavenger Hunt 042911

Our best find was an unexpected one:

We discovered that the family of Canada geese hanging out near Lakeside Center had a chick who had been abandoned — apparently so weak it couldn’t walk or feed itself.

Hanna Toft (center in photo) volunteered to bring it home to her family’s farm in Cape May County because she and her father have much experience caring for birds.

Here’s her email from a couple of days later:

From: Hanna M Toft
> > Sent: Sunday, May 01, 2011 10:22 PM
> > To: Connor, Jack
> >
> > I am happy to inform you that Gertrude, the goose, is doing MUCH better! We decided that he was not cripple when we found him, only starving and on the verge of death. That day he could barely stand or keep his head up. So we fed him some egg yoke mixed with water through a test tube and got him to eat. This gave him energy and the next day he was eating on his own and is now sitting on my lap nice and fat anf fluffy since he just ate! I’m so happy that we got the chance to save him! I’ll keep you posted…but I’m pretty positive he is going to make it just fine!
> >
> > -Hanna

And here’s the next from early June:

From: Hanna M Toft
> Sent: Thursday, June 09, 2011 10:50 AM
> To: Connor, Jack

> Hello!
>
> Hope you are enjoying your summer! Just wanted to say Gertrude is doing GREAT!! He has feathers now and in a few weeks he will be flying!
>
> -Hanna

Finally, here’s Hanna’s most recent note:

From: Hanna M Toft
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2011 10:48 PM
To: Connor, Jack
Subject: Re: Gosling Rescue

Here are some photos of Gertrude who is flying now!