Signs of Spring

The boys and I took a walk this morning, our first in several weeks.  We saw 2 major signs that spring is almost here, but I'm not sure which surprised me most on this sunny February 21st....

Which surprises you the most?

The crocuses in full bloom in the courtyard...

...or the garter snake that I found stretched out, sunning, on the path through the draw?

The garter snake definitely votes for him- (or her-?) self!

Basically most of the rest of the discoveries the boys and I made today were more typical of mid-February.  There were wheel bug egg clusters along the undersides of almost every honeylocust branch I examined, and a few clusters on the green ash, redbud, and Amur maple branches.  There was even a lone cluster of wheel bug eggs on the Bradford pear.

Judging from the number of clusters I saw, it should be a jackpot year for wheel bugs!

The eggs look like little urns, all clustered together in their geometric pattern, awaiting the uncapping that will come with warmer weather.  They make me smile every time I notice a new cluster.

Late last summer, I found a little mantis egg cluster in one of the honeylocusts.

I looked for it again today...and found it, looking much more desolate but somehow impregnable.

Near the compost piles, where I had 5 different black and yellow garden spiders feeding off the plentiful insects last summer, I found 6 egg sacs stalwartly holding steady against the winter weather.  This sac was easy to see, hanging from the pallet that forms one side of the cluster of compost piles.

These two egg sacs were a little more camouflaged, nestled in the chainlink fence among remains of last summer's grass and weeds.

Speaking of remains, I heard the coyotes singing to our west last night and wondered if they were in the Back 5.  As the boys and I walked around that area this morning, I saw something that looked a little odd....

Getting closer, I realized it was the carcass of a possum that had obviously been providing a meal for somebody.

The coyotes were eating last night, I presume.

Coming back to the house, I stopped to see if I could get a reasonable shot of one of the rabbit trails that cross the path periodically.  I first noticed this particular trail shortly after we moved in, over 7 years ago now.  It still looks much the same and travels almost exactly the same route as it did when I first saw it.

I've tried to photograph this trail before, but today's photo (which I took from a much lower angle) is probably my favorite so far.  For the first time, I was able to capture the true sense of the trail through the grass.  I wonder how many years the rabbits have been traveling along this same path?

The days go by and the seasons cycle onward.  It's winter now, but obviously spring will be here before we realize.

The seasons go by and the years cycle onward.  Individual rabbits are born, travel that trail, and die.  This land has seen many people come and go; in recent decades, it has been owned by different people.  They come, they watch over the land, and then they move on or die.  We are the owners who have come most recently and we are now traveling the trails here and watching over the plants and animals who share the land with us.

The seasons cycle on....

The Cleanup Crew

About ten days ago, I went on a basic walkabout that ended up netting me a whole series of photos that I've had fun sharing.  This is the last of that series - and I apologize, in advance, for the indelicate subject matter.  I found it interesting, though, and it's certainly an important part of real life!

On my Sunday morning walkabout, I came across some indisputable evidence - once again - that we share our property with coyotes.  In the gateway between our Back 5 acres and the front area, I came across a significant pile of coyote scat.  (That's biological talk for poop.  It sounds much more professional to talk about scat, though.)

The scat seemed to be moving, which piqued my curiosity, so I looked at it a bit more closely.

In the center of the pile, almost completely hidden, was a large black beetle - a tumblebug, Canthon sp.  As I sat there waiting to get a good photo, I notice another area of the pile start to move and got glimpses of 2 more tumblebugs hard at work.  This was, unfortunately, the best photo I was able to get without disturbing them at their work.

Tumblebugs are dung beetles.  As their name (and locale) suggests, they get their nourishment from animal dung.  In the case of the tumblebugs, they form large balls of dung which they roll away from the original pile of scat and bury, laying an egg on each ball before sealing it into the ground.  The egg hatches and the tumblebug larva uses the dung as its food source to grow and mature.

Dung beetles are important decomposers.  Despite its "ick" factor, their lifestyle literally helps clean up the world and recycle "waste" nutrients.

As I tried to get photos of the tumblebugs, I couldn't help but notice that the coyote scat was full of grasshopper parts.  Note the grasshopper abdomen just above the tumblebug in the photo above, and the broken piece of grasshopper hind tibia to the right of the beetle.  One of the best ways to learn what a wild animal is eating is to examine their droppings.  This coyote was evidently gorging on grasshoppers, a fact that makes me particularly happy.  This coyote is welcome to come and eat as many grasshoppers as he or she wishes, every day, all day.

Also on this pile were several house-fly sized flies that, nonetheless, looked a little different from "normal" flies.

When I worked to identify them, I found out that they are flesh flies, Sarcophaga sp.  Many flesh flies are actually parasitic or predatory.  (The larvae of at least one species bores into grasshoppers and kills them as they eat.  Despite feeling rather bloodthirsty as I write this, I'm rather hoping that species of flesh fly is very active in my yard this year.)  The species I saw on this pile of coyote scat was evidently one of the flesh flies that, like the tumblebug, is a decomposer, propagating in animal droppings.

There was one other insect on this pile of scat, a very small, irridescent fly - or actually several of them.  I never could get a good enough photo to identify it at all.

The flesh fly is at the top of this photo, for scale.  The small, irridescent fly is on the underside of the...dropping.

This is as good a photo as I could get of the small fly, which isn't good enough for me to identify it without some good guess as to what I'm looking at.


As a final note, when I did another walkabout on Thursday morning, 4 days later, this is all that remained of the coyote scat.  If I hadn't know it was there from Sunday, I would have completely missed it.

Really, all that was left were a bunch of grasshopper parts, evidently pieces of exoskeleton that didn't have any nutritional value left, I guess.

Four days to go from a standard "dog pile" effect to a thin layer of grasshopper parts covering the ground.  That's a cleanup crew, in my mind!

Animal Enigmas: Spring on the Prairie

Spring on the prairie can be quite enigmatic.  Heck, life on the prairie, at any time, can be quite enigmatic!

As I walked around this morning, I found several freshly excavated holes.  They were about 3" wide and easily as deep, maybe a bit deeper.  This one was quite near the back yard....

...but these were part of a cluster of about a dozen, similarly sized, in the middle of the Back 5. 

In my experience, these holes aren't big enough to be an armadillo's work, let alone a coyote's.  Given that the cluster of holes was far from any tree, I tend to discount a fox squirrel as the digger, which was the first possibility that popped into my mind.   On the other hand, the holes seem too big to have been made by a mouse, a vole or a cotton rat.  Cottontails don't dig holes of this nature, that I'm aware of.  Perhaps a skunk?  Does anyone have any guesses...or, better yet, any knowledge of what might have caused this size of hole, at this time of year?

Detective work of this sort underpins quite a few of my prairie "sightings".  For example, I know we have a fairly active coyote presence, but I rarely see them. Unfortunately, when I do see them, I'm so thunderstruck that I don't even think to throw my camera up and take a quick shot - if, indeed, I have my camera with me.  So far none of the coyotes I've seen have sat around patiently and waited for me to take their picture.

We do hear the coyotes, at night, fairly regularly.  

Two winters ago, we noticed several large holes that had been dug in the Back 5 and I eventually figured out that they were made by coyotes, digging up vole colonies and eating yellow-jacket combs (and probably some voles as well).  By the way, the blue cell phone in the hole is there for scale.

That same winter we had the mystery deer skull appear and move around a bit, eventually parking itself for almost a year beside a compass plant, before magically disappearing one night.  The dogs were always VERY interested in the scents they found around that skull and made a beeline for it as soon as they got close.

Yesterday, I found signs of coyotes again.  This time I noticed tracks, sized appropriately for coyotes, on a couple of leftover snow drifts.  Note the (significantly larger) tracks that Becker made next to the coyote tracks.

Of course, it's also pretty common to find coyote scat, a.k.a. coyote poop, along the trail too.  This is distinguished from dog poop by being smaller and from cat poop by being larger.  It also tends to be full of hair and bones.  There wasn't a great deal of scat to be seen this winter, but in the last few weeks I've been noticing more and more.  Here is one of the coyote piles, showing the hair that commonly makes up such a large portion of their volume.

A couple years ago I even found some coyote scat with cat claws in it, so I knew that one of the many barn cats in the area had been added to the food chain.  Scientists make studies of the bones and hair in scat to determine what the animals they study are actually consuming.

Another common animal trace that I see is a trail.  Some trails are larger and show up in the grass, like this one I photographed leading towards my neighbor's plum thickets.  I believe this trail was made by rabbits....

However, some trails are fairly faint, showing up best after a burn.  These, for example, are prairie vole trails that I photographed after our last burn.  Normally I don't notice vole trails at all, except occasionally when a particularly well trafficked one crosses over one of the mowed paths in summer.

The last trail I'll show here was invisible when it was made - under snow - but exposed when that treacherous white stuff melted.  It seems smaller than a vole trail, so I'm guessing that it's a mouse trail of some sort, but I'll have to do a lot more research to figure out what species.  Unlike the vole trails, shown above, this one was deeply and precisely incised into the soil.  Interestingly, it disappeared from view soon after being exposed and now, 3 weeks later, there is absolutely no trace of it.

Greg got me a trail camera for Christmas, which I've been playing with in and around the bird feeders.  Now that the soil is softer, it's time to sink a couple posts around the property and find out for sure what animals are busily creating puzzles for me.

In the long run, sometimes the most interesting observations and findings come simply from being alert to changes, then asking myself what could have caused an effect like that.  It's far from an exact science - but it certainly keeps the old brain cells busy!