"What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked." -Aldo Leopold
This tiny and speedy ichneumon wasp, which I am calling a Theronia species, has been hanging around my patch of wild strawberries for a couple of months. If I am close to correct in the identification (with more than 100,000 described ichneumons, how close could I be?), then this species parasitize tent caterpillars along with a number of other lepidopterans.
Ichneumonidae – Theronia sp. – Female – Photographed in the author’s wild strawberry patch, St. Louis Co., MO.
“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars …”
-Charles Darwin-
Ichneumonidae – Theronia sp. – Female – Photographed in the author’s wild strawberry patch, St. Louis Co., MO.
While investigating a patch of Maypop (Passiflora incarnata) I could not find my goal of the Passion Flower Flea Beetle, but I was still happy to find a number of Shiny Flea Beetles – Chrysomelidae – Asphaera lustrans.
Hidden along the Eleven Point River in the south-eastern Missouri Ozarks lies Greer Spring (the 2nd largest spring in the state). This location and surrounding areas of bottomland and riverfront forest are widely heralded among birders in Missouri as being prime for easily picking up a number of forest species. Cerulean, Swainson’s, Worm-eating, Kentucky, and Hooded Warblers, to name a few, are documented as nesting in this area. These clips were recorded during a trip that Steve and I made this past May.
Today I will share a few photos taken this spring at Wild Acres Park in Overland, MO.
Rusty Blackbird
Fascinating, Rusty Blackbirds are always a treat to find. I am planning on publishing a post focused on Rusties soon.
Pine Warbler
A morning with a singing Pine Warbler is as good as it gets…
Bufflehead
I have been surprised a number of times this spring by the waterfowl I have come across in the park’s lake. Unfortunately, the skittish birds often flush as soon as they see people. This pair of Bufflehead stayed for the entire time I visited the park and allowed me to get close enough to photograph. I have found Wood Ducks, Hooded Merganser and Scaup this spring as well.
Finally, although it looks as there will not be young Groundhog in the park this year, I still see the adults from time to time.
Groundhog
Thanks for the visit -OZB
handsomeozarkbillyboy@gmail.com
No, I’m not referring to that no account, poor excuse of a season we witnessed a few months back. What I was finally able to do was capture a few pics of a Winter Wren. I have never been able to get more than a fleeting glance at this skulking bird as it somehow is able to hide by rarely moving more than a few feet off the ground. This spring, however, I was in the right place (Shaw Nature Reserve) and was lucky to find a few of these birds and follow them long enough to get a few poor quality images.
Winter Wren
With more than 35 recognized subspecies, the Winter Wren has an enormous range and is the only member of the wren family to be found outside of the Americas.
Winter Wren
According to NatGeo, “Per unit weight the Winter Wren delivers its song with 10 times more power than a crowing rooster”. I was able to hear the quite complex and rapid musical songs as I watched one or two of these birds foraging. I could tell they were merely partial songs and not delivered with full attention and voice as is often the case of migrating birds, but I was still awed by the sounds.
Winter Wren Tail
The photo above focuses on the quite short tail of the Winter Wren, a distinguishing and obvious field mark.
Although the next photo is quite poor, I like that it captured the typical squat, egg-like shape of the bird.
Winter Wren
Finally, I thought I would add an image of a House Wren that I took on the same day, the first of this species that I found this spring. Notice the much longer tail and the lack of any barring pattern on the flanks forward of the legs. A generally paler bird.
The Leafcutter Bees are an interesting group of native solitary bees found within the Megachilidae Family along with Mason Bees, Resin Bees and Carder Bees. There are approximately 200 species of Leafcutter Bees (Megachile genus) found in North America and several of these species can be easily found in gardens throughout the eastern United States where they favor the plant families Asteraceae, Campanulaceae and Fabaceae.
Leafcutter Bee – Megachile sp.
Leafcutter Bees get their names from an obvious behavior. These bees line their chosen nest cavities (stems, cracks, wood-boring beetle borings, holes of all kinds) with circular discs that they cut from green leaves or flower petals. When a cavity has been sufficiently lined, the bee will deposit an egg along with a provision of nectar and pollen, afterward abandoning the nest.
Leafcutter Bee – Megachile sp.
Bees in this family are abdominal pollen collectors, as can be seen in the photo above. Unlike most bees that hold pollen in brushes on their legs, the Megachilidae hold their pollen on the underside of their abdomens that consist of course, unbranched hairs that curves towards the tail.
Leafcutter Bee – Megachile sp.
A diagnostic behavior of the Leafcutter Bee is their habit of extending their abdomen vertically while they forage. I have not been able to find an accepted reason that they do this.
Leafcutter Bee – Megachile sp.
This is a group of native insects that anyone can help in their own backyard. Consider making, purchasing and installing nesting structures for your native pollinating bees. It’s quite easy to do and will help out a lot in suburban where natural sites for nests are often hard to find.
Almost reflexively, I pull the baby rattle-shaped seed pod from the stately White Wild Indigo (Baptisia alba) as I meander through Shaw Nature Reserve’s prairie trails. I can’t help it. I make sure the pods are always black, mature and any seeds left unravaged I simply help to disperse along my walk. But in doing this so often in the late summer and autumn for so many years I have come to notice that this common forb cannot disperse many seed. Because, inside the seed pods, like the one pictured above, I usually find multiple seed predators – the short-snouted weevils, Trichapion rostrum (Family Brentidae).
Trichapion rostrum
Baptisia seed are favored among other insects as well, but what they may lose in this stage of life, they pick up as they grow, for the false indigo are long-lived, drought-tolerant perennials that contain large amounts of secondary compounds that make them absolutely unpalatable to grazing mammals. The photo below shows these tiny beetles (3.0 – 3.5 mm) among the husks of a number of seeds. I have not been able to find a source that suggests if both larvae and adults feed on these seeds, or just one of the growth stages.
Destroyer of Seeds
Here is an image of a couple, shortly after I split their double-wide…
It’s the Visitors, Martha!
These little one have been a source of fascination for me. I hope to learn more about them someday.
I’m finally ready to share a few more images from a float down the upper third or so of the Current River that Steve and I had the great fortune to experience this past October. We started at navigable mile 8.0 at Cedar Grove Access and pulled out three days later at mile 51, the confluence of the Current and that other, oh-so desirable, Ozark stream – the Jacks Fork. If one floats slow and quiet, the opportunity to see wildlife is very high in this National Park (Ozark National Scenic Riverways N.P.). I’v shared a couple of images of these guys previously. I believe we found 8-9 Mink during the first day of this float. It was enjoyable watching them busily hunt along the stream banks, mostly oblivious to our presence. As usual, Steve did a great job in keeping us quiet and pointed in the optimal direction for capturing some images.
American Mink
It was quite a challenge to keep up with these guys as they fished. This one below had caught a nice-sized crayfish and barely slowed to stop and enjoy his snack.
Ozark Lobster!
Here is a photo of one investigating the water prior to dipping back in.
Testing the Water
Not only does a float down the Current allow for great observations of wildlife, but many geological features are most easily seen by being on the river as well. Cave Spring can now be accessed via a nice newer trail, but it is much nicer accessing it by boat. The endpoint of a vast and interesting karst drainage system, Cave Spring rises from the back of a short cave. At the rear of this cave one can guide a boat over the vertical conduit of the spring, which is ~155 feet deep! What an eerie sensation it is to shine your light down and still see no more than a fraction of the length of the conduit shaft. In the image below, I am on a dry exposed shelf adjacent to the spring’s outlet and Steve is guiding the canoe towards the river.
Cave Spring
Pultite is a spring found on this upper stretch of the Current River that is surrounded on all sides except the river by private property. This means that one must boat or wade/swim to visit it. At only ~ 1/10 the output of Big Spring, Pultite is still quite a good-sized spring with and average daily output of ~ 25 million gallons. The effluent channel on this one is quite attractive and I hope to visit more often.
Pultite Channel
If day one was for the Mink, day two was our River Otter day. We had no Mink, but 5 or 6 of these large weasels were spotted.
North American River Otter
Not to forget the birds! These days, a trip to nearly any permanent Missouri water source will likely bring an encounter with a Bald Eagle. Observing these guys in the Ozarks will never get old to me.
Bald Eagle
Another constant companion on these floats are the Fish Crows, here pictured finishing up a little Ozark lobster.
Fish Crow
We were fortunate in having mostly clear and dry skies on this trip, which allowed us to throw our bags directly on whatever gravel bar that struck our fancy and sleep directly underneath the stars. A morning fire was necessary – not only to burn the dew off of our sleeping bags, but of course, for the river-water French-press coffee. Dark skies on these streams afford great opportunities for astrophotography. My only wish for this trip is that I was a little more tolerant of the cold, tiredness and laziness that limited my patience for getting better nightscape images… 😉
Nightscape on the Upper Current
I will be posting more images of this trip on my Flickr account in the near future. Thanks for visiting and I hope to post again in the near future.
Most of us are familiar with many of the parasites that infect animals, since we, as animals, are susceptible to many. Tonight I am sharing a few easily spotted and recognizable forms of parasitism in the plant kingdom. The photograph above was taken, as were all in this post, at Shaw Nature Reserve and shows a relentless parasite that can infect a number of prairie plant species. Dodder (Cuscuta sp.) is an obligate parasite, meaning it must find a specific living host plant to infect in order to survive and reproduce. One can see by the orange coloration, this plant does not contain chlorophyll and must pull the necessary nutrients from its host plant.
Silphium Wasp Gall
The next parasite is of a form that I am just beginning to study and am finding quite interesting. Plant galls are simply growths of plant tissue, formed not by the host plant, but by other organisms. The variety of gall former as well as gall formation is astounding, to put it mildly. Insects are the primary organisms that cause gall formations, but other arthropods, fungi, bacteria and viruses form galls as well. Researchers are just beginning to learn the basics behind how these parasites cause the formation of such specific, and often beautiful galls.
The particular gall that is found on this poor Rosinweed plant pictured above is caused by a Silphium Gall Wasp (Antistrophus sp.). One of the gloriously interesting facts about galls, much like other forms of parasitism, is the specificity most commonly found between host and gall former. Most often a gall former can infect only one species of plant, or sometimes a group of closely related plant taxa. Such is the evolutionary arms race between host and its necessarily specific parasite. In the case of so many prairie host and gall former relationships, the outcome is sad for both. The near elimination of this habitat has caused dramatic reductions in the variety and abundance of prairie plant species, and accordingly, has had similar effects on the insects that form galls on these plants.
Silphium Gall Wasp
Having observed these galls for so many years, I decided to cut one open to see the developments within. A single gall can host many developing was larvae. In this small section I was able to count no fewer than five wasp galleries, each harboring a developing wasp. The two examples of parasites presented above are just a small example of the number of parasitic species that the Silphium support. A number of other insects/arthropods use Silphium for food and shelter. Birds love the seed and use the plants’ long strong stems for perches. In many ways the Silphium are keystone species and can be considered as important to the prairies as trees are to the forests.
Grape Phylloxera
Grape Phylloxera is caused by an aphid-like insect and is a parasite to native grapes. In the mid-1800s this species was accidentally released in Europe and nearly destroyed the French wine industry. The life cycle of this insect and its relationship to its host is mind-boggling. As many as 18 different life stages have been identified – from sexual to asexual, winged, foliage feeding to root feeding. This complexity, as with so many other multi-stage, specific host-parasite relationships creates major problems in man’s attempt at developing commercial controls. To date, this parasite cannot be controlled with any pesticide solution; the only remedy is still resistant stock that nature has developed in this host-parasite arms race.
