In Search of Jelly Lichens

Last week I took advantage of TWO opportunities to play hooky and go looking for jelly lichens at my favorite location. It had rained over the weekend, so I knew they’d be happily soaking in the humidity.

Bee Lady and I also reveled in springtime humidity as we enjoyed the sights along the way to the best cliff in Lair o’ the Bear. Spring is brief in Colorado, making it very important to play hooky this time of year! 

I hadn’t visited for a while, so had to check every cliff to find the right one, way out at the west end of the creekside trail that was once the main road from Morrison to Evergreen.

Maybe this cliff, with a vertigo view from shady-mossy base to sunny exposed rocky-top?

No, lots of neat things to see, including this little spring beauty growing in a cushion of moss—but still not the right cliff!

Was it this cliff, with the Violet-green Swallows cavorting above?

No, but at the base of it, in a crevice, Bee Lady spotted a Woodrat nest, composed (on the outside at least) mostly of pine boughs and cones.

This also turned out to be a good place to see the unfurling croziers (love that word!), or fiddleheads, of new ferns. I guessed brittlefern, Cystopteris fragilis, based on later specimens, but as these were too young (for me) to tell, they might also be Woodsia.

Eventually we reached the proper cliff, where we could see not only the sought-after jelly lichens, but the wonderful Sticta, and verdant masses of spikemoss, Selaginella. The jelly lichens were soft and slimy from recent rains and lingering rivulets in the cracks and crevices of the cliff. Here a large Umbilicaria (lichen) under the ring, with Selaginella to its right, and masses of true mosses surrounding.

By now, my camera was acting up, so I failed to capture good examples of the very critters I’d come to see. Properly called gelatinous lichens, these guys are so named because they lack the firm texture of more typical foliose lichens and have a characteristic translucence. They remind me of the “tree ears” we sometimes encounter in Chinese restaurant dishes, but those are actual fungi. Gelatinous lichens are unstratified or only partially so, lacking the distinct algal layer, and sometimes the firm lower and/or upper cortex found in the “typical” lichen (if there is such a thing).

They look so different when they’re dry! This one is, I believe, a species of Leptogium, with a white tomentum visible on the lower surface. Perhaps L. saturninum, but confirmation will have to await another trip. With a hand lens. For those who prefer common names, LoNA* calls this one bearded jellyskin.** (Ugh!)

In related news, gleaned from the Nature Blog Network’s blog, President Obama now has a lichen, Caloplaca obamae, named after him. Congratulations, Mr. President! This is also a great story about the citizen scientist, Kerry Knudsen, who discovered this new lichen, proving again that dedicated people can make a real contribution, if they just pay attention to what they see!

* LoNA is Lichens of North America, the coffee table book of lichens, by Brodo, Sharnoff, and Sharnoff. Highly recommended; you can visit it online, though, at Lichen.com.

** Jellyskin is the name used here for the entire genus of Leptogium, as opposed to the name “jelly lichen” given only, in this book, to species of Collema, another common jelly lichen. This is the only book I know that assigns common names to lichens; very few lichens have real common names.

Life is Metallic

  Life Photo Meme is a weekly challenge
  to post a photo of something alive that
  meets a certain criterion, giving us an
  opportunity to think outside our normal
  posting topics and, often, learn something new! Metallic, this week's prompt, is easier to find in beetles than in plants! I've always admired that color I call "bug green," that was popular in cars a few years back.

Today, we'll venture into birds, where metallic plumage is an accessible option. It turns out there are three basic techniques birds use to create the display colors we appreciate especially during breeding season each year: pigment-based colors, structural colors, and cosmetic colors. Among the pigments, carotenoids produce yellow, orange, and red (as they often do in butterflies, flowers, and, well, carrots); melanins produce browns, blacks, and grey, not too spectacular sometimes, but forming the background against which the showier colors are displayed.

Melanins are also critically involved in the production of structural colors, serving as layers in thin-film reflectors or to absorb incoherently backscattered light from reflective keratin and air matrices (Prum 1999, as cited in Shawkey & Hill, 2005). Nano-scale reflective tissues, they add, usually produce UV-blue, white or iridescent coloration.

I thought sure the Black-billed Magpie above would be happy to demonstrate, but he only looks blue. He/she posed in the sun this a.m., giving a little better show.

Because his/her normal magpie iridescence was not adequately displayed in these photos, I turned to a feather source nearer at hand, if less exciting: our mixed-breed flock of domestic poultry. Beaks, here, being a Black Australorp rooster, was willing, and iridescence, or metallic hues, does seem to be best displayed in black feathers. Even this close-up can't do justice to the structural colors created by the intricate design of feathers. George refused to come out from under the juniper to pose, but I wish you could see his iridescence, not confined to blue-green, but venturing into mahogany and rust.

Here's a Partridge Rock hen, capturing a little of the mahogany color George displays so well, along with the traditional iridescence, all against the melanin background feather pattern, somewhat more subdued.

For comparison, a Buff Orpington hen demonstrates complete lack of metallic iridescence. According to Shawkey & Hill, some carotenoid displays (notably in the American goldfinch), though pigment based, depend upon white structural tissue to achieve the brilliance we expect in their vivid yellow.

And cosmetics? As we might expect, they are substances (from oil glands or soil, e.g., iron oxides) externally applied by birds to their feathers, to boost their appearance and attractiveness to potential mates. Parrots and pigeons, among others, use this approach.

All these techniques for creating display colors in birds have a metabolic cost, and must also have an adaptive advantage as payback, without which our world would be less metallic and far more drab.

——
Shawkey, Matthew D. and Geoffrey E. Hill. 2005. Carotenoids need
structural colours to shine. Biol. Lett. 1, 121–124; doi:10.1098/rsbl.2004.0289 Published online 16 May 2005.

Meriwether Lewis and the May Bird List

Each spring, we expect a fairly regular complement of avian arrivals and passers-by. Every now and then though, we're surprised by something vastly out of usual list of guests we've come to anticipate. Tuesday was such a day, when a bird appeared that, to my knowledge, had only visited us once before, many years ago.

There are birds that make us laugh out loud—outrageous combinations of color that somehow suggest frivolity. My first experience of a Western Tanager was like that—what can you say about a bird with so many colors?

Tuesday, I looked out to see this Lewis's Woodpecker perched above the suet feeder. He sat just long enough for me to get the camera and snap off one quick shot. Red face, glossy green-to-black back, pink sides, and a grayish-white collar. I've described him to a couple of people since, and they also seem impressed by his color, even only in description. I wish the photo did him (or her, apparently similar) justice.

I can only imagine that Meriwether Lewis was equally surprised at this bird, among the many new and surprising discoveries made on his famous trip in 1803-1806. Here's his description of this critter new to science. Originally Picus torquatus ("woodpecker with a necklace"), it is today named Melanerpes lewis, or "Lewis's black creeper."

Lewis's name also rests in a couple western wildflowers—Blue flax (Linum lewisii), and our alpine Pygmy Bitterroot (Lewisia pygmaea), a cousin of Montana's state flower of the same genus. I have a nagging suspicion there are many more plants and critters bearing his name, but they're not popping into my head. Please weigh in if you think of others!

The May Bird List (in progress)

• Chukar (exotic, has been here more than 2 weeks)
  
• American Kestrel (courting near the backyard, nesting at the neighbors')
  
• Red-tailed Hawk (soaring nearby)
  
• Golden Eagle (soaring over)
  
  
• Rock Pigeon
  
• Mourning Dove
  
• Broad-tailed Hummingbird (just back)
  
• Lewis's Woodpecker
  
• Downy Woodpecker
  
• Northern Flicker
  
• Western Scrub-Jay
  
• Black-billed Magpie
  
• American Crow
  
  
• Violet-green Swallow
  
• Black-capped Chickadee
  
• White-breasted Nuthatch (until last week; hoping he returns)
  
• American Robin
  
• European Starling
  
• Green-tailed Towhee
  
• Spotted Towhee
  
  
• American Tree Sparrow
  
• White-crowned Sparrow
  
• Dark-eyed Junco: still here, as of last week, but disappearing
  
• Black-headed Grosbeak (just back last week)
  
• Red-winged Blackbird
  
• Western Meadowlark
  
• Bullock's Oriole (just back last week)
  
  
• House Finch
  
• Pine Siskin
  
• House Sparrow
  

Can I count the Lazuli Buntings a neighbor saw a couple days ago? Guess not.

At any rate, that's about 30 species, thanks to some overlap in the season. I'll have a post coming soon on new birds from two visits to Lair o'the Bear this week, along with an assortment of wildflowers we saw there.

The Ants Go Marching

This one's for Honor an Invertebrate Day at Life Photo Meme. A bit late, just in the nick, in fact!


Spilled coffee grounds? was my first reaction when I caught this brownish residue out of the corner of my eye one morning, walking out to feed the chickens. It didn't take long to realize the error—this was life on the move. We had one of these irruptions* inside the house late last summer, possibly the same species, in a breezeway newly converted to civilization.

* An irruption is a sudden explosion in population, or sometimes a shift in presence in a given area, so this is the wrong word, but I've yet to think of a better one. The event last fall was a bit different, a true irruption of sorts, as winged ants were attempting to strike out to colonize new areas.

It wasn't long before I realized my error—this wasn't moving out, this was spring cleaning! (You needn't be surprised that I didn't recognize the phenomenon; it's rare around here!) I did manage (being close to the house) to press the Colorado quarter into duty as a scale object this time, but you'll have to click to see subtle activity along the edge of the paver in this photo.

My guess was the ants had chosen this fine day to remove fallen comrades from the nest. A long winter had, no doubt, induced a fair complement of colony mortality, and "ceremonies," however perfunctory, were in order.


This behavior is called necrophoric (from roots for dead and carrying) and is, like most events in the life of an ant or an entire colony, mediated by chemicals. If you smell like a dead ant, you are presumed to be a corpse and can expect to be treated accordingly. In fact, according to the researchers, "It was soon established that bits of paper treated with acetone extracts of Pogonomyrmex [ harvester ant] corpses were treated just like intact corpses" by worker ants. Separation of components of the extract later revealed (again through "behavioral assay," that is the workers' response to test chemicals) that long-chain fatty acids, in particular oleic acid, were the critical substances.

According to Hölldobler and Wilson:
"The transport of dead nestmates is one of the most conspicuous and stereotyped patterns of behavior exhibited by ants. ... Thus the worker ants appear to recognize corpses on the basis of a limited array of chemical breakdown products. They are, moreover, very "narrow-minded" on the subject. Almost any object possessing an otherwise inoffensive odor is treated as a corpse when daubed with oleic acid."

Even live worker ants were carried to the refuse pile "unprotesting" after being treated with oleic acid. "After being deposited, they clean themselves and return to the nest." And the penalty for inadequate cleaning is... you guessed it! Another trip to the refuse pile. A whole new concept of the living dead. Perhaps I should have saved this post for Halloween.

Sure enough, the next morning, the pavers were littered with broken, immobile ant bodies. I failed to capture the "after" shot before morning breezes blew the departed insects away.

[Forgive my delay. The actual date of this event was April 11, 2009.]

Good Day for a Walk

What a lovely spring day! This is the kind of wet drippy days we have too few of here on the Front Range. Too bad I have to leave to report for jury duty in an hour; it's perfect for visiting the jelly lichens and beaver dam at Lair o'the Bear just up the creek.

We've had a couple of these cool days lately. The year's moisture now sits at about 4.5 inches (11 cm), and plants are finally popping. Last week's cool weather seemed to hold the wild plum in check, then a few warm days allowed them to burst forth in fragrance. We're supposed to have more warm this week, with a small prospect of another wet day or two for the weekend. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Mentor, verb

The dictionary insists it's a noun, but we often use it these days as a verb. This post is a little tribute to a mentor who made a huge difference in my life by inspiring, at a relatively early stage, an enthusiasm for field ecology: Dr. Paul D. Kilburn. I was a biology major in an upstate New York college when a friend suggested a summer field excursion to Colorado. We went, and four weeks later, though I didn't know it at the time, I was bound to become a Coloradoan.

Three of those weeks were spent learning the Colorado flora, with Paul as instructor: identification, montane ecology, and alpine ecology at one week each. In Rocky Mountain National Park! That foundation formed my career in the 1970s and '80s, and my passion in these later decades, though sometimes rarely exercised.

But this isn't a nostalgia trip, this is to tell you what Paul has accomplished now! After ten or twelve years of struggle (through the 1990s), I got busy and abandoned our joint attempt to save an important chunk of native tallgrass prairie in the northern part of our county. But the foundation was laid, and Paul persisted. Last week he made some significant headway, almost 10 million dollars worth, toward protecting and restoring what's left of an important grassland ecosystem. Here's Paul, right, with Dave Buckner, ten years ago today, in a nice chunk of prairie that was purchased by City of Boulder Open Space and is now protected. Dave's a consultant with whom we launched a 5-year grassland study—paid for by the aggregate interests—of the native warm-season grasslands at Rocky Flats.

This photo shows the Chemist, left, and Paul, right, in July 1999 with the Developer who knows his chunk of this well preserved prairie is going to be very remunerative for him, as it is situated at the intersection of two important highways, soon to be a major beltway bringing traffic to his door—if development interests prevail. (Here we bless the economic "downturn" for breathing space.)

In 2001, Paul (far right) led this field trip to the site of a proposed oil well within the boundaries of a portion of the grassland that had been placed in a "Stewardship Trust" by the State of Colorado (which owns Section 16, a state school section). One of the uses for the $10 million will be to purchase certain mineral rights in the Rocky Flats area so that other parts of this grassland won't be turned upside down in a quest for... gravel, bluestone aggregate. Happily, most of Rocky Flats, once a weapons plant, is now a wildlife refuge, so areas inside the fence are protected from pretty much everything except mineral owners and weeds.

Paul's been fighting the good fight, as well as leading groups to collect native seeds for revegetation and pull invading weeds, ever since those early days. Why does he do it? I think it's so his grand-children—and yours—can enjoy sights like this! (Tallgrass prairie in fall, looking toward the foothills.)

Fall color in "turkeyfoot," big bluestem grass (Andropogon gerardii), looking across Section 16 and Boulder's Jewell Mountain Open Space.

Flicker Love

Perhaps the loudest "sign of spring" lately is provided by the Northern Flicker (Colaptes auratus). Although most of our local birds have been courting, some vociferously, the Flicker takes his job seriously. We have a pair, and it seems as if there's a pair for every couple of houses in the neighborhood. Or "our" pair gets around.

Flickers conduct their courtship and territorial displays with two means of getting attention: calling and drumming. They're large birds, so they can make a lot of noise. It's tiring, I'm sure, so he needs to hit the suet feeder regularly to refuel, as he is here.

Here's a small sample of the morning wake-up call we got at 7:40 a.m. Sunday. Repeat at regular intervals for full effect. This drumming is especially impressive because it's taking place on the metal stovepipe on our roof, which means you can hear it inside as well as outside the house. Beats beating on a hollow log, he says.

I like the test thunks that precede the drumming, as if he's checking the surface for proper resonance. Here's what the 8 seconds of drumming above looks like. (You can click to see these better if you like.) Bee Lady said "it's so fast!"; looks like about 20 percussive events per second, when I zoom it in.



Part 2 of the Flicker courtship ritual is calling. Both of these noises serve to attract mates and provide territorial warnings to interlopers. I was criticized a few years back for calling bird songs noise, so you be the judge on this one. Do we want to call that a song? It looks like this:



Add that to everyone else out there advertising, and it ends up being quite a delightful spring cacophony. Especially when you begin to figure out the individual voices. Here's a taste of just two voices (Note: 4 mb file), the staccato Scrub Jay squawk over a distant Flicker call.



——
For all this, you may thank an old friend (we'll call him TrailMeister, or TM for short) who reappeared this year to chide me for not recognizing the call of a Kingfisher. (I mean, how often do I see/hear a Kingfisher? GMAB.) But I had a digi-recorder handy, so I started sending him little challenges, and... well, here we are. Now that I've figured out how to post these little clips, you can expect more of them!

In fairness, I must add that The Chemist sent me this link some weeks ago, where I went to find out what Kingfishers sound like. The Chemist recommended listening to rattlesnakes as a dog-training exercise. That's another story, but may well have reminded me that my recorder would work for other than its intended purpose.

Signs of the Season

After Saturday's steady drizzle, yesterday dawned clear and bright. At 7:40 a.m. the first Hummingbird of the season showed up, hovering where the feeder should have been, where he remembered it was last year. We jumped up from our coffee, and in minutes, it was found, filled, and back up. He (a male Broad-tailed Hummingbird) returned later to check successfully, a sure sign that spring is here.

You may be wondering what he's doing this morning, as we woke to this—another world of white. About 4 inches (10 cm) of wet snow out there.

Here's how Darling Husband started his work day.

The Flicker attacked an icy block of suet; Juncos and Towhees and Finches looked for bird seed scattered on the ground, and the Hummer stayed close to his chosen food source for the morning. Yours truly was not very successful at capturing him in pixels, but I'm posting these photos anyway, just so you know he's okay.


Between sips of sugar-water, he rested near the house on a feed bucket, or out in the branches of the ash tree, seemingly unperturbed by the snow, as long as he was fed and his feathers retained the necessary fluff-factor. Then there were two, politely sharing the only visible food in the area. No squabbles on a day like this, weather a common, if temporary, enemy.

Two hours later, white skies have lifted to reveal landscape features, sun peeks through and helps trees and bushes begin to shed heavy loads of snow, and temps climb to 10 degrees (6C) above the freezing zone. All is on its way to being well, as another of our spring cycles winds to a close.

Despite my basic faith that nature can take care of itself, I worry. Even short-lived tough times can have ill effects for some, if not for the system. But I hear the Flicker calling—and drumming—his reassurance; even he knows tough times don't last.

Foggy Day; Mystery Bird Solved

A cool and soggy day, even the cats want to be inside, as cozily curled up as possible. Unusual but much appreciated, the fog is turning into a bit of a drizzle, and maybe even a dusting of snow on the top of the nearby mountain, invisible in today's view.

The neighbor called; two unusuals in her yard. I headed over with binocs and camera, and got a good look and an ID on this guy, probably the gallinaceous pair I saw near the mailbox on Tuesday. I was unable to capture a picture of these striking birds together.

Here's what I thought was the male, giving me the evil eye. (Sexes are pretty much identical, as far as I could tell.) Any ideas on ID?

The answer is now clear. More details later!

Man of the House

Here's the male of the species, who showed up today after I (belatedly) refilled the suet feeder. (It was only empty for a day...)

Haven't seen the female since Wednesday, but "ya can't have one without the o-o-o-ther"!



Sure hope these new visitors hang around. (C'mon, guys, the suet is restocked!)

Male has a black head; it's gray in the female. See Birds of April.

Hmm... these are nice! I'm thinking DH and I may have to swap cameras!

Oops! White-breasted Nuthatch!

A Walk in the Woods

Sorry, boss. Earth Day is a nationwide holiday, and it's on my schedule of days off. And what a lovely (irresistible spring) day it was... Bee Lady and I, along with her dog Jake, just had to get out for a walk in the woods, if only a short one. We chose O'Fallon Park for a section of "hiker-only" trail I hadn't checked out before. Driving up Bear Creek Canyon, enjoying the views, we spotted several Elk in the meadow at Lair o'the Bear, an Open Space park west of Idledale. There's a new beaver dam there, too, but we were not deterred from our destination.

Nor did the surviving snow on the ground deter us. Jake, in fact, reveled in rolling in each patch we slogged through, perhaps easing his old bones. We walked through a slumbering forest of Ponderosa Pine and Douglas-fir, yet untouched by spring, and were soon rewarded with fabulous views of the mountains to the west. The late sun made capturing the mountains a challenge, so you'll have to exercise a little imagination to see Mt. Evans in the distance here.

Looking back toward Independence Mountain provided a good view of the north-facing slopes still buried in last week's snowfall. Spring will be delayed even longer there. On our warmer side of the hill, Leafy Spurge and Dalmatian Toadflax (both invasive exotics) were already getting a head start on the natives.

There was even time for an ecology lesson. We saw several trees whose tops had been snapped off by the weight of the wettest snow of the year, so when we noticed many tips of PPine branches laying on the ground, I assumed they, too, were victims of seasonal weather-pruning.

Not so, said Bee Lady. See these bare twigs next to them? This pruning is the work of the Abert's Squirrel¹who, instead of caching pine seeds as the Chicarees (Pine Squirrels) do, nibbles on the cambium layer of selected pines. Selective like Porcupines?, I asked. [Those guys choose trees with high sugar(?) content, which are often the ones in the earliest stages of disease or insect attack. It's been reported that Porkies can recognize a sick tree long before any evidence is visible to the forester.]

Just so, said Bee Lady as she explained how the squirrels cut pine tips and select twigs behind the growing part, leaving green tassels strewn beneath the tree. She even demonstrated the cambium-munching technique, much like a person eating an ear of sweet corn. (Okay, I probably shouldn't say cambium, so much as inner bark, that is, phloem and cambium, the living parts of a tree stem. The nutrient-free wood, or xylem, is left behind.) The squirrels are selective, it turns out that ecologists just aren't quite sure what they're looking for in the target trees.²

To add to this tangled web of a story, Bee Lady says the Abert's Squirrels must munch certain fungi come June or so to maintain the necessary enzymes (or some such) to digest all that cellulose they'll be eating next winter!

Our short hike seems to have gotten too long for one post, so it's actually continued in the previous post.

——
¹Sciurus abertii, but comes in several subspecies too. Thanks to Deb for the squirrel photo link above, better than the one at Wikipedia. There's another nice page on Abert's at NatureWorks.

²According to Marc Snyder, 1992, "The phloem of target trees had significantly higher concentrations of nonstructural carbohydrates and sodium, and significantly lower concentrations of iron and mercury, than the phloem of matched nontarget trees. Oleoresin characteristics associated with selective herbivory were unaffected by simulated herbivory over 2 yr, supporting existing evidence that these characteristics are under strong genetic control. Because herbivory is associated with these host traits and results in dramatic reductions in host fitness, Abert's squirrels are probably important agents of natural selection in host ponderosa pine populations." Yum! Nonstructural carbohydrates!

On the other hand, Pedersen and Welch (1984) found that "Protein and other nutrients did not differ significantly between feed and nonfeed trees. However, both outer and inner bark were easier to remove from the woody portion of the feed tree twigs than those twigs collected from nonfeed trees. Therefore, due to the lack of differences in monoterpenoid and nutrient content between feed and nonfeed trees, we attributed the use of certain trees for use as feed trees to the ease of peeling and separating outer from inner bark."