Species Highlight - Aquilegia formosa

Red Columbine is my favorite flower! (Until the purple larkspur, Delphenium, comes up - more on that later). "Formosa" is the word for "beautiful" in Latin - I think it is the most aptly named thing in the world.

This patch of Aquilegia came up like a surprise present by the side of the creek just the other day.

All About Grouse

Today I was working on one of the many steep hillsides around here, when I had to stop suddenly. I wasn't out of breath, but my heart had begun beating uncontrollably! It was totally silent in the woods, and I could hear each beat - bum bum bum bumbum bubububum! I had no idea what could be going on - maybe I had imagined it. I continued work, unsettled and slightly worried. But a few minutes later, it happened again! And then, again! When I put a finger to my pulse as I listened, I was even more confused. The beats seemed to match up, but in some ridiculous double-time. What could I be hearing? Then, it came to me - I was hearing a grouse beating somewhere far away in the forest. By some coincidence of the angles and hillsides, I couldn't place a direction on it and had the impression that it was something very close and quiet, rather than far away and loud. Heartbeat of the forest! I was aortically synced with a Ruffed Grouse, Bonasa umbellus.

The male ruffed grouse beats his wings upon logs as part of a territorial display. Since it is early May, this male was probably looking for a mate. His ability to defend his log communicates his fitness, and therefore, his desirability as a mate, to females all over the area. Pictured here is a photograph of a female strutting along a road. Now, who wouldn't want to impress that lovely lady? She is looking perky because she doesn't know what to make of my truck.

According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website, allaboutbirds.net, both sexes of ruffed grouse mate with multiple partners, and the females raise young alone. The benefits to a male grouse are obvious; his genes are passed on to as many offspring as possible. But if one assumes a "normal", human model of mating biology (and why wouldn't one? We are, after all, humans!), then it is less obvious why a female bird would prefer to mate with many males. If the first male she mates with is most likely to fertilize her eggs, then what use are the rest of her mates?

It turns out that bird reproductive biology is rather different from mammalian reproductive biology. Many kinds of birds have evolved sperm storage tubules, which are basically holding tanks for sperm before they reach a female's egg. These tubules facilitate what is called passive sperm loss, in which sperm die at a constant rate over time. In fact, it is the last male she mates with who will receive the honor of fertilizing most of her eggs, since his sperm will be the most recent and thus, the most numerous. Of course, there are other factors which influence male success - the timing of mating relative to the development of the egg, and the viability and amount of each male's sperm.

It is still unclear how the female bird benefits from these multiple partnerships. Most research on the subject addresses species which pair-bond ("socially monogamous") and then copulate outside their pair-bond, not species in which females raise their young without paternal care, like grouse. Perhaps in socially monogamous species, a good caretaker male is not necessarily genetically desirable for a particular female. Thus, two males may be needed to play two different roles.

But for species like the grouse, all a female needs is a genetically desirable male - not a good caretaker, too. Perhaps behavioral studies will elucidate: if a female only mates with successively more desirable males, then her eggs will be fertilized by the latest, and thus, greatest, sperm she has found so far. Any previous matings retroactively become backup. However, I cannot find scientific literature discussing how, or if, female mate choice works in conjunction with sperm storage structures.

Who knew that bird sex was so complex? My eyes will be peeled for scientific developments in this area. <>

sources:
Peterson Field Guides: Western Birds.
Cornell Lab of Ornithology: Bird Songs of the Pacific Northwest (cd)
All About Birds: http://www.allaboutbirds.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=1189
Northern Wilds: northernwilds.com
Birkhead, Tim R. Sperm Competition in Birds. 1998. Reviews of Reproduction 3, 123-129. (ror.reproduction-online.org/cgi/reprint/3/2/123.pdf)

It's Still Winter Here...

Today I was introduced to a couple of the residents here - they live in the Annex and sleep from the ceiling!

These are Little Brown Bats - that's really their name (or, Myotis lucifugus). 1 As long as we're quiet, they don't mind a quick visit.
Check out those adorable toes they are holding themselves up with.

In a beautiful patch of old-growth forest, we settled on the wet moss to watch a newt lumber like the slowest wind-up toy, like a dinosaur, through the undergrowth.

Looking up to 80-meter trees, I see white sleet hanging from the sky. It has been a strange winter this year - first an early thaw, then, after several days of warm sunshine, and shortly before I arrived, a snowstorm that has stayed, and stayed, and stayed. It will be interesting to compare this to other years - although since I have never been here for more than a few days at a time, I have no sense of normality.


Everything here is new to me! The chance to get to know this place on a more intimate level is something for which I will be thankful forever. Already I am learning to look at the world in a different way. <>

1. Peterson Field Guide to Mammals

Late Winter

Rain today, and snow up higher. Varied thrushes singing from the old hemlocks. Startled two deer going into the woods, footprints in the mud showing their haste.

Then home – a door, a step, a light, and warmth – as if the house itself has been keeping for me.

Bucking up fallen logs across the road, my breath steams in front of me, as my clothes steam in the cold, as the saw steams as Jay melts it through red rotted Doug Fir.

Home, and curry powder on my potatoes, meat, onions. Sweet-spicy smell of my hearth.

Giving my thanks the best I can, bow drawn slowly across strings, I compose a
thrush-song on the fiddle. <>

Phenology

Phenology: I didn't know what the word meant until I had to apply for my current job. Even still, I didn't understand the full meaning of it until I began working here.

Phenology is the study of the timing of periodic changes in biology, as they relate to climate. Migration, breeding, flowering, root growth and leaf growth, metamorphosis - all of these are studied by phenologists. The research I am helping with involves plants, insects, and songbirds - a nice collection of trophic levels that might show some measurable interaction. My job is to look at the plants, and to collect the insect traps. I thought that I would be measuring stem lengths with a little ruler, or counting leaves. In retrospect I was quite naive. And here I was with a college degree in biology!

Fading bloom of Coptis laciniata,
called "cut-leaved goldthread".

Instead, I am grading each plant on two different scales of 1 to 6: 1 being no growth activity, and 6 being a mature stage. One scale is for vegetative growth; i.e., leaves, and the other scale is for reproductive growth: flowers or cones. Each classification is clearly defined; for example, vegetative 4 is "unfolding leaves" and vegetative 5 is "leaves unfolded, less than 75% full size". There are 16 different sites that we visit, in a variety of habitat types: north slopes, south slopes, old-growth, new growth, 3,000 feet, and 5,000 feet. An interesting idea, based off of previous work in these woods, is that micro-climate may have a profound affect upon phenology. In an attempt to factor that variable into the experiment, each site has a temperature and photoperiod sensor, and all of the study plants are located within 30 meter radius of that sensor. At each site, there are about 50 individually tagged and numbered plants. Some of the studied plants include the little yellow violet, Douglas fir, vine maple, rhododendron, and trillium. The species to be studied have been chosen for their relative ubiquity among sites, their ease of studying, their supposed importance to the forest, and their time range of growth activity. For instance, Snowqueen blooms very early, allowing a measure taken in April to be more than just all 1's ("no bud activity"). Vine maple is found at almost every site. And Oregon grape, which was used in the study last year, has been dropped because of its seemingly random flower activity.

But the study of phenology is giving me something more than a page of numbers, even something more than the beginning of what is, hopefully, a long-term study. As I have been watching individual plants, visiting them at least once a week, making notes of their growth, I feel that I have become aware of a pattern of the forest that I have never truly understood, in two ways. The first is the timing - if you had asked me when maples put out their leaves, I would say, "springtime". But I would not have realized that Douglas fir put out pollen cones before new needles, or been able to tell you that trilliums turn purple before their petals wither. I would have no idea when huckleberries started flowering. The second is in details - I had never paid attention to the way that vine maple leaves emerge, first from their reddish buds, encased in a thin green sheath, and then, elongating, suddenly pop out of their stockings and spend several days unfolding to flatness.

This is movement in the plant world! Here I can see plants as never before; I am beginning to know their changes in an intimate way. The only other growth of a biological organism that I have really consciously observed is in a puppy. I realize that this is the sort of thing "real naturalists" always write about - Thoreau, Leopold, authors like Wallace Stegner and Ivan Doig, people who are somehow (so it always seemed to me) magically aware of this aspect of the living world around them. I had never known how to begin in my self-imposed naturalist studies - now, the mechanism has fallen into my lap and focused my yearning eyes. What was missing from my earlier attempts at phenology - though I wouldn't have known what to call it, before?



Above: vegetative buds of Douglas-fir, Pseudotsuga menziesii. The buds on the right are close to breaking open.

Many of the key attributes of the study can be simplified and applied to almost any backyard.

1. Identification of species
2. Comparison of different species
3. Note-taking

Those are the most important ideas, but there are a couple more that have helped me to really develop an understanding for what is going on throughout the area:

4. Comparison across elevation gradients
5. Multiple individuals of the same species

The future of these plants is entirely unknown to me, and I feel like I am unraveling a mystery - what will bud break look like? When will the flowers open? How will the rhododendron leaves unfold themselves? Only time will tell...
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Welcome to the Woods!

Greetings, Readers!

This is Abner writing to you from deep in the Cascade Mountains. I have recently accepted a position here assisting with research, and I hope that as well as paying my bills, it will provide inspiration and insight into this small, yet vast, facet of the incredible ecosystem that we call Earth.



The Cascade Mountains reach from southern Canada to Northern California. As part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, which here consists of the Juan de Fuca plate subducting underneath the North American Plate, the range includes such notables as Lassen, Mt. Rainer, the Three Sisters, and Mt. Saint Helens, which last erupted (albeit, in a minor way) in 2006. My work, however, is not in these high eastern mountains, which are well-known for their dramatic size and incredible views. Instead, I am on the western slope of the Cascades, surrounded by a different sort of size scale that defies attempts to see much further than even 50 yards away. Here, watered by coastal rainstorms and fed by an intensely interconnected flow of nutrients, 500-year old forests boast 300-foot tall trees living intimately with an amazing diversity of life. Yet while it is the hemlock, Douglas fir, and redcedar that dominate the initial perspective and limit the view to what is immediately reachable, all it takes is a second glance to guess at the discoveries that might await an astute observer. And that often involves an even closer view - from, for example, 5 inches away.

Trientalis latifolia

At this scale, we may begin to understand what it is that has kept researchers from all the natural sciences studying this particular watershed for over 60 years. In seeking to understand the whole ecosystem, they must understand each part of it - and there are very many parts. If "the devil is in the details", then what a delightful devil must animate these deep, dark woods! Here there are over 500 species of vascular plants, matched by 500 species of non-vascular plants (mosses, lichens, and algaes), 180 different species of birds, 50 mammal species, 20 amphibians and reptiles, and over 3,200 invertebrates - a grand total of over 4,450 details! And yet, identifying them is only one step; understanding their ecology, their interactions, and the changes associated therewith, is another.

Leucanthemum vulgare with bee pollinator

Not only do we seek to know the interactions among living organisms. It is the non-biotic factors that make up all of life - adenine and thymine, nitrogen and carbon, water, sunlight, and oxygen. How are living creatures influenced by genes, nutrients, and climate? The work I am participating in is phenological in nature: it is concerned with the timing of changes in development and behavior. And as I write, Schmuel is booking tickets for a conference which will augment understanding of how climate drives soil arthropod communities. Neither of us can photograph primary productivity, DNA, or photons, but we recognize that each organism we observe is a product, expression, and active participant in its ecosystem. I look forward to exploring this place. Welcome to the woods! <>

From the Monterey Bay

Using a new design of bathysphere, our research team explored the heretofore unknowable waters of the Monterey Submarine Canyon and the Monterey Bay. We report back with astounding photographs of life underneath the surface which reveal a beauty otherwise unimaginable.









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Evidence of Pleistocene Megafauna in Coastal Regions

Mammoth Rocks

The earth turns, the seasons change, and life on this planet responds to the fluxes of warmth and cooling. Pretend that the earth has metaphorically begun to spin backwards: so back we will go, whirling through great dark space, until, slowing, we will find ourselves alive, and somewhat near the same place we are now, on the coast of Northern California. The place is the same; the time, however, is different: it is the end of the last ice age, for we have traveled back in time 10,000 years.

The land seems fairly similar, although the prairies extend eight miles farther out to sea that they do in the 21st century. The huge, rolling hills and sudden rocky seastacks and boulders of blue schist, chert, and jasper that jut roughly out of the plains are all still there, thirty and sixty feet high. The coastline still dissolves foggily into the distance as we gaze south. However, the plants are somewhat different. Our hayfever is nonexistant. Instead of a carpet of short green grass, we walk through fields of bunchgrass punctuated by flowers. Wild iris and strawberries are blooming heartily in the spaces between rocks, thriving off of the trampling and grazing that creates open spaces for them. Sand dunes dot the landscape. We see evidence of people at this time, though we do not see the people themselves. Small heaps of discarded shells, bones, and stones, fire pits, perhaps even paintings on the tall rocks. This is a seasonal home, and the people who have camped here are already further south. All this is noticed later, when we look around - what catches our attention at the very first are the animals. Down the hill from us, not forty yards away, is a herd of mammoths. They aren't the woolly mammoths that roamed the Siberian steppes, but the larger Columbian mammoths, endemic to North America. They are huge - twice as heavy as an African elephant, although only slightly taller. It is a herd of about twenty animals, loosely related, led by a matriarch. This is part of their coastal migration route, and they have stopped here to rest. They graze, nap, and nurse their young. Some are licking the salt deposits exposed in the boulders, a valuable resource which may have helped them return through this prairie year after year. Juveniles test their tusks by play-fighting with each other. A lone bull has been following the herd from a distance and now ventures to move closer, the matriarch watching him warily. Some are rolling in a mud pit that has been created out of a large depression in the ground. Years later, this wallow may become a clear vernal pool, home to delicate and amazing creatures. But right now it is muddy, eroded, largely inhabited only by the mammoths. A large female chases them out of the wallow, and a young mammoth, already ten feet tall at the shoulder, rubs the mud off of himself against one of the rocky outcroppings. He has a favorite place to do this. There are several ledges that are at just the right height to reach behind his neck, and all the mammoths rub against them in the same few places. As we watch, the young mammoth leaves and the matriarch takes his place, scratching the thick hair on her cheek.

Fast-forward 10,000 years. Standing in the exact same place, we look up. The coarse schist and quartz, normally a rough and lichenous sandpaper, has been rubbed to a smooth sheen of green-blue. After millions of years of migration along this same route, we are reaching up and touching warm rock that the mammoths polished. <>

Most of the information presented here is the result of internet searches, abstracts of scientific papers, and my own inferences from the behavior and biology of modern elephants.

Some great links on the subject are:

http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=23566, which led me to most of the sources I used in writing this.
http://centerfirstamericans.org/MT-archives.php, a publication by Oregon State University. Most of their issues are archived online, although the most recent issues may not be available.