Common Yellowthroats

Common Yellowthroat (Geothlypis trichas)
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Common Yellowthroat warblers are common and even though their numbers have declined, it seems not to be a cause for concern. I would call it concerning, though. They eat insects. They don't really hunt, but seem to wait for a bug to fly by and then catch it. But they will fly after one now and then. They must go through a lot of bugs to feed their babies!

Common Yellowthroat (Geothlypis trichas)
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I have no particular reason for highlighting this bird, except that I ran across one of the photos yesterday and decided to collect them all into one spot. I'm very proud of some of the shots, chuckle at others, and have wonderful memories of them all. I used to get up with the sun and go out with the cats for a bird walk. The cats upset the birds so that they showed themselves and were easy to photograph with a long lens and big camera. The cats never got a bird; they returned to the house with me. But they sure had great walks.

Common Yellowthroat (Geothlypis trichas)
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I'm not a birder, so I can't say with certainty, but the birds with white caps I assume are male. The "duller" birds I think are female. There may be juveniles here. There are 17 races of yellowthroats in North America, I read. That is a lot of variation. You may think identifying insects is tough. I think identifying birds is near impossible. I am in total awe of you who know what you are looking at!

Common Yellowthroat (Geothlypis trichas)
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All photos are confirmed identifications at iNaturalist.

I would never entrust myself with a bird ID unless it is a robin.

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Juvenile?
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Same juvenile (?)
5.2

And the same juvenile (?)
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I also read that the adults do not fly directly to the nest to feed the babies. They drop the bugs and walk to the nest so that predators do not find it.

I feel better now with posting this. It snowed all day yesterday and will snow all day today. I have about a foot of snow now. Power is on and off intermittently because the snow is very wet and heavy. Only plows are driving by, so it is feeling lonely right about now. Seeing all of the colors of summer with these birds is very therapeutic.

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Pesky Porcupines

Porcupine as seen from backdoor
Barton Mountain ridgeline in the back

What a day today. The roads are so iced that the town plow has chained up while it salts the road. Nothing to do but stay inside and do … something.

I'm still keeping an eye on the porcupines. They don't appear every day. It's more like every third day, so I'm wondering what else they are eating. Luckily, I can see them from the windows in the back mudroom. Unfortunately, my tripod is in the car and it won't be until today that I can get it out. So all of these shots are handheld. I did make a tripod of my elbows on my walker but it wasn't enough for the amount of digital zoom I used.

Digital zoom; eye is visible despite snow and handheld shake

I've learned more about porcupines. Their bellies are not quilled and are very soft and vulnerable. In the photo below, you can see that. When they sleep, their head faces a back wall of the den, and their tail faces the entrance. They swing their tail at predators and the quills release upon contact. So they are pretty invulnerable but they still have a couple predators, predominately the dreaded fisher cat.

Vermont had to reintroduce fishers because they are so reviled that they had been extirpated a hundred or so years ago. But they are back and as vicious as ever. And they love porcupines. The balance of porcupines in the wild is back in check now because of the fishers.

More digital zoom; underbelly and claws visible

Fisher (Pekania pennanti)
(c) Jeff Hullstrung

Lucy loves porcupine days. She wants outside constantly and only comes in for warming. She knows where the den is under the barn and she tracks their movements all day. Porcupines are supposed to be nocturnal, and I know mine are out and about at night, but they are active in the day, also. When they are up a tree, Lucy can even spot them!

Lucy is watching the porcupine shown above in the tree.

Porcupines do not clean the scat out from their den. The scat can become so deep that it spills out of the den. No one knows why. 

Amelia came by on Thanksgiving night to drop off a dinner for me, so I opened the garage doors and turned on the outside light. She turned off the lights and closed the doors when she left. In the morning, Lucy went nuts. She excitedly ranged all over the garage, and even thoroughly scanned the rafters of the garage. That's when I became nervous. She explored the garage without hackles so I knew there was not a danger like bear. Sort of. Lucy's definition of danger and mine differ, so I asked her to come back in before she found an animal. I kept the doors open so that whatever it was could leave. I am very fortunate that Lucy has never once attacked another animal. She simply alerts with deafening barking and shows me where they are.

Yesterday morning I went out to the garage and found a lot of scat lined across the garage doors … well it was actually everywhere but most prominent in front of the doors. I found a footprint, too. Neither has been identified but because of the porcupine activity, I strongly suspect that I had inadvertently trapped on in the garage overnight. The scat has the cashew-shape of porcupine. The print is the right size for porcupine but is ill-defined. I have perennial problems with red squirrels trying to move into the attic every winter, so the scat could be theirs, also. Red squirrels are not nocturnal, though.

I had my measuring tape with me, but it  did not work!

The scat was everywhere.

One poor print.

We had a wonderfully odd Thanksgiving. I hope you did, also.

Saturday's Critters at
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Those Are Not Bird Nests

Those are not bird nests.

When I let Lucy out after supper, just at dusk, I looked up at my favorite tamarack tree as I always do and said, "Aww, there are two bird nests from the summer up there." But then I stopped and said, "No! Those nests were not there yesterday or last week or this morning! It's the porcupines!" And I groaned. 

Just after the tamaracks lost their needles (they are a deciduous conifer tree), I saw the evidence of my Barn Porcupine damaging the tree. I showed it to my kids and they chuckled. 

Porcupines ate the bark off the left branch.

The kids didn't know what they were looking at, so I pointed it out to them:

But even I was questioning if it was porkies eating the bark because it isn't the strongest branch and the damage was way out at the end—where the tenderest bark is. Porcupines can be huge like the one that is living under my barn. In the top photo, my Barn Porcupine is on the right on the trunk of the tree and presumably his smaller lady love, who may or may not be under the barn living with him, is on the left here in the photo:

Here is Lady Porcupine

This was a handheld shot with my bug camera (I have lent Amelia my huge camera with my long lens and think I have to get it back now). I used digital zoom while I braced my arms on my walker while sitting on a stool in the laundry room with the back door open heating the entire outdoors with the price of oil what it is.

I'm going to call Fish & Wildlife for advice about my trees. I have over 100 tamaracks that my husband carefully tended for me because I love them so.  Plus the apple orchard, which porcupines also love. Plus the sugar maples that they love that we used to tap. 

A porcupine's only natural enemy is a fisher cat. Fisher cats are vicious wolverine-type furry animals that will attack for no reason at all and are legend for killing house cats and small dogs. I have had them trying to get into my house in the summer through open windows. I close all first floor windows at night in the summer now. But I haven't seen a fisher here for years. I don't want them back. And I don't want the porcupines to kill my trees. And I don't want them shot.

The same tamarack in 2013. It was much smaller.
In November they turn this brilliant orange and are 
seen blazing on mountain sides everywhere here.
The boulder is Pansy Rock where Angel Pansy,
a disabled cat, was buried by my husband. 

More of my porcupine adventures can be found here.

More about tamaracks can be found here.

Saturday's Critters at
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No More Moose

Moose (Alces americanus)

These photos are of the last moose that I have seen. 

They are from September, 2018. 

Moose used to be very plentiful here. But suddenly they disappeared. Ticks have been killing them. Scientists have found upwards of 40,000 ticks on moose. Not on their entire body. Only on the part that was counted. The ticks seem to be a danger now because the climate is warmer, which allows the ticks to survive the winter and breed more successfully than ever before. Moose are most numerous in the Northeast Kingdom,where I live, than in other areas of Vermont. While I have not seen any for years, the Barton road crew has told me that a bull is seen frequently on my land.

I have so many memories of moose. Back in the day when cats were allowed outside, I would see them scuttle for shelter if a moose strolled by. One day, I saw a family with one calf casually sauntering down the double-yellow line in the road on their way to the wetlands across the road from me. They were coming down the road that circles Barton Mountain here. It's a windy road with no way for you to see what is around the next bend. I leaned out the window and yelled at them as loudly as I could to get out of the road. The bull looked at me and slowly, slowly, and grudgingly led his family into the bog.

But I also remember when the daughter of a good friend at church was killed in a collision with a moose. There is no news radio or newspaper, so I found out at the store in town and everyone was giving updates on the search for the woman. It was too eerily quiet in the store; you immediately knew something terrible had happened. She was a nurse in a hospital 30 miles away. She was returning home from a midnight shift. The state troopers did not find her or her car or the moose for over 12 hours. This woman had three very young daughters; one was only one-month old. The family was destroyed. My friend's marriage ended in a divorce.

I hope this horrible fallout from climate change can be reversed and the moose return. Fortunately, they can migrate further north to Canada. I assume. I hope they did. I believe there is nothing else that we as individuals can do for climate change except harass and hound our legislatures to get moving on it. It's up to the big guys now to get this fixed and not rely on the little people like us to do the heavy lifting when we have no power to do so. The environment, and our souls, need them to return.

Saturday's Critters at
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Some Winter Birds

Redpoll

I used to photograph birds all the time. I would put the winter feeders in the tree outside the window, and in the summer, I would walk early in the morning to capture them. It doesn't happen anymore because now I'm disabled and I can't even provide for the feeders any longer because the snow gets so deep.

White-breasted nuthatch

I have closed my Facebook account, and downloaded all of the photos I had there. I'm organizing them and came across these. There is no rhyme or reason to the selection: they were simply together in  one folder that Facebook sent me. I don't know the dates or whether I reported them to iNaturalist back then. But it is fun remembering how I kept busy in winter back in the day.

Redpolls

We get huge irruptions of redpolls here in the winter. They are so fun to watch and are very gregarious. There are two kinds, and I photographed both but can't remember them at the moment. To tell the truth, I'm so tired after the October spider series of posts that I can't bear to identify or write much about animals this weekend. These are more for memories than education.

Mourning dove

Goose on a neighbor's farm

Redpoll

Chickadee

I hope you enjoyed these and I also hope your weather and mine stays warm so that we don't need to burn oil (although I am beginning to worry about what this warm weather will mean for plants and overwintering animals).

Saturday's Critters at
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Arachtober: Barn Spiders

Barn Orbweaver (Araneus cavaticus)

This post is for Brian of Brian's Home and others (there are many of you), who may not be able to read it because of a fear of spiders. A fear of spiders is natural; it may be genetically coded into humans, along with fears of fire, drowning, and other things that threatened early humans. But I have to tell my story of my own fear of spiders and how it worked out.

One summer a few decades ago, I was bit by a mosquito on my inner wrist during a stargazing event in a huge field. It quickly became infected. The infection was bizarre: the skin turned pure black and bubbly and the black area grew and grew. The itching was tremendous. The first doctor said it was poison ivy, which I knew it wasn't, and treatments did not work. So I was sent to a specialist, who said it was a spider bite, which I knew it wasn't. It had to be debrided (the dead skin pulled off with forceps, leaving a huge raw area on my arm). It took many weeks, but eventually the infection was vanquished.  I still have a very large, ugly scar on my arm.

Barn Orbweaver (Araneus cavaticus)

Even though I knew I had not had a spider bite, I developed a phobia of spiders. The infection, I have since learned, was most likely MSRA, a bad staph infection, which is often confused with spider bites. Spider bites are extremely rare (they want nothing to do with humans), especially here in the north. Vermont has no native spiders that bite people. You can read The Global Spread of Misinformation about Spiders for information about spider bite reporting.

I moved into my Vermont farmhouse. Barn spiders are prolific here. They are huge and hairy and everyone's nightmare of spiders. They would dangle down in the garage and barn and once one hit me on the head! They love to live under the gutters outside around the entire house. I couldn't kill them, which I wanted to do despite knowing how valuable they are, because they were too big and juicy.

Barn Orbweaver (Araneus cavaticus)

But I had a camera and tried to get as close as possible to them for photographs. Once, I did, an entire new world opened up for me, and my fascination with arthropods began. In fact, the fascination has only grown to the point that even though I know so little, people ask me what bug they saw, I have been published, and I have even won awards. 

Now I watch my step around spiders. Barn spiders never show up inside the house, so there is no stress about that. I still have a slight fear of them, no more panic, but it doesn't overwhelm me like it did. Unless they land in my head; then I go nuts. 

Barn Orbweaver (Araneus cavaticus)

Charlotte, of Charlotte's Web, is a barn spider. Charlotte's last name, Cavatica, is a variation of the species name cavaticus. Her middle name is Aranea; which is a variation of Araneae, the order in which barn spiders are.  I urge you to read, or listen, to this beautiful post from the University of Houston program Engines of Our Ingenuity about Charlotte. E. B. White, one of our most valuable American authors and scholars, either knowingly or unknowingly, used a well-known strategy to protect animals: anthropomorphization. He gave Charlotte human traits so that we sympathize with her and care about her.

Barn spiders are orb weavers: they eat their web every day and rebuild another one every night. They live in wooden buildings and in rafters (thus they are called barn spiders). They are nocturnal. Barn spiders are a North American spider and are most prevalent in New England and Canada.

This post will not resolve anyone's fear of spiders. Hopefully, it will give a bit more knowledge so that we capture and then release any spiders in our homes or cars. It happened with my kids at school, who even taught their families how to interact with spiders. I have two more species of spiders for Arachtober. They are not as scary as this one. One is beautiful and one is cute as a button.

Saturday's Critters at
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Fly Translation

An unknown fly bathing on a leaf.
Perhaps a Flesh Fly (Sarcophagidae)

This is the power of rapid burst on cameras: get a focus, hold your breath, and hold down that shutter button. You get a series of many shots. This helps with insects that move fast. If you are lucky, you can get good shots now and then. I was very lucky, indeed, to get these. This series spoke to me. 

🤣 YMCA 🤣

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Betsy Goes to Staff Meeting

We had a virtual staff meeting today for two districts. Betsy began the meeting napping but then did what all kitties do when there is a virtual meeting anywhere around: she bathed. She showed off her bits and bobs to everyone else as she purred and purred.

And I, like all good moms everywhere, photographed her on the phone instead of giving my rapt attention to our directors and fellow teachers on the iPad. With low light and awkward angles, it was a challenge. But I am finally able to show off my new little one! I learned that Betsy is actually a dilute tortie. I found pale, pale patches of ginger on her.

The draft standards-based report cards made the perfect bath mat. 

Literally. 

No one could think of any other purpose for which they were suitable. 

Betsy never chewed on any cables or cords. Good kitty of mine!

I got toe beans!

I got tongue!

I got fur up my nose!

This has been a roller coaster of a week, 

but there is no better way to end it then with fur up my nose!

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