Views and News from the Natural World

UNINVITED CHRISTMAS TREE

Being the sole resident of my home and having only rare visitors, I have not had a Christmas tree or a menorah for decades. Besides, so many days of every year are impromptu holidays full of woods and water and wildlife and the colors of flowers and mushrooms that life is sufficiently full of holidays. This morning, however, a spruce next to the house was finely decorated and no colored glass or toxic paints in the mix.

These red crossbills are in the finch family and often mistaken for purple finches or house finches. The young start with a typical cone or wedge shaped bill. The upper and lower halves then cross. The sharp top tip helps the birds dig into cones of hemlock, spruce, fir, and pine.

One or more males often perch high in a tree on the lookout for predators. The rest of the flock usually feeds toward the interior of a tree where they have added protection, including less visibility.

An immature male but with beak well formed.

A male and female. Mating can occur at any time, apparently triggered by abundant food in the cones of evergreens. For the first five days the male feeds the young, then both parents bring food. Within 3 weeks the young are foraging with adults. Each flock has its own distinguished flight call–distinguished at least among crossbills.

“He is, without exception, the wildest animal I ever saw,—a fiery, sputtering little bolt of life, luxuriating in quick oxygen and the woods’ best juices.” Naturalist John Muir, The Mountains of California, 1894 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10012/10012-h/10012-h.htm#chap09

This small squirrel, about half the size of a gray squirrel, divides its life into four categories: foraging and eating, fighting, sleeping, and sex. In their very visible daily lives we see what biologists consider the purposes of life–survive and pass on the DNA of the species. Fulfilling these purposes, of course, takes on many forms of behavior in different measures.

The Douglas squirrel will eat many kinds of seeds of conifer trees, but also likes the easy pickings of sunflower seeds at my bird feeders. One will sit for a half hour or more at a time, picking out the kernels from the hard shells.

The Douglas squirrel also eats a variety of other plant seeds and even birds eggs. Although it is a rapid climber on almost any wood or my window screens, I’ve seldom seen it jump more than a couple of feet. This is unlike the gray squirrel that routinely jumps several feet straight up or more than 10 ft (3 meters) from limb to limb.

The Douglas spends little time socializing or consorting with a mate. Males and females will fight fiercely for food. At my feeders the female seems to win more than lose. The fighting can be vicious. See video below.

Suppose the squirrel hears its own sounds in a way more similar to the slow motion roar? Watch the astute wrestling tactics, the lift and the throw.

The hind feet are powerful, so the top squirrel lifts its foe’s hind feet into the air, rendering it helpless. The goal is to throw the opponent off the railing.

The squirrels do not appear to mind sharing their blood with ticks. In my 12 years here at the slough in squirrel territory I have never had a tick on my skin or clothes. Visiting dogs have never gone home with ticks.

The years that I have spent here watching fishing birds has shown me that to be very good at one survival task requires sacrificing other powers. Loons, like other fishing birds, have large webbed feet for underwater propulsion. Unlike most birds, its bones are solid and heavy. The compromise: those bones and those feet placed near the tail make the loon a quick diver and endow it with fast submarine propulsion. To fly, however, burns calories fast, and on land its waddling walk is slow and tiring.  Also like other fishing birds, to become airborne loons need to run across the water pushing with their legs to become airborne, and only after 10 to 30 meters.

Most birds react to danger with flight. The loon almost always dives.

Although an occasional loon stays here for summer, most will fly north to the near arctic to breed and lay eggs. In the short northern summer the earlier the hatch the more likely survival. Eggs are kept warm for about one month. Chicks require another 3 months to become strong enough to fly south for winter.

In the arctic the Inuit people, according to National Geographic, kill and eat several thousand loons each season. The Canadian Cree tribe also hunts loons.

The loon is most famous and loved for its four calls, the most striking of those the wail and the tremolo. The tremolo, a high quavering call, sounds most often across Yaquina Bay in winter and early spring. Like the wail, it too is an alarm and territorial call and a way of locating other loons. We may hear it most often because it also signals an intruder which might be me in a kayak. In the film “On Golden Pond” two quarrelsome elders, Henry Fonda and Katherine Hepburn, have a moment of bliss while paddling their canoe one evening when they hear a pair of loons give the tremolo call.  Many writers, like Thoreau, describe loon calls it as a crazy laugh, others as a haunting sad call. Neither fits its place in the loon’s life.

Humans often detest the roof rat, a variety of common black rat, for the very traits that have enabled both humans and the rat to spread worldwide. Rats are exceptionally adaptable, eat a wide variety of food, and travel well in boats and other vehicles. They have an exceptionally bad rap because they have carried deadly plagues. So have humans, of course. In the U.S. far more humans get diseases from dogs, cats, and other pets than from rats. Those zoonotic diseases include scabies, eye diseases, rabies, and a variety of parasitic worms. (Kissing pets is risky romance.)

Rats have made their way into a lot of human vocabulary. This picture illustrates, “I don’t give a rat’s ass for . . . ” All square rigged sailing ships of a few centuries ago had “ratlines” for climbing into the rigging. A person who tells secrets of bad deeds has “ratted out” the villain and is called a “rat”. And although rats do not have a particularly strong smell, someone who suspects trouble or an evil doer says, “I smell a rat.” A person who is too busy at work is in the “rat race.” Children before they can walk are sometimes called “rug rats”. And a person soaked by rain might “look like a drowned rat.” And people who are running away from suspected trouble are “like rats deserting a sinking ship.”

When visitors see tan or white clumps of foam riding the tides in the slough or on the bay, they often ask “Where did that come from?” They are thinking of pollution. Maybe someone was washing a car by the waterfront. Maybe a restaurant or brewery discharged waste water or a city sewage plant has overflowed as Newport’s system and those as large as New York City’s have often done. Here on the Oregon coast , however, nature creates almost all the foam with its own waste products. Very few people, entranced by the roar and spray of breaking waves, know how important to the food chain is the sea foam left behind on the beaches or blown inland. It is also important to our search for new human pharmaceuticals.

On beaches like this every year, Oregon loses a few visitors who are not aware that unpredictable “sneaker waves” much larger than the routine of the day roll in, often full of killer logs.

Especially as seawater and the wave forms drag along the ocean floor, passing over beds of kelp and other marine plants, they pick up lignins, proteins, carbohydrates, fatty acids, esters, alcohols, and lipids. This dissolved organic matter (surfactants) traps air and forms the bubbles of sea foam. In those bubbles are nutrients, including forms of sugar. Thus they become important transporters of energy and food.