Goodbye To All Of That
Basswood leaves in September
Once again the forest is almost empty of birdsong. Only an occasional blue-headed vireo holds forth. Even the waves of migrants are mostly quiet as they flit from tree to tree searching for insects and fruit. Noisy blue jays call as they harvest acorns. Eastern wood-pewees cry “pee-a-wee.” Confused looking immature ovenbirds blunder about on the forest floor. How brief is the time of birdsong. “Our” birds are already heading south to spend most of their year in warmer climes.
Along Sapsucker Ridge Trail, resident black-capped chickadees lead migrants to food sources high in the treetops, but I catch glimpses of eastern wood-pewees, red-eyed vireos, black-throated green, Nashville and magnolia warblers. Flocks of cedar waxwings join in along with resident tufted titmice, white-breasted nuthatches, and downy woodpeckers. When I reach the spruce grove, I hear the tin drum calls of red-breasted nuthatches. They, at least, may be coming to spend the winter.
Most people welcome the cool, crisp days of autumn, and I can’t deny that by September I’m tired of the heat and humidity of summer. But I’m not tired of birdsong, butterflies, wildflowers, and the green of our deciduous forest. All too soon the green will be replaced by a brief flame of gold, orange, scarlet, and purple. By the end of October, most of those leaves will be on the forest floor, and my world will be primarily gray and black for almost six months.
Because I regret the approaching end of the fruitful season, I’m out every day in September, gathering memories to take me through those months until spring returns. One windy afternoon I sit in our goldenrod field with our four-year-old granddaughter Elanor. The plants tower over her head and she pretends it is a rainforest. (She’s a big fan of Dora the Explorer.) I am the mommy tiger and she the baby tiger. But mostly we marvel at the golden beauty enveloping us. She uses her binoculars to look at the honeybees and bumblebees nectaring on the goldenrod and at the turkey vultures wheeling overhead and coasting along the ridgetop. I also show her how to squeeze the blossoms of butter-and-eggs to make them talk.
Our spreading wingstem patch
Later, I take a walk by myself to admire the towering and spreading wingstem over the old covered farm dump. Its branchless, wing-shaped stem, which can reach as high as 13 feet, accounts for its name wingstem. This moist site is the only place it grows on our property and, according to one range map I looked at, we are at its northern edge. It is much more common farther south and west. It’s also called yellow ironweed because, like ironweed, it is tall, likes moist conditions and has similar lance-shaped leaves. But wingstem leaves are alternate, hence its species name alternifolia, meaning alternate leaf. Because they are bitter-tasting, herbivores such as deer and rabbits usually don’t eat them. That may be why wingstem lines West Virginia country roads during August, as we discovered the same August wingstem showed up on our property for the first time.
At the top of its stem are sprays of golden flowers. Each flower has 2 to 10 yellow ray florets that droop down and surround prominent and numerous greenish-yellow disk florets visited mostly by long-tongued bees, especially bumblebees. Caterpillars of silvery checkerspot butterflies relish the bitter foliage.
While I always know where to find wingstem, nodding ladies’-tresses move around like other members of the Orchid family. I first discovered 15 plants years ago at the edge of Far Field, but then the deer found them. By the time we fenced them, only a few remained. The following year I discovered a few farther out in the field and none inside the fence. Then two years ago one appeared inside the fence. In the meantime, I literally stumbled on a small patch at the base of the spruce grove in First Field. That patch too has moved around, and last September I found only one plant.
Nodding Ladies Tresses (Spiranthes cernua) by Magnolia1000 (Creative Commons Attribution license)
Nodding ladies’-tresses (Spiranthes cernua) are not showy flowers. As many as 60 small, bell-shaped, white flowers grow on a hairy spike in two to three tightly twisted spirals above grass-like leaves at its base. An early successional species, it prefers disturbed areas that are open, wet to dry, and often sandy. Its species name means “nodding,” which refers to its slightly nodding flowers. Ladies’-tresses was so-named because the stalk of flowers reminded earlier observers of a woman’s braided hair. Altogether there are 32 species in the genera Spiranthes. Nodding ladies’-tresses grow in most of eastern and midwestern United States and Canada except for Florida, Newfoundland and Labrador.
I say goodbye to many other wildflowers too including the aptly named turtlehead, as I point out to Elanor during a stream walk, ranks of lemon-scented horse balm, white wood asters, and even pearly everlasting, which does not quite live up to its name, although it does make a nice addition to a dried winter bouquet.
During September I also spend many hours at the top of First Field, sitting on Alan’s Bench and watching migrating monarch butterflies. One morning I was there by 9:00. Fog filled the valleys, but sun illuminated our 37 acres of goldenrod and asters. The first monarch sailed high overhead in the morning breeze, the second swooped low over the field, and the third fluttered across the trail. Then a fourth did what they all do eventually, It flew straight up from the goldenrod, over the bench and spruce grove, and on down the ridge heading south.
First Field is butterfly central. One warm, breezy day, in addition to monarchs, pearl crescents, orange sulphurs, cabbage whites, summer azures, meadow fritillaries and my favorites, the tropical-looking tiger swallowtails, nectared on the bonanza of asters and goldenrods. Numerous monarchs fluttered up from the field, some almost too high to see, coursed back and forth for a few seconds as if trying to catch a wave, and then sailed over the spruce grove.
On that day I did not see the dozens and dozens of monarchs that our son Dave had reported previously. But I was pleased that they seemed to be recovering from their disastrous all-time low in 2009-10 when the area of Mexico where eastern North American monarchs spend their winters reported the lowest numbers ever, according to Lincoln Brower, who has been studying monarchs for decades. Not only are monarchs threatened by illegal logging in their Mexican wintering habitat, but by land development and herbicide use where they breed in the summer. Dr. Brower wonders if the monarchs’ migratory phenomenon will survive.
Migrating monarch in First Field
But Mexican poet and novelist Homero Aridjis, who led the effort to persuade Mexico’s president to create the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve that hosts most of the monarchs from the United States and Canada east of the Rockies, is determined that it will survive. Calling it the “environmental cause of my life,” he remembers as a boy climbing up into the hills of his native Michoacan State and seeing the monarchs “explode from the tree branches when the sun hit them.” And I remember, not so long ago, seeing a few of the deciduous trees on Sapsucker Ridge fluttering with monarchs on a windy September day.
Almost everyone can appreciate the beauty and grace of butterflies and the showier moths, but they aren’t as fond of the caterpillars from which they develop. One September afternoon, as I crossed First Field, I noticed an incredible infestation of caterpillars on one of our largest catalpa trees. The caterpillars were black with yellow bellies and a thin yellow stripe on their sides. A long, straight, black horn projected from its rear. Nothing was left of the tree leaves but stems. Catalpa sphinx moth caterpillars (Ceratomia catalpae) had caused the defoliation.
A member of the Sphingidae family, they are known collectively as hornworms because most have a horn, eyespot, or hardened button at A8 or abdominal segment 8 (out of 10) in entomological terms. They metamorphize into undistinguishable brownish gray moths, although some sphinx or hawk moths, as they are also called, are more attractive such as the Abbot’s and Nessus sphinx moths that nectar on our lilacs in spring and the day-flying hummingbird clearwings that hover like hummingbirds to drink flower nectar from a variety of plants.
Catalpa sphynx moth caterpillar in one of the First Field catalpas
But the caterpillars of the catalpa sphinx moth only feed on catalpa leaves. As a boom and bust species, it is “occasionally common enough to defoliate catalpa trees,” David L. Wagner writes in his Caterpillars of Eastern North America. “Females raft the eggs, sometimes laying several hundred in a single cluster… The catalpa sphinx is a ‘barfer’ and thrasher. When molested, the larva regurgitates a somewhat viscous green fluid from the foregut and thrashes violently.” When I touched a branch, the caterpillars leaped into the grass.
Although we have a couple dozen catalpa trees in First Field, only a few had been attacked by the catalpa sphinx moth caterpillars. And that was the first time in 38 years that I’d seen an infestation. Two weeks later, Dave found a parasitized catalpa sphinx moth caterpillar covered with white wasp cocoons. At least that caterpillar would suffer the fate that many do — being slowly eaten alive by developing braconid wasps.
But as September progresses, the forest understory changes color. First the black gum trees turn red, pink, and purple. Then black birches, witch hazel, and striped maples form golden bowers as I walk my trails. Ash trees at the back of our house turn bronzy red and gold. Our yard black walnut tree leaves have not only turned yellow, but many have already fallen and litter our veranda and front porch. Only when I walk to the top of First Field for a view of the mountains do I see still green forests.
Reluctantly, I say goodbye to all of that — visitors from the tropics, wildflowers, butterflies, moths, and green forests — until next spring.
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All photos by Dave Bonta except where indicated. Click on the photos to see larger versions at Flickr.
Charismatic Invertebrates
Daddy long-legs on spicebush leaf, mid-August
“Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,
Isn’t it funny? I started to write to you yesterday afternoon, but as far as I got was the heading, ‘Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,’ and then I remembered I’d promised to pick some blackberries for supper, so I went off and left the sheet lying on the table, and when I came back, what do you think I found sitting in the middle of the page? A real true Daddy-Long-Legs!
I picked him up very gently by one leg, and dropped him out of the window. I wouldn’t hurt one of them for the world. They always remind me of you.”
That is what the orphan Judy writes to an anonymous benefactor who is sending her to college in the novel Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster. Because Judy catches a glimpse of a long-legged man leaving the orphanage office just before she learns of her good fortune, she nicknames him Daddy-Long-legs. His only request is that she writes him occasional letters, which reach him through a third person, about her college experience.
As a sentimental teenager, I greatly enjoyed this old-fashioned romance written in 1912. That may be why I, like Judy, wouldn’t hurt a daddy long-legs either. Whenever one crawls over me, I watch fascinated as it deftly uses its four pairs of long, thread-like legs to propel itself forward.
Usually, daddy long-legs appear on our veranda in late September and early October during harvest time, which is why another common name for one is “harvestman.” Most visitors shudder and assume they are giant spiders. They are not reassured when I tell them they are not. Like spiders, they have their own Order in the animal class Arachnida. Spiders are in the Order Aranae; daddy long-legs are in the Order Opiliones, so they are also known as “opilionids.”
“Opilio” in Latin means “shepherd,” and experts say taxonomists chose that name because daddy long-legs look as if they are walking on stilts just as European shepherds used to do so that they could more easily oversee their flocks. At least 6,400 species have been identified in the Order, but there may be more than 10,000. Although there are four suborders, the slender, long-legged, delicate harvestmen in temperate regions are in the suborder Eupnoi.
Daddy long-legs on bergamot, late July
These are incredibly ancient creatures. Well-preserved fossils have been found in 400 million-year-old rocks. Those preserved in the Rhynie cherts of Scotland look modern despite their age. Not only have they not changed much over the eons, but also species have been restricted to small regions because they don’t disperse farther than 50 miles. These ancient arachnids are probably most closely related to scorpions, pseudoscorpions, and solifugeae, which include wind scorpions and camel spiders.
Their heads, thoraxes, and abdomens grow together to form compact, oblong bodies, usually no longer than 5/16th of an inch, that come in hues of brown, if they are mostly nocturnal, or yellow, green, or reddish-brown if they are diurnal species. They have a knob or black turret on top of their heads with a tiny eye on each side that can detect movement several feet away. But they use their second pair of legs, which are longer than the others, as antennae to explore, search for food, and warn of danger. In front and to the sides of their eyes are two pores from which a chemical scent is emitted that deter large predators and ants. Beneath their bodies, they have a pair of pedipalps or pincers with which they grasp, tear, and stuff food in their mouths, fight other harvestmen, and clean their legs.
They can easily discard a leg if it is caught and grow a new one. The detached leg twitches in some species for a minute, in other species for as long as an hour. In order to move, they have so-called “pacemakers” in the end of the first long section or femur of their seven-jointed legs that sends signals through nerves to the muscles in their legs to stretch. Between signals the legs rest. Some researchers believe that the twitching leg keeps a potential predator occupied while the daddy long-legs escapes.
Birds, mammals, amphibians and spiders, some of which are not deterred by their chemical defense, prey on them. Thus, some species of daddy long-legs may defend themselves by gluing debris on their bodies or by playing dead.
Two daddy long-legs on horsebalm, early July
They, in turn, are omnivorous and eat small insects, plant material and fungi. Some species are scavengers that specialize in dead creatures, bird dung and other feces. Most ambush their prey and, unlike other arachnids, which must liquefy their prey before ingesting it, daddy long-legs can eat chunks of food.
In late summer and early autumn, after most daddy long-legs’ species have gone through six nymphal stages, they are ready to mate. It is then that they emerge from their usual habitat under leaf litter, logs and rocks in damp forests to search for mates. After mating, the female may lay her eggs immediately or wait for months. The smaller male drives away rivals while she lays eggs a few at a time in soil or under rotten wood until nothing is left of her but an empty shell. Only one known daddy long-legs’ species in eastern North America hibernates as an adult. The rest die and leave their eggs to hatch into new daddy long-legs the following spring.
The other early autumn charismatic (to me) invertebrate is the walkingstick, distant cousin of crickets and (ugh!) cockroaches. Walkingsticks belong to the Phasmatodea or Phasmida Order of insects, which includes European stick insects, walkingsticks, and leaf insects, among others. “Phasma” comes from the Greek meaning “phantom” because their resemblance to sticks or leaves makes them difficult to see. But when they appear on our white board house or on our screens, as they do in October, their stick-like bodies always impress me.
I’m not the only person who finds walkingsticks intriguing. Some people keep them as pets, the most popular being the Indian stick insect — Carausius morosus — because it (or rather she) eats a wide variety of easily obtainable foods such as lettuce and privet and thrives at room temperature. Also, that species consists only of females that reproduce by parthenogenesis and easily lay fertile eggs.
walking stick close-up, by poppy2323 on Flickr (Creative Commons BY-NC license)
But most likely, the walkingsticks I see every year are northern walkingsticks Diapheromera femorata, also known as “stickbugs,” “specters,” “prairie alligators,” “devil’s horses,” “witches horses,” and “devil’s darning needles,” among other quaint names.
Although I’ve never noticed any harm from these insects, they are defoliators of deciduous trees in the eastern half of the United States and Canada. As young nymphs, they eat a wide variety of low-growing shrubs such as rose, juneberry, sweet fern, blueberry and strawberry. As older nymphs and adults, they prefer the leaves of black oak species, basswood and wild cherry but will also eat quaking aspen, paper birch, hickory, locust and apple tree leaves. However, this species does not fly and so even a stream or road will stop their spread. Two parasitic flies — Biomya genalis and Phasmophaga antennalis — destroy the nymphs. The former lays its eggs on a walkingstick nymph that hatches and eats the nymph, but the latter lays its eggs on foliage that a nymph eats.
The northern walkingstick, like daddy long-legs, mates in late summer, and the female continues laying up to 150 black and white eggs that look like miniature beans, three every day, until cold weather arrives. She drops them wherever she happens to be on a tree, and they fall to the ground. The eggs overwinter in the leaf litter and stay unhatched through the following spring, summer, autumn, and winter, only hatching into pale green miniature adults the next year in May or early June.
Northern walkingsticks go through six larval instars before maturing in late July or early August. The female is larger than the male — 2 ½ to 3 ½ inches long — and he is brown and she is greenish-brown. Both have long antennae that are two thirds the length of their bodies.
walkingstick on sycamore at French Creek State Park, PA, by Colin Purrington on Flickr (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license)
To defend themselves, the young nymphs drop to the ground or jerk back-and-forth, but the older ones and adults remain still, stretching their front legs beside their antennae so that they look even more like harmless twigs. They sometimes release a bad-smelling liquid too. Birds, such as common grackles, blue jays, wild turkeys, American crows, American robins, white-breasted nuthatches and Carolina chickadees, often prey on them, especially during an infestation when they are more noticeable. Five-lined skinks, Chinese mantids, white-footed mice, eastern chipmunks, and eastern gray squirrels also find them tasty.
With more than 3000 species worldwide, most of which live in the tropics, walkingstick life histories are diverse. For instance, Eurycantha horrida (its species’ name hints at its ferociousness), has large spines on its hind legs that it uses to defend itself and to compete with other males. Some species, like the southern United States species, the American or two-lined walkingstick (Anisomorpha buprestoides), have defensive glands and spray a noxious chemical that repels birds and other insects, not to mention curious entomologists like Thomas Eisner who describes the spray as a “fine mist” that had a piercing stench. “My eyes hurt, as did my lungs when I got a whiff. This was evil stuff. I started coughing,” he writes in his book For Love of Insects. The species is nicknamed “musk mare” and “devil’s rider,” because the small male spends much of his time astride the much larger female. “They are not necessarily mating when thus found,” Eisner writes, “although the pairing is sexual, and the two do eventually mate and produce eggs.”
walkingstick nymph, SW Ontario, by jclucier on Flickr (Creative Commons BY-NC license)
Many stick insects that drop their eggs on the ground, including the northern walkingstick, have eggs with a large food body called a capitulum, which contains substances attractive to ants, similar to some plants that have food bodies called “eliasomes” on their seeds to entice ants to take them back to their nests so they will have a more fruitful place to germinate and grow. In the case of stick-insects, the ants take the eggs back to their nests, cut off the capitulums, and feed them to their brood. Then the ants discard the rest of the eggs in their garbage, where they will hatch and live in the ant nest, safe from predators. Some species are even ant mimics.
Luckily, northern walkingsticks have never released a bad-smelling liquid when I pick them up, as I do with the daddy long-legs, and show them off to visitors. Youngsters are particularly intrigued by both of them. Then I place the northern walkingstick on a tree to demonstrate its excellent camouflage, and put the daddy long-legs back in the woods, knowing that both critters will soon be dying as the season of warmth ends.
All daddy long-legs photos taken on the mountain by Dave. Please click the walkingstick photos to see the larger originals on Flickr.
Marcia with golden eagle (photo by Todd Katzner)
Marcia Bonta is the author of nine books and over 300 magazine articles. The blog portion of this website includes her popular “Naturalist’s Eye” column from Pennsylvania Game News, reprinted here on the 1st of each month. Unlike typical blog entries, these columns are written months in advance, usually about things that happened during the previous year. Read more…
