Circle of the Seasons: May 2010

D'Arcy and I drove up to the White Mountains this past weekend to a spot where we were told there were bear tracks. I have only seen bear tracks once before in New Mexico on a Boyscout trip so it was good to see them again. I have often heard bears, mountain lions, and wolves referred to as the Sexy Megafauna. This is sort of a joking term used to poke at the fact that land managers give an unproportional amount of attention to these exciting animals and overlook how important something like moles, for example, might be to an ecosystem. I however, love tracking the Sexy Megafauna. Here are some pictures. We also found some very nice Mink and Beaver tracks.

Having found and journaled black bear tracks, I only have one species left (Ruffed Grouse) for the advanced completion certificate of the White Pine Tracking Apprenticeship. Here are the ones I've journaled: Virginia Opossum, Eastern Coyote, Red Fox, Gray Fox, Domestic Dog, Black Bear, Raccoon, River Otter, American Mink, Bobcat, Domestic Cat, White-Tailed Deer, Moose, Beaver, Groundhog, Muskrat, Porcupine, Snowshoe Hare, Cottontail, Red Squirrel, Grey Squirrel, Chipmunk, Mouse, Meadow Vole, Mole, Shrew, Wild Turkey, Great Blue Heron, Mourning Dove, Rock Dove, Robin, Sparrow, Crow, Raven, Frog, Toad, Striped Skunk and Canada Lynx.

"Nature does not stagnate. It is a flowing river. We seek to ride down this river. To surrender to its speed and direction. We do not want to hold our position, standing in or wading across the river. Or worse, to deny its existence. For where the river of nature flows, also flows the river of spirit." -anonymous tracker

We had a good tracking weekend with guest Charley Eiseman who is the author of the new book Tracks and Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates. He gave us a great slide show the first morning with pictures and stories of some of the fascinating creatures he learned about as he wrote his book. Here are a few of the more interesting things that I learned this weekend:

Texas leaf cutter ants use bits of leaves as a medium for a fungal growth that sustains them. There are several different duties that the ants take responsibility for. Some ants cut the leaves, others protect the plant, and other ants act as "quality control" and send back leaves that aren't best suited for fungal growth. There will be piles of these rejected leaves a hundred feet from the ant mound. And the mounds can be 40 feet wide with the fungal gardens 20 feet under ground.

Leaf miners genetically engineer leaves to create a growth that encapsulates their larvae by inserting their DNA into the leaf. This also happens in many other galls. There is a theory that the origin of fleshy fruit is from wasp DNA interacting with a plant to create a gall, which eventually proved beneficial to the plant and turned into its fruit.

Slugs poop out of the side of their heads.

17 year cicadas suck on roots under ground for 17 years and then pop out to reproduce. Millions of individuals are perfectly synchronized to do this in 17 year intervals. Different species do this too, almost always in intervals of a prime number so that their pop out doesn't coincide with another species.

We saw some ants that were farming aphids. Aphids eat more sugar than they can digest so the ants protect them and eat the excess. They shelter the aphids in poor weather and take them out to graze in good weather.

There are 1600 species of caddis fly, each with their own specific casing. Some create casing out of pebbles with two bigger pebbles on either side for better balance in swift streams. Some are perfect rectangles, other are a mess of debris.

How all of these tiny creatures "know" to do these things is beyond me. Here are some pictures from the weekend:

Resin midge larvae (the red spot) and faint beetle tracks.