Every morning has its share of routine chores: get-newspaper, retrieve-garbage-cans, check-weather, wash-breakfast-dishes, etc., etc., etc… But then, there are mornings when chores get interrupted by the force of an unexpected event… as recently happened to me on a November morning, not long ago.
After spending a good part of the afternoon gardening, I enter the small bathroom on the first floor of my house to wash up. A miniscule speck of something appears on the far wall. Pavlov’s dogs were conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell. My brain, similarly conditioned by multiple past experiences, salivates at the sight of specks on a wall.
The species names spill off the tongue quickly – “Oh, that’s a Pink Lady’s Slipper…. or a Green Darner….or a Round-leaved Sundew or Great-crested Flycatcher. Perhaps its a Brook Trout….or Eastern Chipmunk or a Diamondback Terrapin”. These names, and hundreds of thousands of others, are the scientifically established common names for these creatures, useful because they help to establish order, definition, and identity.
You are a Monarch Butterfly. Autumn has arrived and you are crouched on a branch on Long island at the starting block of a marathon flight. Your number is on a round plastic tag attached to your wing. While your attention is to the prevailing winds and the passing cirrus clouds, you are aware of the wing that is wearing the identity tag, much like a marathon runner wears a number on his shirt. But with a few differences.
If you love observing the natural world, once in a while you receive a gift. Maybe it’s a special moment of excitement such as with an osprey hitting the water with talons flaring and, with labored flight, lifting off the surface with a writhing fish firmly ensconced. Perhaps it’s a moment of intimacy provided by a doe nuzzling her fawn or a mother cottontail rabbit licking her newborn young.
As they continue their journey from that Sargasso Sea and move more fully into freshwater, juvenile American eels start to gain pigmentation and turn from translucent “glass eels” into “elvers.” Dams remain a significantly obstacle, greatly reducing their ability to reach freshwater habitat.
Imagine spending the winter months stark naked in a damp, frozen woodland environment. It’s a chilling prospect, is it not? One that dwarfs any self-described Polar Bear Club’s seconds-long winter swim. But there is a creature, native to Long Island, which does just that. This species is no 100+ pound, hairy mass of endothermic (warm-blooded) protoplasm dressed in a Speedo, but rather, an ectothermic (cold-blooded) critter weighing in at less than a quarter ounce, that endures this wintry imprisonment unclad and unconscious. It spends the winter barely protected, perhaps under a log or burrowed beneath the leaf litter.
Diadromous fish (Greek for “running through”) are those unique species that migrate between fresh and salt water. There are two general types: anadromous fish (“running up”) and catadromous fish (“running down”). The former spend most of their lives in saltwater, but migrate into freshwater to spawn; the later do the opposite.
A few weekends ago Georgia and I decided to explore McAllister County Park in the Village of Belle Terre with the goal of seeing some winter birds, and secretly hoping to spy a Snowy Owl, a winter visitor occasionally seen here. This not-well-known county park is on the east side of Port Jefferson Harbor and consists of a mined out section of the Harbor Hill Terminal Moraine and a sand spit that extends west to the jetty connecting the harbor with Long Island Sound.
With winter’s icy embrace hitting Long Island we tend to respond by spending more time indoors out of the cold, something we all certainly did during this winter’s visit of the polar vortex to Long Island, which dropped nighttime temperatures well below zero. Wild animals, of course, cannot do this. But what they can do is to respond with a wide variety of adaptive behaviors which enables them to survive through the most challenging time of the year. One animal that is especially adept at surviving the winter is a familiar one to anyone with a backyard bird feeding station – the black-capped chickadee.