Science

Any day now, American Tree Sparrows (Spizella arborea) will arrive to spend the winter. They share honors with Red-bellied Woodpeckers and Ring-necked Ducks in being comically misnamed. American Tree Sparrows (tree sparrows for short, although they should not be confused…

Large aggregations of insects — a crop of periodical cicadas, overwhelming hatches of mayflies, or the sudden synchronous appearance of many colonies of winged ants — are most often a summertime phenomena. But fall can be an excellent time to…

Lo! on the topmost pine, a solitary cicada Vainly attempts to clasp one last red beam of sun. — Japanese poem I actually got a call the other day from a man complaining about the sounds of cicadas and katydids….

Here’s a startling update to the deer overpopulation thread. A paper in the latest issue of Conservation Biology described how Black Bears (Ursus americanus) have been extirpated from an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence by the introduction of…

This is a Variable Cracker, Hamadryas feronia, a member of a mostly Neotropical genus of about 20 species. Variable Crackers are found from the southern U.S. through Brazil, and are one of several species of Hamadryas that can make an…

While we’re talking about swans… My mitten-state neighbor TroutGrrrl over at Science and Sarcasm posted on the Michigan DNR’s request for Trumpeter Swan sightings. She gave a little overview and history of the effort to “reintroduce” Trumpeter Swans to Michigan….

In a previous post, I wrote about the difficulty in using lethal control of White-tailed Deer because the public finds deer charismatic and engaging. Another problem species that has many fans in the general public, confounding management, is the Mute…

I’ve mentioned before that my field site is a typical urban forest, loaded with invasive species. The primary woody invaders are buckthorns (Rhamnus catartica and frangula). I’ve wondered why the mono-patches of buckthorn usually had no litter layer beneath them….

Dispatch from the road.