Leaf-footed Bug

5:00 AM. Cleaned out the wood stove ash tray before lighting a morning fire. Outside it was dark, but for the sky full of bright stars and a waning gibbous moon in the east. I heard the deep hoot of a great horned owl calling from the woods along the edge of the Mitchell field, defending its several square mile territory. The female, likely, is incubating eggs by now, although I'm uncertain where the pair is nesting.

After the crisp and clear start to the day, it turned windy and raw, with a washed-out look and feel. There was so little to see and enjoy outside, so I was excited to find a bug in our bathroom window. Something to study, and it was dead so I carried it downstairs for a closer look.

You've probably seen them in your house too. They move slowly; this one wasn't moving at all. This is a western conifer seed bug (Leptoglossus occidentals), commonly known as one of the leaf-footed bugs. So called because of the widening on the hind legs that looks like a bit of leaf. This inch-long bug is another one of those house invaders that does little harm. If this one were alive and it was a nice day I would have moved it outside. Alan Eaton, Entomologist at the University of New Hampshire, has a nice fact sheet on this bug and four others called: Seasonal Insect Invaders in New Hampshire. All are relatively harmless.

Let's hope the weather outdoors improves soon, so I don't have to go looking for more home invaders to study.

February End

The temperature reached into the low 50s today and, in combination with a bit of sun, the slush disappeared from the driveway. This week's weather of cold rain and wet snow pushed us into the "we are ready for spring" mood.

During a walk in UNH's College Woods around mid-morning, I noticed that springtails (also known as snow fleas) by the thousands had flung themselves on top of the snow. Something they do when temperatures rise above freezing and the sun shines, if just a bit today. Closer to home, I saw the first chipmunk of the season on a stone wall along Bald Hill Road. Things are waking up, stretching, and emerging from their winter hideouts.

With spring fever at hand, it seemed like a good day to switch up the blog to a more spring-like look. And what better way to cheer the winding down of winter than a sweet spring peeper. With nighttime temperatures still at or below freezing, and more than a foot of snow in the yard, we won't hear peepers for awhile. We can dream though.

To encourage your own thoughts of spring and all things frog-like, check out this advance story at the Northern Woodlands magazine on The Annual Frog Symphony. You can literally listen to them all at once alongside beautiful illustrations. And another gentle nudge to consider subscribing to Northern Woodlands--the best magazine of the region.

Weasel, Rabbits, Possum, and a Blackbird

We spent the weekend visiting my parents and celebrating my niece's birthday in western Massachusetts, about 120 miles west and 50 miles south of where we live here in New Hampshire. The difference in latitude and longitude is noticeable in the timing of sunrise and in the types of plants and animals. The sun rises later there, so we wait a bit longer to take Kodi out for an early morning walk.

My parents farm is a mix of pasture, cropland, hardwood forest, and shrub thickets along wetland drainages. Coyote sign is usually abundant, something that makes Kodi wary of venturing too far into the back forty. Surprisingly, on this visit we saw little sign of coyotes, including no tracks in the snow. Kodi, therefore, was more adventuresome. It helped that he spotted several eastern cottontails that squirted out from thickets of multiflora rose. Fewer coyotes means more rabbits, and we saw rabbit tracks in several places, as well as two rabbit kills.

Eastern cottontail tracks

The only tracks around the remains of the two cottontails, was a network of small prints, smaller than the rabbit tracks. After some sleuthing in the field and research in references, we concluded that the predator was a long-tailed weasel. The weasel's erratic track pattern looped here and there along a field-shrubby wetland edge, typical of the long-tailed weasel's haunts. Their primary foods are meadow voles and field mice, with rabbits third on the menu. So, despite being about one quarter the size of a rabbit, the weasel hunts and kills bunnies.

Long-tailed weasel tracks

We saw lots of turkey tracks and one tom turkey displaying to a harem of three hens. An opossum wandered past the shed during the night, leaving behind its signature tracks in a dusting of snow.

Opossum tracks

The most significant sign of spring was the lone male red-winged blackbird that had staked out its territory in the same wetland drainage where the weasel hunted. That is my first blackbird sighting of the year. Mud, maple sugaring, and other signs of spring are here too. Although when we arrived back home there was another four inches of heavy wet snow in the driveway, the third weekend storm in a row. Winter lingers here.

Bluebirds in Winter

Most of the eastern bluebirds that spend summers here, head south of New England for the winter, some as far south as Cuba. Handfuls of bluebirds stay through winter along the coast and around Great Bay in southeastern New Hampshire, where the climate is more moderate, although only slightly so. Their winter diet favors fruits of sumac, bay, cedar, juniper--any shrub that bears fruit. The pickings are slim this deep into winter.

So, it is always a treat to see the brilliant blue of bluebirds in late winter. These must be the hardy ones, able to survive the wind and cold. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology says that wintering bluebirds will roost together in a cavity. They reported one case where 14 bluebirds roosted together with their bills all pointed toward the center, like a football huddle.

Huddling against the wind seems to be the best way to survive the cold winds of winter. My friend Laurie Hill sent the following photo of bluebirds huddling outside her window in Newfields, in the next town over from ours.

Laurie says there were eight bluebirds huddled together when she first looked out last Sunday; here there are five. It is remarkable that these birds, dependent on scarce fruits for food, are able to survive these conditions at all. I hope Laurie continues to see these birds well into spring, which will mean they continued to survive the winter winds of 2013.

Firewood and Woodstove Update

This week I received an email from Nathan in northern Minnesota who had recently installed a Jotul Oslo wood stove in green majolica enamel, just like ours. So, it seemed like a good time to post an update on our stove, after 11 weeks of winter use. The stove is awesome. Easy to load wood and build a fire through the side door and easy to clean the ash tray and front door window as needed. The wood fire heats our entire house--the oil furnace now runs only to heat hot water. Our house is quieter and warmer, and we are using far less oil.

Sitting in a rocker in front of the wood stove watching the fire, Kodi at my feet, is peaceful and calming. I could spend a lot of time just staring at the fire. Apparently I am not alone. Sarah Lydall at the New York Times writes about Norway's love of firewood in Oslo Journal: Bark Up or Down? Firewood Splits Norwegians. Norwegians spend Friday nights watching a 12-hour show about firewood, which includes a few shots of people chopping wood and 8 hours of watching a fire burn in a fireplace. One viewer apparently said, "I couldn't go to bed because I was so excited...When will they add new logs? Just before I managed to tear myself away, they must have opened the flue a little, because just then the flames shot a little higher." The show is inspired by Lars Mytting's book, Solid Wood: All About Chopping, Drying and Stacking Wood--and the Soul of Wood-Burning.

So, about the firewood part. Lydall writes in her piece that 50 percent of the viewers of "National Firewood Night" called in to complain that the wood was stacked with the bark facing up and others complained that the bark was facing down. When we bought our first cord of wood last fall, I read oodles of Internet posts about bark up or bark down. It is apparently a global concern. The best advice I read was by Carl Debow at Northern Woodlands. He recommends: bark side up (on top) if the wood stack is open to the weather and bark side down if covered. Although looking at our wood stacks, I think the bark up or down is random.

Nathan from Minnesota wrote to me about two different problems. His Oslo was installed in a corner. In those set-ups, Jotul recommends (perhaps code requires?) that you not use the side door, only the front door. Nathan said, as others have complained, that ash flies out when the front door is used. This is a problem that our friends have with the Jotul Castine, which only comes with a front door. I suggested to Nathan that he consider a heat shield on the wall and floor along the side door if feasible and allowed by code, to allow use of the side door. For others thinking about these stoves -- go for one, like the Oslo, with a side door, and install it to allow safe and routine use of the side door.

Nathan's second concern: potential small cracks in the enamel on the stove top. He thought he overheated the stove, which can cause cracking. The other potential cause is dropping water on a hot enamel stove. We avoid the use of those fancy enamel pots for water, just for this reason. The chance of spillage is too great. So, one downside of buying the enamel stove is the need to be careful with liquids if you plan to cook on the stove. But for us, the trade-off is worth it, as the green enamel adds beauty to our living space.

We have used about two cords of wood so far, since December 4th. This week we started drawing down on the third cord. The fire burns hot as I watch the flames flicker. Perhaps I have a bit of Norwegian in me.

Skeleton Puzzle

On Sunday I brought home a fragment of an animal skeleton from Seapoint Beach. At first it looked like a baby dragon, but that's just too much George R.R. Martin on the brain. Then I discounted a bird, and thought fish skull. I posted that thought and some pictures on Sunday. That got my friend JoAnne thinking about every possible bird, fish, mammal, invertebrate that she could think of, as was I.

Nothing seem to fit, until JoAnne's husband suggested that it might not be a skull. Well, that was it, I was thinking about the wrong part of the skeleton. With much searching on the Internet, I finally found a picture that matched my skeletal fragment. Thanks to Dr. Karen Petersen in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle for the pictures of comparative vertebrate anatomy. If you check the website and compare them to the following pictures of my beach finding, you'll see the answer (my answer at the bottom of the post, so here's your chance to solve the puzzle before I do!).

The skeletal fragment from Seapoint Beach matches the gull pelvis shown on the website linked above. The roundish end is the anterior end of the ilium, which in birds is fused with the other pelvic bones: the ischium and the pubis, as this diagram shows. Well, that was fun, although as to which species of gull, I will leave to others to study.

Winter Winds

Any hint of spring that I felt on Friday disappeared in a gust of wind. Another few inches of snow and gusty winds for the last 24 hours showed that winter is still here and full of gusto. Today, if you bundled up sufficiently, it was another beautiful winter day worth celebrating.