Bloom Time

As per the cliche, it seems that May is when I notice things blooming in these here parts.

And this is one of the blooms that is hard to miss. Especially when the field you are in has been severely mowed, as was the case here.

It is Turkey Beard, Xerophyllum asphodeloides, and as Boyd* notes, it is "frequent to common in low sandy pinelands". I spotted these on Lakehurst Naval Air Station.

The flowers are ephemeral. The grass like base is persistent throughout the year. Lucky for it the base is low to the ground.

~~~~~~~~~~

I do grassland bird surveys at the Lakehurst NAS as part of a NJ Audubon Society citizen science project. And the reason that the Turkey Beard stands out so is that the fields that I survey, as well as those of several other surveyors, was severely mowed this 'winter' (scare quotes because it sure didn't seem like there had been several months worth of growth since the end of winter).

Here are three shots showing what is supposed to be grassland habitat.

I usually have multiple Grasshopper Sparrows calling at my ten survey points. The morning I took these shots I had but one bird singing.

Very sad. And so unnecessary.

~~~~~~~~~~

* Howard P. Boyd, Wildflowers of the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. A wonderful little book.

Clams

This is our back pond.

In the fall it attracts its fair share of leaves. And when it gets warm algae begins to bloom. And thus this past weekend I donned my muck boots and headed in. And while scooping the fruits of my labor, the aforementioned algae and leaf muck, into a wheelbarrow for disposal, I noticed a small shell.

It was a clam. A tiny clam. And then I noticed another. And another.

So I grabbed a small aquaria, as a school teacher Patty has a bunch, filled it with water, and began to pick through the muck for clams.

There were lots of tiny clams.

And they were very active, moving about the tank (you can see the center clam has its foot out) and siphoning for food.

I transferred a couple to a tank with cleaner water to take pictures. Here is a shot with the foot more obvious (as with any image, click to bigafy):

Here is an image of an empty shell, with a dime for scale.

I told you they were tiny.

Both our ponds are man made with the back pond being the more natural of the two. I understand how frogs (and tadpoles) and turtles and snakes found their way there. They hopped or crawled or slithered. But clams? While that foot works great in water I doubt it would do too well for the quarter mile or so from the nearest lake or stream.

My reference works and field guides are silent on the subject of clams. And the interwebs were little better. While I did discover that these are known as "fingernail clams" (FnCs) I learned little else. Other than some are native and some are not.

It's a puzzlement.

Update: Patty found this page on the web. I found this bit especially interesting:

The concept of a barely-half-inch wingless, aquatic critter starting out in mid-country and taking over America (and the world) is fairly astonishing, no matter how much geologic time you give it, but it turns out that FnCs “think outside the pond.” They attach to water plants as tiny juveniles, and the water plants attach to the feet of water birds, and water birds DO have wings. Sometimes the clam-ettes clamp directly onto feathers, amphibians, or mobile aquatic insects (clam and clamp both derive from Old English “clamm,” “to bond or fetter”). In addition, some species of FnC are ingested by ducks but not digested, and they may be regurgitated alive at some distance from home.

So maybe they hitched a ride on these?

What a Difference a Year Makes

Remember the mini-meadow and the problems we had with deer?

Look now.

Stuff is growing. And the deer are leaving it alone.

If you look closely at the lower left corner you'll see one of the nine Wireless Deer Fence units we have about the yard. Three guarding the mini-meadow (Patty got zapped by one while we were planting stuff the other day - ouch!). A chance encounter at the Philadelphia Flower Show led to the purchase of a set of three at the company's show booth. And it worked so well we bought two more sets (they come three to a set) for the rest of the yard. So far they are working quite nicely.

Mother Goose

Or maybe dad? Watching over the chicks.

I don't know if the chicks are from these eggs. But I do know that there are now new Canada Geese in the world.

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide if that is a good thing.

A Puzzle

I mentioned that our mothing light had a shield on it in a prior post. Shields limit the spread of light. Good for not blinding humans. Not so good for bringing in the greatest number of moths.

The shield on our lamp is also colorful.

I noticed these colors when we first had the light on this year, the Wednesday prior to the big moth night. A dry run to make sure the equipment was in good working order. Note that when the light is off there are no colors other than the silver of the aluminum shield.

But when I first tried to take a picture the result was this:

Curious. The colors are there. But what are those bands? They were not visible to the naked eye.

And the closer I got to the light, the more bands there were in the image.

The above images were taken with an iPhone 6 Plus. By the time I had retrieved another camera to see if I got the same results, the light had completely warmed up and was so bright the colors were completely washed out.

So on the big moth night I was ready with my Sony RX100 II camera. I chose this camera because Sony makes the camera module in the iPhone.

The results:

As with the iPhone, from a distance no bands. Although the color palette is limited to greens and blues.

But as I got closer ...

... no bands either. no matter how close I got. Hmmm, very curious.

I emailed the images to Dr. Les Cowley, he of the awesome Atmospherics Optics and OPOD sites. I had thought they might be diffraction effects. He had (no surprise!) explanations for the colors.

The colours are produced in two ways

  1.  by micro grooves on the metal shade.  The grooves act as a diffraction grating. 

  2.  interference across the anodised film if aluminium - see http://www.atoptics.co.uk/fz801.htm

Could be both.

You can see the groves on the shield, and that's what made me think diffraction for the colors. But I'd not thought of thin film interference.

As to the bands,

The bands are puzzling.   Any filament lamp powered by AC fluctuates in light intensity at twice the supply frequency.    The bands 'might' be due to the intensity fluctuations if the iPhone camera scans its sensor in a peculiar way.  The test of that would be to image a dim surface illuminated by a fluorescent lamp.

It's an iPhone issue rather than a lamp one!  What's puzzling is that they are so strong and are not produced by another camera.

So time for more experiments in iPhone photography. Stay tuned.

Giant Hummingbird

We've a giant hummingbird visiting our yard.

I think we need a bigger feeder ...

Snow Geese

My friend Rosanne sent me a link to a video of Tundra Swans flying at Pungo Lake in North Carolina today.

It reminded me of a trip to Bosque del Apache Patty and I went on, christmas week 2012. It was our first christmas trip together.

We saw Snow Geese.

 Lots of Snow Geese.

Lots and lots of Snow Geese.

But we almost didn't see any. We landed in El Paso, Texas on christmas day and headed off to New Mexico. And we were told how fortunate we were as this was the first time in twenty-five years that it had snowed on christmas!

Yay! Lucky us.

We didn't go to New Mexico for snow and cold. But that's what we got.

The reason to go to Bosque is for the many many Snow Geese and Sandhill Cranes that overwinter there. And to experience the spectacle of thousands of Snow Geese taking off en masse at dawn.

The place to see this is known as "the flight deck". And Patty and I found ourselves there before dawn. Waiting in the cold dark December morning. It was eerily quiet. Geese are normally very loud, honking away. We discovered why when the sky began to brighten. The lake was frozen over. There were no geese!

Fortunately, the lake is long. And we headed north to see if we could find some geese. We did and just in time to see them take flight:

Amazingly, they all decide to go at once. A curtain lifting off and flying away. Magical.

The numbers were quite astounding. Even more so when we learned that since the lake was frozen over, most of the geese were down at the river. A river we could not get to because there roads were blocked by snow and ice. And they have no plows to clear the roads.

In fact, had we been arrived a day earlier, we would not have been able to get into the refuge.  They were using big front loaders to shovel the snow off the road.

We could see the clouds of geese off toward the river.

Steams of birds flying off for a day of bird business.

We spent the day wandering about the refuge  (we saw road runners!) and were back at the lake when the geese came in to roost for the night.

We went back the next morning and were there to see the birds emerge in the dawn twilight.

A white christmas and the magic of nature. Santa was good to us.