Nature Moncton Nature News: March 22 2022

NATURE MONCTON NATURE NEWS

March 22, 2022 (Tuesday)

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Edited by: Nelson Poirier nelsonpoirier435@gmail.com

**Sue Berube comments their feeders have been very busy with mostly the usual suspects, but they did have a large flock of very vocal Common Crackles with a couple of male Red-winged Blackbirds fly through on Sunday.

On Monday morning, there were two Pileated Woodpeckers in a Maple tree in front of their urban Riverview home. They have been around for about a week. They hear them more often than they see them. The tree has some disease and has been pruned by an arborist, but this recent activity does not bode well for the tree's future.

(Editor’s note: it is interesting to note the number of Pileated Woodpecker photos being submitted, signifying that the woodpeckers are apparently adopting urban territories to take advantage of the forage opportunities in dying older trees that attract recycling insects).

** Louise Nichols, Wendy Sullivan and Elaine Gallant checked out some lagoons in the Memramcook area on Monday to find they were still mostly frozen with just a bit of open water. Not much was present yet except for some gulls at the Arthur St. lagoon. Most were Iceland Gulls. Louise got a side-by-side photo of a 1^st and 3^rd winter Iceland gull. (Editor’s note: am basing the 3^rd winter identification on the lack of brown remnants, yellow eye, and dark smudge near the tip of the bill. The long primary projection and the grey bands on it suggest it to be an Iceland Gull of the Larus glaucoides subspecies. Other comments welcomed).

Elaine and Wendy also got a photo of a sharply plumaged male Common Merganser at the Arthur St. lagoon waiting impatiently for the ice to go.

Elaine got a very high photo of an adult Red-tailed Hawk riding thermals in migration.

The three of them also visited Fred and Susan Richards in Taylor village and saw flocks of Red-winged Blackbirds mixed with Common Grackles and heard the welcome spring sound of Song Sparrows. They finished the day at Johnson's Mills where they saw several groups of Black Scoter out on the water, approximately 350 to 400 altogether. They were able to hear them calling. When they left, a strong shower of ice pellets was falling. Spring is not quite here yet!

Wendy got documentary photos of some of the Black Scoter flocks with Shepody Mountain in the background.

**Susan Richards reports the bird activity at their Taylor Village feeder station is certainly entertaining these days. A look out the kitchen window can bring no birds, to an invasion of Red-Winged Blackbirds and Common Grackles taking over where the Black-capped Chickadees, Dark-eyed Juncos, Red-Breasted Nuthatches, Mourning Doves, Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers, Blue Jays and American Goldfinches were yesterday.

In the next few minutes, a male Ring-Necked Pheasant came by, and the scene changed again!

**Stella and Jean-Paul LeBlanc had a visiting Raccoon Monday afternoon and that did not look good. It was limping but stayed quite a while eating seeds on the ground under the feeders. It’s very rare for them to have Raccoons in the middle of the day. They usually come at night and try to reach the bird feeders. (Editors note: this animal appears to have sarcoptic mange which many wild mammals are susceptible to. It is most commonly seen in the Coyote and the Red Fox. Some animals recover but most do not. It is caused by a skin mite and is contagious to the domestic dog).

**Lichens may be one of the most unappreciated items in Mother Nature’s community that are abundant, striking, and all around us as they have been for millions of years. Every lichen is a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and alga to create a name different from the components. Lichens are very easy to photograph as they are totally cooperative!

We are fortunate to have Kendra Driscoll at the New Brunswick Museum offer to help identify photos we are unsure about and to give a bit of a story about individuals.

We will start off with a few photos today in hopes more of our great photographer contributors will start to take note of lichens so we can all get to call a few by name when we meet up with them. We will make every effort to use common and scientific names to increase comfort when we chat about our lichen encounters. I am going to paraphrase some of Kendra’s comments on the 2 photographs attached today.

Paraphrasing Kendra

The lichen from March 7th looks to be Flavoparmelia caperata. It normally develops pustule-like patches that produce little granules (soredia) that have a role in vegetative reproduction. I don't see any here but could be the magnification or just that these thalli are young. The "flavo" part of the name means yellow. The mineral grey foliose lichens scattered around the patches of Flavoparmelia are grey - the name is a reflection of the difference in colour. That yellow-green pigment in the Flavoparmelia is the same one found in Usnea (old man's beard)--usnic acid-- and it acts as a sunscreen.

I can't quite get close enough to make out the shape of most of the black fruiting bodies (they should have raised black margins and the spore producing hymenium layer sunken below the surface), but it looks like Stictis urceolata (syn. Conotrema urceolata) which is a characteristic species on sugar maple (the photo with the white thallus). There are a handful of lichens that prefer particular trees and this is one of them. There are enough of the black structures that I can see well enough to be pretty confident they have a hole in the middle that if it is not this species I wonder if it is something infected with a lichenicolous fungus that can have a similar look. The grey lichen above and below the white and black crustose species is Parmelia. Some is Parmelia sulcata (very common and widespread species) but most of it I'm not sure about.

I completely agree that lichens deserve more attention than they generally get and am happy to help spread the word.

Kendra Driscoll

PS - I realize I just threw out "lichenicolous fungus" like that's a normal term you would have heard of and not a really obscure and specialized concept. It just means any fungus specialized in living on lichens, more or less parasitically (separate from the primary fungus that forms a lichen). My one attempt at a blog post of my own explains briefly: https://www.natureconservancy.ca/en/blog/discoveries-in-little-known-fungi.html

(Editor’s note: this short blog has some very interesting information in understanding lichen biology).

nelsonpoirier435@gmail.com

Nelson Poirier

Nature Moncton