Bark Sprouts Legs

Yesterday I went to go scrape the white paint band off of an old RCW cavity tree when a piece of unpainted bark got up and walked out of the path of my bark knife. Yeah, I was surprised, too. Do you see it?


Here's a better look:


It turns out this piece of legged bark has a name: the Grizzled Mantis (Gonatista grisea). It kept skittering in a quick crab-walk around the trunk as I chased it in circles with my camera. I did manage a few more pictures:


In retrospect, I should've cornered it and harassed it more. The result is this spectacular display.

I hadn't realized there were such crazy-looking mantids in the US. I'll have to dig out and share some pictures of even crazier tropical mantis species that I used to keep.

Stealing Shrike Food

I was moseying along a barbed-wire fence on the bombing range this week, waiting for a Red-cockaded cluster to wake up, when I noticed an odd object along one of the wires. On closer inspection, it was this utterly ridiculous-looking beetle, with a horn to make any rhinoceros or Triceratops jealous. It didn't move upon my approach, and then I realized it was impaled hard upon the barb - it must have been cached by a Loggerhead Shrike. The barb was stuck quite solidly into the thorax plate, but I was able to slide it off without serious damage to the specimen, thereby depriving the shrike of a critical meal (what an a-hole I am, right? Well, it was worth it). Check this thing out:


The entomologist at Archbold identified it for me as Phanaeus vindex, the Rainbow Scarab, a type of dung beetle (I'm sure they do just fine with all the cattle grazing out here). The colors on the thorax armor are just utterly brilliant (and not well captured here) and they change with the angle. This thing is amazing!

Hyperactive squeeky toys

As you might have noticed, I've been bad about blogging lately (lately = this whole year?). I've got gobs and gobs of material to post from New York, Florida, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Mexico... all in due time. In order to not fall even farther behind, I'm going to get right into writing about current sightings. It is another field season and another field job. I spent January through July of this year working at Archbold Biological Station as a scrub-jay intern. I've grown quite fond of Aphelocoma and some posts need to be written about them.

Aphelocoma coerulescens, the Florida Scrub-Jay

My days as an intern are in the past. I spent August in NY, "vacationing" in Ithaca finishing my phylogeography work, presenting a talk at the AOU meeting in Philadelphia, and even managing to fit in a bit of shorebirding on Long Island. Just two weeks ago, I flew back down to south-central Florida to start working again for Archbold, this time as a winter field tech at a different location: Avon Park Air Force Range (APAFR).

Archbold Biological Station is a nice big private reserve mostly composed of endemic scrub habitats found on the Lake Wales Ridge. APAFR is a MASSIVE tract of land encompassing a range of habitats including wet prairie, sand scrub ridge, and large tracts of longleaf and slash pine flatwoods. I'm still working on jays in the scrub habitats, but guess what new species I get to work with in this position?

Mysterious pinewoods...

... contain Red-cockaded Woodpeckers! (source: Wikipedia)

One of the two focal species I am employed to monitor are the local population of Red-cockaded Woodpeckers (Picoides borealis), another endangered cooperatively breeding species of the Southeast. I'm still learning the ropes around here, but I'll be doing population monitoring and cavity maintenance. Most of my actual time spent observing the RCWs is at the crack of dawn, when they wake up from their roost trees, say hello to us researchers, we read their band combinations, and they fly away to forage and we don't see them again.

Because I mostly see them in the early dawn hours with terrible lighting, I don't have lots of pretty pictures to grace this blog yet, hence my reliance on wikipedia for the bird photos here. I did get one good mid-morning observation the other day, when we followed two clusters as they came together and squabbled. There was much wing-lifting and red-cockade-flashing displays, and lots of squeeky noises. Red-cockadeds are hilarious to listen to vocalizing, they sound like hyperactive squeeky toys. So does another pine flatwoods species, the Brown-headed Nuthatch.

Samples of both vocalizations from xeno-canto:

Red-cockaded Woodpecker
Brown-headed Nuthatch

Just imagine a flatwoods patch with both species yammering away constantly, and you'll understand why sometimes I just want to giggle while working.

Sitta pusilla, the Brown-headed Nuthatch (source: Wikipedia)

Well, that's all, but now you know where I am and what I'm up to. Hopefully I'll start getting back into the swing of things with more blogging. Stay tuned. Here's a little Osborne Brothers while you wait.

Distractions from Blogging

I've been too busy to blog much lately, although I've got plenty of exciting things to write about that are just piling up higher and deeper. My chief distraction is all the time spent in the field playing with Florida Scrub-Jays (Aphelocoma coerulescens). What a terribly photogenic species:


Like these photos? I've got a million of them.

My other big distraction is another push towards finishing some of my genetic research. Along those lines, I was just cited for the first time! Okay, so it was for my 'in prep' manuscript and not in a publication, but still... to see for yourself, check out the Gray-crowned Palm-Tanager (Phaenicophilus poliocephalus) account on Neotropical Birds.

He's older than me! - Gopherus polyphemus

I've been at Archbold Biological Station for just over a month now, and I've already accumulated a nice collection of Gopher Tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus) sightings. I've never been particularly excited by tortoises (Testudinidae) - I thought they were ugly and boring. Since seeing my first wild tortoise (there is one Venezuelan exception I'll write about soon), I've come to appreciate them more. Maybe soon I'll even admit to liking them.

Gopherus might be considered a keystone species here in the central Florida scrub. They dig large burrows into the sand that dot the landscape here and end up providing homes for a variety of other interesting creatures, including my highly-desired target species, the Indigo Snake (Drymarchon). Here is a collection of my interesting tortoise observations so far. I'll proceed ontogenetically.

Can you spot the youngling?


This little tortoise is the youngest I've yet found. After shutting himself up for my camera, he went running for his little burrow.

Next up are a series of adults. This first one I found basking in his burrow entrance. In response to my prodding, instead of backing down his burrow, he actually moved forward and rotated, completely blocking the burrow with his shell. I've never heard of this behavior before.


Other adults:


The coolest behavior I have observed so far was a failed mating attempt by two young adult tortoises. I came upon them in the middle of the road, and was able to get within 10 feet to film them. Check out this absolutely hilarious video!

Can you just see the pain of rejection on his face?


He watches as she recedes into the distance:


Evidently the attempt had been going on a while before I got there, there were tracks all over the road:


My final observation of Gopherus is a real winner. It turns out herpetologists at Archbold had been marking tortoises in long-term studies for many years (although it has been discontinued for an unknown number of years). Well, I happened to find one of those marked tortoises, and boy is he a geezer.


It turns out this old man was first marked as an adult in 1972. We have no way of knowing how old he was then, so all we can say about him no is he is old. How cool is that?

GBBC Results

This past weekend was the Great Backyard Bird Count. In case you missed it - quick, go back and tally your lists!

I just thought that, since I'm five months behind in blogging (I'm still in Venezuela last fall) that I would give a quick update as to where I am now. Here is my most significant GBBC contribution - see the big purple circle in south-central Florida? The one lamely hidden by the smaller green circles? That represents my checklist tally of 55 Florida Scrub-Jays (Aphelocoma coerulescens).


Yeah, I said 55. I bet you don't believe me. I wouldn't either.

Well, the fact is, if I had put more coordinated effort into it, I could've added 150 more, each with their own individual identifying color band combo. They follow me everywhere... can you guess where I am?