Earth Almanac: January/February 2001

Planter of the Western Woods

The clark's nutcracker is a big part of the spirit of the western evergreen forest. Sometimes he is brash and loud, dipping out of the canopy with a nasal kra-a-a as the day's first light slashes through the spires of conifers. Sometimes he is sedate and stately, sculling crowlike over the alpine forest, sun flashing on the white patches on his black wings and tail. Around your camp he may be a beggar and a thief. On otherwise still winter days he raucously patrols south-facing slopes, recovering the pine seeds he tapped into the earth with his long, sharp bill during late summer and fall. There may be only 4 to 5 seeds per cache, but his total store may contain as many as 33,000, and he can tote 95 at a time in a special pouch under his tongue. Recent experiments have demonstrated that nutcrackers use forest features to help them remember the locations of their seed caches. If a feature--a log, for instance--is moved 10 feet north, a bird will look for its seeds 10 feet north of where they really are. Because Clark's nutcrackers never recover all their seeds, they help plant the forest that sustains them.

Strange Changes

When the sun's passage is still low and brief, and snow lies high like a shaken quilt, male eastern newts begin their pre-spawning transformation. If their pond has black ice or no ice, you may see them sashaying along the bottom most anywhere in the eastern half of our nation. Their tails grow flat and eel-like; their vents swell; their hind legs enlarge; and black, horny appendages form on their inner thighs and the tips of their toes. The most useful words for anyone explaining this salamander's life history are but sometimes. Usually, larvae transform into a subadult terrestrial stage called red eft, but sometimes they transform directly into the aquatic adult stage. Usually, adults have lungs, but sometimes (when they skip the eft stage) they retain their larval gills. Because newts exude a toxin, fish almost always shun them--in fact, in one experiment, trout died when newts were pushed down their gullets--but sometimes wild brook trout glut themselves on newts.

The Gall of Goldenrod

If you are a fisherman seeking live bait (a scarce commodity in winter) or just a curious naturalist, get thee to a goldenrod field, especially in the northern half of the country. Bring kids. Look on the stems for galls, bulbous growths that are the plant's reaction to insect attack. Goldenrod hosts about 50 species of gall makers, but if you find spherical galls about three-quarters of an inch in diameter, chances are they were made by the larvae of the goldenrod gall fly. Before it pupates in spring, a larva will bore an exit hole to the edge. Split the gall with a jackknife, and you'll see the larva, hard and immobile but protected by its own antifreeze. Bring it inside your house, and in a few minutes it will start to wriggle. If you would like to watch the fly emerge in late spring, leave the gall outside through February, since the larva can't complete its life cycle without an extended period of cold.

Frostbitten Pioneer