Neature is neat!

Have you ever seen Lenny Peppercorn videos? It’s hysterical. A satire on all nature show hosts, and a poke at all nature nerds. I love it! Check him out below…

I couldn’t help but laugh at myself this weekend as I was hiking with my dog and a friend. We kept coming across all sorts of *neat* things, and I kept exclaiming, “This is so neat!”… Am I a Lenny Peppercorn?

Shared via: http://www.dec.ny.gov/outdoor/48283.html

Tyler and I have spring fever. It’s now March, and STILL bitter cold with a lot of snow on the ground. Our spring break from courses at SUNY Cobleskill is in 12 days (who’s counting?) and we are tired of being cooped up in the house. He and decided to take my VERY energetic and young golden retriever out for an adventure. The temps here in Schoharie County on Saturday were mid-30s, a heat wave by all accounts of recent ambient temperatures, and it was sunny… perfect day for some outside time.

We have a few state forests around us within easy driving distance (Mallet Pond, Patria, and Petersburg State Forests) that we’ve explored for field labs during various courses, and we decided to try and get as far into the state land as possible. This was a challenge though, because many of the roads within are seasonally maintained, and this is not the season they are maintained.

We first tried to get to Rossman-Fly Pond (which is within Mallet Pond State Forest), a beautiful pond with access to launch a motorless boat. I like to think it’s a hidden gem, but I know others have to know about it. I really want to get up and check the ice out, but unfortunately the plow had stopped a mile or two from the turn off to the pond. We got out and hiked a bit with the dog in the snow, but I’ve been experiencing a flare up from an old ankle injury, and didn’t want to push it.

LUCKILY though, we observed something really neat from the side of the unplowed road. Lots of field sign that a porcupine or several, had been foraging in the hemlocks!

Have you ever seen this? I know it looks kind of unassuming, just some twigs on the ground, but with all the snow we’ve had, it’s not dead stuff that’s fallen over time. All of that would be covered over with snow. THESE twigs, are the sloppy leftovers of our largest arborial rodent.

Here’s the proximal end of a hemlock twig 

that’s been neatly nipped off by the sharp

 incisors of a porcupine.

Porcupines eat soft vegetation like leaves, shoots, and needles. And in the winter they have the advantage over others with similar diets, to be able to climb up trees, and nibble twigs and branches.

Porcupines are a solid critter, not as chunky as a beaver (but close), and not as light as a squirrel. So, they’ll eat their way along a sturdy branch, moving farther and farther from the tree. They are sloppy, and often drop as much as they eat. They nip a twig off, and it falls to the forest floor.

I’ve read (somewhere) that porcupines are often relied on by other forest-dwelling herbivores who can’t reach up into the canopy to eat. Deer, rabbits, hares, moose have all been documented eating porcupine “nip twigs” from the forest floor.

Here’s a porcupine I got to observe quite up close while living in Alaska. You can see her orange inciscors poking out. That orange color is enamel that covers the teeth of many rodents, especially those who eat or gnaw hard woody materials.

We wandered around the feeding grounds for a few minutes, checking out the carnage, when we noticed a well-packed trail in the snow. Porcupines, due to their short stubby legs, don’t often leave a very well defined set of tracks, but more of a trench where they’ve plowed through the snow. It’s hard to see in this picture below, but what I want to share is that we noticed it leading right to the mouth of a drainage culvert pipe alongside the roadway.

Porcupine trail through the snow, to a den in a culvert pipe.

We were intrigued. Could we possibly actually catch a glimpse of the porcupine?

Addie and Tyler trying to decided whether or not sticking your face into a hole in the ground, which might contain a porcupine, is such a good idea…

I did NOT want my dog to get a face full of quills. Tyler, well he was on his own, but I didn’t want Addie to get quilled. So we pulled her back, and I sacrificed myself to get down in there and investigate.
 
My first observation, was the overwhelming stench of ammonia. It reminded me of my pet rabbits cage. Porcupines are nasty animals, in the way that they defecate when and where they want. Many animals attempt to keep their dens clean of fecal matter, but not the porcupine. Check out this entry from last winter when I found a den, and the amount of built up porky poop outside: http://blog.timesunion.com/nywildlife/porcupine-sign/887/

A look inside the “den”. What a cozy place to live, right? Hemlocks in your front yard, and totally protected from the elements. You can see on the left side of the picture, the fecal matter scattered along. Just out of view above this picture, along the top rim of the pipe, were ice crystals. This led me to believe that the porcupine(s) were generating enough heat to melt ice and snow around the entrance which had frozen back over. Unfortunately, or fortunately, no one was visible. I have no idea how far back this tunnel went, but it was freaking cool!

So that’s one of my *neat* finds from this past Saturday. I have another really cool story, but I’m saving that for another entry. I’ve been reading for hours, and just thought I’d take a break to share this cool story. Hae a great Monday!

Camera trap visitors and a new job!

I haven’t posted any camera trap pics in awhile! The end of the semester kept me busy, and then the past couple of weeks seem to have been just as busy! I also started a new job this week, which I will share later in the post. Going back a month ago, my friend Tyler went out the first week of May to go Turkey hunting. The spring Turkey season opened on May 1st, and he was successful in getting a Jake (young male!). He was excited to bag a bird, but I was excited because I was going to get the carcass once he got the meat he wanted from it. I know, it’s a morbid thing to be excited about. But, if you’ve been following along with my blog, you know there’s no shortage of “gross” in my life :)

A few weeks before Tyler gave me his Turkey carcass, I had found a road-killed stray cat at the end of my driveway. I had seen this cat around, flea bitten with ticks. Sad, but it happens. So when I found the dead cat, I removed it from my driveway, and brought it into the woods. I didn’t have anything to bury it with, so I figured I’d just let nature take it’s course. And I set up my Bushnell Trophy Cam HD on the site. So when Turkey was ready, he joined Stray Cat. It’s been an active site, here are a few of the pictures!

A couple of scavengers: American Crows

A usual visitor, the Virginia opossum checking out the dead cat before Turkey came on the scene.

That’s Tyler! Setting out Mr. Turkey

A pair of raccoons stopped by the buffet…

Possum is back…he was definitely the most common visitor. I like this picture because I think he’s eating some of the Turkey carcass. Sitting up like a squirrel!

Stray cat #1.

 

Stray cat #2

And the first real predator! A coyote is checking the scene out.

Stray cat #3

Another predator: Red fox

A cottontail hops by in the background…

And FINALLY I get my porcupine! I know they’re around, I just have not yet seen one in my yard! I love them.

The Turkey Thief! I walked up the check the camera recently, and the Turkey was gone. Well, I have photographic evidence of the thief. COYOTE.

So I guess that was more photos than a few, but I’ve been getting some good stuff lately! I am wondering where the fisher and bobcat and bears are though. I’m hoping they show themselves sometime this summer!
I might mention also that the cat is pretty much untouched. Nothing seems to really be feeding on it, it’s just decomposing. I wonder why…?

 I’m spending the majority of my summer in the Capitol Region of NY, in Albany. I live in Cobleskill for school (I attend SUNY Cobleskill), but I got a great internship this summer at the NY State Department of Environmental Conservation main office on Broadway! It’s really a great opportunity for a budding biologist like myself, and I’m working under Jeremy Hurst, big game biologist. Big game in NY consists of white-tailed deer, black bears, and moose. Moose really aren’t on the radar much yet though, because they are so few. This position is an office position, no running around outside this summer. But I am going to be getting the chance to learn a lot about how black bears are managed for in NY. I’m hoping that my future career will include work with black bears. I don’t know why, but I’ve always been very interested in them. At first when I was a kid, they were “cute”. Now, they just mystify me with their incredibly adaptive habits and behaviors. They literally stop eating, drinking, and moving for 4-5 months, give birth, and then come out on the other side of winter a little lighter but generally ok! I wish I could do that!

Anyway, this position will be interesting and a great learning experience. I will be posting periodically about what I’m up to on the job. Stay tuned!

Porcupine sign

I. Love. Porcupines.

They are unique, mild mannered, CUTE, and one of my favorite mammals to observe.

Porcupine caught on camera trap in Soldotna, Alaska

I became enamored with them a year or so ago. I had a fairly large writing assignment ecology course that I was taking at the time. We had to pick a plot of land, and do a complete survey of it. All species of plants, animals, fungus, soil types, climate, elevation, aspect, slope, values, etc. I think that paper was 18 pages long. Then we had to write another paper selecting just one facet of our plot, and expound upon that. I chose the North American porcupine. They are found in the Finger Lakes of NY. Just apparently not as frequently in the Northern half, where I lived. I received teasing and jabbing about how I was chasing down a locally "mythical" animal. Whatever! I then began my quest to find the "elusive porcupine".

Porcupine climbing a tree in Soldotna, AK

And actually- porcupines are anything BUT elusive. They are conspicuous, slow-moving, and have an attitude. My very first porcupine sighting was in Montana over 10 years ago. Ok, so that doesn't count. My next several sightings were all in Alaska this past summer. Nope, they don't count either.

Then I've seen 2 dead porcupines this past fall. One less than a mile from my house, and the other on the side of the road in NE Massachusetts.

Each time I spot one, dead or alive, I think to myself "HA! I told you they were he....oh. Wait. I'm not in Ontario County. Or even in NY."

I've not given up on seeing them in the Finger Lakes, just set it on the back burner for now since I don't live in the area.

Porcupine in Soldotna, AK

My past two blog entries have been about the Wildlife Techniques course I'm taking this semester. The most recent of the two entries explains wildlife sampling techniques. At the end of our lab session, our teacher took us on a short walk to see something "really cool", as he put it. I'm down to learn about anything "really cool" wildlife related, especially on a gorgeous morning in the snowy woods.

Where did he bring us? To a porcupine denning and feeding site!

Porcupine den in a hole in a dead conifer tree. He may or may not have been home when we were there!
It was too high for us to see in his front door.

Ahhhh! Porcupine scat! I love scat. It's usually easily found, or more easily than the animal itself.
And porky poop was on my bucket list...check!
Porcupines are one mammal that has no regard for a clean den. Many other animals, including our domestic pet dogs, don't like to "mess" where they sleep. Not porcupines. There was scat spilling out of that hole, littering the forest floor. If this den happened to be on the ground, allowing for no place for scat to fall...the den would have been full of scat.

At first glance, this looks like a pretty snowy forest picture.
But to someone who yearns for porcupines...this is gold. All of this twigs and debris you see on the ground, are hemlock twigs, "nip twigs" is what I call them (I think I read that somewhere). Porcupines will hang out in a tree, and gnaw off the bark of a branch or twig to get at the cambium below. The keep moving out and out the branch until it can't support it's weight anymore. Then, they sometimes nip it off. This is a really important favor that porcupines unknowingly pay to other animals. Other herbivores (deer, rabbits) who can't reach vegetation in the tree tops, have been known to visit porcupine trees and browse the off castings.

A "nip twig" with obvious signs of cambium feeding.

I was so excited, and no one else seemed to even care! I think I even smacked the arm of the guy standing next to me when he handed me that twig above and exclaimed "NO WAY!". He looked startled and let it go.

I'm not sorry that porcupines and their sign excite me. I do apologize for hitting you though :)

Maybe I should set up a camera on this site???

Finicky Fisher

Since I moved to Schoharie, I've been told to be on the lookout for a few animals different that have been absent from the Finger Lakes in the past. Those 3 specific critters are the bobcat (Lynx rufus), the porcupine (Erithizon dorsatum), and the fisher (Martes pennanti). They are my "Big 3" of the Catskill region of NY.

I got a great picture of a bobcat in my backyard within weeks of moving here:





And I've seen enough road-killed porcupines to last me a lifetime! I would like to see a live one show up on my camera though...







What I have yet to see with my own eyes, or through my camera, is the fisher. I have had two classmates set up cameras in my backyard. Both cameras were set up within a stones throw of mine. In fact, one was set up on the very same tree that mine was on when I got the bobcat, although I had moved mine temporarily...ugh!



I wanted to share the pictures because fisher are cool. They belong to the weasel family (Mustelidae), making them cousins to weasels, mink, marten, otter, badgers, and wolverines! It's pretty crazy to think that they're all related, but they are. And, for a long time the skunks were thrown in that family too, although now they've been placed in their own family.



The "weasels", and I use that generally, are hard to camera trap, or observe with the naked eye. They are very smart for their size, they are wary, and are mostly nocturnal. So, unless you're skulking around in the dark, in their specific habitat (because they all have very specific habitats), you're not likely to see them. I've only ever seen mink, otter, and a weasel species of some sort by chance. I've much more often see sign left behind: scat.



Here are the fisher images:




Photo credit: Adam Rogers

Photo credit: Courtney Stein

I don't know why I haven't gotten a picture of my own yet! Unless it's the technology I'm using. I am using a flash camera, where as both of these pictures are taken on an infra-red camera. Perhaps the flash keeps the fisher away, although I would think that I should at least be able to get ONE picture before the flash goes off and spooks the animal! ((Plus..I still think my Cuddeback is a lemon.))


And as you can see on the time stamps, this is likely the same animal. Taken the same night, 3 minutes apart. The bottom picture was actually taken first. My camera was BETWEEN these two. I don't get it!!!

Oh well, I'm crossing my fingers for the future.

Cleaning Skulls and Setting Cameras

This past weekend I went back to my hometown because we had a 4 day weekend for "fall break". As a disgruntled professor of mine said last week, "Isn't Columbus Day a made up holiday? Wasn't he like the 8th guy to "discover" America?"...well, whatever. I'll take 2 days off from class!

So while I was back, I picked up a few things from my alma mater, FLCC. Among the things, was a container with skulls in it. Animal skulls. Like, meaty, gory, brainy, yucky skulls. I know, I know...but let me explain.

Mady (my roommate) and I collect skulls. We like them because we can learn from the skulls. It's a sign that's left behind, after the animal has died. I know it may seem morbid to collect, but they're already dead. We don't kill animals for their skulls. We started last year tramping through the woods after the snow melted looking for antler sheds and skulls....we've morphed a bit, and now we do collect roadkill with the intention of keeping the skull.

See: Porcupine Paws for more information about collected roadkill :)

We've had a long-tailed weasel skull and porcupine skull sitting out in the woods, underneath rocks, rotting. Carrion beetles come and naturally clean the bones, making it very easy for us to clean up and make sanitary.

The container I had of skulls, was given to me by a taxidermist. I had expressed a want of skulls, and he hooked me up with a flying squirrel skull, coyote skull, and red fox skull.

Today Mady decided to clean skulls, which is awesome because I'm too squeamish to do it myself. I like them, and I'll collect them, but I don't like the cleaning part, unless it's passive like setting them out in the woods for 3 months.


These pictures are gross, just a warning (Well, not of Mady...the pics after that!).

Mady cleaning skulls.

After they've been outside for a long time, and most of the "meat" is rotted off, Mady boils the skull in water and hydrogen peroxide.

 

Suggestions: Do this OUTSIDE in a pot that you will never use for the preparation of food items ever again. This is our "skull pot". I got it at Wal-Mart for a few dollars, and serves it's purpose well.

A "pre-rotted" red fox skull.

Mady boiled this for a few minutes to loosen stuff up, then we put it out in the woods, where it will sit for a month or two.

This is a completely cleaned weasel skull.

 It came out really nice! I love that elongated brain case. They have a large brain in relation to their body size. They are cunning little creatures.

Porcupine skull and incisors.

Those gray blocks are just packaging material stuck to the cardboard. My computer was broken, got fixed, and was sent back with this cardboard and Mady just used this piece as a surface to work on.

 

Upper jaw of the porcupine.

Upper jaw again: Mady and I thought these teeth looked old.

The teeth are very worn, flat looking- and the dentine is evident (dark brown). Porcupines average between 5-7 years of life in the wild (according to Nat Geo). 5 years is a long time to be chewing on wood, bark, and other woody plant material, so no wonder these teeth look the way they do.

Porcupine incisors.

The darker end was the end implanted in the jaw of the animal, and the orange is the extra hardened enamel which aids in protection of the tooth. These incisors are the same teeth that beavers have, mice, tree squirrels, muskrats and woodchucks (although woodcucks don't have orange enamel for some reason). But they all share the characteristic of constantly-growing, self-sharpening, large front teeth. This makes them rodents in the Rodentia family!

Weasel skull in hand, for some scale.

Flying squirrel skull, pre-cleaning, in hand.

Gross, I know. Flying squirrels are adorable, ADORABLE, and this is not. But, look at the eye socket of this thing. HUGE eyes!!! Compared to the weasel above! Why is that? Because they're nocturnal! Weasels I suppose do move around at night as well, but not as exclusively as the flyers. Which, right now I have 3 on the bird feeder in the backyard. It's cool to peep out there at night with a flashlight and see them munching on bird seed.

 

Flying squirrels are, by the way, the most common squirrels in NY. They're nocturnal, that's why we hardly ever see them. If you have a bird feeder, I urge to check it out at night! Eventually I'm going to rig up a camera trap on the feeder to get pics of them!

 

Then our friend and FLCC/Cobleskill classmate Adam came over to store his scent lures at my house. He lives on campus, and didn't want to leave them in his room or in his car because they're so noxious. He hung his Bushnell Trophy Cam on the tree my Cuddeback used to hang on, when I got the bobcat picture. And then he went to work setting stinky scent lures out for predators.

 

 

And on our way back down the hill, Mady set out the coyote skull and red fox skull to be cleaned up a bit by Mother Nature.

And the last pic of the day, the coyote and red fox skull side by side for some size comparison, along with the toe of my boot.

 

 

I have nothing exciting to show from my weekend away, when I checked my cameras upon my return. Crows and a raccoon. Boring! But hopefully I can do a follow up entry soon with some pictures that either Adam or I have gotten!

 

Porcupine Paws

A few months ago, while I was in Alaska, I ran into a porcupine one night while I was out for a walk. The entry Little Miss Quill Piggy details that story. In the entry I wrote that I hoped one day to be able to write about how interesting porcupine feet are, and now I have my chance!

Earlier this week on our way to school, Mady (my roommate) and I found a road-killed porcupine within a half mile of our house. We both saw it at the same time, and I whipped a U-turn in the middle of the road to go back for it, while Mady was screaming "It's ok!!! We can be late for GIS class!". When we pulled up on it, we noticed how good of condition it was in, despite having been run over. A large patch of skin on it's hindquarters had been scraped away...but it was fresh (probably just a few hours old), and not particularly gushy. We had nothing to pick it up with, or put it in, so Mady kicked it into the drainage ditch next to the road, so no one else would stop and steal our porcupine :)

That afternoon we went back armed with leather work gloves, and a big cardboard box to bring it back to our house. Mady really wanted to collect it for its skull, and I wanted to check out its external anatomy. Before Mady beheaded it, I got some great up-close pictures of this porky's paws!

Mady and the porcupine.

It was a pretty good sized animal, and very dark! The porcupines I saw in Alaska were much more brown (see below).

 

 

Anyway, here they are, those pebbly porky paws:

On the left: left front (4 toes)

On the right: left rear (5 toes)

 

Check out the texture of that pad! It's so different than any other mammal out there. If I saw just this:

 

...I'd think I was looking at reptile skin!

 

I haven't yet found porcupine tracks in the woods yet, but since we found this guy/gal, Mady found another roadkill porcupine within several miles of our house. The odds seem to be good for finding them where we live. I'm just waiting til one shows up on my camera trap! I have a good spot on our property that we're renting (7+ acres!), and have had quite a few wild visitors already.

 

The other characteristic of the porcupine's paw that I wanted to share, are those long nails. The porcupine is an arboreal critter, meaning it spends much of its time climbing up and and down trees. These nails are like built in crampons! The picture below is of porcupine I observed in Alaska, just scaling the height of this tree in seconds.

 

Those nails are like built in cramp-ons.

 

So, that's my second awesome porcupine experience. The first was of course better, because the critter was alive, but I was really able to feel the quills, and check out its feet this time. I'm not a hunter, and I don't really do blood and guts well, but I do love checking out dead animals...to anyone outside of this profession or field, I'm sure it seems like a morbid interest. It's how we learn though!